Tuesday morning, when Albert, the border collie, and I went out to Gardiner pond, a half inch of rain had already fallen on our rain gauge. The rain did not let up while we walked. We were later than usual; in these dark days, a few minutes after nine is early enough. The pond was high: for two days, off and on, the inflow had exceeded outflow. The shallow brown water was lethargic and bloated, reaching beyond the pond’s border of cattails, which looked sodden and defeated by the gloomy weather.
We spotted four Canada geese huddled on the north side of the island in the center of the pond. Walking past the old birch that had crashed to the ground in the strong southwest wind that blew in before the rain started, we were surprised by an additional dozen geese across the water, sitting and strolling on the south bank. We don’t often see geese out of the water this time of year. As we rounded the west end of the pond, several geese blocked our path. Albert pulled me on. He does not cotton to anserine interruptions on a serious walk. Goose psychology is not an open book, but I guessed their low cackles expressed goosey aggrievement at the intrusion of a determined border collie and his human.
We saw no mergansers, hooded or otherwise; the heron that surveys the pond from the trees on the island was absent, but the usual dozen oblivious, quacking, and dabbling mallards were checked in for the day.
I’ve been following up on an old promise I made to myself years ago: I’m reading Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a confusing book by an Irishman from Clonmel, County Tipperary, who wrote in Yorkshire England about twenty years before the American revolution. The book is considered a novel, although it is hard for me to think that it even resembles novels written today. Some say that Tristram Shandy deeply influenced authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pyncheon, and David Foster Wallace. I have books by all of these authors on my shelves, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to finish any of them, which says more about my limitations than anything else, I suppose. In Sterne’s favor, he was accused by critics, then acquitted by posterity, of plagiarizing from Robert Burton’s meandering and wordy The Anatomy of Melancholy, written about a hundred years prior to Tristram Shandy. The Anatomy is one of my favorites.
Nevertheless, I have enjoyed Tristram Shandy immensely so far, but it’s hard to read. The vocabulary is more recondite than my own. I keep a dictionary at my side. Saying the book rambles is understated inanity. Duh. I’ve gotten near the end of the second volume of nine.
The book begins at the moment of Tristram’s conception, taking the routine of beginning an epic with the birth of a hero to an extreme. At the scene’s climax, Tristram’s mother asks his father if he was forgotten to wind the clock. From that high point, Sterne bumps, doubles back, and twists on toward Tristram’s birth. Some one hundred fifty pages later, his mother is in the pangs of childbirth with a woman midwife in attendance while Tristram’s father Walter, his uncle Toby, and a man-midwife, Dr. Slop, chosen by Tristram’s father and detested by his mother, listen to a sermon that fell out of a technical book on military fortifications, Uncle Toby’s obsessional HOBBY HORSE [Sterne’s caps.] The sermon is read by Uncle Toby’s theatrically inclined servant, Corporal Trim. If you think the names Slop and Trim are salaciously suggestive, I think you are right.
This is either a train wreck or a masterpiece. Oddly, I am finding Tristram Shandy surprisingly relevant to my thoughts in the first month of 2020.
Father, Toby, and Dr. Slop debate a plan for a wind-powered chariot. Piloting a wind-powered vehicle does not require purchasing horses and feeding them. The vehicle is fast and free, but they decide it should not be built because it would threaten the critical trade in horses and fodder. The climate change debate, anyone?
The sermon read while Tristram’s mother suffers could have been written and delivered by Anglican clergyman Sterne himself. Its subject is the co-dependence of moral ethics and religion. The gist is that a morally ethical man without religion is free to act despicably when ethical rules do not prohibit an action. For example, ethically upright bankers may throw widows and orphans out to starve and die on the streets while following the letter of laws and ethical rules. Without religion to question their greedy motives, they feel no compunction to stop.
Conversely, religious people who place religion above morality may steal and murder for profit, but as long as they intend to later repent, which may be years after the profits from their crimes are enjoyed and gone, they remain secure in the good graces of their religion.
I read op-eds and tweets on these subjects every day in 2020.