Friday
I hope readers will indulge another reflection upon my return to my alma mater Carleton College this past weekend, where I participated in 50th reunion planning. I discussed my mixed feelings about the school on Monday but didn’t mention my meaningful encounters with former classmates. In one of the English language’s greatest poems about revisiting old haunts, Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey talks about the importance of having someone with whom to share intense memories.
Given the power of Wordsworth’s trip down Memory Lane, I’ve always found it funny that the poem memorializes a fifth-year reunion, maybe the least dramatic of all reunions (it stands in stark contrast with the 50th). Maybe, given Wordsworth’s intensity, five years for him is 50 for anyone else. In any event, the year is 1798 and Wordsworth is returning to a spot “a few miles above Tintern Abbey…on the Banks of the Wye” that he first visited in 1793 at the age of 22.
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
Since then, the poet has carried the scene and the accompanying sensations with him wherever he has gone:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration…
Nor is that all the remembrance does for him. Because he recollects so deeply, he has an out-of-body experience:
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Wordsworth acknowledges that not everyone will have a mystical experience when looking back, and I must admit that my Carleton memories have not put me in touch with the divine. What Wordsworth says about his intense nature moments, on the other hand, resonates with me. In Tuesday’s post I recounted how Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October” took me back to experiences with Julia in Carleton’s Arboretum, and the following Tintern Abbey passage also captures the heightened emotions that I remember:
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led…
For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love…
Contributing to my own “glad animal movements” was the pulsating animal poetry of D. H. Lawrence, one of which (the sexually explicit “Tortoise Shout”) Julia and I included in our Commencement-day wedding.
I promised this post would be about reunions as shared experience, however, so I turn now to where Wordsworth talks about the importance of having a companion. His sister Dorothy accompanies him on this second visit, and he now looks at the scene through her eyes. To continue with my reunion theme, he resembles the parents who, Carleton graduates themselves, want their children to have the Carleton experience:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister!
Sounding like someone who is my age (70) rather than 27, Wordsworth hopes that his sister’s memories will help him hang on to his own. “When these wild ecstasies shall be matured/ Into a sober pleasure,” writes the still young William to Dorothy, your mind will be
a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies…
Because they share the moment, the poet concludes, this magical spot on the Wye River will always be special. Or as he puts it,
Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
When I attended my 40th reunion ten years ago, my classmates sharing their varied life experiences revealed how much we had been shaped by both Carleton and the early 1970s. Despite differences, we all carried with us a similar vision of life because we had all used our liberal arts education to negotiate the same historical forces—those being the Vietnam War, the protest movement, the racial strife, and the Nixon White House. I have always told my students that, to understand an author’s vision, look at the world when he or she was 21. One can apply that lesson to college reunion classes as well.
The planning committee came up with a logo and a slogan for the reunion that captures what we share. There is a sketch of Carleton’s landmark “Hill of the Three Oaks,” the three individual trees having their roots intertwined below ground. The slogan will probably be, “Shared Journeys, Deep Roots.”
As I have just been reading Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a sublime novel about trees and humans, I can see the theme to be even better than I would previously have thought. Powers lets us know that, even when trees appear separate, they are actually joined in complex ways, sometimes through root systems, sometimes via the chemicals they send off. For instance, here’s his botanist Patricia Westerford responding to an aspen forest:
The oldest downed trees are about eighty years. She smiles at the number, so comical, for these fifty thousand baby trees all around her have sprouted from a rhizome mass too old to date even to the nearest hundred millennia. Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they’re a day. She wouldn’t be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years.
And here are maples communicating through the air:
Confirmation comes the following spring. Three more trials, and she’s convinced. The trees under attack pump out insecticides to save their lives. That much is uncontroversial. But something else in the data makes her flesh pucker: trees a little way off, untouched by the invading swarms, ramp up their own defenses when their neighbor is attacked. Something alerts them. They get wind of the disaster, and they prepare. She controls for everything she can, and the results are always the same. Only one conclusion makes any sense. The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.
As she writes up her results, Westerford observes,
The biochemical behavior of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community.
Our own lives make more sense if we see ourselves as members of a common experience. When this experience occurs at one of the most impressionable moments of our lives, it’s important for the members to reassemble and ritually revisit it. I didn’t think this when I was closer to Wordsworth’s 27 years—in fact, I avoided all reunions until the 25th—but I think it now.