The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling by Stephen Cope
Authors: Stephen Cope
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called me, excited.
Out of the blue, Katherine had been asked to be the editor of a small and now-struggling journal of nature writing. It had once aimed to be one of the premier journals of great nature writing, and aspired to feature the blossoming Thoreaus and Burroughs of the times. But the journal had fallen on hard times. Katherine had been on their board for six years. (It was one thing that had really lit her up in the previous three years.) And then, quite without warning, an opening: The forty-five-year-old editor had left the journal smack in the middle of the recession. In difficult straits as they were, the journal couldn’t pay much. But they needed Katherine’s steady and already-trusted hand at the wheel. They had no reason to think she was available. They asked anyway.
Here it was. The intersection of The Gift and The Times. This new work would use Katherine’s gifts for writing and editing. Her love of organic gardening. Her devotion to nature. Her concern about the future of the planet. And it cooked them all together into an entirely new stew that Katherine found thrilling. It was small. And it was very, very large.
6
Walt Whitman passionately adopted the garb of Soldier’s Missionary. He began to develop a routine—the essential infrastructure of any profession. He started, as he said, by “fortifying myself with previous rest, the bath, clean clothes, a good meal, and as cheerful an appearance as possible.” Before he sallied forth, he prepared a grab bag of treats, including candy, fruit, writing supplies, tobacco, socks, cookies, underwear. He would then set forth to the hospital wards and sessions of “visiting” that might last anywhere from two hours to four or five hours. He embraced his work with everything he had. “Behold,” he had written earlier in
Leaves of Grass
(as if foreshadowing his work in the hospitals), “I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself.”
There is no episode of Whitman’s nursing career more moving than his involvement with a young fifer named Erastus Haskell, who contracted typhoid fever while serving with the 141st New York. Whitman describes him as “a silent dark-skinn’d Spanish-looking youth, with large very dark blue eyes …”
Doctors had pronounced Haskell’s case all but hopeless, and Whitman sat with him as much as he could during his final weeks. “Many nights I sat by in the hospital till far in the night—The lights would be put out—yet I would sit there silently, hours, late, perhaps fanning him—he always liked to have me sit there, but never cared to talk—I shall never forget those nights, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and wounded lying around in their cots, just visible in the darkness and this dear young man close at hand lying on what proved to be his death bed—I do not know his past life, but what I do know, and what I saw of him, he was a noble boy.”
In a letter to Haskell’s parents after the young man’s death, Whitman reveals some of the deepest sources of his call:
“I write you this letter, because I would do something at least in his memory—his fate was a hard one, to die so—He is one of the thousands of our unknown American men in the ranks about whom there is no record or fame, no fuss made about their dying so unknown, but I find in them the real precious and royal onesof this land, giving themselves up, aye even their young and precious lives, in their country’s cause …”
Whitman gave his boys the gift of acknowledging the nobility of their sacrifice. He faced death with them.
7
By the fall of 1863, Whitman had begun to feel the strain of death and loss. He was increasingly distracted and emotional, and he wrote at length to his mother about his “heart-sickness.” Whitman had taken on the suffering of the times. He began to write poetry again as a way of coming to terms with this suffering. Now, his experience in the war spilled forth in a swell
Out of the blue, Katherine had been asked to be the editor of a small and now-struggling journal of nature writing. It had once aimed to be one of the premier journals of great nature writing, and aspired to feature the blossoming Thoreaus and Burroughs of the times. But the journal had fallen on hard times. Katherine had been on their board for six years. (It was one thing that had really lit her up in the previous three years.) And then, quite without warning, an opening: The forty-five-year-old editor had left the journal smack in the middle of the recession. In difficult straits as they were, the journal couldn’t pay much. But they needed Katherine’s steady and already-trusted hand at the wheel. They had no reason to think she was available. They asked anyway.
Here it was. The intersection of The Gift and The Times. This new work would use Katherine’s gifts for writing and editing. Her love of organic gardening. Her devotion to nature. Her concern about the future of the planet. And it cooked them all together into an entirely new stew that Katherine found thrilling. It was small. And it was very, very large.
6
Walt Whitman passionately adopted the garb of Soldier’s Missionary. He began to develop a routine—the essential infrastructure of any profession. He started, as he said, by “fortifying myself with previous rest, the bath, clean clothes, a good meal, and as cheerful an appearance as possible.” Before he sallied forth, he prepared a grab bag of treats, including candy, fruit, writing supplies, tobacco, socks, cookies, underwear. He would then set forth to the hospital wards and sessions of “visiting” that might last anywhere from two hours to four or five hours. He embraced his work with everything he had. “Behold,” he had written earlier in
Leaves of Grass
(as if foreshadowing his work in the hospitals), “I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself.”
There is no episode of Whitman’s nursing career more moving than his involvement with a young fifer named Erastus Haskell, who contracted typhoid fever while serving with the 141st New York. Whitman describes him as “a silent dark-skinn’d Spanish-looking youth, with large very dark blue eyes …”
Doctors had pronounced Haskell’s case all but hopeless, and Whitman sat with him as much as he could during his final weeks. “Many nights I sat by in the hospital till far in the night—The lights would be put out—yet I would sit there silently, hours, late, perhaps fanning him—he always liked to have me sit there, but never cared to talk—I shall never forget those nights, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and wounded lying around in their cots, just visible in the darkness and this dear young man close at hand lying on what proved to be his death bed—I do not know his past life, but what I do know, and what I saw of him, he was a noble boy.”
In a letter to Haskell’s parents after the young man’s death, Whitman reveals some of the deepest sources of his call:
“I write you this letter, because I would do something at least in his memory—his fate was a hard one, to die so—He is one of the thousands of our unknown American men in the ranks about whom there is no record or fame, no fuss made about their dying so unknown, but I find in them the real precious and royal onesof this land, giving themselves up, aye even their young and precious lives, in their country’s cause …”
Whitman gave his boys the gift of acknowledging the nobility of their sacrifice. He faced death with them.
7
By the fall of 1863, Whitman had begun to feel the strain of death and loss. He was increasingly distracted and emotional, and he wrote at length to his mother about his “heart-sickness.” Whitman had taken on the suffering of the times. He began to write poetry again as a way of coming to terms with this suffering. Now, his experience in the war spilled forth in a swell
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