第67章
OUR NEXT DOOR.The daily news is a necessity.I cannot get along without my morning paper.The other morning I took it up, and was absorbed in the telegraphic columns for an hour nearly.I thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of immediate contact with all the world of yesterday, until I read among the minor items that Patrick Donahue, of the city of New York, died of a sunstroke.If he had frozen to death, I should have enjoyed that; but to die of sunstroke in February seemed inappropriate, and I turned to the date of the paper.
When I found it was printed in July, I need not say that I lost all interest in it, though why the trivialities and crimes and accidents, relating to people I never knew, were not as good six months after date as twelve hours, I cannot say.
THE FIRE-TENDER.You know that in Concord the latest news, except a remark or two by Thoreau or Emerson, is the Vedas.I believe the Rig-Veda is read at the breakfast-table instead of the Boston journals.
THE PARSON.I know it is read afterward instead of the Bible.
MANDEVILLE.That is only because it is supposed to be older.I have understood that the Bible is very well spoken of there, but it is not antiquated enough to be an authority.
OUR NEXT DOOR.There was a project on foot to put it into the circulating library, but the title New in the second part was considered objectionable.
HERBERT.Well, I have a good deal of sympathy with Concord as to the news.We are fed on a daily diet of trivial events and gossip, of the unfruitful sayings of thoughtless men and women, until our mental digestion is seriously impaired; the day will come when no one will be able to sit down to a thoughtful, well-wrought book and assimilate its contents.
THE MISTRESS.I doubt if a daily newspaper is a necessity, in the higher sense of the word.
THE PARSON.Nobody supposes it is to women,--that is, if they can see each other.
THE MISTRESS.Don't interrupt, unless you have something to say;though I should like to know how much gossip there is afloat that the minister does not know.The newspaper may be needed in society, but how quickly it drops out of mind when one goes beyond the bounds of what is called civilization.You remember when we were in the depths of the woods last summer how difficult it was to get up any interest in the files of late papers that reached us, and how unreal all the struggle and turmoil of the world seemed.We stood apart, and could estimate things at their true value.
THE YOUNG LADY.Yes, that was real life.I never tired of the guide's stories; there was some interest in the intelligence that a deer had been down to eat the lily-pads at the foot of the lake the night before; that a bear's track was seen on the trail we crossed that day; even Mandeville's fish-stories had a certain air of probability; and how to roast a trout in the ashes and serve him hot and juicy and clean, and how to cook soup and prepare coffee and heat dish-water in one tin-pail, were vital problems.
THE PARSON.You would have had no such problems at home.Why will people go so far to put themselves to such inconvenience? I hate the woods.Isolation breeds conceit; there are no people so conceited as those who dwell in remote wildernesses and live mostly alone.
THE YOUNG LADY.For my part, I feel humble in the presence of mountains, and in the vast stretches of the wilderness.
THE PARSON.I'll be bound a woman would feel just as nobody would expect her to feel, under given circumstances.
MANDEVILLE.I think the reason why the newspaper and the world it carries take no hold of us in the wilderness is that we become a kind of vegetable ourselves when we go there.I have often attempted to improve my mind in the woods with good solid books.You might as well offer a bunch of celery to an oyster.The mind goes to sleep:
the senses and the instincts wake up.The best I can do when it rains, or the trout won't bite, is to read Dumas's novels.Their ingenuity will almost keep a man awake after supper, by the camp-fire.And there is a kind of unity about them that I like; the history is as good as the morality.
OUR NEXT DOOR.I always wondered where Mandeville got his historical facts.
THE MISTRESS.Mandeville misrepresents himself in the woods.Iheard him one night repeat "The Vision of Sir Launfal"--(THEFIRE-TENDER.Which comes very near being our best poem.)--as we were crossing the lake, and the guides became so absorbed in it that they forgot to paddle, and sat listening with open mouths, as if it had been a panther story.
THE PARSON.Mandeville likes to show off well enough.I heard that he related to a woods' boy up there the whole of the Siege of Troy.
The boy was very much interested, and said "there'd been a man up there that spring from Troy, looking up timber." Mandeville always carries the news when he goes into the country.
MANDEVILLE.I'm going to take the Parson's sermon on Jonah next summer; it's the nearest to anything like news we've had from his pulpit in ten years.But, seriously, the boy was very well informed.
He'd heard of Albany; his father took in the "Weekly Tribune," and he had a partial conception of Horace Greeley.
OUR NEXT DOOR.I never went so far out of the world in America yet that the name of Horace Greeley did n't rise up before me.One of the first questions asked by any camp-fire is, "Did ye ever see Horace?"HERBERT.Which shows the power of the press again.But I have often remarked how little real conception of the moving world, as it is, people in remote regions get from the newspaper.It needs to be read in the midst of events.A chip cast ashore in a refluent eddy tells no tale of the force and swiftness of the current.
OUR NEXT DOOR.I don't exactly get the drift of that last remark;but I rather like a remark that I can't understand; like the landlady's indigestible bread, it stays by you.
HERBERT.I see that I must talk in words of one syllable.The newspaper has little effect upon the remote country mind, because the remote country mind is interested in a very limited number of things.