Not bad for one village.
Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong. That is where Gerald Stanley Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed envelope I will give you the name of our village, and instructions for avoiding it. It is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the east by asthma7 and the pollen8 of anemophylous plants.
It is bounded on the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor Castle, confirmed with butlers, buttresses9, bastions, ramparts, repartees, feudal10 tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, chevaux de frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, machine-gun emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux de fantaisie that make life worth living for retired11 manufacturers. The general effect is emetic12 in the extreme. Hard by the castle is a spurious and richly gabled stable in the general style of the chateau13 de Chantilly. One brief strip of lawn constitutes a gulf14 of five hundred years in architecture, and restrains Runnymede from Versailles.
Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At five o'clock merchants and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, remove the cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot. The countryside is as lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, rolling terrain15, stewed16 terrapin17, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, spare tires, and other props18. But we are equally infamous19 for hideous20 houses, of the Chester A. Arthur era. Every prospect21 pleases, and man alone is vile22.
There is a large, expensive school for flappers, on a hill; and a drugstore or pharmacy23 where the flappers come to blow off steam. It would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to ambush24 herself behind the Welch's grape juice life-size cut-out, and takes notes on flapperiana. Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy.
Our village was once famous also as the dwelling25 place of an eminent26 parson, who obtained a million signatures for a petition to N. Romanoff, asking the abolition27 of knouting of women in Siberia. And now N. Romanoff himself is gone to Siberia, and there is no knouting or giving in knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other check on the ladies. Knitting instead of knouting is the order of the day.
Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning from the pharmacy or drugstore.
Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, but she is within a day's journey on the Cinder4 and Bloodshot.
But I was speaking of hay fever. "Although not dangerous to life," say Drs. S. Oppenheimer and Mark Gottlieb, "it causes at certain times such extreme discomfort28 to some of its victims as to unfit them for their ordinary pursuits. If we accept the view that it is a disease of the classes rather than the masses we may take the viewpoint of self-congratulation rather than of humiliation30 as indicating a superiority in culture and civilization of the favoured few. When the intimate connection of pollinosis and culture has been firmly grasped by the public mind, the complaint will perhaps come to be looked upon like gout, as a sign of breeding. It will be assumed by those who have it not.... As civilization and culture advance, other diseases analogous32 to the one under consideration may be developed from oversensitiveness to sound, colour, or form, and the man of the twenty-first or twenty-second century may be a being of pure intellect whose organization of mere33 nervous pulp34 would be shattered by a strong emotion, like a pumpkin35 filled with dynamite36." (vide "Pollen Therapy in Pollinosis," reprinted from the Medical Record, March 18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H.L. Mencken, fellow sufferer, for sending me a copy of this noble pamphlet. I hope to live to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand. Their essay is marked by a wit and learning that proves them fellow-orgiasts in this hypercultivated affliction of the cognoscenti.)
I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate some of the affinities37 between hay fever and genius by attributing it (in the debased form of literary parody) to those of great intellectual stature38. Upon the literary vehicles of expression habitually39 employed by Rudyard Kipling, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Hilaire Belloc I have wafted40 a pinch of ragweed and goldenrod; with surprising results. These intellectuals were not more immune than myself. For instance, this is the spasm41 ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, of Spoon River:
Ed Grimes always did hate me
Because I wrote better poetry than he did.
In the hay fever season I used to walk
Along the river bank, to keep as far as possible
Away from pollen.
One day Ed and his brother crept up behind me
Tied my hands and feet,
And carried me into a hayfield and left me.
I sneezed myself to death.
At the funeral the church was full of goldenrod,
And I think it must have been Ed
Who sowed that ragweed all round my grave.
The Lord loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. Masters deserves great credit for lending himself to the cult31 in this way.
I am a fanatical admirer of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, and have even thought of spending fifty of my own dollars, privily43 and without collusion with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable book of his called "WE" which is probably the ablest and most original, and certainly the most verbose44, book that has been written about the war. Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and get this right) is the most eminent victim of words that ever lived in New England (or indeed anywhere east of East Aurora). Words crowd upon him like flies upon a honey-pot: he is helpless to resist them. His brain buzzes with them: they leap from his eye, distil45 from his lean and waving hand. Good God, not since Rabelais and Lawrence Sterne, miscalled Reverend, has one human being been so beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables46. I adore him for it, but equally I tremble. Glowing, radiant, transcendent vocables swim and dissolve in the porches of his brain, teasing him with visions far more deeply confused than ever Mr. Wordsworth's were. The meanest toothbrush that bristles47 (he has confessed it himself) can fill him with thoughts that do often lie too deep for publishers. Perhaps the orotund48 soul-wamblings of Coleridge are recarnate in him, Scawfell become Mount Tom. Who knows? Once I sat at lunch with him, and though I am Trencherman Fortissimus (I can give you testimonials) my hamburg steak fell from my hand as I listened, clutching perilously49 at the hem29 of his thought. Nay50. Mr. Lee, frown not: I say it in sincere devotion. If there is one man and one book this country needs, now, it is Gerald Stanley Lee and "WE." Set me upon a coral atoll with that volume, I will repopulate the world with dictionaries, and beget51 lusty tomes. It is a breeding-ground for a whole new philosophy of heaven, hell, and the New Haven52 Railroad.
But what I was going to say when I lit my pipe was this: had I the stature (not the leanness, God forbid: sweet are the uses of obesity) of Mr. Lee, I could find in any clodded trifle the outlets53 of sky my yearning54 mind covets55: hay fever would lead me by prismatic omissions56 and plunging57 ellipses58 of thought to the vaster spirals and eddies59 of all-viewing Mind. So does Mr. Lee proceed, weaving a new economics and a new bosom60 for advertisiarchs in the mere act of brushing his teeth. But alas61, the recurring62 explosions of the loathsome63 and intellectual disease keep my nose on the grindstone—or handkerchief. Do I begin to soar on upward pinion64, nose tweaks me back to sealpackerchief.
The trouble with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind of Emerson; a constitutional ascete or Brahmin, battling with the staggering voluptuosities of his word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium65 to set him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no control over his thoughts. A poet may begin by thinking about a tortoise, or a locomotive, or a piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his mind has shot up to the conceptions of Eternity66, Transportation, and Nourishment67: his cortex coruscates68 and suppurates with abstract thought; words assail69 him in hordes70, and in a flash he is down among them, overborne and fighting for his life. Mr. Lee finds that millionaires are bound down and tethered and stifled71 by their limousines72 and coupons73 and factories and vast estates. But Mr. Lee himself, who is a millionaire and landed proprietor74 of ideas, is equally the slave of his thronging75 words. They cluster about him like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely76 impeding77 his progress. He is a Laocoon wrestling with serpentine78 sentences. He ought to be confined to an eight-hour paragraph.
All this is not so by the way as you think. For if the poet is one who has lost control of his thoughts, the hay fever sufferer has lost control of his nose. His mucous79 membrane80 acts like a packet of Roman candles, and who is he to say it nay? And our village is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the east by chickweed, and on the west by a sleepless81 night.
I would fain treat pollinosis in the way Mr. Lee might discuss it, but that is impossible. Those prolate, sagging82 spirals of thought, those grapevine twists of irremediable whim83, that mind shimmering84 like a poplar tree in sun and wind—jetting and spouting85 like plumbing86 after a freeze-up—'tis beyond me. I fancy that if Mr. Lee were in bed, and the sheets were untucked at his feet, he could spin himself so iridescent87 and dove-throated and opaline a philosophy of the desirability of sleeping with cold feet, that either (1) he would not need to get out of bed to rearrange the bedclothes, or (2) he could persuade someone else to do it for him. Think, then, what he could do for hay fever!
And as Dr. Crothers said, when you mix what you think with what you think you think, effervescence of that kind always results.
The End
The End
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1 remarkable | |
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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2 baron | |
n.男爵;(商业界等)巨头,大王 | |
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3 fragrant | |
adj.芬香的,馥郁的,愉快的 | |
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4 cinder | |
n.余烬,矿渣 | |
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5 cinders | |
n.煤渣( cinder的名词复数 );炭渣;煤渣路;煤渣跑道 | |
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6 afflicted | |
使受痛苦,折磨( afflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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7 asthma | |
n.气喘病,哮喘病 | |
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8 pollen | |
n.[植]花粉 | |
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9 buttresses | |
n.扶壁,扶垛( buttress的名词复数 )v.用扶壁支撑,加固( buttress的第三人称单数 ) | |
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10 feudal | |
adj.封建的,封地的,领地的 | |
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11 retired | |
adj.隐退的,退休的,退役的 | |
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12 emetic | |
n.催吐剂;adj.催吐的 | |
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13 chateau | |
n.城堡,别墅 | |
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14 gulf | |
n.海湾;深渊,鸿沟;分歧,隔阂 | |
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15 terrain | |
n.地面,地形,地图 | |
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16 stewed | |
adj.焦虑不安的,烂醉的v.炖( stew的过去式和过去分词 );煨;思考;担忧 | |
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17 terrapin | |
n.泥龟;鳖 | |
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18 props | |
小道具; 支柱( prop的名词复数 ); 支持者; 道具; (橄榄球中的)支柱前锋 | |
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19 infamous | |
adj.声名狼藉的,臭名昭著的,邪恶的 | |
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20 hideous | |
adj.丑陋的,可憎的,可怕的,恐怖的 | |
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21 prospect | |
n.前景,前途;景色,视野 | |
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22 vile | |
adj.卑鄙的,可耻的,邪恶的;坏透的 | |
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23 pharmacy | |
n.药房,药剂学,制药业,配药业,一批备用药品 | |
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24 ambush | |
n.埋伏(地点);伏兵;v.埋伏;伏击 | |
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25 dwelling | |
n.住宅,住所,寓所 | |
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26 eminent | |
adj.显赫的,杰出的,有名的,优良的 | |
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27 abolition | |
n.废除,取消 | |
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28 discomfort | |
n.不舒服,不安,难过,困难,不方便 | |
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29 hem | |
n.贴边,镶边;vt.缝贴边;(in)包围,限制 | |
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30 humiliation | |
n.羞辱 | |
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31 cult | |
n.异教,邪教;时尚,狂热的崇拜 | |
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32 analogous | |
adj.相似的;类似的 | |
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33 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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34 pulp | |
n.果肉,纸浆;v.化成纸浆,除去...果肉,制成纸浆 | |
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35 pumpkin | |
n.南瓜 | |
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36 dynamite | |
n./vt.(用)炸药(爆破) | |
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37 affinities | |
n.密切关系( affinity的名词复数 );亲近;(生性)喜爱;类同 | |
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38 stature | |
n.(高度)水平,(高度)境界,身高,身材 | |
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39 habitually | |
ad.习惯地,通常地 | |
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40 wafted | |
v.吹送,飘送,(使)浮动( waft的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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41 spasm | |
n.痉挛,抽搐;一阵发作 | |
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42 sonnet | |
n.十四行诗 | |
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43 privily | |
adv.暗中,秘密地 | |
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44 verbose | |
adj.用字多的;冗长的;累赘的 | |
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45 distil | |
vt.蒸馏;提取…的精华,精选出 | |
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46 syllables | |
n.音节( syllable的名词复数 ) | |
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47 bristles | |
短而硬的毛发,刷子毛( bristle的名词复数 ) | |
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48 orotund | |
adj.宏亮的,宏壮的;浮夸的 | |
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49 perilously | |
adv.充满危险地,危机四伏地 | |
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50 nay | |
adv.不;n.反对票,投反对票者 | |
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51 beget | |
v.引起;产生 | |
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52 haven | |
n.安全的地方,避难所,庇护所 | |
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53 outlets | |
n.出口( outlet的名词复数 );经销店;插座;廉价经销店 | |
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54 yearning | |
a.渴望的;向往的;怀念的 | |
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55 covets | |
v.贪求,觊觎( covet的第三人称单数 ) | |
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56 omissions | |
n.省略( omission的名词复数 );删节;遗漏;略去或漏掉的事(或人) | |
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57 plunging | |
adj.跳进的,突进的v.颠簸( plunge的现在分词 );暴跌;骤降;突降 | |
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58 ellipses | |
n.椭园,省略号;椭圆( ellipse的名词复数 );(语法结构上的)省略( ellipsis的名词复数 ) | |
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59 eddies | |
(水、烟等的)漩涡,涡流( eddy的名词复数 ) | |
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60 bosom | |
n.胸,胸部;胸怀;内心;adj.亲密的 | |
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61 alas | |
int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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62 recurring | |
adj.往复的,再次发生的 | |
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63 loathsome | |
adj.讨厌的,令人厌恶的 | |
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64 pinion | |
v.束缚;n.小齿轮 | |
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65 opium | |
n.鸦片;adj.鸦片的 | |
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66 eternity | |
n.不朽,来世;永恒,无穷 | |
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67 nourishment | |
n.食物,营养品;营养情况 | |
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68 coruscates | |
v.闪光,闪烁( coruscate的第三人称单数 ) | |
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69 assail | |
v.猛烈攻击,抨击,痛斥 | |
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70 hordes | |
n.移动着的一大群( horde的名词复数 );部落 | |
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71 stifled | |
(使)窒息, (使)窒闷( stifle的过去式和过去分词 ); 镇压,遏制; 堵 | |
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72 limousines | |
n.豪华轿车( limousine的名词复数 );(往返机场接送旅客的)中型客车,小型公共汽车 | |
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73 coupons | |
n.礼券( coupon的名词复数 );优惠券;订货单;参赛表 | |
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74 proprietor | |
n.所有人;业主;经营者 | |
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75 thronging | |
v.成群,挤满( throng的现在分词 ) | |
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76 picturesquely | |
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77 impeding | |
a.(尤指坏事)即将发生的,临近的 | |
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78 serpentine | |
adj.蜿蜒的,弯曲的 | |
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79 mucous | |
adj. 黏液的,似黏液的 | |
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80 membrane | |
n.薄膜,膜皮,羊皮纸 | |
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81 sleepless | |
adj.不睡眠的,睡不著的,不休息的 | |
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82 sagging | |
下垂[沉,陷],松垂,垂度 | |
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83 whim | |
n.一时的兴致,突然的念头;奇想,幻想 | |
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84 shimmering | |
v.闪闪发光,发微光( shimmer的现在分词 ) | |
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85 spouting | |
n.水落管系统v.(指液体)喷出( spout的现在分词 );滔滔不绝地讲;喋喋不休地说;喷水 | |
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86 plumbing | |
n.水管装置;水暖工的工作;管道工程v.用铅锤测量(plumb的现在分词);探究 | |
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87 iridescent | |
adj.彩虹色的,闪色的 | |
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