A short rhetoric for leaving the family, by Peter Dimock. Everything about the title draws me, all four things: short and rhetoric, leaving and family. Rhetoric is not a word I use often, but I like to meet it, shelter there a while, cloaked in careful, pleasured vocabulary.
I am writing, this season, a letter to the owner of the lands around us, from whose family I have bought before, several times. I take seriously the task of writing to him about my reasons for wanting to buy the fields that originally spread around the house I have lived in for a half-century. So I read a book whose hundred or so pages are an address to the narrator's two nephews. He is leaving them his money to enable them to leave the family, should they wish, and he hopes they will wish when they have absorbed, in ten years time, when they will be twenty and twenty-one, the full horror of their grandfather's involvement in the American military plans for Vietnam in the 1960s.
Sometimes a reader is a translator. Signals are set off in personal history. Translator sounds too definitive, as if one language for another equalled one coin for another, and no change. Peter Dimock reminds me how remote I am from the general parlance. And that's lesson enough as we approach midsummer.
No comments :
Post a Comment