of the “grave water”�she was sure there was danger. Jacob tried to convince her there was no danger, she must not be ridiculous. He told her what the township officials had told him: the water in their well had been tested recently, it was pure spring water.
“And we won’t be living here long.”
Though later, he would tell her bluntly, “We will have to live with it, for now.”
Was there an odor in the cemetery? A smell after rain of something sickly-sweet, moldering? A rancid-meat smell, a maggoty-meat smell, a putrescence-smell?
Not when the wind blew from the north. And the wind was always blowing from the north, it seemed. In these foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains south of Lake Ontario.
What you smelled in the Milburn cemetery was earth, grass. Mown grass rotting in compost piles. In summer, a pungent odor of sunshine, heat. Decomposing organic matter that was half-pleasurable to the nostrils, Jacob Schwart thought.
It would come to be Jacob Schwart’s unmistakable smell. Permeating his weathered skin and what remained of his straggly hair. All his clothing, that, within a short period of time, not even 20 Mule Team Borax could fully clean.
Of course he knew: his children had to endure ignorant taunts at school. Herschel was big enough now to fend for himself but August was a timorous child, another disappointment to his father, tongue-tied and vulnerable. And there was little Rebecca, so vulnerable.
It sickened him to think of his daughter whom he could not protect laughed at by her classmates, even by ignorant teachers at her school.
Gravedigger’s daughter!
He told her, solemnly as if she were of an age to understand such words, “Humankind is fearful of death, you see. So they make jokes about it. In me, they see a servant of death. In you, the daughter of such a one. But they do not know us, Rebecca. Not you, and not me. Hide your weakness from them and one day we will repay them! Our enemies who mock us.”
All human actions aim at the good .
So Hegel, following Aristotle, had argued. In Hegel’s time (he died in 1831) it had been possible to believe that there is “progress” in the history of humankind; history itself progresses from the abstract to the concrete, in this way realized in time. Hegel had believed, too, that nature is of necessity, and determined; while humankind knows freedom.
Jacob had read Schopenhauer, too. Of course. They had all read Schopenhauer, in Jacob’s circle. But he hadn’t succumbed to the philosopher’s pessimism. The world is my idea . The individual is confusion . Life is ceaseless struggle , strife . All is will : the blind frenzy of insects to copulate before the first frost kills them . He’d read Ludwig Feuerbach for whom he had a special predilection: it thrilled him to discover the philosopher’s savage critique of religion, which Feuerbach exposed as no more than a creation of the human mind, the projection of mankind’s highest values in the form of God. Of course! It had to be so! The pagan gods of antiquity, thunderous Yehovah of the Jews, Jesus Christ on His cross so mournful and martyred�and triumphant, in resurrection. “It was all a ruse. A dream.” So Jacob told himself, at the age of twenty. Such blindness, superstition, the old rites of sacrifice given a “civilized” cast: all were the way of the past, dying or extinct in the twentieth century.
He read Karl Marx, and became an ardent socialist.
To his friends he defined himself as an agnostic, a freethinker, and a German.
…a German ! What a bitter joke, in retrospect.
Hegel, that fantasist, had been right about one thing: the owl of Minerva flying only at dusk. For philosophy comes too late, invariably. Understanding comes too late. By the time human intelligence grasps what is happening, it is in the hands of the brutes, and becomes history.
Broken-off pieces, like vertebrae.
Oh! I could listen to you talk forever, you have such wisdom .
Early in
“And we won’t be living here long.”
Though later, he would tell her bluntly, “We will have to live with it, for now.”
Was there an odor in the cemetery? A smell after rain of something sickly-sweet, moldering? A rancid-meat smell, a maggoty-meat smell, a putrescence-smell?
Not when the wind blew from the north. And the wind was always blowing from the north, it seemed. In these foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains south of Lake Ontario.
What you smelled in the Milburn cemetery was earth, grass. Mown grass rotting in compost piles. In summer, a pungent odor of sunshine, heat. Decomposing organic matter that was half-pleasurable to the nostrils, Jacob Schwart thought.
It would come to be Jacob Schwart’s unmistakable smell. Permeating his weathered skin and what remained of his straggly hair. All his clothing, that, within a short period of time, not even 20 Mule Team Borax could fully clean.
Of course he knew: his children had to endure ignorant taunts at school. Herschel was big enough now to fend for himself but August was a timorous child, another disappointment to his father, tongue-tied and vulnerable. And there was little Rebecca, so vulnerable.
It sickened him to think of his daughter whom he could not protect laughed at by her classmates, even by ignorant teachers at her school.
Gravedigger’s daughter!
He told her, solemnly as if she were of an age to understand such words, “Humankind is fearful of death, you see. So they make jokes about it. In me, they see a servant of death. In you, the daughter of such a one. But they do not know us, Rebecca. Not you, and not me. Hide your weakness from them and one day we will repay them! Our enemies who mock us.”
All human actions aim at the good .
So Hegel, following Aristotle, had argued. In Hegel’s time (he died in 1831) it had been possible to believe that there is “progress” in the history of humankind; history itself progresses from the abstract to the concrete, in this way realized in time. Hegel had believed, too, that nature is of necessity, and determined; while humankind knows freedom.
Jacob had read Schopenhauer, too. Of course. They had all read Schopenhauer, in Jacob’s circle. But he hadn’t succumbed to the philosopher’s pessimism. The world is my idea . The individual is confusion . Life is ceaseless struggle , strife . All is will : the blind frenzy of insects to copulate before the first frost kills them . He’d read Ludwig Feuerbach for whom he had a special predilection: it thrilled him to discover the philosopher’s savage critique of religion, which Feuerbach exposed as no more than a creation of the human mind, the projection of mankind’s highest values in the form of God. Of course! It had to be so! The pagan gods of antiquity, thunderous Yehovah of the Jews, Jesus Christ on His cross so mournful and martyred�and triumphant, in resurrection. “It was all a ruse. A dream.” So Jacob told himself, at the age of twenty. Such blindness, superstition, the old rites of sacrifice given a “civilized” cast: all were the way of the past, dying or extinct in the twentieth century.
He read Karl Marx, and became an ardent socialist.
To his friends he defined himself as an agnostic, a freethinker, and a German.
…a German ! What a bitter joke, in retrospect.
Hegel, that fantasist, had been right about one thing: the owl of Minerva flying only at dusk. For philosophy comes too late, invariably. Understanding comes too late. By the time human intelligence grasps what is happening, it is in the hands of the brutes, and becomes history.
Broken-off pieces, like vertebrae.
Oh! I could listen to you talk forever, you have such wisdom .
Early in
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