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Excerpted Inspirations #193

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • 7 days ago
  • 0 min read
[The year is 1907, and Neale Crittenden is waiting for a train to take him to a woodlot in Vermont he plans to inspect as part of his job in the lumber business. He and his fiancee have recently decided, by mutual consent and with great sadness, to part ways, realizing that they are not suited to be married partners. This parting has led Neale to reexamine his entire life and what it means. He draws on his reading of Emerson and his experience with college football to help him make sense of it.] But shutting the book, even slamming it shut, did not silence the voice. He sat alone under the smoky kerosene lamp, staring into the dusty, dreary, empty waiting room and heard it clear and calm and summoning, “Leave your theory as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee!” He looked about him desperately, but there was not a soul in the station save himself, nor a house near the tracks. There was not a sound to drown out the deep humanity of that summoning, challenging voice. He made an impatient rebellious gesture. Summoning? That was all very well. But to what? To something better than he had, more worthwhile than he was? Well, what was there? Where could it be found? Those vague high-sounding phrases were easy enough to write, but what could you do about it in real life? What was the matter with what he had? The matter with it was that it was bare and dingy and empty, like the room in which he sat. But what was not? Everything was like that, if you didn’t believe the nonsense written about it, if you looked at it and saw it. It wasn’t to be supposed that he, Neale Crittenden, would go and be a missionary, or any of those pious priggish make-shift devices to pretend that you were doing something worth while? Or join the Salvation Army and beat a drum? He was an American business-man. What in hell did Emerson think you could do? He got up and walked restlessly around the dreadful little room, helpless before its bareness. Nothing to read in the place, not even a time-table. Nothing but the Emerson. He went over to where it lay on the bench, opened his valise, put the book back in down among his shirts, and snapped the valise shut on it. [...] As he filled his pipe it came to him that once before he had felt the same aching restlessness, so intense that it was pain. That was the time when he had gone stale. He’d been put out of the game, and had sat on the sidelines eating his heart out. He was there again, gone stale, out of the game. He had the strength, he had the speed, now as then. Why was it he stood out of the game? Other men were giving their souls to it. Maybe he was a quitter, after all. There had certainly been quitting or something the matter in his relations with Martha ... how empty life was without Martha. ... But he was mighty glad he wasn’t going to marry her. He was a fine specimen anyhow! “Well now, well now,” he shook himself together, “let’s consider all this. What’s the best thing to do when you go stale and have a slump?” Atkins had showed him what to do that other time. He had actually profited by it in the end, profited immensely by being temporarily out of the game, so that he could consider and understand the real inwardness of what it was all about. Why, perhaps that was what he needed to do now, pull out for a while, get away from the whole thing, look at it from a distance, get a line on what it was all about. He sucked on his pipe, cocking his head sidewise to look at the ceiling, his hands deep in his pockets. There was nothing to hinder his taking a year off. He had money enough. And not a tie on earth to prevent his doing as he pleased. He’d lose his job, of course. But he didn’t seem to be just madly in love with his job anyhow. And there were other jobs. “Well, by George, why not?” Where should he go? Anywhere that wasn’t the lumber business. There was the whole world, the round globe hurtling through the infinite. What in God’s name was he doing in Hoosick Junction? [...] His heart unfolded from its painful tight compression. The way out? Why had he been so long in seeing it? The way out was to put on your hat and go. -Dorothy Canfield, Rough-Hewn (1922), pp. 313-315

 
 
 

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