Radio Script #5
Little Talk On Common Things,
December 12, 1948
A common thing in the Maine autumn is fog, and the year around it is all too common on the Maine coast. But I suppose we seldom see such fogs as enveloped England a fortnight ago. The soupy mist was so thick that traffic, not only in London but in the inland cities, came to a standstill. One could see nothing two yards away. It clung to the earth with that impenetrable thickness for five long days, and as lighter haze lasted much longer. The oldest inhabitants remembered nothing like it.
Now Carl Sandburg, whom we all res~ct as poet and biographer, thought he knew something about fog, and he once write a poem which began: “The fog comes in on little cat’s feet.” But I agree with our Maine poet, Bob Coffin, that if Sandburg means that for accurate description, he never· saw a Maine fog. It may describe the fuzzy little haze that sweeps in from Lake Michigan over Sandburg’s Chicago, but it doesn’t fit the fogs of Casco and Penobscot Bays.
Mr. Coffin’s own poem, THE FOG, is more like it. Listen!
“He knew how Roman legions looked, for he
Had seen the Maine fogs march in from the sea
For many years now, in the August days.
They came in mighty columns up the bays,
Tawny and gray and silver in the sun;
They trampled out the seaports one by one,
The islands and the woods, with their high hosts,
And pushed the world back inland from the coasts.
“This little house was lost, these hills and dells,
Cows in pasture faded into bells,
The world around a man closed in and in
Till nowhere was ten paces from his chin.
This was the peril and the comfort too,
A man who lived in such a region knew;
On any summer’s day, within an hour,
He might be blind and naked to a power
So vast, it might have come from stars unmade,
Undreamt of, even, making him afraid,
So mightier than the night that he could guess
How life was but a name for loneliness.”
So much for the literal fog. Like every true poet, Mr. Coffin suggests figurative applications: the fog of loneliness, the fog of uncomprehending fear. At best we live most of our lives surrounded by fog; there are so many things we see as through a glass darkly, or do not see at all. The fogs of fear and hate, of vested interest and prejudice, of materialistic philosophy disguised as reality. How much we all need the light that penetrates the fog, the light of religious faith — not the dogmatism of any creed or sect -but the staunch belief that we are not alone, fogbound in an all too hazy universe, but that we are children of a divine creator, and like Job of old we know our vindicator liveth. And we would also remember that 2,000 years ago there was one who said to men just as fog-bound as we: “I am the light of the world.”
Among common things shall we include the Little Red Schoolhouse? Certainly we hear enough about it. But let me ask you a frank question. When did you last, if ever, see one? One of the true elderly statesmen of our community, a man whose memory goes well back into the nineteenth century, asked me that question not long ago, and I confess it was not easy to give him an honest answer. Had I ever seen one? I can remember just two. In my boyhood days the litt1e one-room school at West Bridgton, Maine, was painted red. I never attended it, but my father did, and he often spoke of it as “the red school”, in distinction from other schoolhouses in the town. The other red schoolhouse which I remember was painted red, I suspect, because of the red schoolhouse tradition, and not because red was its original color. It is the building associated with Mary and her little lamb — the schoolhouse which Henry Ford moved to a site on his historical development near the Wayside Inn at Sudbury, Massachusetts.
Whi1e we are on the subject of old-time things now hard to find, including little red schoolhouses, where in central Maine is there an old cattle pound? I refer to the really old ones an enclosure, usually rectangular, built of stone wa1ls high enough to keep cattle and horses from jumping out, with only one opening where once hung a wooden door. Somewhere, within fifty miles of Watervil1e, there must be the remains of one of those old pounds, where the poundkeeper put stray horses to await claim by their owners. I know an historical worker who is anxious to locate one of those pounds. If any listener will send this information to WTVL, the historian will get it.
What a precious, though common, thing is companionship. We think of it as applying to two schoolboy chums, two men friends, two inseparable girls. We scarcely give a thought to the conunonest of all companionship, that made by the bond of marriage. Many a .man has seriously asked the question, “How has my wife been ab1e to put up with the kind of person I am, living under the same roof, for all these years?” We men, .. knowing ourselves for what we really are and how far we fall short of being acceptable companions, ought to wonder that divorce isn’t even more prevalent than it is, instead of venting our social wrath about its deplorable increase.
Perhaps more than one man of us ought to take to heart the point of a little story I heard recently. A tornado, one of those quick twisters, had struck a Nebraska farm in the middle of the night. It ripped the roof off the farmhouse, and lifted the bed, with the farmer and his wife in it, right out through the opening, across the road, over the fences, and deposited bed and occupants, entirely unharmed, in the middle of a distant field. When the man realized what had happened, he found his wife crying softly, but not hysterically, and he said: “There, there, Mother, everything is all right. We aren’t hurt at all, and the twister is over . Stop crying.” But the good lady kept right on with her gentle sobs. So the man said, “Why don’t you stop crying? What are you crying for anyway? Can’t I make you understand that we are perfectly safe?” Whereupon the woman replied, “Yes, Dad, I know we’re out of danger. That’s not why I’m crying. Don’t you realize this is the first time we’ve been out together in seventeen years?”
Words, we have said, are common things we shall often mention on this program. Just now let us think a bit about common expressions. All parts of the country have such phrases, some more picturesque than others. We who think Maine is peculiarly rich in them are anxious to get these fine old sayings of Maine into the record now being compiled by the American Dialect Society. Some of these expre~sions are common comparisons like “slower than cold molasses”,”homelier than a stump fence”,”thick as spatter”, “like a bump on a log”, “no more peace than a toad under a harrow”. Some are simple phrases, such as “took a hist” for had a fall; “she looks kind of peaked” or “she’s feeling pretty slim” for sickly; “he’s lost his gumption; he was ali beat out, but yesterday he perked up some”. There are hundreds of simple combinations like a “good-living day”, “the shank of the evening”, the whole kit and caboodle”, “just a step and a straddle”, “a lick and a promise”, “a hind-end start”. Do you have some favorite expression you would like to see recorded? Your present speaker is a member of the American Dialect Society, and he will gladly see that your favorite expression, unless it is already listed, is properly recorded and accredited, if you will send it to Little Talks on Common Things, Station WTVL, Waterville.
Let us turn now to the influence of a little man. Shakespeare has reminded us that “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” But that is fortunately only half the truth. The good which men do also has a way of.living after them. No generation inherits merely good or merely evil from its fathers. Hence a homely, shrunken, almost misshapen little man, clothed in a loin cloth and persistently turning an old-fashioned spinning Wheel, has left such impression of good upon a people that one fruit of his tireless effort has ripened before he has lain a year in his grave.
All his life Mahatma Gandhi fought for the unrecognized rights of India’s 50 million untouchables. Those tragic human beings, totaling a full quarter of India’s population,were untouchable because, not only their touch, but also the touch of anything they had touched was contamination to any other Hindu. They were outcasts, not because they belonged to the lowest caste, but to no caste at all. Until the British Raj had brought slight betterment of their plight, they could not use the village wells, because even their shadows would contaminate the water. Because they could not enter the shops, they could buy no food and no tools. They could get their food only by gleaning and scavenging. Millions of them literally lived on garbage.
Mahatma Gandhi, though himself a Hindu of Caste, ate with these untouchables, slept in the same room with them, declared again and again that Untouchability must go. He seemed to be making no more impression than had the British Raj on a system that was 1,500 years old when Christ was born. But last week, only a few months after the assassin’s hand had ended Gandhi’s life, the Indian Constituent Assembly adopted the following provision in India’s new Constitution: “Untouchability is abolished and its practice is forbidden in any form. Enforcement of any disability arising out of Untouchability shall be a punishable offense in accordance with law.”
Elation and the world’s acclaim of this reform may be a bit premature. Customs embedded in a people for 3,500 years are not swept aside; by merely passing a law. The vested interests of the higher castes will be defended to the bitter end. Enforcement will be slow and difficult. Lest we expect a sudden miracle in India, we had better remind ourselves of a bit of American history. In 1870 the States ratified the 15th Amendment to our Constitution. which reads: “The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged-by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
For more than 75 years, until a recent decision of the Supreme Court, men (and later women) were persistently denied the right to vote because of their color. Even now, by vicious poll tax legislation and by more vicious intimidation, colored people are kept away from the ballot box. If we cannot completely enforce our 15th Amendment after 75 years, in spite of the admitted power of the Federal Government, we can hardly expect the enforcement of the new law against Untouchability in India. But, like our Emancipation Proclamation, and our 13th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, this new law in India is the first great step in a long overdue social reform. And the credit for it belongs largely to the little man with the spinning wheel, the man of non-violence and passive resistance, who not only brought a great empire to submission, but who brought the leaders of his own country to face with shame their treatment of the Untouchables. Shakespeare notwithstanding, the good that men do lives after them.
Mahatma Gandhi was not a Christian. He died as he was born, a Hindu. But he himself has told us where he got his idea of the power of non-violence. He got it from the greatest life that was ever lived, as he pondered and absorbed the greatest story ever told.
Year: 1948