Men Made Out of Words, and: Large Red Man Reading, and: The River of Rivers in Connecticut

Abstract

Men Made Out of Words, and: Large Red Man Reading, and: The River of Rivers in Connecticut John Surowiecki Men Made Out of Words Everyone please stop writing for a few days. Let the brilliance settle like dust on the topsof desks and other pieces of furniture. Let words become a cuneiform of dead worms on ordinary sidewalks,sentences become odors no one recognizes. Words aren’t the way, get in the way, will give way. Every word has become a double entendreso everything’s now twice what it used to be. Whatever you think your life is it’s not that: not anything of a shape or color anymore,not anything you can put into so many words. [End Page 107] Large Red Man Reading The sagacious man who smells of beetsand rust has always been beset by ghosts, but not large red ones. Someone’s lost sister brushes October leavesfrom his red shoulders; someone’s uncle, for whom the crossword is a university, helps him with the want ads.He learns about Prospero, who hides from the red death but dies anyway, and he thinks about the world none of us is meant to seeand the type of time that’s not made for passing and doesn’t age a soul. [End Page 108] The River of Rivers in Connecticut In memoriam Prof. Joseph Cary We always found our way back to the gaiety of it,satires of exigencies, flashes in the sun.But his river was never quite ours, was it? Or anyone else’s. See Farmington from the riverbank? Not a chance.No ferrymen? Actually, there are two,one in Glastonbury, one in Chester (plus: there’s the knot in Windsor to consider). Down in Haddam men don’timagine golden birds, but they oftenget to see eagles. Current tends to spill thickly there, sediment and dross. In spring, freshets areeasily managed, compliant,familiar. Taken together, it’s one big blue-brown cocktail. In winter, it begins asone thing and ends as another,carrying sticks and snow to the sound of sounds and the race of races, the sea of seas and the key of keys,where the poet of poets ignores icy innuendosand digs his feet deeper into the venereal sand. [End Page 109] John Surowiecki Amston, Connecticut Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press