Auden’s ‘The Way’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

At one point in “The Quest,” his modernist version of a quest romance told in 20 sonnets, the poet W.H. Auden derides occult fascinations as “an architecture for the odd.”

The particular sonnet, which in some editions is titled “The Tower,” but in Auden’s official Collected Poems is simply called number “IX,” concludes with a warning from magicians caught in their own tower:

Yet many come to wish their tower a well;
For those who dread to drown, of thirst may die,
Those who see all become invisible:
 
Here great magicians, caught in their own spell,
Long for a natural climate as they sigh
“Beware of Magic” to the passer-by.

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Today in History: June 25

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A war with many names started on this date in 1950. Most know it as the Korean War; in South Korea it is called the “6-2-5 Upheaval,” in North Korea it is called the “Fatherland Liberation War,” and in China it is called the “War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea.”

On June 25, 1950, forces in North Korea invaded South Korea; the North was aided by the USSR and China, and the South was defended by the United Nations, with most forces supplied by the United States. Three years and one month later, an armistice was declared that kept the border between the two countries in place and tensions high to this day. A combined two and a half million civilians on both sides of the border were killed or wounded in the conflict.
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Now, and Then, Voyager

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If the photo above is not of the actual car that my family owned in 1979, it is the same model Chevy Malibu station wagon that my memory has chosen to remember as the actual car that my parents drove to cart my sister and ten-year-old me around that summer and every other summer, before 1979 and after.

(My memory is not what it used to be: It is better!)

Our family road trips over about two decades included vacations in Vermont (to see family), weekends on Cape Cod and in Pennsylvania Dutch country and along the Connecticut shore. We were not a wealthy family, so our family vacations were always road trips to a destination that we could reach in one day or less of driving. My father was the only driver, so this was more than fair. The long(ish) car ride was simultaneously unendurable and somehow, maybe sometimes, the only part of the trip that was worth remembering.
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