A. E. Coppard - My Hundredth Tale

[Sitaram]

A. E. Coppard - My Hundredth Tale

(short story - excerpts)

... I have enjoyed much of my life here (in this forest, in this hut). and indeed perhaps I still enjoy it. It is hard to find the truth about your own emotions. I can look back with joy upon times when I fancied I was unhappy, but I know now that one enjoys all experiences, whether happy or not.

By the time my new story was finished and disposed of I had grown restless. The year was falling into decay, and in the forest there is nothing between the fall of the leaves and the coming of the primrose. The primroses come, and after them there is the blue bugle. The wild parsnip runs to seed (I rub it on my hands because I love its curious scent), and then the leaves fall off trees and the years is over. Now, like the prodigal son, I wanted to gather my rags about me and turn home, for the habits of home are the things we measure life by - but I had no other home.

What shall I call such passages as these?

I am thinking of calling them "pensive passages" or, perhaps, simply pensives.

I am always encountering such passages, in anything of quality that I read. Common writing seems to lack such pensives.

What is it that they have in common, that they all stand out in my mind and I regard them as creatures of the same species?


Water is everywhere, all kinds of water; running water, still water, stagnant water, shallow water, deep water, muddy water. But water differs from rain.
Rain is water with a certain style and mood.

A drop of dew differs from a drop of rain.

Something appears, suddenly. Something inconspicuous catches our attention. Perhaps we pass it at just the right moment and angle, and suddenly, it gleams.

The moment we behold and admire is evanescent, evaporating with the droplet of dew.

If I could gather all the pensives in the world to one place, all the drops of dew, would, then, drowning be possible? May one drown in dew?

[mono]

I remember reading this A.E. Coppard story long ago, and had nearly forgotten I had read it until reading through the selected passages. I remember reading a few works by Henry David Thoreau not long afterwards (specifically A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden), and always thought the two writers had strikingly similar styles - pensive, reflective, introspective works, often stimulated by ideal and musing surroundings (later developing much writing from trascendentalism).
Perhaps I can review the story again sometime soon (I might have it in an anthology somewhere in my mini-library), and post more.

[fnord]

Interesting, I've thought something similar, only with a different metaphor. When my grandfather was in the last stages of his life, I got to thinking about mortality quite a bit. I thought: the most tragic thing about death is the loss of experience. Scores of years of experience, vanish, like that. A life's work, gone.

Youth spends so much time being lost, misunderstanding life. If I could retain the experience of my grandfather, could I not spend the time towards an even greater understanding of life? It is only a small fragment of understanding, but equal to what I could create in my life and fashioned from a fundamentally different perspective.

If we gathered the fragments together, would we find ourselves staring at a magnificent stained glass picture? Would all be revealed? If so, then I thought it was an even greater shame that it could not, ever, be pieced wholly together.

Yet you offer an interesting alterior perspective. Perhaps we cannot gather those gleaming, important fragments for a reason. Perhaps we can't understand for our own good.

If we did, we might drown.
If we did, we might be unmade.