Eric Larsen

EXCERPT FROM THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY

(READ OR PRINT ALL THE 19TH CENTURY EXCERPTS IN PDF FORMAT)

FROM CHAPTER ONE

.....1)..... I stayed in the bathroom, I suppose, for twenty minutes or so, possibly more. For me, that wasn’t long, and so the length of my visit was unlikely to draw attention, at least from my parents or sisters, since they were familiar with my unusual patterns of behavior.

..........In truth, due to my having slipped away from the table—so I believed—without being noticed, I imagine now that during my time upstairs I was in the thoughts of no one at all: not of those just a few feet away, under the floor below my feet, nor of any others who might have been far away indeed, beyond the horizon, in Africa, the Philippines, China, or any distant reach of the planet.

..........The nearest included not only those still at the table downstairs, but any who might have gone into the living room—my sisters Hannah and Ingie, for example, who by this time had likely excused themselves and were sitting on one of the scatter rugs in the living room (Ingie Indian fashion, Hannah, more demurely, with her legs to the side, one arm supporting her weight), playing pick-up sticks, Chinese checkers, or Authors. And the nearest also included those who might have gone into other rooms—Lutie, for example, who, with my mother and my aunt Signe, may have gotten up to carry cups and dessert plates through the swinging door to leave them on the ribbed drainboard of the sink, where, very easily, it seemed to me that I could not only imagine but also actually see them.

.....2)..... As I said, I have no memory of passing through the back hall or coming up the stairs. I have no memory, either, of later getting up from the toilet, leaving the bathroom, or going back downstairs. This second blank space in memory sometimes has the strange effect of causing me to imagine that I am in fact still there, still upstairs, on the toilet, beside the dormer window, as if, after sixty years, I had never left that spot, not even though the house itself and everything around it are now gone.

.....3)..... The origin of the bathroom seemed a miracle and mystery to me after my experience in it, and it seems only the more so now. This is true especially when I think back to the room’s distinctiveness in harmony, balance, and proportion, and back to the resultant and commensurate pleasures brought into being by those qualities. How could such a room, in the first place, ever have come into existence? How could it have been conceived, then subsequently brought about physically? How, above all, could the great number of necessary, varied, timely, and complex impulses, motives, and actions toward that end have been brought into so perfect a convergence, as they obviously had been, to bring such a room into existence at just such a time, in the autumn of 1921, that distant, single, particular year whose very sound is now both hopelessly antique and dizzyingly modern?

..... 4)..... (Two pipes came up through the floor and disappeared under the curled rim of the tub, presumably connecting there with the tub’s thick white ceramic faucets. Downstairs, on the wall behind the kitchen sink, there had been three pipes. Where, now, was the third one, and what had its purpose been?)

.....5)..... I was never again to visit the upstairs of Marie and Lutie’s house, a fact that may help explain the occasion’s having proved as memorable as it did. Of the things that happened afterward, I don’t know how many were direct results of my visit. But I do know, with an unqualified certainty, this much: that on my visit upstairs I received the first sustained and lucid premonition, however I may or may not have understood it at the time, that, through no choice of my own, I was one of those destined to scrutinize and ponder, for the remainder of my life, the mysteries of space and time.

.

..........In that now-unexistent little room, that is, where I had never been before and was never to be again, I felt, for a handful of minutes, and simultaneously, these things: 1) that I was suspended inside time itself as if in an enormous, warm, embracing sea; and 2) that I was situated perfectly, for those same few moments, at the very center of all things.

.

..........(As had happened once before in my life, my consciousness grew first in a vertical direction, bringing with it a heightened awareness of what was below me. It then changed direction and expanded horizontally, in the manner of waves moving outward on a pond. It brought with it, in this second way, a heightened consciousness of things around me and at varying distances away.

.

..........The immediate effect of the vertical form of development was to make me aware of the rooms below with such a degree of vividness that I actually saw them, although not always in complete form. For a moment, for example, I saw Lutie’s hands (sleeves pushed to her elbows) as she held a china plate under running water. For another moment, I saw not Lutie’s hands but Marie’s as she placed a new stack of dishes on the drainboard (her sleeves were cuffed neatly at the wrists). I saw the kitchen door swinging, then slowing to a stop. In the living room, I saw Hannah and Ingie playing pick-up sticks on an oval braided scatter rug. Both of them were now leaning sideways, their weight on one elbow.

..........Mainly, however, I saw things directly below, in the dining room. I saw Marie and Lutie returning to the table; a fresh pot of coffee being poured into cups; the curtains at the windows blowing briefly inward, like pale hands reaching toward the table, then emptying out again and falling limp.

..........My grandmother, in her wheelchair, sat at the far end of the table, with her back to the windows. At her left was Hannah’s place, empty now since she had gone into the living room with Ingie. To the left of Hannah’s chair sat my aunt Klara, the wife of my great-uncle Edgar. To Klara’s left was Marcus, followed by my own chair (it was one of the three yellow straight chairs that had been brought in from the kitchen). On what had been my own left was my aunt Signe, and next to her my father. Then came Marie herself, directly across the table from my grandmother, her back toward the arched doorway into the living room. To Marie’s left was my great-uncle Edgar; then my aunt Nora; after her, Lutie (who sat nearest the kitchen door); then Ingie’s empty chair; and at last my mother, in her usual place at my grandmother’s right.

..........Seeing the table from above in this way provided an unusual perspective, so that I saw people’s arms extend outward as they picked up their coffee cups and then drew them toward their lips. My father, with a cigarette between his first two fingers (his only cigarette since the one he stubbed out on the sidewalk), moved his hand also from an ashtray to his lips. Now and then (he sat forward on his chair, his elbows resting on the tablecloth), he turned his head toward the ceiling in order to exhale smoke away from the others at the table. (When he did this, it was almost as if he were secretly glancing up at me.)

..........The oddity of these movements, along with other arresting details—my mother’s large blue earrings, for example, and her yellow summer dress; the billowing of the curtains; my aunt Signe and my grandmother relaying something to one another across the table, moving their lips but using no words; my uncle Edgar leaning back, clasping his hands across his buttoned vest, then with a mischievous expression saying something in Latin; Lutie at that same moment reaching out with a faintly trembling hand to move a small vase (it held a single red peony) an inch to the left on the white cloth—all of these details, along with the general impression of the room and the scene, seized my attention powerfully and yet proved able to hold it for only a short time, the reason being that the horizontal growth of my consciousness arose unexpectedly at almost the same moment and began at once to intensify rapidly.

..... .....The sudden and powerful sideways expansion of my consciousness, as I’ve suggested, was to provide the true climax of my trip to the bathroom. I now believe, in fact, even though such an experience had occurred once before in my life, that this one constituted the earliest altogether synthesizing moment in my embryonic intellectual life, the first moment of its kind that gave me—as it was taking place instead of later—an awareness, faint as it may have been, of the magnitude and significance of what was happening to me.

..... .....There should be little surprise, therefore, that I found myself gripped more firmly by this new consciousness than I had been by my vertical one. And there should be little that seems unusual in the three-step movement of the powerful energy that was involved. First, somewhat like an anchor being weighed, this energy drew my attention upward from the rooms below. Then it consolidated and compressed itself, for a brief time, entirely within myself. And finally, making its exit from me, it moved outward in all directions in its widening circumferent journey.

..........It is agreed universally that nothing can be set into motion except through a stimulus separate from itself. Therefore, I have studied assiduously, searching back carefully into these memories in an effort to find the one energizing power that most probably triggered this episode of consciousness. And that catalyst, I’m now all but certain, was the glimpse I’d had, as I came to the top of the stairs, of Marie and Lutie’s bedroom.

..........Directly in front of me, as I said, before I entered the bathroom, stood the open door to my great-aunts’ room. And, clearly, the memory of what I saw through that door remained with me as I sat gazing up at the wallpaper on the underside of the slanted bathroom ceiling; at the open window to my right; and at the white chair standing nearby, with the towel folded over its back.

..........Before I went into the bathroom, it had never occurred to me in even the most faintly conceivable way that any part of Marie and Lutie’s lives might have had to do with sleep. Before I reached the top of the stairs and saw the bedroom door, I had never once given thought to my great-aunts’ experience of nighttime or to the phenomenon of their sleeping through it. Never had I thought of them as growing tired in such a way as to require sleep—or even as being, for that matter, associated in any way whatsoever with the homely, commonplace, intimate act of sleeping itself, with preparations for it, the appurtenances of it, participation in it, or risings from it.

..........Now, however, my glimpse into their bedroom had changed everything and had already begun to create a consciousness that was destined to influence, alter, and change the very path of the life that stretched out before me.

..........What I’d seen through the door, in short, had had for me a vividness sufficiently intense that, even when was I no longer looking at it directly, it stayed in my consciousness with the clarity not only of something remembered but of something physically still there. The intensity of the impression, in other words, gave me a consciousness, as I sat on the toilet, not only of the memory but of the yet-concrete presence of my great-aunts’ room. And this degree of tangible physicality—the actuality, as it were, of the room’s existence inside myself, and therefore of my self’s existence inside the room—made tangible and real to me for the very first time in my life the following uncertainties:

...............1) the uncertainty of knowing where I was;
...............2) the corollary and attendant uncertainty of knowing where I was not;
...............3) the difficulty of knowing the difference between the two;
...............4) the difficulty of understanding why such a difference existed at all.

9
..........(With the result that my sensitivity to the world around me, and to the relationship among its parts, changed suddenly, was enhanced, and grew.
.

..... .....A transformation of such a kind as this couldn’t, of course, have been brought into existence by chance alone, and yet I can’t help acknowledging the part that chance must have played. Unquestionably, such a transformation depended, first, on the simultaneous existence of three forces, each holding a personal significance to me; second, on the coincidence of each of the three forces, in and of itself, being situated in a certain, strategic way; and, finally, on the coincidence of each being situated also in a particular and strategic way in relation to the other two.

..........The initial locations of these forces, as I’ve suggested, were:

..... ..... .....1) The dining room
..... ..... .....2) The bathroom
..... ..... .....3) The bedroom

..........And, as I came to understand them later, the significance of each of the locations was as follows:

.....1)..... The significance of the dining room (through my vertical consciousness) lay in its containing (in the persons of those gathered there and in the ceremoniousness of what they did) evidence of the depth, longevity, and continuity of my family’s biological origins as well as of their roots in a variety of historical and cultural traditions extending back to the early middle years of the nineteenth century. Earlier than that, the traces and lineages of their existence faded, grew dim, and disappeared from my view.

..... 2)..... The significance of the bathroom (which I was conscious of neither vertically nor horizontally, but as a place unified, compact, secure, holistic, and both physically and aesthetically comforting) lay, first, in its evident perfections of light, air, design, and proportion; second, in its being a marvelously achieved and exactly preserved manifestation of the touch, feel, texture, and thought of the year 1921; and, last, in its being a transformative meeting place of the energies approaching me from the other two directions: from the dining room below, and from my great-aunts’ bedroom upstairs, through the wall behind me and slightly to the left.

..... 3)..... The significance of the bedroom (which I became conscious of as being actually inside myself, and myself inside it) lay in its providing me with an awareness for the first time in my life of the intimacy of sleep; of the many customs and habits associated with it; and, therefore and simultaneously, an awareness also of the formality, omnipresence, and inevitability of death.

>>READ AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER TWO OF THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY>>>

>>READ AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER FOUR OF THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY>>>

>>READ THE CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER FOUR OF THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY>>>

>>(READ OR PRINT ALL THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY EXCERPTS IN PDF FORMAT)>>>



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	EXCERPT FROM THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY *(READ OR PRINT ALL THE 19TH CENTURY* EXCERPTS IN PDF FORMAT) FROM CHAPTER ONE .....1)..... I stayed in the bathroom, I suppose, for twenty minutes or so, possibly more. For me, that wasn’t long, and so the length of my visit was unlikely to draw attention, at least from my parents or sisters, since they were familiar with my unusual patterns of behavior. ..........In truth, due to my having slipped away from the table—so I believed—without being noticed, I imagine now that during my time upstairs I was in the thoughts of no one at all: not of those just a few feet away, under the floor below my feet, nor of any others who might have been far away indeed, beyond the horizon, in Africa, the Philippines, China, or any distant reach of the planet. ..........The nearest included not only those still at the table downstairs, but any who might have gone into the living room—my sisters Hannah and Ingie, for example, who by this time had likely excused themselves and were sitting on one of the scatter rugs in the living room (Ingie Indian fashion, Hannah, more demurely, with her legs to the side, one arm supporting her weight), playing pick-up sticks, Chinese checkers, or Authors. And the nearest also included those who might have gone into other rooms—Lutie, for example, who, with my mother and my aunt Signe, may have gotten up to carry cups and dessert plates through the swinging door to leave them on the ribbed drainboard of the sink, where, very easily, it seemed to me that I could not only imagine but also actually see them. .....2)..... As I said, I have no memory of passing through the back hall or coming up the stairs. I have no memory, either, of later getting up from the toilet, leaving the bathroom, or going back downstairs. This second blank space in memory sometimes has the strange effect of causing me to imagine that I am in fact still there, still upstairs, on the toilet, beside the dormer window, as if, after sixty years, I had never left that spot, not even though the house itself and everything around it are now gone. .....3)..... The origin of the bathroom seemed a miracle and mystery to me after my experience in it, and it seems only the more so now. This is true especially when I think back to the room’s distinctiveness in harmony, balance, and proportion, and back to the resultant and commensurate pleasures brought into being by those qualities. How could such a room, in the first place, ever have come into existence? How could it have been conceived, then subsequently brought about physically? How, above all, could the great number of necessary, varied, timely, and complex impulses, motives, and actions toward that end have been brought into so perfect a convergence, as they obviously had been, to bring such a room into existence at just such a time, in the autumn of 1921, that distant, single, particular year whose very sound is now both hopelessly antique and dizzyingly modern? ..... 4)..... (Two pipes came up through the floor and disappeared under the curled rim of the tub, presumably connecting there with the tub’s thick white ceramic faucets. Downstairs, on the wall behind the kitchen sink, there had been three pipes. Where, now, was the third one, and what had its purpose been?) .....5)..... I was never again to visit the upstairs of Marie and Lutie’s house, a fact that may help explain the occasion’s having proved as memorable as it did. Of the things that happened afterward, I don’t know how many were direct results of my visit. But I do know, with an unqualified certainty, this much: that on my visit upstairs I received the first sustained and lucid premonition, however I may or may not have understood it at the time, that, through no choice of my own, I was one of those destined to scrutinize and ponder, for the remainder of my life, the mysteries of space and time. . ..........In that now-unexistent little room, that is, where I had never been before and was never to be again, I felt, for a handful of minutes, and simultaneously, these things: 1) that I was suspended inside time itself as if in an enormous, warm, embracing sea; and 2) that I was situated perfectly, for those same few moments, at the very center of all things. . ..........(As had happened once before in my life, my consciousness grew first in a vertical direction, bringing with it a heightened awareness of what was below me. It then changed direction and expanded horizontally, in the manner of waves moving outward on a pond. It brought with it, in this second way, a heightened consciousness of things around me and at varying distances away. . ..........The immediate effect of the vertical form of development was to make me aware of the rooms below with such a degree of vividness that I actually saw them, although not always in complete form. For a moment, for example, I saw Lutie’s hands (sleeves pushed to her elbows) as she held a china plate under running water. For another moment, I saw not Lutie’s hands but Marie’s as she placed a new stack of dishes on the drainboard (her sleeves were cuffed neatly at the wrists). I saw the kitchen door swinging, then slowing to a stop. In the living room, I saw Hannah and Ingie playing pick-up sticks on an oval braided scatter rug. Both of them were now leaning sideways, their weight on one elbow. ..........Mainly, however, I saw things directly below, in the dining room. I saw Marie and Lutie returning to the table; a fresh pot of coffee being poured into cups; the curtains at the windows blowing briefly inward, like pale hands reaching toward the table, then emptying out again and falling limp. ..........My grandmother, in her wheelchair, sat at the far end of the table, with her back to the windows. At her left was Hannah’s place, empty now since she had gone into the living room with Ingie. To the left of Hannah’s chair sat my aunt Klara, the wife of my great-uncle Edgar. To Klara’s left was Marcus, followed by my own chair (it was one of the three yellow straight chairs that had been brought in from the kitchen). On what had been my own left was my aunt Signe, and next to her my father. Then came Marie herself, directly across the table from my grandmother, her back toward the arched doorway into the living room. To Marie’s left was my great-uncle Edgar; then my aunt Nora; after her, Lutie (who sat nearest the kitchen door); then Ingie’s empty chair; and at last my mother, in her usual place at my grandmother’s right. ..........Seeing the table from above in this way provided an unusual perspective, so that I saw people’s arms extend outward as they picked up their coffee cups and then drew them toward their lips. My father, with a cigarette between his first two fingers (his only cigarette since the one he stubbed out on the sidewalk), moved his hand also from an ashtray to his lips. Now and then (he sat forward on his chair, his elbows resting on the tablecloth), he turned his head toward the ceiling in order to exhale smoke away from the others at the table. (When he did this, it was almost as if he were secretly glancing up at me.) ..........The oddity of these movements, along with other arresting details—my mother’s large blue earrings, for example, and her yellow summer dress; the billowing of the curtains; my aunt Signe and my grandmother relaying something to one another across the table, moving their lips but using no words; my uncle Edgar leaning back, clasping his hands across his buttoned vest, then with a mischievous expression saying something in Latin; Lutie at that same moment reaching out with a faintly trembling hand to move a small vase (it held a single red peony) an inch to the left on the white cloth—all of these details, along with the general impression of the room and the scene, seized my attention powerfully and yet proved able to hold it for only a short time, the reason being that the horizontal growth of my consciousness arose unexpectedly at almost the same moment and began at once to intensify rapidly. ..... .....The sudden and powerful sideways expansion of my consciousness, as I’ve suggested, was to provide the true climax of my trip to the bathroom. I now believe, in fact, even though such an experience had occurred once before in my life, that this one constituted the earliest altogether synthesizing moment in my embryonic intellectual life, the first moment of its kind that gave me—as it was taking place instead of later—an awareness, faint as it may have been, of the magnitude and significance of what was happening to me. ..... .....There should be little surprise, therefore, that I found myself gripped more firmly by this new consciousness than I had been by my vertical one. And there should be little that seems unusual in the three-step movement of the powerful energy that was involved. First, somewhat like an anchor being weighed, this energy drew my attention upward from the rooms below. Then it consolidated and compressed itself, for a brief time, entirely within myself. And finally, making its exit from me, it moved outward in all directions in its widening circumferent journey. ..........It is agreed universally that nothing can be set into motion except through a stimulus separate from itself. Therefore, I have studied assiduously, searching back carefully into these memories in an effort to find the one energizing power that most probably triggered this episode of consciousness. And that catalyst, I’m now all but certain, was the glimpse I’d had, as I came to the top of the stairs, of Marie and Lutie’s bedroom. ..........Directly in front of me, as I said, before I entered the bathroom, stood the open door to my great-aunts’ room. And, clearly, the memory of what I saw through that door remained with me as I sat gazing up at the wallpaper on the underside of the slanted bathroom ceiling; at the open window to my right; and at the white chair standing nearby, with the towel folded over its back. ..........Before I went into the bathroom, it had never occurred to me in even the most faintly conceivable way that any part of Marie and Lutie’s lives might have had to do with sleep. Before I reached the top of the stairs and saw the bedroom door, I had never once given thought to my great-aunts’ experience of nighttime or to the phenomenon of their sleeping through it. Never had I thought of them as growing tired in such a way as to require sleep—or even as being, for that matter, associated in any way whatsoever with the homely, commonplace, intimate act of sleeping itself, with preparations for it, the appurtenances of it, participation in it, or risings from it. ..........Now, however, my glimpse into their bedroom had changed everything and had already begun to create a consciousness that was destined to influence, alter, and change the very path of the life that stretched out before me. ..........What I’d seen through the door, in short, had had for me a vividness sufficiently intense that, even when was I no longer looking at it directly, it stayed in my consciousness with the clarity not only of something remembered but of something physically still there. The intensity of the impression, in other words, gave me a consciousness, as I sat on the toilet, not only of the memory but of the yet-concrete presence of my great-aunts’ room. And this degree of tangible physicality—the actuality, as it were, of the room’s existence inside myself, and therefore of my self’s existence inside the room—made tangible and real to me for the very first time in my life the following uncertainties: ...............1) the uncertainty of knowing where I was; ...............2) the corollary and attendant uncertainty of knowing where I was not; ...............3) the difficulty of knowing the difference between the two; ...............4) the difficulty of understanding why such a difference existed at all. 9 ..........(With the result that my sensitivity to the world around me, and to the relationship among its parts, changed suddenly, was enhanced, and grew. . ..... .....A transformation of such a kind as this couldn’t, of course, have been brought into existence by chance alone, and yet I can’t help acknowledging the part that chance must have played. Unquestionably, such a transformation depended, first, on the simultaneous existence of three forces, each holding a personal significance to me; second, on the coincidence of each of the three forces, in and of itself, being situated in a certain, strategic way; and, finally, on the coincidence of each being situated also in a particular and strategic way in relation to the other two. ..........The initial locations of these forces, as I’ve suggested, were: ..... ..... .....1) The dining room ..... ..... .....2) The bathroom ..... ..... .....3) The bedroom ..........And, as I came to understand them later, the significance of each of the locations was as follows: .....1)..... The significance of the dining room (through my vertical consciousness) lay in its containing (in the persons of those gathered there and in the ceremoniousness of what they did) evidence of the depth, longevity, and continuity of my family’s biological origins as well as of their roots in a variety of historical and cultural traditions extending back to the early middle years of the nineteenth century. Earlier than that, the traces and lineages of their existence faded, grew dim, and disappeared from my view. ..... 2)..... The significance of the bathroom (which I was conscious of neither vertically nor horizontally, but as a place unified, compact, secure, holistic, and both physically and aesthetically comforting) lay, first, in its evident perfections of light, air, design, and proportion; second, in its being a marvelously achieved and exactly preserved manifestation of the touch, feel, texture, and thought of the year 1921; and, last, in its being a transformative meeting place of the energies approaching me from the other two directions: from the dining room below, and from my great-aunts’ bedroom upstairs, through the wall behind me and slightly to the left. ..... 3)..... The significance of the bedroom (which I became conscious of as being actually inside myself, and myself inside it) lay in its providing me with an awareness for the first time in my life of the intimacy of sleep; of the many customs and habits associated with it; and, therefore and simultaneously, an awareness also of the formality, omnipresence, and inevitability of death. >>READ AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER TWO OF THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY>>> >>READ AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER FOUR OF THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY>>> >>READ THE CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER FOUR OF THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY>>> >>(READ OR PRINT ALL THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY EXCERPTS IN PDF FORMAT)>>>**
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