Customer Reviews

Rip Van Winkle: and other selected stories

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The classic story by Washington Irving which establishes the theme of this bargain book of stories might also serve as a reminder of how out of touch anyone who preserves a sense of how the past has shaped this world can be in a social situation which needs to concentrate totally on an appreciation of what is happening now. Among the selections in this book is "English and French Character," in which Irving observed how an Englishman "makes a little solitude around him by his silence and reserve; he moves about shy and solitary, and, as it were, buttoned up, body and soul." (p. 184). There are also observations, in "The Art of Bookmaking," of authors at work "in the reading room of the great British Library~an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read; one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature in which modern authors repair and draw buckets full of classic lore, or `pure English, undefiled,' wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought." (p. 99). Somehow the occasion gave Washington Irving a fantasy, which he related quite vividly, of old authors from the portraits which hung on the walls of this famous reading room attacking an expert on Greek thought, and "There was something so ludicrous in the catastrophe of this learned Theban that I burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, which broke the whole illusion." (p. 103).

My relationship (what I might steal most easily, if I were an author) with Rip Van Winkle might be more like the part of old Peter Vanderdonk, a character in that story who "assured the company that it was a fact, handed down from his ancestor the historian, that the Kaatskill Mountauns had always been haunted by strange beings. That it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half Moon, being permitted in this way to revisit the scenes of his enterprise and keep a guardian eye upon the river and the great city called by his name. That his father had once seen them in their old Dutch dresses playing at ninepins in a hollow of the mountain, and that he himself had heard, one summer afternoon, the sound of their balls, like distant peals of thunder." (p. 17). When I hear thunder, though, I am reminded of how much it sounds like a distant echo of bombing in the mountains where I heard my first B-52 bombing strike, near An Lao northwest of Bong Son in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam almost 33 years ago. Other people might have different associations for thunder, but the link to Rip Van Winkle remains uncanny.