Friday
Last week I applied Walter Shandy’s theory of names to my eldest son. According to the protagonist’s father in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, your name determines your destiny, and I found that somewhat to be the case with Darien.
So how about my second son, Toby, who it so happens is a fan of Tristram Shandy? Looking back, I think I named Toby after Uncle Toby in Sterne’s novel, although perhaps I also had in mind Tobias Smollett, the 18th century Scottish novelist and my dissertation subject. I also have long been enamored of the story of young Tobias and the three angels from Tobit, the most fairytale-like book in the Bible. Names are often overdetermined in this fashion.
As I mention Sterne’s Uncle Toby and the Scottish novelist, I hear Toby’s voice: “So Dad, you named me after a character who may have been rendered impotent by a groin wound from the 1695 siege of Namur and who, to recover from his PTSD, becomes obsessed with constructing a miniature model of the fortified city?! And also after a novelist who was so cranky that Sterne nicknamed him Dr. Smelfungus?! What kind of destiny does that set me up for?”
In my defense, however, my major association with Sterne’s Uncle Toby is his kindness, and my Toby is one of the kindest people I know. He evinces such interest in other people, even those with opposite political views, that they come away feeling respected and heard. Here’s Tristram’s description of his uncle:
My uncle Toby was a man patient of injuries;—not from want of courage,—I have told you in a former chapter, “that he was a man of courage:”—And will add here, that where just occasions presented, or called it forth,—I know no man under whose arm I would have sooner taken shelter;… he was of a peaceful, placid nature,—no jarring element in it,—all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly.
Tristram isn’t kidding about the fly:
—Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand,——I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?——This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
Tristram talks about the influence:
I was but ten years old when this happened….I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.
Along with his kindness, my Toby also has an affinity for children (he is finely attuned to the individual personalities of each of his four kids) and for small animals. I mention the latter because the Biblical Tobias, when he goes off with the angels, has an unexpected companion: “So they went forth both, and the young man’s dog with them.” (This strange throwaway detail has delighted at least one novelist although it’s driving me crazy that I can’t remember who. If you know, please write.)
Tobias, incidentally, is Hebrew for “God is good.” When we visited the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, I purchased for my Toby a Francesco Botticini print of Tobias and his angel companions.
For all his kindness, it cannot have been easy for Toby to grow up in the shadow of his two older brothers, who were both straight A students and standout athletes. Toby was far quieter and, unlike Justin and Darien, excelled only in the subjects that caught his attention (like English). His standout qualities were less flashy, and it took a professional-level coach to notice that, when Toby played soccer fullback, no one scored on his side of the field. Even when he was in elementary school, he would amaze the family by his psychological insights into human behavior. I later recall a moment—I think he was a high school junior—when I gave him Beowulf (he wanted to read something I assigned my students) and saw him detect power dynamics that I myself had missed. As a sophomore in college, he once decided he would read every major literary epic and proceeded to immerse himself in Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Orlando Furioso, The Fairy Queene, Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Leaves of Grass, and The Waste Land. (He would write his senior thesis on the last three.) For much of his childhood and adolescence, Toby flew under the radar.
To make sure he didn’t fly under mine, I made sure that we did special things together, including ice cream after soccer and lacrosse games and nightly reading. Also, once a year, I’d pull him out of school and we’d spend the day together, often watching a movie or visiting a park.
Toby and Justin were very close and Justin’s death devastated him. He once reported—I believe when visiting Justin’s grave—of experiencing in a visceral way Justin’s presence, feeling goose pimples all over although the weather was warm and there was no breeze. I don’t believe he was just fantasizing this—he’s too honest about his feelings to do that—and I find it interesting that he is now writing about Victorian ghost stories (including Dickens’s Christmas Carol).
Toby connects ghost stories with time travel literature, the subject of his dissertation, and he recently texted me about how the interest dates back to Justin. He was at home alone when news started to circulate that Justin had drowned and, when the phone began to ring, he started “telling stories that I thought were probably true.” To this day, he says, he has “never stopped having dreams, from then to now, where he talks to me about that very concept. He tells me that they never found him and that he’s been living on the other side of the river.”
Toby adds that this is, in some ways, “the philosophical basis for my entire approach to the idea of a time machine.” In his dissertation Toby wrote about Frankenstein, David Copperfield, Alice in Wonderland, Williams Morris’s News to Nowhere, Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent, and H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, all of which explore different aspects of time, and he says that reading a work that takes one back in time is a form of time travel. As he puts it, it’s a sort of “intentional acceptance of the alienation that happens when we accept the provisional reality of a mediated experience.” In such instances, he believes, narrative “becomes every bit as load bearing as concrete or electricity.”
If I understand this correctly, the fact that Toby’s own experience with death was initially mediated, not only through invented narrative but through a machine (the telephone)–and that there was a time disjunction (Justin alive in the narrative dimension, dead in the physical one)–led Toby to his time machine focus at the University of California at Davis. In Toby’s vision, H.G. Wells’s time machine is only one form that time travel takes, and one can also see the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott as time machines. Of course Christmas Carol also features time travel.
Toby once told me that his favorite Wordsworth poem is “We Are Seven,” which at first surprised me as I’ve never taken it all that seriously. I was deeply moved, however, when I saw it in light of Toby’s experience. After all, it explores the the collision of two different realities. Narrative is indeed “load bearing” for the child:
We Are Seven
By William Wordsworth
A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad;
Her eyes were fair, and very fair; —
Her beauty made me glad.
“Sisters and brothers, little maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.
“And where are they? I pray you tell.”
She answered, “Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
“Two of us in the churchyard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And in the churchyard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”
“You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven! — I pray you tell,
Sweet maid, how this may be.”
Then did the little maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the churchyard lie,
Beneath the churchyard tree.”
“You run about, my little maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the churchyard laid,
Then ye are only five.”
“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.
“My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.
“And often after sunset, sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.
“The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.
“So in the churchyard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
“And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.”
“How many are you, then,” said I,
“If they two are in heaven?”
Quick was the little maid’s reply,
“O master! we are seven.”
“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
‘T was throwing words away; for still
The little maid would have her will,
And say, “Nay, we are seven!”
Toby’s interest in the intersection between machines and narrative helped land him a post-doctoral fellowship at Georgia Tech, where he got along well with his engineering students. He also did some work in the robotics lab, and he understands A-I better than anyone I know. Toby is currently completing a book on time travel literature that, among other things, looks at how conceptions of time changed in the course of the 19th century. His research has somehow plunged him into the origins of calculus, and he only half-jokingly says that, to truly understand Newton, one must read Paradise Lost.
While all this was going on, Toby also married Candice, a Trinidadian woman who teaches Film Studies at the University of North Georgia. Toby himself teaches at Georgia Gwinnett College and they have three girls and a boy. As I mentioned last week, he also maintains weekly contact with his brother Darien and they are currently reading together The Brothers Karamazov, my own all-time favorite novel. Toby’s latest observation, texted to me yesterday, was filled with his characteristic humor:
Doctor Herzenstube showing up and not understanding anything is one of the funniest reoccurring bits in Karamazov. It’s like a Marx Brothers’ punchline. He always shows up at the end of a scene where there’s been a dangerous sickness or a seizure and then the narrator describes how respected and venerable he is. And every time he says, “I don’t understand,” and the scene ends.
While I don’t think Toby carefully ushers flies out of the house, he remains the kind and thoughtful human being he was as a child. Tragedy, marriage, and fatherhood have only deepened him.
Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026)
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026)
Lit in the Year following Justin’s Death (March 27, 2026)
My Eldest Son, Named after a Keats Sonnet (April 3, 2026)
Sterne’s Uncle Toby and My Own Toby (April 10, 2026)
