Riverboats and Bone Yards II |
Monday Feb 12 2007
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is second in a five-part series.
Those paddlewheel steamers on the Yukon keenly awakened my sensibility
that all things—regardless of how grand or wonderfully complex at the
time—have their time. If we are lucky, they, like us, will live on in a
sweet memory, rife with nostalgic editing that carves away the worst.
Like
a distant love affair that once seemed to have held the very purpose of
life in its hands, it is possible to be reminded of happier moments
that, for reasons not quite understandable now, at a far remove were
incapable of sustaining themselves. There’s a mystic contemplation that
surrounds something we do not want to end.
love did no more begin than love will end
—e.e. cummings
Never mind that paddlewheel steamers burned anywhere from six to ten cords of wood an hour, depending on the currents. What this mode of passage recalled was travel on a more human scale, where people dined with one another, rather than facing forward in narrow seats while clutching plastic forks. One traveled through the countryside, rather than over it—experiencing, literally, a world of difference.
As we age, there are more of these memories that make us yearn for the ‘good old days’. But as bumper sticker lore would have it: the only thing good about those days is that they’re old…which is why poetry triumphs over the past. Aristotle wrote that poetry is finer and more philosophical than history because poetry expresses the universal, whereas history concerns itself merely with the particular. The truth in poetry is as valid for the current reader as it was when it was written.
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