Eric Larsen

EXCERPT FROM THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY

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

FROM CHAPTER FOUR: FIRST PART

.......... In the years of my early adolescence, there existed innumerable things and places in West Tree that offered windows for me to see through, into the past. These included objects as varied, for example, as the wooden paving blocks that still remained in some parts of downtown, or the pitted iron railing (put there in 1854) along the crest of Old College Hill. The windows included, seemingly, almost everything-the smooth, dark flow of the river as it curled over the lip of the mill dam, or the way the breezes smelled when they came from the southwest in the sweet part of a warm autumn, or the sound of church bells on spring mornings, or the taste of root beer floats in Harry Bauchman's drug store, or the way sunlight looked when it flowed through thick leaves to splash brokenly on cracked sidewalks in July and August.

..........Simply to name all such places or things to see through, let alone describe them, would approach the impossible. But, even so, here is a list of some of the moments, things, and locations that I now think were in one way or another typical, and typically influential, in bringing me in my adolescent years toward an increasingly precise and complete understanding of the world as a creation of the past (and to an understanding, although not immediately, of the place I might expect to have in that world).

..........Being by its nature arbitrary and to some degree necessarily partial and selective, the list nevertheless offers a practical usefulness through its inclusion of:

..........1) ..... My grandmother's house at 917 Woodland Avenue (similar if not almost identical in style to my great-aunt Marie and Lutie's house on Christiania Avenue)

..........2)..... The back yard of my grandmother's house, which extended deep into the center of the block, with trees, hedges, and swing; the part of the yard nearer to the house, most significantly with its picnic table and, at the northwest corner of the house and providing the driveway's terminus, its pitted concrete apron for a car to stand on

..........3)..... The basement of my grandmother's house, with, among others, these particulars: an extra toilet one corner, behind an improvised wooden wall; exposed ceiling beams made of two-by-eights, with smaller angled struts separating and bracing them; numerous vestiges of the lives of my father and his siblings in years long past, among these a bicycle without wheels, a rusty tire pump, three and a half pairs of skis, five bamboo ski poles, a croquet set with mallets, balls, sticks, and wickets, though the wickets were rusted, the colors of the wooden parts were faded, and the handles of three out of the six mallets were broken

..........4)..... The upstairs of my grandmother's house (similar to but considerably larger than the upstairs of Marie and Lutie's house), with its central hallway, its telephone and telephone table, sloping ceilings, and four bedrooms

..........5).....Of these, my father's bedroom in particular, with its window facing north and its ceiling garret-like and slanted

..........6)..... Located a long block directly north of my grandmother's house, the West Tree Hospital and what I believe now to have been the significance both of that building and of its design

..........7)..... The park and esplanade reaching north from the rear of the hospital, toward Christiania Avenue

..........8)..... The wading pool and sprinkler located in that park, at the Christiania Avenue end

..........9)..... My visit to the wading pool in the summer of 1944, although it could conceivably have been 1945

..........10)..... The figure, personality, and influence of Dr. F. K. Kampfer, nearby neighbor of my grandmother, fellow church member, frequent visitor to her house, and professor, since 1928, of German and physics at Old College

..........11) ..... The clothing worn by Dr. Kampfer, in particular the hat, soft brown jacket, high socks and baggy shorts that he commonly wore on his walks through West Tree

..........12)..... The scent that came from Dr. Kampfer's clothing: a scent composed of mothballs and the smoke of ancient campfires, these being mingled with a number of other and much fainter smells

..........13)..... The part these smells played at my grandmother's house one Saturday morning in early April 1954, when they caused me, for the first time in my life-through realizing that what I smelled in Dr. Kampfer's clothing were the scents of the past and therefore the scents of what no longer existed-to understand that by necessity the past exists and yet by an equal necessity can not and does not exist.

FROM CHAPTER FOUR: SECOND PART

vii.
(I had nothing to do. The house was empty, hollow, dreary, vacant, abandoned. Time didn't move. In the living room I looked up at the rows of books behind their glass doors flanking the fireplace. I went into the basement but soon came back up again. In the dining room, I opened the door and climbed the carpeted stairway to the second floor. I stood in the hall near the telephone table and looked from one end of the house to the other. I went into each of the rooms and came out of them again, including my father's room and the storage room with the tent pegs and tennis rackets in it.

My grandmother reads. She writes letters. The house is quiet and no one is in it. My grandmother sometimes listens to the radio. In her wheelchair at the dining room table she almost always does so. On Saturday mornings when I am there, the station from Old College broadcasts selections of music interspersed with periods of talk and discussion. I pay little attention to it. The sound of the radio seems to me dreary, vacant, and churchlike.

viii.
(Professor C. P. Kampfer most often came in through the front door. He would give the bell a quick double ring, open the door, put his head inside, then sing out the word "hello" in a way that was less interrogative than declarative. He sang the second syllable in three extended tones that I thought of as forming an undulating string of letter "o's" that came into the house, wending their way through doors and around corners into my grandmother's ear.

If the weather was at all wet, snowy, or muddy, Professor Kampfer's ring would be more distant because he would come in at the back door instead of the front. He would step into the wood-paneled vestibule, take off his boots and leave them on the mat there, then come up the three steps, open the kitchen door and sing out his greeting. Invariably, as though imagining that he still had on wet boots, or muddy ones, he would tiptoe across the kitchen floor, appearing at the entry to the dining room with only thick wool stockings on his feet.

My grandmother clearly seemed pleased at the attentions she received from Professor Kampfer. She received him eagerly, with smiles and an awkward, brief half-embrace, for which he leaned down to her. In spite of the fervor of these visits, I remember them as normally lasting little more than ten or fifteen minutes. This kind of brevity, however, was in keeping with one of Professor Kampfer's most pronounced traits, which was the impression he gave of being always in very great haste.

.......... If my grandmother was in her bedroom, he would go in immediately and, after the embrace, draw up the small straight chair to the side of the bed. If she was in the dining room, he would sit at the table where my mother had sat, with his back toward the windows.
.....
.......... He brought items of food for my grandmother-breads, cakes, muffins that he had made himself, small jars of his own preserves from the raspberry bushes in his yard. With very nearly each visit, too, he would return reading materials that my grandmother had given him, commenting without fail-whether or not the two went on to discuss the matter further-that what he'd read had been "very interesting." In turn, he often brought items for my grandmother to read. Sometimes these were books with certain chapters set off by markers. More often they were articles in popular magazines or in alumni or church newsletters. On the following Saturday's visit they would make their exchanges again.

(From the beginning, I found Professor Kampfer a curiosity but at the same time faintly unsettling. There was a quality in his appearance-partly the result of his eyebrows, which were dark and bushy and seemed to be held up by tiny invisible hooks-that gave him a constant look of surprise

..........In the time I knew him, I doubt that he and I spoke more than twenty words. I know, however, that I had more than twenty moments of uneasiness when, for no apparent reason, I would notice Professor Kampfer staring at me fixedly, as if I were a mystery in need of solving, or-thanks to his eyebrows again-as if I had just done something so alarming as to render him shocked and speechless.

..........I had no idea that Professor Kampfer was later to play so significant a role in my life. He, too, I'm sure, would have been just as surprised to know the same thing.

The pleasure my grandmother took in his company must been due in some part simply to the length of their acquaintance. Professor Kampfer, after all, had lived around the corner (or through the block) on Poplar Street since 1928, the year he began teaching at Old College. This meant that my grandmother had known him and his family-a now-deceased wife and a son grown and gone-for over a quarter of a century.

..........My own curiosity about Professor Kampfer was less personal than my grandmother's but no more limited. Unquestionably, he was strange both in appearance and behavior. There were his startled eyebrows, his perpetual haste, his rapid speech, the bird-like quickness of his movements, and, most noticeable of all, his curiously asymmetrical mouth. Not only was its left side higher than the right, but a tic had chosen to make its home somewhere within that same left lip. Whenever the tic became active, the top lip jerked suddenly upward-as if tugged by another tiny hook-and exposed the long yellow canine residing behind it. The fleeting appearance of that tooth gave Professor Kampfer an oddly sinister look, as if a civilized face had been ever so briefly unmasked to reveal a glimpse of the unliterate carnivore behind it.

ix.
(I can't be absolutely certain which of the following is of the greatest significance, either in and of itself or in its relationship to the future:

..........1) .....the clothing worn by Professor Kampfer
..........2) .....the mingled smells that sometimes arose from Professor Kampfer's clothing
..........3) .....the fact that Professor Kampfer existed seemingly in a different plane of time from everyone else, since he continued to dwell within the Epoch of Walking when, for all others, that epoch had long since ended

The three, I do know, are of equal interest insofar as all concern themselves obviously with the mysteries of space and time.

x.
Like anyone else's, Professor Kampfer's clothing varied with the seasons. It differed from other people's, however, in being so clearly old-fashioned, as if he had received it from storage in some previous era.

.......... Whether his appearance seemed more unusual in summer or winter is difficult to say. In the cold months, wearing black leather boots that came slightly more than halfway up his calves, a Russian black fur hat, a greatcoat that hung below his knees, and oversized fur mittens, he would walk out in any and all weather. He did so even in the most fierce of blizzards, when he would also put on dark goggles with small round lenses. In the drift-bound, below-zero weather that followed the storms, he could be seen moving through the unpopulated silence on snowshoes.

..........In summer, on the other hand, he was distinguished by being the only male in West Tree over six years of age to wear short pants. Sometimes these were authentic lederhosen, though most of the time they were belted, baggy, multi-pocketed gray shorts of soft thick cotton. In addition, he wore a pair of dusty oxfords and knee-high socks, an open shirt under a four-buttoned brown jacket (the latter omitted in hot weather), and on his head a Bavarian felt hat with the tail feather of a pheasant in it, set at a rakishly angle. In this season, he always carried with him a dark, knobbed, crooked walking stick.

(He was wearing these clothes one unseasonably warm Saturday morning in April of 1954 when he came in at the front door, crossed the living room, passed the dining room piano, and came to a stop at my grandmother's elbow to look down at something she was reading. He stopped at her elbow at precisely the same moment that I, having been upstairs, where I hadn't heard him arrive, opened the staircase door and came into the dining room.

..........This coincidental timing placed me very close to him, and it was necessary for me to draw even closer as I stepped behind him (and my grandmother) in order to go into the kitchen. It was at just that moment, as I squeezed between him and the china cabinet, that I caught the scent that made its way out from among the folds and creases of his summer walking clothes, perhaps mainly from the brown jacket. It was a smell made up, as I've mentioned, mainly of the scent of mothballs and of very old woodsmoke, these mingled with three or four other traces, much fainter.

..........I know now that it was the scent of the past, of what had been but was no more, of what had existed and now did not. The scent brought to me, with an overwhelming immediacy and power, a flood of lost things from abandoned years like 1923, 1927, 1931, 1934, and 1938; the vanished remnants of days spent hiking, of backpacks, dust, trails, pine needles, forest floors, of streams and rods and reels and fish-knives and tents and creels and canvas and campfires-an impression so overwhelming to me that, as I left the dining room and went in through the kitchen door (Professor Kampfer, scarcely disturbed, gave me this time only a second's incurious glance before he turned back to my grandmother's reading material), I took with me for the first time in my life the sudden understanding that the past does exist but that the things in it do not; that the scent of old woodsmoke was the scent of something that was no longer there and that therefore could not exist and yet that at the same time still did exist; and that the mysteries of space and time must indeed be the puzzles that hold the answers to all things in the world and in the universe-and that yet, at the same time, remain, and show every promise that they will always remain, out of reach, impenetrable, and unknowable.

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

>>READ AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER TWO 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 19TH CENTURY EXCERPTS IN PDF FORMAT)>>>



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	EXCERPT FROM THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY *>>(READ OR PRINT THE 19TH CENTURY* EXCERPTS IN PDF FORMAT)>>> FROM CHAPTER FOUR: FIRST PART .......... In the years of my early adolescence, there existed innumerable things and places in West Tree that offered windows for me to see through, into the past. These included objects as varied, for example, as the wooden paving blocks that still remained in some parts of downtown, or the pitted iron railing (put there in 1854) along the crest of Old College Hill. The windows included, seemingly, almost everything-the smooth, dark flow of the river as it curled over the lip of the mill dam, or the way the breezes smelled when they came from the southwest in the sweet part of a warm autumn, or the sound of church bells on spring mornings, or the taste of root beer floats in Harry Bauchman's drug store, or the way sunlight looked when it flowed through thick leaves to splash brokenly on cracked sidewalks in July and August. ..........Simply to name all such places or things to see through, let alone describe them, would approach the impossible. But, even so, here is a list of some of the moments, things, and locations that I now think were in one way or another typical, and typically influential, in bringing me in my adolescent years toward an increasingly precise and complete understanding of the world as a creation of the past (and to an understanding, although not immediately, of the place I might expect to have in that world). ..........Being by its nature arbitrary and to some degree necessarily partial and selective, the list nevertheless offers a practical usefulness through its inclusion of: ..........1) ..... My grandmother's house at 917 Woodland Avenue (similar if not almost identical in style to my great-aunt Marie and Lutie's house on Christiania Avenue) ..........2)..... The back yard of my grandmother's house, which extended deep into the center of the block, with trees, hedges, and swing; the part of the yard nearer to the house, most significantly with its picnic table and, at the northwest corner of the house and providing the driveway's terminus, its pitted concrete apron for a car to stand on ..........3)..... The basement of my grandmother's house, with, among others, these particulars: an extra toilet one corner, behind an improvised wooden wall; exposed ceiling beams made of two-by-eights, with smaller angled struts separating and bracing them; numerous vestiges of the lives of my father and his siblings in years long past, among these a bicycle without wheels, a rusty tire pump, three and a half pairs of skis, five bamboo ski poles, a croquet set with mallets, balls, sticks, and wickets, though the wickets were rusted, the colors of the wooden parts were faded, and the handles of three out of the six mallets were broken ..........4)..... The upstairs of my grandmother's house (similar to but considerably larger than the upstairs of Marie and Lutie's house), with its central hallway, its telephone and telephone table, sloping ceilings, and four bedrooms ..........5).....Of these, my father's bedroom in particular, with its window facing north and its ceiling garret-like and slanted ..........6)..... Located a long block directly north of my grandmother's house, the West Tree Hospital and what I believe now to have been the significance both of that building and of its design ..........7)..... The park and esplanade reaching north from the rear of the hospital, toward Christiania Avenue ..........8)..... The wading pool and sprinkler located in that park, at the Christiania Avenue end ..........9)..... My visit to the wading pool in the summer of 1944, although it could conceivably have been 1945 ..........10)..... The figure, personality, and influence of Dr. F. K. Kampfer, nearby neighbor of my grandmother, fellow church member, frequent visitor to her house, and professor, since 1928, of German and physics at Old College ..........11) ..... The clothing worn by Dr. Kampfer, in particular the hat, soft brown jacket, high socks and baggy shorts that he commonly wore on his walks through West Tree ..........12)..... The scent that came from Dr. Kampfer's clothing: a scent composed of mothballs and the smoke of ancient campfires, these being mingled with a number of other and much fainter smells ..........13)..... The part these smells played at my grandmother's house one Saturday morning in early April 1954, when they caused me, for the first time in my life-through realizing that what I smelled in Dr. Kampfer's clothing were the scents of the past and therefore the scents of what no longer existed-to understand that by necessity the past exists and yet by an equal necessity can not and does not exist. FROM CHAPTER FOUR: SECOND PART** vii. (I had nothing to do. The house was empty, hollow, dreary, vacant, abandoned. Time didn't move. In the living room I looked up at the rows of books behind their glass doors flanking the fireplace. I went into the basement but soon came back up again. In the dining room, I opened the door and climbed the carpeted stairway to the second floor. I stood in the hall near the telephone table and looked from one end of the house to the other. I went into each of the rooms and came out of them again, including my father's room and the storage room with the tent pegs and tennis rackets in it. . My grandmother reads. She writes letters. The house is quiet and no one is in it. My grandmother sometimes listens to the radio. In her wheelchair at the dining room table she almost always does so. On Saturday mornings when I am there, the station from Old College broadcasts selections of music interspersed with periods of talk and discussion. I pay little attention to it. The sound of the radio seems to me dreary, vacant, and churchlike. viii. (Professor C. P. Kampfer most often came in through the front door. He would give the bell a quick double ring, open the door, put his head inside, then sing out the word "hello" in a way that was less interrogative than declarative. He sang the second syllable in three extended tones that I thought of as forming an undulating string of letter "o's" that came into the house, wending their way through doors and around corners into my grandmother's ear. . If the weather was at all wet, snowy, or muddy, Professor Kampfer's ring would be more distant because he would come in at the back door instead of the front. He would step into the wood-paneled vestibule, take off his boots and leave them on the mat there, then come up the three steps, open the kitchen door and sing out his greeting. Invariably, as though imagining that he still had on wet boots, or muddy ones, he would tiptoe across the kitchen floor, appearing at the entry to the dining room with only thick wool stockings on his feet. . My grandmother clearly seemed pleased at the attentions she received from Professor Kampfer. She received him eagerly, with smiles and an awkward, brief half-embrace, for which he leaned down to her. In spite of the fervor of these visits, I remember them as normally lasting little more than ten or fifteen minutes. This kind of brevity, however, was in keeping with one of Professor Kampfer's most pronounced traits, which was the impression he gave of being always in very great haste. .......... If my grandmother was in her bedroom, he would go in immediately and, after the embrace, draw up the small straight chair to the side of the bed. If she was in the dining room, he would sit at the table where my mother had sat, with his back toward the windows. ..... .......... He brought items of food for my grandmother-breads, cakes, muffins that he had made himself, small jars of his own preserves from the raspberry bushes in his yard. With very nearly each visit, too, he would return reading materials that my grandmother had given him, commenting without fail-whether or not the two went on to discuss the matter further-that what he'd read had been "very interesting." In turn, he often brought items for my grandmother to read. Sometimes these were books with certain chapters set off by markers. More often they were articles in popular magazines or in alumni or church newsletters. On the following Saturday's visit they would make their exchanges again. . (From the beginning, I found Professor Kampfer a curiosity but at the same time faintly unsettling. There was a quality in his appearance-partly the result of his eyebrows, which were dark and bushy and seemed to be held up by tiny invisible hooks-that gave him a constant look of surprise ..........In the time I knew him, I doubt that he and I spoke more than twenty words. I know, however, that I had more than twenty moments of uneasiness when, for no apparent reason, I would notice Professor Kampfer staring at me fixedly, as if I were a mystery in need of solving, or-thanks to his eyebrows again-as if I had just done something so alarming as to render him shocked and speechless. ..........I had no idea that Professor Kampfer was later to play so significant a role in my life. He, too, I'm sure, would have been just as surprised to know the same thing. . The pleasure my grandmother took in his company must been due in some part simply to the length of their acquaintance. Professor Kampfer, after all, had lived around the corner (or through the block) on Poplar Street since 1928, the year he began teaching at Old College. This meant that my grandmother had known him and his family-a now-deceased wife and a son grown and gone-for over a quarter of a century. ..........My own curiosity about Professor Kampfer was less personal than my grandmother's but no more limited. Unquestionably, he was strange both in appearance and behavior. There were his startled eyebrows, his perpetual haste, his rapid speech, the bird-like quickness of his movements, and, most noticeable of all, his curiously asymmetrical mouth. Not only was its left side higher than the right, but a tic had chosen to make its home somewhere within that same left lip. Whenever the tic became active, the top lip jerked suddenly upward-as if tugged by another tiny hook-and exposed the long yellow canine residing behind it. The fleeting appearance of that tooth gave Professor Kampfer an oddly sinister look, as if a civilized face had been ever so briefly unmasked to reveal a glimpse of the unliterate carnivore behind it. ix. (I can't be absolutely certain which of the following is of the greatest significance, either in and of itself or in its relationship to the future: ..........1) .....the clothing worn by Professor Kampfer ..........2) .....the mingled smells that sometimes arose from Professor Kampfer's clothing ..........3) .....the fact that Professor Kampfer existed seemingly in a different plane of time from everyone else, since he continued to dwell within the Epoch of Walking when, for all others, that epoch had long since ended The three, I do know, are of equal interest insofar as all concern themselves obviously with the mysteries of space and time. x. Like anyone else's, Professor Kampfer's clothing varied with the seasons. It differed from other people's, however, in being so clearly old-fashioned, as if he had received it from storage in some previous era. .......... Whether his appearance seemed more unusual in summer or winter is difficult to say. In the cold months, wearing black leather boots that came slightly more than halfway up his calves, a Russian black fur hat, a greatcoat that hung below his knees, and oversized fur mittens, he would walk out in any and all weather. He did so even in the most fierce of blizzards, when he would also put on dark goggles with small round lenses. In the drift-bound, below-zero weather that followed the storms, he could be seen moving through the unpopulated silence on snowshoes. ..........In summer, on the other hand, he was distinguished by being the only male in West Tree over six years of age to wear short pants. Sometimes these were authentic lederhosen, though most of the time they were belted, baggy, multi-pocketed gray shorts of soft thick cotton. In addition, he wore a pair of dusty oxfords and knee-high socks, an open shirt under a four-buttoned brown jacket (the latter omitted in hot weather), and on his head a Bavarian felt hat with the tail feather of a pheasant in it, set at a rakishly angle. In this season, he always carried with him a dark, knobbed, crooked walking stick. . (He was wearing these clothes one unseasonably warm Saturday morning in April of 1954 when he came in at the front door, crossed the living room, passed the dining room piano, and came to a stop at my grandmother's elbow to look down at something she was reading. He stopped at her elbow at precisely the same moment that I, having been upstairs, where I hadn't heard him arrive, opened the staircase door and came into the dining room. ..........This coincidental timing placed me very close to him, and it was necessary for me to draw even closer as I stepped behind him (and my grandmother) in order to go into the kitchen. It was at just that moment, as I squeezed between him and the china cabinet, that I caught the scent that made its way out from among the folds and creases of his summer walking clothes, perhaps mainly from the brown jacket. It was a smell made up, as I've mentioned, mainly of the scent of mothballs and of very old woodsmoke, these mingled with three or four other traces, much fainter. ..........I know now that it was the scent of the past, of what had been but was no more, of what had existed and now did not. The scent brought to me, with an overwhelming immediacy and power, a flood of lost things from abandoned years like 1923, 1927, 1931, 1934, and 1938; the vanished remnants of days spent hiking, of backpacks, dust, trails, pine needles, forest floors, of streams and rods and reels and fish-knives and tents and creels and canvas and campfires-an impression so overwhelming to me that, as I left the dining room and went in through the kitchen door (Professor Kampfer, scarcely disturbed, gave me this time only a second's incurious glance before he turned back to my grandmother's reading material), I took with me for the first time in my life the sudden understanding that the past does exist but that the things in it do not; that the scent of old woodsmoke was the scent of something that was no longer there and that therefore could not exist and yet that at the same time still did exist; and that the mysteries of space and time must indeed be the puzzles that hold the answers to all things in the world and in the universe-and that yet, at the same time, remain, and show every promise that they will always remain, out of reach, impenetrable, and unknowable. >>READ AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE OF THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY>>> >>READ AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER TWO 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 19TH CENTURY* EXCERPTS IN PDF FORMAT)>>>**
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