Lucky Reuben's Seasons in Hell

By Steven Quidam

The tale of an innocent, naïve, and romantic Amish lad who shunns his pacifist exemption to enlist in the US Navy only to be made a medical corpsman attached to Marine in combat units. Medical corpsmen had the highest death rate in Vietnam. The first part is of his Amish youth with scenes such as his mother's death when eleven years old on Christmas Eve, an Amish funeral, an Amish church service and farm scenes and being sent away from home to be a farmhand when fourteen . The second part is not always pleasant as there was utter horror in Vietnam. No matter which calendar season it was always a Hell season. The Vietnam scenes are disturbing yet it is merely what was going on. In lieu of whining Reuben feels lucky to have learned that he is not a coward and the experience is rich in that it could not have been got on a university campus. The gist is that it is a yarn of life delight in lieu of life fright.
There are also playful essays, many jokes, ribaldry, and a lot of things that the tender minded and correct thinking shall find outrageous and blasphemous.
A prevalent them is captured in: “In the end we shall understand the people to whom we are most grateful are those that made our lives difficult.” -Dhammapadan Dogen, A Ladang of Bali. A ladang is a healer. The Balinese have no word for art as life is art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Quidam
• Release date: Sep 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452404301

Steven Quidam

Quidam is obsessed with privacy, obscurity and anonymity. He sees those as exigent to a vital life. He has an Artium Baccalaureus in History but is self-educated as he is a relentless autodidact. To him, the university degree was merely the starting gun of the education marathon not completeable. The author drinks more than he aught but not as much as he wants but he does not have a drinking problem; he has a writing problem. Yet, when stewed to upright drunk he never writes as it is even more jejune than when sober. He has an incurable severe case of logomania. He passes many hours moodling amongst flowers shunning striving letting the mot juste pop into his brain; it must not only have the right meaning but the right sound, whether sonorous or dissonant. He has the queer idea that learning other languages improves one's English. He lives in an American backwater in nigh total solitude where he begins each day round 0300 being in China the Double Hour of the Monkey embracing his utter insignificance listening on his iPOd on really loud to the Brasilero Djavan's, “Me Leve, My lightness or Insignificance.” In the recent blip ago yore of 1983 aft five or so years of autodidactic Greek study he made gaffe ultimo of going to Greece with his Greek-American wife who was, as near as he can remember when he feigns being a punctilious accountant, wife #2. When he came onto the crest of a hill to see the Parthenon he was bunged in the gut with “Something is wrong with the way I am success living. Seven years later he found the courage or stupidity of chucking his success to strive to live a life of his own volition. Aft a whole lot trouble and error he finally found his nitch; as a rather poor existence as a reclusive gardener for the Podunk tiny town he lives near. He grows a polychrome of sunflowers which signify false riches in florigraphy reminding him of his once false life. When he was asked to do the gardening he agreed to do so with three rules: One: no cell phone. Two: I shall never attend a meeting. Three: No one shall interfere. (A good garden is as a good book or good music, a solo composition. He has won awards for his gardening which he ignores.) He made the gaffe of creating his gardens within the town limits and thus his great ineffable sorrow; he is not allowed to have noble pigs.The author would be most grateful if you bought this but even more grateful if you did not read it. He has tried to offend everyone but has failed, due not to lack of effort but a dearth of talent.

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LUCKY REUBEN’S SEASONS IN HELL

Quidam

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Published by:

Quidam at Smashwords

Copyright (c) 2011 by Quidam

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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L’objectif premier pour un éducateur est de former des autodidactes. The primary objective for an educator is to produce autodidacts. -Frère Daniel De Montmollin

I don’t think the boy of lively mind is hurt much by going to college. If he encounters mainly jackasses, then he learns the useful lesson that this is a jackass world. -Mencken.

Quidam is obsessed with privacy, obscurity and anonymity. He sees those as exigent to a vital life. He has an Artium Baccalaureus in History but is self-educated as he is a relentless autodidact. To him, the university degree was merely the starting gun of the education marathon not completeable. The author drinks more than he aught but not as much as he wants but he does not have a drinking problem; he has a writing problem. Yet, when stewed to upright drunk he never writes as it is even more jejune than when sober. He has an incurable severe case of logomania. He passes many hours moodling amongst flowers shunning striving letting the mot juste pop into his brain; it must not only have the right meaning but the right sound, whether sonorous or dissonant. He has the queer idea that learning other languages improves one’s English. He lives in an American backwater in nigh total solitude where he begins each day round 0300 being in China the Double Hour of the Monkey embracing his utter insignificance listening on his iPOd on really loud to the Brasilero Djavan’s, Me Leve, My lightness or Insignificance. In the recent blip ago yore of 1983 aft five or so years of autodidactic Greek study he made gaffe ultimo of going to Greece with his Greek-American wife who was, as near as he can remember when he feigns being a punctilious accountant, wife #2. When he came onto the crest of a hill to see the Parthenon he was bunged in the gut with "Something is wrong with the way I am success living. Seven years later he found the courage or stupidity of chucking his success to strive to live a life of his own volition. Aft a whole lot trouble and error he finally found his nitch; as a rather poor existence as a reclusive gardener for the Podunk tiny town he lives near. He grows a polychrome of sunflowers which signify false riches in florigraphy reminding him of his once false life. When he was asked to do the gardening he agreed to do so with three rules: One: no cell phone. Two: I shall never attend a meeting. Three: No one shall interfere. (A good garden is as a good book or good music, a solo composition. He has won awards for his gardening which he ignores.) He made the gaffe of creating his gardens within the town limits and thus his great ineffable sorrow; he is not allowed to have noble pigs.

The author would be most grateful if you bought this but even more grateful if you did not read it. He has tried to offend everyone but has failed, due not to lack of effort but a dearth of talent.

Lucky Reuben’s Seasons in Hell

by Quidam

Pre-Ramble, Adagio, Ma Non Troppo

What’s going on brothers and sisters?

Head Quotes And A Request

In the end we shall understand the people to whom we are most grateful are those that made our lives difficult. -Dhammapadan Dogen, A Ladang of Bali. A ladang is a healer. The Balinese have no word for art as life is art.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. –Einstein

It is absolutely essential to be modern. -Rimbaud, A Season In Hell

The forgetting of being. -Heideggar. (The magic disturb.)

If a jackass decides to try to write a novel, is it reasonable to expect an angel to type it? -Quidam

Let us stop folderol and start with a question: Were humans given speech to reveal or conceal their thoughts and feelings?

Seque to more folderol: "Siempre que enseñes, enseña a dudar de lo que enseñes - Whenever you teach, teach your hearers to doubt whatever you teach. - José Ortega y Gasset. I cite the quote for I ask you the favor of doubting all I type.

Let Us Begin

I’m crazy, I have too many moments to live. -Charles Mingus

I told my psychiatrist, `Everyone thinks I’m crazy.’ She said, `That’s crazy. Not everyone knows you.’ -Rodney Dangerfield

Hell, there are no rules here--we’re trying to accomplish something. -- Thomas A. Edison

Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme with its gate motto: Do What You Want leads my only rule for this novel try: You can do anything. I believe it is the duty of every novelist striving to be honest to learn precisely where the lines not to cross are and then set to to crossing them in presto, not giving a damn for approbation or opprobation.

Conto I: Sprouthood Scenes and Silly Observations in Quodlibet:

A Particular Youth Being an Universal Youth

Scene 1: Eeaglob Stinkt

Of all countries the US is the most addicted to self-praise and complacency--even more than France. ---Paul Fussell, BAD, or The Dumbing of America.

We hear Reuben saying in adagio and adgietto to a neighbor lad’s proud litany on his papa’s up-to-date farm machinery, "Our Percheron horses are stronger, smarter, quieter and more beautiful than your weak, stupid, noisy and ugly tractors. So, I’m stronger, smarter, quieter---"

"Reuben. Eeaglob stinkt!" said Reuben’s papa in andante, martellato (hammered). Reuben’s youth was riven with repeats of, Self-praise stinks. It was said in deadpan for it was and remains irrefragable even in our time of High Enlightenment when one of the de rigueurs to getting on swell is self-promotion. Indonesian Kantjil philosophy includes, Only fools praise themselves and push themselves forward. In places such as on Java self-promotion remains a solecism. No lament as that shall change as the world rushes into the moribundity of uniformity.

In high German Eeaglob stinkt is Eigenlob stinkt. In church Reuben heard Hoch Deutsch but not in everyday speech. Hoch Deutsch or, High German is the everyday low-German folk speech of the people from the Principality of Palatinate. Early in the eighteenth century they arrived in William Penn’s Quaker settlement near Philadelphia to farm in the fertile acres of the Delaware, Susquehanna, Lehigh and Perkiomen. Known first as Pennsylvania German or Deutsch before corrupted into Pennsylvania Dutch. By Reuben’s time many English words were added.

Reuben was taught that Hochmut (pride) was a sin while Demut (humility) was the sure and right way to Heaven. Reuben knew he had sinned. Reuben paid the sin price by obeying Jonas’ imperative by fetching a razor strop. Jonas set to work and going straight to the bulls-eye of the bottom of Reuben’s discipline by applying puissant strokes to his lower cheeks. (Some years later on the Sunda Sea Reuben had no trouble remembering the name of the aft sail, spanker.) Reuben allayed earned ouches by imagining his low and back cheeks going into the beautiful hues and shades of ripening early June strawberries.

Reuben, from the Hebrew, Behold, a son, went on to learn to speak in tune with his times and to mute what he actually thought. Reuben went on to a joy of learning things just to know them in lieu of passing an exam, showing-off or cadging money from the learning. Reuben learned Eeaglob Stinkt in Swedish is Eget beröm luktar illa, in Portuguese Auto-elogio fede and so on.

Headnote: An Apologia in Beseech.

A man performing a pas seul upon a red-hot stove cannot be expected to achieve an impeccable goose-step. -Mencken

There are in these pages a myriad of errors. I cannot let anyone I know edit this for I do not want to bear the responsibility of the shock to them that the person they think they know and the one that actually be and then they might snitch to the right speech and thought police. And, I just could not bear again having my time--being the only thing I think I can own--stolen by editors who suggest proper grammar, Do not interject yourself, Avoid the first person, Not chronological, and such as You can’t say that when I have already said it. And telling me when I type christian and Christian or catholic and Catholic it’s a repetition. And telling me That’s a repeat when it is my precise aim:

You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again. / Shall I say it again? -T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets. And being told You are contradicting yourself when that is a given when one labors to become ein Dichter or, word artist in lieu of a philosopher or intellectual.

I could have turned to literary agents but they know less about literature than our hogs know about the theory of relativity.

I just got down on my knees supplicating in thanks to God and all the gods especially Mullo, the Celtic celestial jackass for the technology of Kindle as I recall how little I learned from editorial comments and how much time such murdered: A confederacy of dunces William Blake called publishers. Yet, indebted to publishers and agents for the pile of rejections as they were utile as wallpaper and fire starters.

What genre this is I do not know. It may well be, at best, seventh-rate but if so, I want to be so because that is what I in solo composed.

Whoever comes to the gates of literature without the Muses’ madness, believing technique alone will make him an adequate writer, is himself ineffectual, and the writing of this sane man vanishes before that of the man who is mad. --- Plato, Phaedrus

If the miracle happens that I abort my having too much fun composing and set to the work of getting this to Kindle:

Dear Reader, se faz favor, shut the door. Let us go back to the really recent before computers, palm-pilots, the Internet, and the myriad of other inventions to stick one’s head into information glut ignorance. Before the galore of gadgets helping one live betwixt moribund and rigor mortis in ovinity; in fear of being. (Let us hear a yarn of a man born in the recent but so lucky as not to be connected-up electronically and thus denied avoiding living in vital so easy now by tuning in the media and experts raving in moribund ovine buncombe). Reuben is merely a lad so lucky or unlucky as to have had the chance to be an original; perhaps the most joyous and saddest and hardest way to be.

Round 25 years back I was a success. At least I had the vulgar symbols – expensive German car, big house, and other vulgarites ad anon. One day I had the devilish thought: Good God! I am what others and I expected I to be. I lacked the courage to give up all the nugatory stuff of being a bit well-heeled gets one for seven years. One day I simply gave up the success stuff. I disappeared onto Java. And re-visited some of the Far East scenes of my youth. I decided to write a roman a’ clef novel fictionalizing my nugatory life. I labored as a sedulous simian. The result? A rather high pile of rejections in paper and electronic forms. Hence, I decided to write non-fiction – even though there are more lies in these pages than in that really bad novel. Thus, in my sextuagesima I offer a combination of fiction and non-fiction with scenes, quips, probes, thrusts, screeds, japes, taunts, insults, musings, harangues, verbal ordeals...

(Adagio, ma non troppo, Leisurely, but not too much so. I be riven with doubt whether to type explanations of words some may not know. My favorite writers do not condescend to my innate desire to read re-spins of what I have read ad infinitum before. Hence, is it insulting to explain to educated people? I am joy riven when reading and having to look up things. I have this queer thought and feeling that may not the norm. Learning things is just so bloody much fun; the delight is zoomed especially when they have nothing to do with cadging a bit of the national swag. I do not think nor feel that my obsession with language is special nor laudable; it simply be a thing I love doing just as some love things I do not such as playing golf, socializing, shopping, watching movies, etc.)

In my title I revive the word chrestomathy in its true sense of a collection of choice passages from an author or authors, and ignore the late addition of `especially one compiled to assist in the acquirement of a language.’ ... nor do I see why I should be deterred by the fact that, when this book was announced, a few newspaper smarties protested that the word would be unfamiliar to many readers, as it was to them. Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives that have stood in every decent dictionary for years are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses, and I do no solicit their patronage. Let them continue to recreate themselves with whodunits, and leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school." -Mencken, Chrestomathy

Aft all that squacking I still do not know whether to explain. Thus I turn to the tried and true method of nummurancy as Karl Kraus put it, I have decided many a stylistic problem with heads or tails. I reach into my pocket and take out a coin. It is a two penny or tuppence which I have no clue why that be there as I have not been in Britain for a decade. I flip and the answer is? You shall see.

Before moseying along here be two ditties by Herr Kraus who you shall see was always in correct thought and an incurable sentimental romantic: I: To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for all. No petty prejudices. II: A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure.

(Oft-times Reuben struggles to find reasons to live on. One that works is to live long enough to stop making an ass of himself. This being impossible it prevents submitting to the Lorelei of suicide.)

I hear, When, pray tell, is he going to get to the yarn? When I feel like it.

Ode to Jackasses

I’ve made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one. - Norman Mailer

(Music: A Medieval Christmas - Pro Cantione Antiqua - Medieval Wind Ensemble. 6. Orientis Partibus: Song of the Ass.

Jackasses are utile. The quadruped jackass is slow yet sure-footed on rocky paths and on steeps. Yes, the genus Equus Asinus, also known by bi-pedal mammals as burros and donkeys are abused as symbolic of humans who are doltish, stubborn, dull, thick, vapid, stupid whilst actual asses have high sagacity compared to the most doltish, dull, thick and stupid mammal whimsically self-praising themselves with the libel label Homo sapiens-sapiens. Asses’ milk is higher in sugar and protein than cow’s milk and was ingested in old Egypt as nutritious food, as medicine and as a cosmetic to make whiter skin. One struggles to imagine a half-bright jackass believing the asininities most humans believe such as melorism or, the world is improved by human effort. Yet, the human relentless effort to make the world uninhabitable for mammals may soon improve the world as humans continue their suicidal nature rape and reach their destiny of extinction. The crocodile is not a symbol of sagacity yet crocodiles have thrived for 200 million years. It would take an optimistic melorist to see humans that sagacious.

Neddy is the informal British child’s word for a donkey. Via Latin from Greek comes hinnos which in English is hinny being the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse or a human arse. A jumart the offspring of a cow and a donkey. A donkeyman is the petty officer of the engine-room crew. The French idiomatically call a degree a peau d’âne – donkey skin. Diplomas were oft written on sheepskin parchment. A degree is a Schafspelz or sheepskin. I haul-up but not for long.

A female ass is called a Jenny. Thus, a test of discipline is when introduced to a person named Jenny, to mute this trivial knowledge.

We pause to honor a great being being Balam’s jackass who Balam kept mistreating in the Old Testament who suddenly starting speaking to his total jackass of a master; chewing him out for being totally uncivilized and inhumane.

We all know the tale of Buridan’s ass starving between two hay stacks unable to make a choice. That is I in the sense of not finishing Reuben’s tale doing nothing whilst trying to decide what to put in and what to leave out. A productive writing day for me is oft putting in a semi-colon in the morning and taking it out in the afternoon.

And now for Ambrose Bierce’s comments in The Devil’s Dictionary: ASS: n. A public singer with a good voice but no ear. In Virginia City, Nevada, he is called the Washoe Canary, in Dakota, the Senator, and everywhere the Donkey. The animal is widely and variously celebrated in the literature, art and religion of every age and country; no other so engages and fires the human imagination as this noble vertebrate. Indeed, it is doubted by some (Ramasilus, lib. II., De Clem., and C. Stantatus, De Temperamente) if it is not a god; and as such we know it was worshiped by the Etruscans, and, if we may believe Macrobious, by the Cupasians also. Of the only two animals admitted into the Mahometan Paradise along with the souls of men, the ass that carried Balaam is one, the dog of the Seven Sleepers the other. This is no small distinction. From what has been written about this beast might be compiled a library of great splendor and magnitude, rivaling that of the Shakespearean cult, and that which clusters about the Bible. It may be said, generally, that all literature is more or less Asinine. Hail, holy Ass!" the quiring angels sing;  

Priest of Unreason... Priest of Unreason, and of Discords King!" Great co-Creator, let Thy glory shine: God.

The ass in art includes Chagall’s Blue Donkey, Picasso’s Paulo on a Donkey, Pissaro’s Girl with a Donkey, and so on. All worth a long look.

Asinus ad lyram (L.) an ass at the lyre; a stupid awkward fellow. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. Less common is hinny the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse. Hinny is also vulgar slang arse hinny, n. origin early 17th cent.: via Latin from Greek hinnos.

To winx is to bray like a jacakss. Then there is Mullo the Celtic celestial jackass and---. Perhaps that’s enough on jackasses as this could go on donkey’s years.

Piscivorous Fellowfeel

Is being ensconced at university a propitious place to learn of life? -Sok Sombong

A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world. -John le Carre

In 1912 at Harvard University at an exam time students were asked to frame the legal dispute over fishing rights on the Grand Banks from the American and British points of view. Robert Benchley answered that he did not understand the American argument and was ignorant of and bloody indifferent to the British argument and intended to remain so, but that he would consider the problem from the view points of fish. He thus invented a dialog in which a cod and a flounder debated whether it was better to be "Roasted in Liverpool, boiled in Boston or sautéed in Paris?"

Mister Benchley flunked. (I resurrect an obsolete word; fellowfeel. To my mind, it is more humane and civilized than compassion with its connotation of condescension.)

Michael Foucault said the same in intellectual scholarly speak when he wrote of subjugated knowledges. Foucault was referring to those outside the venues of expression and scienticity, not following social and intellectual rules and correct forms; without licenses for erudite, serious ideas who have experienced what most of those licensed to explain have not but have theories of.

Indonesian proverb: Cari pengalaman – The irrefragable salubrity and vitality of seeking experience.

In his dotage Reuben recalls the myriad of times puissant strokes were bunged on his backside. He cannot remember one such occasion not earned.

When I was young I prayed for a bicycle. Then, I realized God doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked God to forgive me.

Scene II: A Swainling: Slippery Conflicts

We see Reuben in the year 1952 in his fourth year moseying along in town with three elder brothers as a staring tourist woman says in loud as she raised a camera, Like a step-ladder. O’ how cute. Especially the little one. He’s adorable.

Reuben’s mama, Elizabeth, shunned her stance of public amiability and said

reflexively in agitato, adagio, Please madam don’t take our picture which is verboten, and please don’t single him out.

This is one of Reuben’s earliest memories. Adult Reuben is severely skeptical of youth memories as are all striving toward the impossible of obeying the Delphic Gate imperative, Know Thyself. Sentimentality self-laudation, and vanity fools our memory. Is honest autobiography the quintessential oxymoron? (Oxymoron is from the Greek for sharply silly.) Reuben longed to but could not make the leap of faith he had been singled-out for other than being the youngest and smallest one in a place and time of the high enlightenment of the kitsch of children oddly called little goats, kids.

To the ass, or the sow, their progeny is the bonniest in creation." -Jogmarr, the Half-Sapient Aesthete

To my mind a lamb is no less precious than a human baby. -Ghandi

I am so proud that I bred and begat. I pause. What have I done that a hog, dog, frog, even a cockroach does not do? -Palisbeyondus

When I read that it was not a moment of utmost felicity but a moment of something that may actually be true. Oddly or logically I felt a liberation from twaddle; from imbecilic pieties, mawkish poltroonic jejunery. A moment of a felicity that mere animal doing never had begat me. Oddly or logically I felt a joy unimagined in my duty doing when I saw myself as wonderful; so bloody wonderful. An ineffable gladness gallivanted through my being.

(The bald fact was Reuben’s brothers were by chance as or more comely. Yet the bald fact is they were as Reuben, utterly adorable.)

Elizabeth is from the Hebrew, God is my oath. Elizabeth shunned indoctrinating her nine children with the whimsy of how special they were. Their duty was submission to group. Words for this were Gelassenheit, Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft.

Yet, is that other than all indoctrinations? The survival and perpetuation of a group is its chief, natural and intelligent aim. Scandinavians are indoctrinated with "Janteloven, Jante’s Law. Number one: Du skal ikke tro, du er noget (Dansk): Thou shalt not think that you are special."

In our high enlightenment education is presented as a gig to make students knowledgeable and wake their intelligence. Educators say in their uneducated verblown ugly language their methodology (method) is heuretic; teaching students to discover things for themselves. The actual and practical purpose is to train individuals to be standardized duty tethered and blinkered citizens; to shunn skepticism and doubt which educate; to destroy originality; to bridle innate curiosity, nose-ring innate intelligence and perception; to make people express their individuality in behavior that would make a sheep (Ovis aires) blush. That is always the aim everywhere. The whine that education being actually training is in asorry state is humbuggery. Mere observation of the young make it obvious that pedagogues and pedagoguesses do their job of rendering utter conformists damn well. Who of us has ever met someone proudly proclaiming, I’m an educator that is educated? (Oxymoron: Educated educator.)

An Amish nonage is as all other nonages as conveyed in the oft beseech to a Javanese sprout in Bahasa Indonesia: Semoga adik menjadi anak yang baik. We hope you grow up to be a good boy. If spoken in kind honesty, baik would be domba being Bahasa Inodnesia’s sonorous arbitrary sound for sheep.

Was Reuben’s Amish nonage other than a diddle-free version of the American pressure cooker of conformity?

(Aside: Many years aft the scene above, Reuben’s eldest brother happening to be the provost of a prestigious university said, Mom and dad argued much about you. Dad thought something very wrong with you for your being alone so much and not paying attention in church while mom defended you as, That’s just the way Reuben is. He’s happy when alone." Reuben does not know if that is true. Reuben hoped it was not.)

Technology Ode

(Life was a bitch before GPS: one had to know where one was and was going. --Jenny, The Sure-Footed

Conrad stood before the mast and had his mettle tested. A friend living on a sailing boat in and around the Bahamas tells me the advent of GPS has polluted those waters with wussome sailors and sailoresses to whom a sextant is a mystery.)

A Grammar Whiz

Reuben suddenly remembers the fun of fracturing English unintentionally or intentionally such as standing at recess in school when seven when watching a train and saying after it had disappeared, Teacher, ven it comes a little red box, why den the train’s all, ain’t?

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. -Twain

Scene III: Fernsprecher or, Far-Speaker

When Reuben was round about six years-old he was at a neighbor’s house for a good eat. Dinner and a lively conversation on the weather was interrupted by a noise. When the lady of the house returned from silencing the noise Reuben said, Vhy ven dat ding make dat noise, you den go talk to dat ding?

Lacrimando Diluendo: Plaintive Dying Away Into Silence

The backward Amish when Reuben was a swain had the highly civilized rule of no loud noises on Sunday. Once in Hawaii it was illegal to make loud noises on Sunday and in New York City it was illegal to mow lawn with power mower on Sunday. The no loud noise stance made newspapers verboten as overstatement is a form of noise.

With the progress of the century since Nietzsche, the most violent known in human history, we need a neologism as numbness grossly understates the result of impressions on young and old souls now. My imagination fails me perhaps due to having made the ultimate gaffe of having gone a bit serious. Benumbed? Berotted? Betwixt moribund and rigor mortis; mori-mortis, bemired, bewallowed? What is uglier than noise? What veils the merciless ugliness of now more effectively than the ubiquity of noise now? What is more soul castrating? What is more violent than noise? What controls more effectively than noise? What rapes privacy more than noise? What is more conforming and uniforming than noise? What is more infantile than noise? I hear some of what is now called music made by mechanical and human machines and remember the high art of the music of stone age tribes. One reads the latest revelations from think tanks and prestigious universities and hears the loud-hailing noise of the tendentious cock-sure. An image: A stone toad on a petrified log under a concrete stool.

Yet, who of us has gone into ecstasy at ear-splitting sound? Ecstasy’s etymology is from Greek stasis; leaving one’s position; being outside oneself. It is a total in