To Any Reader (RL Stevenson)

Well this is embarassing. Having posted Stevenson's dedication in his A Child's Garden of Verses I recollected one of his poems which captures some of the magic of reading. I am completely confident that I posted it on the site somewhere but I can't for the life of me find it. Did I just imagine posting it?

Regarldess, here is that magical poem, wherever else it might have disappeared to.

To Any Reader

As from the house your mother sees
You playing around the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

To Alison Cunningham from R.L. Stevenson

From the dedication by RL Stevenson in his A Child's Garden of Verses to his childhood nanny.

To Alison Cunningham
From Her Boy

For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake:
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted:

For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore: --
My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life --
from the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

And grant it, Heaven, that all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
and every child who lists my rhyme,
In bright, fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice.

A Drover's Life by Desert Rat

And here is the alternate view of the drover's life to that presented by Banjo Paterson. In this case the parody is written by a real drover, Wally Darling, who wrote under the pen name, Desert Rat.

A Drover's Life
By Wally Darling (Desert Rat)

As I write this little ditty
Perhaps I'm feeling blue
For the swag is wet and sodden
And the fly is blown in two.

The rain is pouring heavy,
The wind is bloody chill.
And I rather feel like howling
With the dingo on the hill.

No doubt this life is thrilling
Out beneath the desert stars.
When your fitting sole companion
Are a mob of mad Gallahs.

Then the old joke comes to memory.
It was written long ago,
That the drover's life has pleasures
That the townsfolk never know.

When your are sitting on a rooter
With a green-eyed monkey holt
A quiet horse they tell you
But sometimes he'll buck and bolt.

So you hit him in the shoulders
With a pair of three inch spurs.
Next thing you know, you're sitting
In a patch of bloody burrs.

When you are tangling with the clean skins
In the dust and in the heat
And the big Mick with a grievance
Makes a beeline for your seat.

You try to make the fence
But the Mick's got too much tow.
Oh, yes, the drover's life has pleasures
That the townsfolk never know.

When you are coming down the Canning
Where the lonely stages are
And the owner comes to meet you
With his brand new motor car.

And the dust he raises mingles
With that churned up by the feet
Of the hides that you are droving
Some of which perhaps he'll eat.

And when you are sitting on the night horse
On a dark and stormy night.
You see the white-horns glistening
In the lightning's ghostly light.

And you shiver there and wonder
If they jump, which way they'll go.
Ah, yes, the drover's life has pleasures
That the townsfolk never know.

Now the tucker's mostly tasty
On the Canning route you know.
When the flies have had a gutful
And the meat hats have had a go

And when you eat the babbler's browny
Well it's best to close your eyes.
For it's hard to tell the difference
Between the currants and the flies.

Or when you're whipping water
Till your bellows nearly burst.
And your water camel joeys
And you bullocks cry from thirst.

When the feed is mostly scanty
And the waterholes are dry.
The squatters sitting on your back
It's enough to make you cry.

So you reckon that you will truck it in
Give something else a go.
Yes, the drover's life has pleasures
That the townsfolk never know.

You battle down a dusty stage
To a well that's broken down.
Or a tank shot full of bullet holes
By yokels from the town.

And they wonder why you hit the grog
And curse their lousy stations.
Why many a man has cut his throat
In sheer desperation.

So let this be a warning,
To you fellows of the town.
Who want to go a droving,
Where the bullocks all come down.

For if you go a droving
You very soon will know
That the drover's life has pleasures
That it's better not to know

Yes, I sometimes rather doubt it
But then I wouldn't know.
They say that the drover's life
Has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

Clancy of the Overflow by Banjo Paterson

Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson are two iconic Australian poets. Clancy of the Overflow is one of Paterson's more famous poems and known to most Australians. It tells the tale of a city person's romantic musings about the life of Clancy, a drover (the equivalent of a cowboy).

Clancy of The Overflow
by A.B. 'Banjo' Paterson

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago;
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just 'on spec', addressed as follows: 'Clancy, of The Overflow'.

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar);
'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, verbatim I will quote it;
'Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are.'

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving 'down the Cooper' where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street.
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cashbook and the journal -
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of the 'Overflow'.

Storytelling as an evolutionary engine

From Daniel J. Levitin's review of the book Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Michael S. Gazzaniga in the August 22, 2008 edition of the New York Times.

Human brains turn out to be less different from other animal brains than you might think. Language and social cognition fall along a continuum across species. Deception, for instance, long thought to be unique to humans, is present in monkeys and crows, which can even hide their attempts to deceive. Counterintuitively, much of what makes us human is not an ability to do more things, Gazzaniga writes, but an ability to inhibit automatic responses in favor of reasoned ones; consequently, we may be the only species that engages in delayed gratification and impulse control (thank you, prefrontal cortex).

Gazzaniga doesn't shy away from hard problems, like why humans, alone among species, have art. The attraction to stories, plays, paintings and music - experiences with no obvious evolutionary payoff - is puzzling. "Why does the brain contain reward systems that make fictional experiences enjoyable?" he asks. Part of the answer, he argues, is that fictional thinking engages innate "play" modules that enhance evolutionary fitness (that is, the ability to propagate one's genes) by allowing us to consider possible alternatives - hypothetical situations - so that we can form plans in advance of dangers or even just unpleasant social situations. "From having read the fictional story about the boy who cried wolf when we were children," he writes, "we can remember what happened to him in the story and not have to learn that lesson the hard way in real life." Art may be more than a leisure activity. Artistic, representational thinking could have been fundamental in making us the way we are. As Gazzaniga concludes, "The arts are not frosting but baking soda."

Reader by Edward Dixon Garner

A poem from For All the Lost and Lonely by Edward Dixon Garner.

Reader

He draws the curtain and turns out the light,
Throws to the coals the fuel they require,
Then settles back, to read far in the night,
In the great book, whose author's name is Fire.

Crackers in Bed

I love Norman Rockwell's work but only just discovered this painting from early in his career: Crackers in Bed (1921).



In our house the kids not infrequently stay up late to finish an especially gripping story and despite our best efforts to keep them from eating in bed, somehow it seems they frequently manage to smuggle in some sustenance to keep them going. If he had painted this in our house, it might have been titled Crumbs in Bed.