- amolosh
- Nov 7, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 8, 2024
Woodrow Cowher, Unfinished Kant (2019)
1. Stephen Crane
"Darkened his eye, his wild smile disappeared,
inapprehensible his studies grew . . . "
—John Berryman, “Op. post. no. 1,” in Dream Songs (1969)
The last thing he thought of at Badenweiler in their rented room
on the edge of the Black Forest, far from the Hotel de Dreme,
was, I'd like to think, wading in the Raritan River as a small boy, notThe Red Badge of Courage.
Every death is a sudden death, it seems.
"What a catastrophe!" said Henry James.*
2. Anton Chekhov
"Chaliapin burst into tears and cursed: 'And he lived for these bastards, he worked, taught, argued for them.'"—Maxim Gorky.†
In their Badenweiler hotel a few years later,
Chekhov's doctor ordered a bottle of champagne,
as German medical etiquette prescribed for a dying colleague.
Drinking a glass, Chekhov murmured: "'I haven't had champagne for a long time,' lay down on his left side, as he always had with Olga, and died."‡
3. Ça va !
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Climbing Table Mountain quite early one morning
moving slowly upwards through the drifting scraps of fog;
then sitting on a ledge, legs dangling over the drop
three hundred feet down,
he suddenly became afraid of heights!
Fortunately, he didn’t realize it until later.
That was very long ago.
Now as I climb the gray-carpeted stairs
past the Unitarian bookcase, Muggs (the cat) underfoot,
I try not to spill my mug of tea.
Ça va !
*"What an unmitigated unredeemed catastrophe!" James wrote. Crane was only 28. Cited in Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (New York: Holt, 2021), 730.
†Gorky on the mob at Chekhov's Moscow funeral, cited in Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York: Holt, 1997), 599. Chekhov was 44 when he died in 1904.
”‡ Ibid., 596.
Thursday, November 8, 2024
