Read four or five essays the two hours before dark in my tree-stand and I finished the remainder tonight. An enjoyable, entertaining, enlightening read. Was and still am curious about King saying he was "furious". Jim Bishop noted in his concluding essay that many of King's classmates and associates from the time do not remember him as such, remembered him as a number of things, furious not among them. I don't see anything wrong with furious. I've been furious at times. Frumious. Bandersnatch.
I first slithered onto this board, to use a word another used to describe my being here, ten years ago lacking but two months, January of aught-seven, a few weeks after reading Hearts in Atlantis, paperback, one of three paperbacks my wife gave me for Christmas, '06. I'd already devoured the tower. Hearts in Atlantis brought me here.
Caught up in the fable I watched the tower grow. Like I said above, or below, depending on your scroll...I was a ten-year-old in '69. One of my first posts here was a kind of homage to Bag of Bones, another Christmas gift, '06. My wife knows what her little boy likes. The post, long gone now, had "guilt in the green" spelled out first letter of the paragraph or two of my post, a poor attempt to describe our own adolescent angst of that time. I don't recall the post, other than my attempt to be cute in the letters running down the right side. (oops, left side...I do that a lot) Nineteen down. But Hearts had touched me like few other stories ever had and I've read it enough to know when to step into the other room. My wife gets a kick out of it when she sees me tear up. (She's getting ready to fix a shake.)
Furious would be right for the time. That was the impression I had of the older boys, playing rough games of football on the lawn below the old four-gable schoolhouse where we had elementary and where four others and myself "marched" around the school at lunch, our arms around each other's shoulders, chanting "down with Nixon!" Heh! I don't know who came up with that idea...I've got an idea who, the only explanation that makes sense, but I don't remember. The same goes for those gigantic snow-boulders we made one winter noon, rolling one in front of and the other in back of Mrs. Erva's big blue Buick. Our attempt to be like the older kids. Gene and Finny jumped from trees, preparing for war in Knowles's story. We played a like kind exchange but we also were witness to the news with Walter Cronkite, hippies protesting the war, cops with nightsticks whopping them in the head, the images from the war. Furious. When they finished they got into their muscle cars parked beneath the streetlight buzzing with moths and squealed their tires as they left to do other things. Younger, my friends and I sat on the hillside and watched them go.
(Honey, you're almost done...my wife...just picked up the book. Didn't tell her I am done. Musta left a bookmarker in a few pages back.)
Good men through the ages tryin to find the sun. The essays describe a time of energy and devotion, acts both enlightening and baffling. There's a range of emotion expressed in the essays, some emotion fringes on furious, to maintain a theme, or at least potent anger. That's furious, isn't it? But there's a range of emotion, from Harold's calm and cool demeanor, a calmness also expressed by one of the female essayists, or maybe more than one. One of the poets. Quite a few poets and singers among the essayists. (I wondered if Laurie Andersen...a local guy who apparently went to school with Stephen King, and also a writer, would have been available to contribute? Met him briefly at a bookstore in Hancock and I've read some of his work.) I'm curious about the contributors...some are published...and given time I'll read some more. Curious, as always...like we were on the hill, watching them go...where they went from there.