379: In those difficult ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 17 concludes
IN THOSE DIFFICULT YEARS, Studebaker’s declining years, Herb and Lorna had much to worry about, and worrying changed them. I didn’t notice the change; during those years I passed from childhood into adolescence, and I was far too interested in the ways that I was changing to notice what was happening to them. Oh, I noticed the details, but I didn’t see the pattern. I was blinded by self-concern and also by the idea I had of them, an idea that I had already held for so long that it possessed the tempered strength and burnished gleam of immutable truth. Now, forced to reconsider them, I see what I never saw then.
Their characteristics became exaggerated. Herb’s projects became less and less practical, more and more baroque. Now nearly all of them were undertaken more for the process than the product, as if, to apply perceptions years removed from the events, he worked at them only to be busy at something, only to be working, not to be useless or idle. They were rarely completed, or, if completed, they were rarely successful. In fact, more and more of the projects he chose to undertake were of the type that, he must have known from the very start, he was unlikely ever to complete: complex, interminable, tedious projects with countless opportunities for error, for failure. Was he punishing himself? Perhaps he was.
Lorna began concocting her own mathematics problems and logical puzzles, and these too were increasingly intricate and purposeless. Often they would involve long strings of operations on long strings of numbers. Lorna would peer at her slide rule through a magnifying glass, and even at the time I had some understanding of the fact that she was looking for an answer beyond what the slide rule could provide. Her logical puzzles became more confusing and exasperating, and they began to exhibit autobiographical elements. Here’s an example. I think that Lorna based this one on a similar puzzle devised by Lewis Carroll.
Two homely sisters were on their way to school one day and suddenly realized that they had forgotten what day of the week it was.
“We’ll be laughingstocks,” wailed the younger of the homely sisters.
“Oh, be quiet,” said the older of the homely sisters. “We can decide what day this is if we just stop and think.” She sat down on a stone wall and thought. “Let’s see,” she said, thinking aloud. “What day was yesterday? What day will tomorrow be?”
Just then, the homely sisters’ quick-witted and pretty younger sister came skipping along, whistling a happy tune.
“Oh, help us, sister,” wailed the younger of the homely sisters. “We’ve forgotten what day of the week this is, and when we get to school we’re sure to be laughingstocks for having forgotten.”
“Well,” said the quick-witted and pretty sister with a twinkle in her eye, “when you can call the day after tomorrow ‘yesterday,’ then the day that you call ‘today’ will be as many days away from Wednesday as was the day that you called ‘today’ on the day when you called the day before yesterday ‘tomorrow.’ ”
Off she skipped, trying very hard not to giggle, leaving her sisters with their mouths agape.
There is bitterness in that puzzle, bitterness and sorrow, the kind of sorrow that, Henri Bergson points out in Time and Free Will, begins as a facing toward the past. But, thank goodness, there is no sorrow that isn’t sweetened by some joy, and there were some sources of joy in those years, some things that turned Herb and Lorna toward the future, toward hope. I think I was one. I hope I was one. Children often are a source of joy for their grandparents, so perhaps I was. Still, however happy they might have been at times, their worry was always there, cold and threatening, like the winter wind that blew through the Whatsit Valley.
[to be continued on Thursday, November 10, 2022]
In Topical Guide 379, Mark Dorset considers Games and Puzzles from this episode.
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