289. "Oblivion"

The reason you can't trust tests to reveal knowledge is that knowledge comes only when you know the meaning of the words used.  When I was nine years old I could ace the test on the Ten Commandments because I had memorized them, but I would have flunked if I had been asked what some of them referred to.  Adultery?  I searched the other side of my brain.  Nothing there.  When I asked an adult (naturally) what I got was more words, and then more words. 

I don't think you could say I had acquired any "knowledge" of adultery until the adult got to a word where I could say, "Oh yes, I've done that or felt that or seen that or thought that."  And then it would be pretty low-grade knowledge, because I'd still have to get the analogy, or analogies, before I "got" adultery.

Teachers help you do that, and I saw a stunning example in my seventh-grade (12-year-old) Sunday School class.  There had been a big rumpus in the papers about "adulterated foods" (this was the year of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act), how manufacturers were putting acid and stuff into our wholesome jelly made from the pure juices of fruits the farmers sent them.  "Do you know what it means to adulterate foods?"  Did we ever.  You put something yucky into something pure.  "Well, adultery is like that.  It's putting an impurity into something that's supposed to be pure — a marriage."

Well that, getting one important word understood, was a terrific step in our education, and it took a while.  I don't know how you'll ever know it's been taken on the kind of tests I hear they're using in schools now, but I do know that it will pay off.  The students in that class are on their way to understanding Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, and to being able to write about them knowledgeably, as students who have memorized the right words to say about them are not.

In college I was expert in the right words.  I'd observed them closely in the textbook.  This one goes here and that one goes there and you've got the Renaissance.  And I know all about it, as you can see by my answer, where I have them all in the right place.  I had been well taught.

No, I wouldn't be well taught until more teachers did what my Sunday School teacher did: filled one word, and then another, and another, with meaning.  "Sophomoric"?  That's Hotspur, "an all-state halfback stuck on himself."  Like water into an empty can.  No student of a human subject is ever well taught until that is done, by herself or another.

But how about the untaught, or lightly taught, or self-taught prodigies?  Doesn't their example let us skip this, or shorten it? 

No.  They, mostly in math and physics, are moving around empty cans.  Chess pieces.  The cans of literature-readers have to be filled, with life, and that takes time.  History-readers too.  Consider my experience with "sovereignty."  When I come across it now I think of something very much needed in countries plagued by warlords and bandits, like France in the tenth century, or Italy in the sixteenth.  I think of how that need can be exploited.  I think of the risks of violating a nation's sovereignty, and taking it over yourself, and being criticized by Putin and Xi Jinping, who want us out.  But in the first history book I read "sovereign" meant King George III, somebody all good Americans wanted thrown out.  In the next book "autocrat," offered as its synonym, took me to a host of foreign sovereigns, all of whom needed, by all good people, to be thrown  out.  That can labeled "sovereign" needed a lot of filling.  Now it's so heavy I can barely move it around.

Then there's the word "oblivion."  I came to it through "oblivious," a word I, a daydreamer, heard applied frequently to my condition.  Unaware, out of it.  Then "oblivion," naming the state the dead were in.  Of course.  Irremediably unaware, permanently out of it.  Then a worse state, being lost to other people's memory, no matter how aware they were. 

I, soon aided by poets, was moving toward Ozymandias, the king who fought the loss so pathetically (leaving us only a few stone legs and a head to go on) that he came to the attention of Percy Shelley.   I could return to Ozymandias, and to "oblivion," every time I viewed a relic or fingered an arrow head.  Oblivion was an awful place and you didn't just "fall" into it; you could "drift" or "slide" or "fade" into it (as, an NYR piece assured me, George Romney was going to do).  Still you could, if you were lucky, be "plucked from it," as by museum curators.  Or learn (from Proust) how to "rescue" something from it.  Oh, my wide reading taught me so much.  After years of it I thought my can labeled "oblivion" was about as full as it could get.

Then, in planning a eulogy for my 80-year-old younger brother, I found myself wondering whether to include, among the people who had played a part in his and my childhood, mention of Annie, a spinster who, living with our grandmother, took care of us on visits.  This was in the days when every family harbored, somewhere in the house, a feeble parent or a damaged sibling.  Annie's damage was in the brain, done when she was five by an untreated fever.  She had played only a very small part, and for a very brief time, in my brother's life.

Small?  It was nothing.  She made nothing happen.  She couldn't.  Things only happened to her — like getting bit by the child she was tending in the baby carriage.  Because she couldn't read she had to turn us over to somebody else when we came running with the Sunday funnies.  

OK, not worth a mention.  But then it occurred to me that if I didn't say something about Annie she would be totally forgotten.  Don and I were the last people alive to know her.  When I died she would be lost to all memory.  Plunged into oblivion.  And I had thought my "oblivion" can was full.

What I knew of what the word meant to others, poets, added to the seriousness of it.  Annie had been "unbodied, unsoul’d, unheard, unseene" for years.  Soon she would be unremembered. 

The pang of it prompted a closer review.  Annie had lived a life that, to my grown-up eyes, had only one memorable action in it.  (Well, two if you count saying your nightly prayers in Swedish with the window open, thereby amusing those of us bedded on the porch.)  When, at the age of about eleven, I was in the worst pickle of my life, it was Annie who saved me.  My cousin, my brother, and I, three years older than they, had been playing on the fire-escapes on the back side of the buildings up on the next street, the big, commercial Michigan Avenue.  This, though we didn't know it, took us into the neighborhood of one of the gangs Chicago boys were always forming, even at that time.  They didn't like it that we were playing on their fire escapes, and they were going to make us, through me the biggest one, pay.  I had to fight one of their guys, right there in the alley.  Just when my ability to hold them off with talk was about to reach its limit the boy I was talking to, their leader, looking over my shoulder, said, "Jesus, here comes his mom!"  There was Annie, waving a big broom, with my cousin right behind her.  He had sneaked off and cried for help.  The young Southsiders ran in all directions.

That great image of her care for us brought back lesser ones.  Annie adding "sweetheart" — or "sweedart" — to everything she addressed to us.  Facing the funnies it was "Ask Ida, sweetheart."  With a jacket patiently held out it was, "Hand here, sweetheart."  An adult might have seen how much frustrated love for children she was expressing but we children were oblivious to it.

The pang of it all brought her back into my eulogy.  But no, a eulogy, somebody else's eulogy, is no place to satisfy such a pang. 

John Updike has some great things to say about goodness.  When Miriam, Rabbit's sister (in Rabbit Run), extends her bangled arm toward the baby's cheek he says, "Goodness, like a gas, filled the house," or something like that.  (My memory is not so good.  I have forgotten the place where he, after maybe over-detailing a moment in Shillington, says apologetically that he's doing it "so that this goodness not be lost.")

The deepening of my understanding of "oblivion" made me  worry more about the loss of Annie's goodness.  Lost, lost, eternally lost.  I ended by including her in the eulogy.  The alternative, putting her story in an email to everybody was, I now think, probably better.  Except that email gets lost.  Digital storage can't be trusted.  Will family members make a hard copy?  I see that that might well depend on how fully they understand the word "oblivion."  A test of knowledge after all!