Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [167]
Charlie had gone exuberant, as he often did in these situations. He was getting to be more Joe’s age than Joe himself. Although it would have been hard to tell at that moment, given Joe’s helpless giggling, and his shrieks of delight at every sprung launching. He had always loved weightlessness. Even in his first weeks, when colic had so often left him wretched and inconsolable, if she had tossed him lightly up and then gently supported him on the way down, never quite releasing her hold on his body and head, he would goggle and go still, then rapt. At the time she had postulated that the weightlessness reminded him of being in the womb, in a swimmer’s world, before the outer world had inflicted colic and all its other trials on him. Now, watching him fly, she thought maybe it was still true.
Charlie, on the other hand, just liked playing. Anything would do. In the absence of anything else he would pitch pennies against a wall, or flick playing cards into a pan set across the floor. Wrestle with the boys, especially Joe. Make paper airplanes out of the newspaper. Throw rocks, preferably into water. They all liked that. Very likely during some part of this day she would find them down on the banks of the Potomac, grubbing for pebbles to throw in the stream.
“You must not only aim aright,
But draw the bow with all your might.”
Tuberculosis progressed in Thoreau until it was clear he was dying. He was forty-four, and just beginning to become a well-known writer. In the bold if morbid style of the time, people dropped by to visit him on his deathbed. It became a kind of tourist destination for the New England intelligentsia. Stories were told to illustrate his flinty character. God knows what he thought of it. He played his part. A few weeks before he died, a family friend asked him “how he stood affected toward Christ.” Thoreau answered, as reported later in the Christian Examiner, that “A snowstorm was more to him than Christ.”
His Aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God, and he replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”
Parker Pillsbury, an abolitionist and family friend, dropped by near the end, and said to him, “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.”
Thoreau said, “One world at a time.”
Then he died, and for Emerson it was yet another in the series of catastrophic premature deaths that had struck his loved ones. Wife, child, friend. In reading Emerson’s essay on Thoreau, Frank could sense the intense care the old man had taken to give a fair and full portrait. “In reading Henry Thoreau’s journal, I am very sensible of the vigor of his constitution. That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked, or worked, or surveyed wood-lots, Henry shows in his literary task. He has muscles, and ventures on and performs feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him, I find the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generality. ’Tis as if I went into a gymnasium, and saw youths leap, climb, and swing with a force unapproachable—though their feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.”
Emerson went on, “He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. He thought that, if waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of year it