After the Gold Rush

The New Republic now has a photo up of senior editor Michelle Cottle. I once shared a fiction writing class with her in college. From what I remember she had a very beautiful southern accent, although she rarely spoke in class. (I believe she came from a small town in western North Carolina.) My attempts to engage her in conversation after class always failed. I would heap praise on a story she recently shared with the class and she would respond with a polite thank you and excuse herself. Maybe it was my Yankee/Chicago accent and off-putting manner. Maybe it was her religiosity. Probably she just wasn't interested in the slightest and thought my stories were crap.

There were two Senior level fiction classes of 15 students (I'm pretty sure you had to be an English major). Students applied to the class by submitting a story, and luckily I was deamed worthy. The professor who taught the class and judged the stories was an elderly Southern gentleman who reminded me of the actor John Neville. Aloof but courteous. 

I labored on my story all summer and don't remember much about it except it involved a typewriter repair man who hitchiked even though hitchiking was unheard of in the story's universe because of a high crime rate and general distrust of strangers. I dropped proper names like Theodore Dreiser (An American Tradgedy), Norman Mailer (The Executioner's Song) and Neil Young.  

Not long ago, I was thinking about Neil Young and the cover to his album After the Gold Rush which I always found striking and memorable. Recently it dawned on me that the album cover reminded me of Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which W.H. Auden discusses in his poem Musée des Beaux Arts.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.