The Riverdale Reader 2014

A Journal of Ideas and Experience Essays by members of the school community

RiveRdale CountRy SChool 5250 FieldSton Road BRonx, new yoRk 10471

June 2014

The editors would like to thank all those who submitted their work to the Non-fiction Writing Contest. Submissions were lively and impressive, and we look forward to your continuing participation in this venture. Thanks also to members of the History and English Departments who solicited, collected, and read the essays.

Thanks to Kelley Nicholson-Flynn and Dominic Randolph for funding the publication of this journal and supporting the work of teachers and students to produce it. An enormous thank you goes to Margaret Corn, ’15, whose design expertise and great generosity with her time brought the journal into existence.

-Sarah Banks and Ron Murison Riverdale Country School, May 2014

Introduction and Dedication to Volume V of The Riverdale Reader Riverdale prides itself on the quality of its students’ writing, and for many years English teachers have devoted much of their time, both in and out of the classroom, to helping students become better writers. While publications such as Impressions and The Riverdale Review have provided outlets for our students’ creative writing and journalism, until recently there has been no means of sharing the best of the non-fiction writing that is an essential part of the daily work of all our students. In 2010, to remedy this deficiency, David Nicholson, long-time English teacher and tireless promoter of good writing, introduced to the Riverdale community a new publication, The Riverdale Reader as a forum for non-fiction. At the same time, the Non-Fiction Writing Contest was inaugurated as a means of identifying the very best non-fiction writing produced by Riverdale students each year.

Since then, until he retired this February, Mr. Pahlka was in charge of the program, organizing the contest and overseeing the publication of the Reader. Mr. Pahlka was the ideal person for this task, having taught the art of writing in English classes from eighth through tenth grade, in Constructing America, and in ILS, of which he was one of the founding faculty over thirty years ago. In addition, he is an excellent essayist himself, and his many Riverdale friends look forward with anticipation to the publication of a collection of his essays.

It is entirely fitting, therefore, that we depart from normal practice and dedicate this year’s Riverdale Reader to Dr. William Pahlka, who was for many years at the very heart of Riverdale’s writing program and whose influence upon generations of Riverdale writers has been immeasurable.

Each year, we include an essay by a member of the faculty, and this year, to honor Dr. Pahlka, we present one of his own witty and insightful creations in the genre of literary analysis for your reading pleasure.

Table of Contents

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“New Orleans’ Water”

Lucy Pan ‘20

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“Gun Control Essay”

David Betensky ‘19

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“The Death Penalty”

Michael Maffezzoli ‘19

22

“Falling Into Despair”

Stephanie Shwartz ‘18

26

“Femininity in The Things They Carried”

George Harvey ‘17

32

“The Dingaling”

Jack Tien-Dana ‘16

40

“Marlowe’s Greyness and Kurtz’s Darkness: Leaning Over the Abyss Versus Falling Into It”

Hannah Gallen ‘15

44

“Castles in the Air: Transcendence through Imagination and Writing”

Miranda Hoyt-Disick ‘15

50

“Memory in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland”

Riley Griffin ‘14

56

“Two Ways of Seeing New York City”

Matt Roffe ‘14

60

“Cockroach Prosody”

Bill Pahlka, Faculty

New Orleans’ Water Sixth Grade Opinion Winner

Lucy Pan ‘20 Lucy Pan, a sixth grader, joined Riverdale last fall.

She is very curious about global warming and how it affects the way people live. The article she wrote is related to New Orleans, a city that is below sea level and has been facing worse and worse flooding problems in recent years due to bad storms. It was written based on information she got from various sources that she had been exploring, and she wrote it to draw attention to the problem. Besides writing, Lucy has many interests, such as playing the violin, drawing, and outdoor activities.

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N

ew Orleans’s water has been causing trouble—and global warming puts the city in danger.

A Normal City New Orleans uses water just the way we do.

Citizens there drink water, bathe, brush their teeth, rinse/wash food with it, and do everything we do with water. Many New Orleans citizens drink tap water. They get their water from water pipes.

Troubled Taps Most people who don’t know anything about New Orleans would suspect that there is nothing wrong with its water supply. If you are one of those people, you are wrong. New Orleans is having trouble with water.

In October of 2012, New Orleans’s East Coast water power plant failed. Water pressure went down. Scientists alerted the people and told them to boil their tap water before drinking it. Bacteria might be in the water. The people boiled their tap water until the power plant was repaired.

Rising Seas Infected tap water is not the only problem in New Orleans. Global warming is getting worse and worse every century—even every decade. Why? Well, if you use “fossil fuels” (coal, oil, natural gas) to power up your industries, homes, or vehicles, you’re a part of the cause. Fossil fuels release carbon dioxide into the air. Carbon dioxide traps the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, warming the Earth up. How does that relate to sea levels rising—and how does it affect New Orleans?

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Higher temperatures every year melt glaciers and ice at record speeds. The melted ice goes into the ocean, making sea levels rise.

When heated, water expands and takes up more space. New Orleans, Miami, New York, and many other coastal cities are affected.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, New Orleans was well protected with levees, but the levees only offered protection from flooding, not from storms. During Hurricane Katrina, a levee broke, and floodwaters rushed into New Orleans.

As global warming gets more and more severe, New Orleans is being put at risk of sinking underwater. In fact, some places are already eight feet underwater! The gulf coast is washing in on New Orleans. Sooner or later, New Orleans could be underwater.

Sea levels rising are a problem for New Orleans. In fact, levees might go as high as twenty-seven feet in the following years. New Orleans is encouraging their citizens to try and help stop global warming. Citizens there hope that New Orleans will one day not be an underwater city.

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Gun Control Seventh Grade Opinion Co-Winner

Daniel Betensky ‘19 Daniel Betensky, a seventh grader, was born in New York and lived there all of his life. He started his schooling at the Calhoun school, but for sixth grade he switched to Riverdale. All seventh graders at Riverdale work on their first real research paper in history class. Daniel was intrigued and had strong feelings about the topic of gun control. He felt that guns needed to be out of the streets and that stricter regulations of guns would lead to less crime. He ended up writing his five-paragraph essay on why states and cities should be allowed to have gun control. Some of Daniel’s other interests include playing sports and watching good movies.

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O

n December 14th 2012, it was a typical morning for Sandy Hook Elementary School, but then Adam Lanza, with two semi-automatic pistols and a semi-automatic rifle, shot down the door of the school. He killed twenty-six people in that school. Twenty of them were children. He also killed his mother and finally, himself. His mother was a gun enthusiast, and he used her guns to brutally murder her and all of the victims (Barron). The arguments surrounding gun control are about whether or not states and cities can regulate handguns and assault weapons. The facts show that more gun accessibility leads to higher amounts of crime and violence. Guns cause taxpayers to pay extra money for the medical, legal and societal costs of gun damage. The Second Amendment gives individuals the right to bear arms, but it is not unregulated. States and cities should be allowed to regulate the keeping and carrying of handguns and assault weapons because gun ownership leads to crime and violence, guns are a burden on taxpayers, and the meaning of the Second Amendment does not give individuals the unregulated right to bear arms.

The keeping and carrying of guns causes gun violence and crime. Many of the crimes in the United States are committed with guns. Two thirds of all homicides, one half of all suicides, one third of all robberies, and finally, one fifth of all aggravated assaults are committed with guns (Burton). The United States has many more gun crimes and violence than other wealthy countries. The homicide rate in the United States is only 7% higher than the rates in twenty two other wealthy populated countries combined, but the gun homi-

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cide rate is 20% higher (Ruben). In the United States guns kill about 35,000 people and injure another 200,000 each year (Burton). If the United States could lower the number of guns that the individuals in the United States have, it would save many lives. Over three thousand children were killed by guns in 2007, which is equivalent to the number of U.S combat deaths in the Iraq War and four times the amount of deaths in the Afghan War (Children’s Defense Fund). The United States cares more about the soldiers than the children. They try to lower the number of soldiers dying, but they do nothing about the children dying. States with high gun ownership have seven times more gun-caused deaths than states with low gun ownership. States with high gun ownership have 114% higher gun caused murders than states with low gun ownership. States with high gun ownership have 60% higher total homicides than states with low gun ownership (Ruben). The states with high gun ownership have weaker gun laws than states with low gun ownership. People take advantage of those weak laws and commit crimes. Guns cause much more damage than other weapons. Guns are dangerous weapons. If we could keep them out of the hands of individuals, the United States would be a much safer place.

Not only do guns cause violence, but that violence creates a large economic burden on taxpayers and the United States. Once the medical, legal, and societal costs are combined, the price of gun violence amounts to over $100 billion a year that the United States pays (Ruben). Some of the people involved with guns need a lawyer for when they get shot or are involved in gun crimes and violence. The government pays for that lawyer, not the person. Some other people cannot afford medical treatment by themselves, so they need the government to pay for them. The costs all add up very fast considering how many gun crimes and how much violence there is. As taxpayers we pay $1.15 billion for medical treatment on the gun-shot victims each year (Ruben). If we took away the guns the government could lower the taxes. Guns make us pay even more taxes for other people’s problems. $1.15 billion is too much money to be spending on guns.

We could do much better things with that money. We could build parks or repave our streets and help our country, but we choose to spend it on guns.

The Second Amendment gives the right for individuals to bear arms, but it is not unregulated. Pro-gun organizations such as the NRA argue that the Second Amendment does give the right to unregulated individual ownership. According to Pulitzer prize win12

ning historian Garry Wills, “History, philology, and logic furnish no solid basis for thinking the Second Amendment has anything to do with the private ownership of guns” (Spitzer). Also, according to the Supreme Court of the United States in the United States v Miller case, “The Second Amendment’s obvious purpose was to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of the state militia” (Legal Action Project). The Second Amendment absolutely does not give the unregulated right to individual gun ownership. According to the United States Supreme Court in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, “like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose” (“Court Rulings…”). The individuals can have guns, but the government is allowed to regulate them. The NRA is just trying to make sure nobody can take away their guns. Historians and judges have studied the second amendment from both sides, but the NRA has only looked at it from one. The historians and judges analyzed the second amendment and came up with the conclusion that it does not give individuals the unregulated right to own guns.

Guns cause large problems everywhere, but United States’ gun laws are weaker than other wealthy, heavily populated countries’ gun laws. Guns cause crime and create a burden on taxpayers. Some people think that they have a right, in the Constitution, to own a personal gun, without regulation, but they do not. Gun control would lower crime and let the government cut taxes. If we continue without gun control there will be more guns. The extra guns will cause even more crime, create an even bigger burden on the taxpayers, and cause even more people like Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting to be able to have assault weapons. We do not want even more school shootings. One is too many as it is. It is for these reasons that cities and states should be allowed to regulate the keeping and carrying of handguns and assault weapons.

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Works Cited Barron, James. “Nation Reels After Gunman Massacres 20 Children at School in Connecticut.” The New York Times 14 Dec. 2012: n. pag. Print.

Burton, C. Emory. “Gun Ownership Contributes to Violent Crime.” Gun Violence. Ed. James D. Torr. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2002. Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 27 Feb. 2014. http://ic.galegroup.com.libproxy.riverdale.edu/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVI C&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGrou pName=Viewpoints&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=false&d isplayGroups=&sortBy=&search_within_results=&p=OVIC&action=e&c atId=&activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ3010223209&s ource=Bookmark&u=nysl_me_rcs&jsid=ac0ea044204f5e9a48713bd301fcd 27b Children’s Defense Fund. “Gun Crimes Cause Serious Harm to Children.”

Guns and Crime. Ed. Christine Watkins. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2012.

At Issue. Rpt. from “Protect Children, Not Guns 2010.” 20 Aug. 2010: 1-18.

Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 24 Jan.2013.

“Court Rulings on Firearms.” Gun Control: Restricting Rights or Protecting People?. Sandra M. Alters. 2009 ed. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Information Plus Reference Series. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 9 Mar. 2014. http://ic.galegroup.com.libproxy.riverdale.edu/ic/ovic/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC &windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroup Name=Reference&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=true&displ ayGroups=&sortBy=&search_within_results=&p=OVIC&action=e&catId =&activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ3020690104&sour ce=Bookmark&u=nysl_me_rcs&jsid=f5f974580ae91f1376a7ab7dba12625b Legal Action Project. “The Second Amendment Guarantees a Collective Right, Not an Individual Right.” Gun Control. Ed. Tami Roleff. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2007. Opposing Viewpoints. Rpt. from “Exploding the NRA’s Second Amendment Mythology.”www.gunlawsuits.org/defend/

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second/articles/nramyths.php. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 27 Feb. 2014. http://ic.galegroup.com.libproxy.riverdale.edu/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OV IC&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGro upName=Viewpoints&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=false &displayGroups=&sortBy=&search_within_results=&p=OVIC&action= e&catId=&activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ301014029 9&source=Bookmark&u=nysl_me_rcs&jsid=eada04321a5fb73fb52eb10c1 2e6216 Ruben, Alan M. “The Accessibility of Guns Leads to Gun Crime.” Guns and Crime. Ed. Christine Watkins. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2012. At Issue. Rpt. from “Battle over Guns Continues.” Intelligencer and Wheeling News-Register 27 Mar. 2011. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 27 Feb. 2014. http://ic.galegroup.com.libproxy.riverdale.edu/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVI C&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGrou pName=Viewpoints&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=false&d isplayGroups=&sortBy=&search_within_results=&p=OVIC&action=e&c atId=&activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ3010015246&s ource=Bookmark&u=nysl_me_rcs&jsid=e335fb04d8ee5eae36c3b2d42bc80 5d6 Spitzer, Robert J. “The Second Amendment Applies to Militias, Not Individuals.”Militias. Ed. Noah Berlatsky. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2012.

Opposing Viewpoints. Rpt. from “Heller’s Manufactured Gun Rights Can Be Traced to a Flawed Law Review Article.” HNN.us. 2008. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 3 Mar. 2014. http://ic.galegroup.com.libproxy.riverdale.edu/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVI C&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGrou pName=Viewpoints&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=false&d isplayGroups=&sortBy=&search_within_results=&p=OVIC&action=e&c atId=&activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ3010803218&s ource=Bookmark&u=nysl_me_rcs&jsid=8e6944a22292637a9541fc8fe5ee7 1ba

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The Death Penalty Seventh Grade Opinion Co-Winner

Michael Maffezzoli ‘19 Michael, a seventh grader, started at Riverdale this year.

For a paper in history Michael chose to write about the death penalty and argued its constitutionality.

He found the topic really interesting because of the controversy surrounding it, and having a passion for debate, found arguing one side to be fun. Other than writing Michael enjoys lacrosse, listening to music, math, science, and hanging out with friends.

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C

apital punishment has always been a controversial subject, but it remained in the US legal system until the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia made all death penalty laws invalid, freeing many people from death row. This moratorium was short lived because the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia made the death penalty constitutional once again (ProCon.org). The death penalty is punishment for people who commit some of the most gruesome and horrifying crimes, and what is in question is whether killing these criminals is equally gruesome and horrifying. People have also questioned the death penalty’s ability to deter as well as its constitutionality and morality. Capital punishment should not be abolished because it is a strong deterrent to crime, it serves a retributive purpose, and it does not violate the eighth amendment.

The death penalty should not be outlawed because it is a strong deterrent to future crimes. In fact, between 1972 and 1977 America paused the death penalty. In those ten years without the death penalty the number of murders doubled (Otis). There were no executions in 1980 and the murder rate was 10.2 murders per 100,000 people. In 2000 there were 85 executions and the murder rate dropped from 10.2 to 5.7 murders per 100,000 people (Hall “Executions…” ) (Lowe). Without capital punishment the number of homicides rose significantly. In addition, a study conducted from 1977 to 1996 by three professors at Emory University found that each execution resulted in 18 fewer murders. Most likely this is because criminals are no different from regular people in the sense that they weigh their

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personal interests with their means of obtaining them, and the risks that they have. Having the risk of being executed put in the equation deters many potential criminals because no one wants to be killed (Muhlhausen). Abolitionists argue that the death penalty is not a strong deterrent because murderers do not pay attention to the risk of death. If this were true then every time a policeman held a criminal at gunpoint and told them to get on the ground with their hands in the air, they would end up with a bullet in their head. This of course does not happen because they are afraid of what the gun can do to them and do not try to run away. In a similar way, people are afraid of the lethal power of the death penalty so they do not commit capital crimes (Lowe).

Capital punishment serves a retributive purpose that imprisonment cannot make up for. Society, which is a place where each person’s natural rights to life, liberty and property are protected, is disturbed by crime since criminals take away what, in society, is supposed to be protected. It is only just that the criminals are removed from society for an amount of time that corresponds to the damage done to their victims (Budziszewski). Capital crimes are different from other felonies because it is not just the loss of replaceable items or the healing of an injury, it is the loss of a life. In this case imprisonment is not sufficient retribution for the crime. An example of a crime like this is the brutal raping and killing of a middle-aged woman and one of her two daughters. All three of them were tied to their beds and their house was set on fire. This wicked crime is different from robbery or even kidnapping, and therefore needs to be treated differently, so when the two men responsible were found, the most logical punishment would indeed be the death penalty (Koch).

Those who are against the death penalty often set aside deterrence and retribution and focus on its constitutionality, however, it is neither cruel nor unusual and therefore does not violate the Eighth Amendment. The world is no stranger to death as a form of punishment. In fact, it goes as far back as eighteenth century BC when King Hammurabi of Babylon made Twenty Five different crimes punishable by death (Bohm). The Death penalty is clearly not as unusual as cutting off the hands of burglars or Chinese water torture. It was the main punishment for thousands and thousands of years. Furthermore, the point of the Eighth Amendment is to prevent the criminal from being punished in the same way as the crime that they committed against their victim(s). Rapists are not raped as punishment, torturers

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are not tortured, and murderers are not murdered in the same manner as their victims. With the current methods of execution, the criminals pass without pain (Eddlem). The modern technique for execution is lethal injection where the only pain inflicted is the needle being put in the arm. First a heavy anesthetic puts the inmate to sleep and numbs the body, and then a heavy dose of pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride, which slows breathing and then stops the heart (Hall “Methods‌â€?). This method ensures that the criminal passes quickly and painlessly, so it does not match the crime, and therefore is not cruel.

The significance of capital punishment is too great to be abolished. Without it, there would be more crimes, and some criminals would be let off easy. There are no substantial abolitionist arguments that can balance out these effects. Having death as a punishment for certain crimes undeniably acts as a deterrent, it does not violate the Constitution, and it is morally just. It would be worse to get rid of capital punishment than to keep the punishment and deterrence, constitutionality, and retribution are why.

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Works Cited Bohm, Randa. “Introduction to the Death Penalty.” Death Penalty Information Center. Death Penalty Information Center, n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2014. <http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/part-i-history-death-penalty#intro>.

Budziszewski, J. “Capital Punishment: The Case for Justice.” ProCon.org.

ProCon.org, n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2014. <http://deathpenalty.procon.org/ view.source.php?sourceID=6050>.

Eddlem, Thomas R. “Arguments Against the Death Penalty Are Flawed.”

Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Gale, n.d. Web. 21 Feb. 2014. <http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/Viewpoint sDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC&windowstate =normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName=Viewp oints&limiter=&u=nysl_me_rcs&currPage=&disableHighlighting=false &displayGroups=&sortBy=&source=&search_within_results=&p=OVI C&action=e&catId=&activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7C EJ3010313203>.

Hall, Charlene. “Executions by Year.” Pro Death Penalty. Charlene Hall, n.d.

Web. 9 Mar. 2014. <http://prodeathpenalty.com/Resources.htm> Hall, Charlene. “Methods of Execution.” Pro Death Penalty. Charlene Hall, n.d. Web. 9 Mar. 2014. <http://prodeathpenalty.com/Methods.htm> Koch, Edward. “Justice Is Served with the Death Penalty.” Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Gale, n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2014. <http://ic.galegroup. com.libproxy.riverdale.edu/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/Viewpoin tsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC&windowstat e=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName=View points&limiter=&u=nysl_me_rcs&currPage=&disableHighlighting=tru e&displayGroups=&sortBy=&source=&search_within_results=&p=OVI C&action=e&catId=&activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7C EJ3010124274>.

Lowe, Wesley. “Consistent and Swift Application of the Death Penalty Reduces Murder Rates.” Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Gale, n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2014. <http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/

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ViewpointsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC&win dowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName =Viewpoints&limiter=&u=nysl_me_rcs&currPage=&disableHighlighting =false&displayGroups=&sortBy=&source=&search_within_results=&p= OVIC&action=e&catId=&activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE% 7CEJ3010009222> Muhlhausen, David. “The Death Penalty Deters Crime.” Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Gale, n.d. Web. 13 Feb. 2014. <http://ic.galegroup. com.libproxy.riverdale.edu/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/Viewpoints DetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC&windowstate=n ormal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName=Viewpoints &dviSelectedPage=&limiter=&u=nysl_me_rcs&currPage=&disableHighl ighting=&displayGroups=&sortBy=&source=&zid=&search_within_resu lts=&p=OVIC&action=e&catId=&activityType=&scanId=&documentId= GALE%7CEJ3010124278>.

Otis, William. “The Death Penalty Saves Lives.” Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Gale, n.d. Web. 18 Feb. 2014. <http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/ ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDetailsWindow?failOverType= &query=&prodId=OVIC&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mo de=view&displayGroupName=Viewpoints&limiter=&u=nysl_me_rcs&c urrPage=&disableHighlighting=false&displayGroups=&sortBy=&source =&search_within_results=&p=OVIC&action=e&catId=&activityType=&s canId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ3010009225>.

ProCon.org. “Major Death Penalty Cases in the US Supreme Court.” ProCon. org. ProCon.org, n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2014. <http://deathpenalty.procon.org/ view.resource.php?resourceID=001769>.

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Falling Into Despair Eighth Grade Analytical Winner

Stephanie Shwartz ‘18 Currently an eighth grader, Stephanie Shwartz began her career at Riverdale as a bald, baby-faced fouryear-old in the Pre-K. Stephanie developed an early interest in writing, something she manages to do every day. When reading “Catcher in the Rye” for English class, Stephanie initially found Holden Caulfield annoying but eventually became intrigued and decided that we are all Holden Caulfield to some degree. Her essay is a psychological analysis of Salinger’s complex and atypical protagonist. In addition to writing, Stephanie enjoys acting, singing, paddle-boarding, ping pong, and tennis.

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T

he motif of falling in Catcher In the Rye is a metaphor for Holden Caulfield’s fear of having to give up the innocence of childhood and grow up into the more complex world of adulthood. Fearing change, Holden refuses to take the leap from childhood and accept the natural progression of human development. Instead, he escapes into the fantasy world that he has concocted, where nothing ever changes and childhood is forever. Holden’s anxiety heightens when his unrealistic outlook is challenged. When Stradlater, his womanizing roommate, goes on a date with Jane Gallagher, his childhood crush, Holden is furious. Holden longs to go back in time and play checkers with Jane again. He fantasizes that she is the sweet, innocent girl who has not changed, “still keeping all her kings in the back row” (42) and who would never fall for a “conceited, sexy bastard” (34) like Stradlater.

Holden’s fantasy is that like him, Jane will never grow up. In Holden’s mind, childhood is a pure and honest place while adulthood is superficial and hypocritical. His philosophy is that everything should stay the same, like the Museum of Natural History or the carousel that always plays the same song, and that to grow up is the equivalent of hitting rock bottom.

Consistent with his infatuation with childhood and fear of the adult world, Holden’s animosity towards authority figures and disdain of adults is palpable. When he says goodbye to his former history teacher, Old Spencer, Holden comments that he hates “to see old guys in their pajamas and bathrobes… Their bumpy old chests are always showing. And their legs… look so white and unhairy” (7). Adding that his teacher might just be “a nice, old guy that didn’t know his ass from his elbow,” (8) Holden cannot resist making childish and

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disrespectful remarks. His habit of constantly expressing strong negative opinions about adults merely reflects his own fear of eventually having to become one. Holden’s view is that adults are inferior to children in every way. He believes that the older a person gets, the more unhappy and dreadful they become. Thus, Holden is determined to “hold on” to boyhood bliss, treasure the purity of youth, and avoid ever becoming a “phony” (9) adult. The prospect of leaving the cocoon of childhood and falling into the unknown abyss of adulthood is daunting and overwhelming for Holden Caulfield.

Holden’s childish behavior and physical falls reveal the instability and loss of control that accompany his escalating anxiety about growing up. Leaving Pencey, for instance, is a desperate attempt by Holden to delay losing his youth. Not only does Holden figuratively fall out of a good education, he also literally tumbles down the stairs as he makes his departure from the boarding school, almost breaking his “crazy neck” (52). After Holden quits school, he wanders aimlessly around Manhattan. Carelessly slipping and falling on the ice all over the city, he is living from moment to moment, never knowing what he will do next. Walking on Fifth Avenue, Holden expresses anxiety about falling: “Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again” (197). Holden then talks to his dead brother, Allie, and begs him not to let him fall or disappear into thin air. Holden senses that he is falling as he continues to plunge further into despair.

Retreating into the past for comfort once again, Holden still cannot accept change–Allie is dead, and his own childhood is gone forever.

Holden’s missteps illustrate his floundering through life, for he is neither an innocent child nor an adult. Stuck in “no man’s land,” Holden lacks purpose and the motivation necessary to move forward in life and advance into adulthood. His frequent drunken episodes, stumbling around the streets without a destination, represent more futile attempts to escape change and avoid having to take on the task and responsibility of becoming an adult. Instead, he resorts to childish antics. When Holden staggers into a bar to have a drink with Luce, his friend from the Whooton School, he seems incapable of accepting the fact that his school friend has moved on with his life. Although Luce used to educate all the younger boys at Whooton about sex and girls, it is clear that Luce has matured since then while Holden has not.

Relentlessly bombarding Luce with provocative questions, Holden

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tries in vain to relive old times with his buddy as if they were still at Whooton together. At first, Luce politely refuses “to answer any typical Caulfield questions tonight” but eventually gets so irritated that he blurts out, “When the hell are you going to grow up?” (146).

Holden’s longing for childhood and nostalgia for old times create tension between him and Luce. Holden fears the future and repeatedly goes to great lengths to avoid it, instead clinging to childhood at every opportunity.

Unable to control his world and stop change, Holden succumbs to his fear of growing up and falls hard after his encounter with Mr. Antolini. Antolini’s warning that Holden is “riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall” (186) and that he is “going to have to find out where he wants to go” (188) is a harsh dose of reality. Antolini knows that Holden is wasting his life by not applying himself in school or bothering to find something that is worth living for. He realizes that his young former student needs to move forward and change his bitter, hateful ways towards other people if he wants to succeed in the world. Although Mr. Antolini’s seductive actions are inappropriate, his words are a powerful attempt to catch Holden from falling into despair before it is too late. Realizing that he is going to be unable to stop the clock, Holden finds that he cannot rebound and continue his journey out of adolescence. Once wanting to be the protector, “the catcher in the rye” (173) who saves all children from going “over a cliff” (173) into reality and losing their innocence, Holden himself seeks shelter from the harsh world that he is emotionally unequipped to handle.

Holden falls into a deep depression, unable to cope with the ups and downs that are a part of growing up and entering what he perceives as the unforgiving world of adulthood.

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Femininity in The Things They Carried Ninth and Tenth Grade Analytical Winner

George Harvey ‘17 George Harvey is currently a freshman. This is his first year at Riverdale, and he previously attended Saint David’s School in Manhattan. He enjoyed reading “The Things They Carried” in English class with Ms. Fischer and was intrigued by the contradictory forces that defined all of the characters. He was particularly struck by the frequency with which the theme of femininity appears despite the fact that the novel focuses on violent stories of men in war. He enjoys playing soccer, baseball, piano, and hanging out with friends.

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A

lthough almost every character in The Things They Carried is male, the theme of femininity is a common thread throughout the narrative. The men often characterize the females in their stories as innocent, naïve, and pure, one example being when Rat Kiley recounted the tale of Mary Anne to all the men of Alpha Company. Ironically, the stories about women are what allow the men to express emotions and share thoughts with each other, activities inconsistent with their definition of masculinity and toughness. After the war, both Norman, when he tries to speak to Sally, and Tim, when he returns to the field where Kiowa died with his daughter, attempt to heal and sort out their emotions by seeking a female audience for their story. The notion of the female gender as soft, innocent, and kind, becomes a powerful vehicle for the men to express how they have been changed by the war. Femininity also represents the men’s deepest hope that when the war is over they will be accepted when they return to America and civilization. During the war, the men’s stories of fictional women is what gives them a safe haven where they can communicate and share their thoughts and feelings, but after the war ends, the men find that the real women back home can’t truly understand them. Sally has moved on with her life and doesn’t seem willing to listen to Norman.

Kathleen, on the other hand, may also not be able to relate to Tim, but she is able to provide the one thing all the soldiers truly wanted and needed: unconditional love and the willingness to listen without judgment.

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In Rat Kiley’s story of Mary Anne, in which she is slowly corrupted and altered dramatically by the war, Rat communicates his deepest fears, not only of how the war has already changed him but also what the war will eventually turn him into. When Mary Anne arrived, “…she was seventeen years old, fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High. She had long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream. Very friendly, too” (89). Mary Anne is the epitome of the classic all-American girl. She is pale, blond, attractive, innocent, and young. She is exactly the sort of girl that all the men in Vietnam dream of when they think of the girls “back home.”

Although she is the embodiment of feminine characteristics, Rat Kiley clearly draws a parallel between her and all the men when they arrived from America. Although they are different genders, the men share Mary Anne’s youth, curiosity, and wide-eyed innocence. Mary Anne also symbolizes the dreams the men had before the war, ones to which they still cling. They all hope to return to America after the war and settle down with their sweethearts, as Mark Fossie and Mary Anne plan to do.

As Mary Anne starts to spend more time in Vietnam, she begins to become transformed by the war, much in the same way the men were affected. The metamorphosis is first evident when Mary Anne talks to Mark about their future after the war. She says, “Not necessarily a house on Lake Erie…Naturally we’ll still get married, but it doesn’t have to be right away” (94). Not only is Mary Anne becoming harder, tougher, and less “girly,” but their utopian future is also in jeopardy of being destroyed or corrupted by the war. Mark tries to stop her from changing, but she becomes enamored of the excitement and thrill she receives when she is out on an ambush. When Mark goes to the greenies hut and sees her, “She wore her pink sweater…

There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it…

At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues” (105). Here, the Mary Anne who used to exist, represented by the pink sweater, is juxtaposed against the vicious, war-crazed male greenies and her present self, represented by the necklace of tongues. The feminine qualities initially ascribed to her, friendly, bubbly, and innocent, are all gone, replaced by violent impulses. She has been completely and irreversibly altered by the war. Only by telling the story about Mary Anne can Rat Kiley vent his anxiety that he too has lost his soft and naïve feminine side without fear of appearing to compromise his masculinity. When Mary Anne disappears into the wilderness of Vietnam,

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never to return to America, Rat seems to make clear his fear that he, like Mary, will become so changed by the war and that his feminine, gentle, and decent qualities will be displaced by those of the hypermasculine greenies to such an extent that he will never be accepted or fit in when he returns to American and civilization.

Norman Bowker also desires and seeks comfort from femininity.

When Norman returns to his home town and finds that the real woman in his life, Sally Gustafson, appears to have moved on, he assumes she will not be willing to listen to him. He imagines what would occur if she were in the car with him, “she would’ve said, ‘Stop it. I don’t like that word.’ [shit] ‘That’s what it was.’…Clearly, he thought, this was not a story for Sally Kramer. She was Sally Gustafson now” (139). In the passage it is evident that Norman believes Sally can no longer relate to him and has chosen a life separate from him, which is illustrated by the emphasis placed on Sally’s last name becoming “Gustafson.” The girl Norman used to know is gone. It is clear that he believes Sally can’t comprehend what occurred in the war when she says she doesn’t like the word “shit”. Cursing is one of the most benign byproducts of his experiences at war, yet she can’t even handle that. In a sense, the Sally he remembers is almost too innocent to listen to Norman’s war story. In her little Midwestern town she has seen nothing even close to as horrific as the events Norman witnessed everyday. He wants to talk to the women he was closest to before the war so that she can heal, or at least manage, the guilt he feels about his role in Kiowa’s death. However, his Sally isn’t able to listen to the story that he needs so desperately to tell. Sally contrasts sharply with the men’s fictional character, Mary Anne, who provided an outlet for the men and enabled them to share their emotions. Sally is not, as Norman might have hoped, there riding shotgun, to support and listen to him.

Tim’s quest for feminine healing depends upon his 9-year old daughter Kathleen. Like Mary Anne, Kathleen also visits Vietnam, but she does so after the war is over, with her father. During the trip Tim, “looked for signs of forgiveness or personal grace or whatever else the land might offer” (173). He seems to expect that his daughter will be able to offer the aid that the fictional women of their wartime stories, such as Mary Anne, provided the men. Tim believes that if he can share his story to a pure listener, such as his daughter Kathleen, he will be forgiven for the mistakes he made during the war. It is as if the purity of his young daughter will wash away the sins perpetuated

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by the father. The author’s choice to give Tim the character a daughter and to have him bring her to Vietnam illustrates that Tim, the author, believes in the healing power of femininity. Kathleen’s reaction, however, is not as he imagined. She says, “ ‘Some dumb thing happens a long time ago and you can’t ever forget it.’ ‘And that’s bad?’ ‘No’ she said. ‘That’s weird’ ” (175). In this passage it is clear that Kathleen does not understand what the field means to Tim. For Tim, the field represents everything he lost in the war, particularly his innocence and best friend; however for Kathleen the field is completely insignificant, no different from any other field in Vietnam. Because Kathleen has never experienced war she will never truly be able to understand her father as he seemed to hope she would. When she says, “that’s weird” instead of that’s bad, it demonstrates that even though she can’t completely understand Tim, she is not judging him and loves him unconditionally. Although the real female figure, in this case Kathleen, does not fulfill all of Tim’s unreasonable expectations, she is willing to give her love and listen, something that all the men sought in the stories of women and truly needed.

All of the men in The Things They Carried seek forgiveness, escape, and spiritual cleansing from female figures, whether fictional or real.

During the war, the stories about women, such as Mary Anne, offer the men a sort of safe-haven in which they can release their thoughts and feelings. After the war, many men seek out a feminine audience, such as Kathleen or Sally, to tell their stories to in an attempt to gain healing and forgiveness. Both the fictional women, and the ones in America welcoming the men home, are ways for the men to feel loved and to accept the feminine side in themselves. Norman’s inability to talk to Sally reflects his struggle and eventual failure to embrace the femininity within him that he and all the men repressed during the war. Through the unconditional love he receives from his daughter, on the other hand, Tim is able to bring his feminine side to life even when faced with the field symbolic of the horrors of war. Tim O’Brien, the author, powerfully argues throughout the story cycle that survival and sanity hinges on balancing and embracing both feminine and masculine sides of one’s self. For the soldiers in particular, the importance of accepting and cherishing the femininity within all of them is vital to make the men whole.

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The Dingaling Ninth and Tenth Grade Personal Winner

Jack Tien-Dana â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;16 Jack, a sophomore, is in his fifth year at Riverdale.

He wrote this essay for his tenth grade personal essay project.

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M

arch 25th “Ring the bell.”

I look up, startled. “You’re sitting at the head of the table, Jack,” Pam, my step-grandmother says, demure yet steely, a Southern accent like she has a hot potato in her mouth. “Ring the bell.”

We are at the Mill Reef Club for spring break, a private club in Antigua where my grandfather owns a house. I am with my parents and a friend; two of my father’s brothers—half brothers, really--and their families are also here. This is our fourth night, but by the end of the first night it was clear that this would be a situation of Us and Them.

Sometime in January, I remember hearing my father tell my mother—and the reason I remembered is because I could detect fear and defiance in his voice, fighting like two cats in a bag—“My brothers want us to go to Mill Reef for spring break because it’s the year anniversary of Dad’s death.”

“Interesting,” my mom replied. “Will there be a cake?”

The next few weeks brought a flurry of shopping for plane tickets and tennis whites, polo shirts and cloth shorts with no pockets on the legs--club rules said that logoed T-shirts, gym shorts and cargo shorts were not allowed. Closed shoes were required at mealtimes, coat and tie for weekend dinners, and all shirts—even daytime shirts—had to be collared. Those same rules also, rather puzzlingly, decreed that, “The wearing of baseball caps backwards or sideways is considered inappropriate and will not be tolerated.”

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“What?” my mother asked. “You were expecting Coachella?”

Late February, We were eating dinner at our kitchen island, when my dad fakecoughed and fake-casually mentioned, “You know that Pam is going to be at Mill Reef with us, right?” My mother’s face took on a look I recognized, a look that either means, I-can’t-believe-you-tazered-meyou-bottom-feeding-bastard, or Jack-hand-me-that-tazer-so-I-cantaze-everyone-in-the-room.

“I did NOT know that,” she replied, and if real-life words could be framed by those little zig-zags that cartoonists use to convey electricity, hers would. “But thank you for telling me now, when it’s too late to change our plans.”

The meal continued but the air was different, charged, like when you’re watching a TV show and something scary is about to happen, and you have that tense yet happy excitement because, yes, it might be bad, but, hey, it’s TV, so everything will be fine.

“Meanwhile, you can get that tense/happy/TV look off your face,” my mother said to me. “Don’t underestimate Pam.” Sixty-ish years ago, James Dana, and Bertha Rittenhouse Betts—my paternal grandparents--were divorced after ten years of marriage and four children. My father was a baby at the time; he had three older siblings ranging from three to eight years old.

My father’s family, according to my mother, are the last of the bonafide WASPs. They have their own set of rules, (for instance, never admit that anything is new, as in: “I’ve had this dress for twenty-three years!”), their own language (“sofa,” not “couch”; “drinks party,” not “cocktail party”; “the beach,” not—heaven forfend—“The Hamptons”), and their own style (the twenty-three-year-old dress).

The original old-schoolers drank, golfed and inherited their way through life and never talked about anything more meaningful than algae. In a way, they were algae: they sat at the top, merely floated on the surface, and functioned as both scourge and necessity.

A few years later, my grandfather married Pamela Redfern, a woman fourteen years his junior. She was from a poor rural part of North Carolina, but she and her sister, Patty, made it their business to clean themselves up, improve their accents and gamely climb the ladder from redneck to fallen gentry (if, of course, fallen means aspirational).

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They pooled their money, attended two years of junior college and headed Northeast in a red convertible. Pam was the pretty one; Patty was the canny one, and the combination was irresistible. Within a year, Patty caught Bucky, one of the Kennebunkport Bush brothers, and thusly introduced Pam to John Bush’s roommate, Jim Dana; Pam promptly set about to reeling him in. It was like that show, The Deadliest Catch, but with more of a stench about it.

Pam and Jim were married at the Colony Club in New York and the moment she took his name, she lay down and happily rolled down the slope of his identity, picking up all the sticks and stems of Dananess: Hotchkiss, Princeton, the Maidstone Club. They became hers.

They became Her. She became Them.

Sixty-ish years ago, Chi Tien and Julia Cheng—my maternal grandparents—left China and came to America to go to college. Chi was from the North, Peking: his father was the deputy Minister of Education; his mother was a member of Parliament. Julia, a southerner, was one of ten children from a wealthy family in Shanghai (pre-Communism, she explained, you were either grossly rich or a peasant; her family were the former).

She traveled to the States on the Queen Mary with four trunks of tailor-made “American-look” clothes and the tearful admonition from her parents, “Do not strain your brain.” My grandfather attended Northwestern; my grandmother went to the University of Michigan.

They met at a picnic one summer in Chicago, married a year later at an Episcopal church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had two daughters and moved to Syracuse, New York.

There are more PhD’s in the Tien family than there are Tiens in the phone book. There are more books in my grandparents’ house than there were in my lower school library (I know because I counted); more Chinese art than there is at the Asia Society on Park Avenue, and more classical music and opera than any one grandson should ever be forced to listen to, for the love of all that’s holy. Nonetheless, the Tiens would never be admitted to the Mill Reef Club. After all, they’re Thems—or Us, really, depending on your perspective. By fluke of Tien-Dana marriage, I am an amalgam of both. Thus. Ums. March 21, The day we arrive at the club, I realize that Mill Reef itself is a study of Thums. Every house has well-off, Caucasian, ethnophobic owners

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and a staff of Island-born housekeepers, cooks and gardeners. At the Dana house, which is called Bamboo, the “help” consists of Jackie, the cook, Joan and Oscia, the housekeepers, and a thin, silent gardener.

If we are Us and the Pams of the world are Thems, Jackie and her crew are Other, and it’s hard to watch, hard to fathom that, in this day and age, Otherland still exists. The Others are not allowed to touch the family food or even eat any leftovers—Pam actually counts the cans in the pantry to make sure they aren’t being stolen. They aren’t allowed to use the house bathrooms or sit on any house furniture except for three wooden chairs in the kitchen. They live in three bleak rooms in a shanty at the back of the house, which are subject to monthly inspections by Pam. If she doesn’t like the way something looks—a book, a curio--she confiscates it. If the rooms aren’t bandbox perfect, their pay, all $100 a month of it, is docked. They can’t speak unless spoken to. When a family member walks into the kitchen, they must stand. They serve the food at every meal according to strict protocol.

The next morning, Joan was strict-protocollingly serving my friend and me scrambled eggs; we had slept late, so the other families had already eaten and were lounging around the table. My mother started to butter some toast for us, when Pam put her hand on my mom’s wrist.

“Now, stop that, Ellen,” she purred, all sugar and rebuke. “The boys are perfectly capable of doing that themselves.”

“I realize that,” my mother replied evenly, “but I want to save time since it’s so late and we want to get to the beach.”

“When you’re raising a son,” Pam continued smugly, “it’s so important for him to be self-sufficient.” My mother kept her head down and intently buttered on. “Jack will be stronger person if you don’t always help him.” Still buttering. “You’re only hurting him, you know.” Furiously buttering! “Quite honestly, Chinese parents are too involved. You will only succeed in crippling him for later life.”

Down went the butter knife. Up came my mother’s head. She was wearing sunglasses, but I was pretty sure I could detect a glint of tazerness in her eyes.

“Pam,” she said and then seemed to count to ten; I could almost hear the whole table counting along with her. “Pam. Let me get this straight. You have a 40 year-old son who went to rehab when he was 25 and now lives at home. And you—you--have the temerity to give

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me parenting tips?” She dropped the world’s best buttered toast on our plates and abruptly walked out of the room.

“Grandma, what does temerity mean?” one of the little cousins asked.

“Well, Ahm not shoowa,” Pam answered tersely; her southern accent always went nuts when she was upset. “But Ahm shoowa it’s not a wud that propah people use, especially gulls.”

That night There was a drinks party at Bamboo, complete with 30 gallons of rum punch and too few pigs in blankets stabbed with toothpicks that had little seashells at the top.

During the party, Pam summoned me to sit with her and a few friends on the ugly, massive round ottoman that was the centerpiece of the living room. “So, tell me Jack: What kind of people go to Riverdale? What do they contribute to society? Do they share our values?”

My father, who was standing nearby, turned around swiftly.

“You know what, Pam,” he said testily, “that’s a leading question, not to mention inappropriate and disturbing.”

“Well, ahm shoowa ah don’t know what you meeyan,” Pam started, but my father cut her off.

“Jack doesn’t need to answer that,” he said sternly. “His friends are his friends and our values are definitely not your values. As for contributing to society, you’ve never worked a day in your life so you really have no context on the matter. Come on, Jack,” he gestured for me to follow him. “I need some fresh air.”

In that instant, I realized that my dad, so Them-looking on the outside, was indelibly Us on the inside. And I was proud.

After the party, my friend and I were hanging out in the kitchen, when I saw Oscia washing the be-shelled toothpicks and laying them out to dry. I must have looked surprised, because she shrugged and said, “Mrs. Dana doesn’t like to spend money on more toothpicks—it costs four dollars for a box of 300.”

Somehwere in the house, we heard the insistent ringing of a bell.

Oscia dropped the toothpicks, hurriedly dried her hands and ran out of the kitchen.

“Mrs. Dana wants something,” Jackie explained. “She doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

Did I mention that the staff answer to a bell? Yes indeed they do, which brings me back to—

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Right now “Ring the bell,” Pam repeats, an edge in her voice. “We’re finished with the meal. Ring the bell.”

I don’t want to ring the bell. Only firemen, school children and dogs should be summoned by bells. I suggest that I take the arduous five-foot trek to the kitchen and get Joan or Oscia myself.

“That’s not how we do things,” she replies, Themly. “Ring the bell.”

I push the bell away from my place. “I’d rather not.”

“I don’t cayuh what you’d rathuh do, I cayuh what you should do,” she says, with increasing tightness.

“He doesn’t want to ring the bell, Pam,” my mother interjects, hackles rising. “Why don’t you just ring it yourself?” The family members who aren’t in a drunken stupefaction—all two of them— shift uneasily in their seats.

“He’s at the head of the table; he hay-us to ring the bell,” Pam insists at full volume, “It inn’t good manners for him not to.”

“And yet it’s the height of courtesy to make your dinner guests feel uncomfortable?” my mother shoots back.

“He should ring it!”

“Ring it yourself!”

“You should make him ring it!”

“You should leave him alone!”

“What kahnd of a muthah are you?”

“Likewise!”

Them!

Us! In the end, my aunt reached over and apologetically rang the bell.

The table was cleared. Dessert was a chocolate soufflé.

The next day, my family and I left Mill Reef early and came back to New York, where we could be We.

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Marlowe’s Greyness and Kurtz’s Darkness: Leaning Over the Abyss Versus Falling Into It Eleventh and Twelfth Grade Analytical Co-Winner

Hannah Gallen ‘15 Hannah, a junior, has attended Riverdale since Kindergarten. She loves literature and the ideas, thoughts, and feelings provoked therefrom. In particular Hannah is drawn to dark characters such as Heathcliff, Lady Macbeth, and Kurtz. Upon deeper examination, Hannah found Marlowe’s challenge of reconciling his respect for and admiration of British society with his awareness of the “horror” within compelling.

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I

n Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlowe, the central character, travels from England to the Congo and back to England. Marlowe’s journey begins as a mere business trip, descends into the heart of human depravity, and concludes with Marlowe, returned to London society, shaken to the core and teetering over the “abyss.”

Marlowe ultimately confronts but is not consumed by the dark reality of the human soul revealed through Kurtz. Marlowe’s response to “the horror” is to tell the “inconclusive” yet truthful version of his journey and his encounter with Kurtz to the Director and his shipmates, but to “protect” Kurtz’s fiancé from the horrible truth by lying to her. Upon his return, Marlowe is left with a perpetual “riddle” about his culture and society. He neither breaks through the illusions within his culture, nor further investigates “the horror” of the heart of darkness because he respects and depends upon the social scaffolding of society and is unwilling to dismantle it. Marlowe’s decision to narrate the truthful version about Kurtz during his journey, while lying to Kurtz’s intended reveals a profound conflict within Marlowe as to his dependence upon and deference to the social scaffolding of his society.

Prior to his journey into the wilderness, Kurtz is the exemplar of society and the imperialist mission. He is respected, admired, and beloved. Kurtz achieves the ideals of his culture as a writer, a musician, and an exploitative businessman. However, when Marlowe finds Kurtz in the Congo, he has taken a young African lover, built a fence of human skulls around his house, and concluded his eloquent re-

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port on the civilizing mission with the note, “exterminate the brutes,” written in its margin. Kurtz has been “shaken loose” of any social system. Marlowe describes his soul as one “that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itelf” (page 83). When Marlowe reaches him, Kurtz has “kicked himself loose of the earth” (Page 82). Marlowe expresses that “his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad” (Page 83). Not even Marlowe could break the “spell” that the wilderness had over Kurtz, insisting that “his was an impenetrable darkness.”

While Kurtz descends into and is consumed by darkness, Marlowe observes but does not succumb to “the horror”. Marlowe only leans over “the abyss” of moral depravity whereas Kurtz “had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge” (Page 88). Marlowe acknowledges that this step is the “whole difference” between living with the knowledge of “the horror” and being consumed and overtaken by it. The “heavy, mute spell of the wilderness” embraces Kurtz unto death, whereas Marlowe is deeply affected but not entirely consumed by the same darkness.

In contrast, Marlowe recognizes that at the same point at which he was at “the edge of the abyss” he was also “within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say” (Page 87). Consequently, Marlowe respects Kurtz’s unequivocal conclusiveness as evidenced by his summation: “the horror, the horror” (Page 86). He reveres Kurtz as a “remarkable man” purely because of his ability to “express some sort of belief.” Marlowe asserts that Kurtz “had something to say. He said it…. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’” (Page 88). Marlowe returns to England not only carrying high regard for Kurtz, but also carrying his bones and writings. Moreover, Marlowe carries the emotional burden of the knowledge and awareness that his journey to the heart of darkness has imparted.

As a result of Marlowe’s physical and psychological burden, he guards the truth not only from the ruling class, but also from Kurtz’s cousin and his “intended.” Marlowe lies to his fiancé, telling her that Kurtz’s last words were her name, as opposed to “the horror, the horror.” Marlowe says, “I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether…” (Page 96). Marlowe strives to preserve the innocence of the intended and consequently to preserve the social scaffolding that she represents.

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However, in order to fully ‘wake up’ from the “nightmare” of his journey, Marlowe must ‘wake up’ the rest of society to the reality that can only be found in the “evanescence” between light and darkness.

Marlowe pronounces that, “However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and show my loyalty to Kurtz once more” (87). Because Marlowe refuses to disturb social conventions, he must remain alone with this dark knowledge that he cannot discharge. Marlowe can never truly rejoin his culture and therefore remains straddled between society and the dark, horrifying reality of human existence.

Marlowe claims the inadequacy of language as an alibi for not reconciling and coming to terms with his inner division and conflict. He uses language, a symbolic system, as a prop to attempt to make his story and himself available for judgment. Marlowe professes that “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle penetrating essence” (33). Ultimately, words are both descriptively and morally inadequate to his story, as they function for Marlowe to stand behind and avoid disrupting his society.

Marlowe returns to England and his social fabric a wanderer between his knowledge and understanding of man’s darkness and his dependency on his culture and its social framework. Marlowe appreciates the tenuous grasp of societal norms but holds onto them nonetheless. His has been a truly “inconclusive” journey and experience. Marlowe must return to England and incorporate and reconcile Kurtz into his consciousness. He is conflicted between man’s nature as demonstrated by Kurtz and a reliance on society as demonstrated by himself. Yet, in lying to Kurtz’s intended, Marlowe not only shows deference to society, but a respect and reverence for Kurtz.

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Castles In The Air: Transcendence through Imagination and Writing Eleventh and Twelfth Grade Personal Co-Winner

Miranda Hoyt-Disick ‘15 Miranda Hoyt-Disick is truly honored to be able to express her thoughts on Henry David Thoreau in The Riverdale Reader this year. Her essay concerns her own experience of transcendentalism through creative writing. In addition to essays, Miranda loves writing plays, poetry, and songs. Her play, Enter Banquo’s Ghost is being performed this spring in the New Jersey Young Playwright’s Competition and the Roxbury Young Playwright’s Contest. She has published poems in Poetic Power Journal, The Bronxloaf Anthology, and the most amazing literary magazine of all time, Riverdale’s own Impressions. One of Miranda’s favorite activities is setting the themes of reconstruction in the post-bellum South and W.E.B. Dubois’s double consciousness thesis to the melodies of Frozen.

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W

alking to class, I was attempting to focus on my surroundings--the sharp, sweet air, the yellow leaves swaying on the breeze like fans on some luxurious barge—rather than on the sweaty aching of my sore feet. I was wearing uncomfortable high-heeled boots, their impracticality exacerbated by suede tassels at the ends of their laces, tassels over which it was almost impossible not to trip. But as I passed through the formidable gates, the school sign gleaming gold above them, I became less conscious of the pain. Looking down at my boots, I admired their silver buckles, the moccasin-like stitching around the edges, even the laces, precariously tied. The shoes were a means of distinguishing myself from others, and when I walked in them, I felt taller, more capable, omnipotent, almost. As they scuffed along on the cobblestones, I could catapult myself onto another path, bathed in the light of a different sky. Beginning to transport myself, I melted into different characters.

“Oh, well, will you look at the time?”

“I’m not wearing a watch. You’re not wearing a watch.”

“Which must mean I’m late. See you around, Val.” “And how exactly would you know my name?”

“How could I not?”

The scenes I devised were only fragments, pieced together from a lifelong obsession with fairies and the hyper-meta and quip-laden writing style of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a TV show that still has a great influ-

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ence over me. Eliciting a few confused glances as I neared the brick exterior of 9-10, I veered off of the path, choosing to climb down the small, rocky slope instead. Tripping ominously on the aformentioned tassels, I managed to reach the segment of the slope that mysteriously descended into rounded steps. Embedded in dark moss, there was a somewhat otherworldly quality to them, one that contrasted with adjacent rectangular cement stairs, marked off by a matter-of-fact iron bannister. I felt utterly transported as I walked down them, my boots unsuited to the rough terrain, sarcastic fairies buzzing around in my head. I was crossing two thresholds, both walking into the school and at the same time, into a world of my own creation.

In class, this world continued to materialize around me. In my position at a brightly colored plastic desk, I could see the little rocky little slope from the window, and beyond it, a parallel green hill with a small, old-fashioned bench perched upon it, as if left there for an elven child. They were all so clear to me, the characters who had resided on the slope and set the bench down, hoping it would make its way into the corner of my eye. But I was trapped, unable to acknowledge them. I could fully empathize with Thoreau, who had gazed through a similarly transformative window while spending a night in prison.

Just as he could see his native town with an overwhelmingly clear sense of insight, so I could see the world that had formed in my head.

“It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold… It was to see my native village in the light of the middle ages, and our Concord turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles pass before me…I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done…a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view…I was fairly inside of it.” (“Civil Disobedience,” 13) Like Thoreau, I felt that everything around me was simultaneously familiar and fantastical. I too was an “involuntary spectator and auditor,” and my fingers longed to type out the words to describe the sensory details of my experience. I was present in both places at once, still an energetic student typing elaborate notes, but I was also a writer, and a magician, powerful enough to bring my private world to life.

I pressed “enter” vigorously on my computer, creating a blank space between bullet points and quotation marks, between the nascent industries of Japan and the tall white balcony in another dimen-

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sion where two fairies awaited the arrival of snow. Journeying over this transition was like coming up to the surface after having been under water too long. As the characters made themselves known to me, I gained insight into myself. The snatches of dialogue and glimpses of a foreign land awoke me to my own inner life. Into my characters, I wove the person whom I wanted to be. They felt the things I wanted to, shared my vulnerabilities and fears, and overcame them brilliantly, with flair and banter. Though these thoughts and emotions were the kind that might have been better suited to a diary, I preferred to type them out in the midst of Otto von Bismarckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rise to power. By allowing my worlds to overlay each other, like two translucent fabrics, I gained an ephemeral insight, clearer and more whole, both into my surroundings and into my true self.

Every now and then, someone sitting next to me would glance at my usually meticulous notes, searching for anything they might want to copy down. An aggressive self-consciousness crept over me as I watched their eyes move down the page. I always feel a simultaneous sense of elation and terror when people read my writing. More than anything, I want the person in question to identify with the passage, to accept it, and thereby accept me as well. My desire to connect with other people stems from an acute sense of isolation, one that is made far worse in any class involving numbers, shapes, or maps. It is in these classes that I sit next to my peers, miles away from them, utterly blind to the things they are able to see. Forty-five minutes of homework for them is multiplied for me, sometimes numbering in the hours, my handwriting slanting across the page, jagged, uneven, and decreasing in legibility. Making up stories gives me no such trouble. I am no longer stifled under layers of square roots and bearings I cannot read. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to struggle to communicate when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m allowed to use words. In fact, I can excel at it.

Sitting at my desk in the history class, I pretended to watch the teacher, all the while glancing peripherally at the person reading my work. As the girl smiled a little, I knew she was reading a joke I had written, an intentionally quirky sentence structure that revealed more about a certain character. I was thrilled by my own awareness of her thoughts, by the mere fact that she was seeing, in her head, images I had crafted, meeting the characters I had imagined. By sharing my writing with her, I had given her a means by which to cross the threshold. I was no longer alone in the world that I had created. Not only were we linked, we were equals.

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“I pleased myself with imagining a State at last which affords to be just to all men, and to treat each individual with respect as a neighbor…a star which bore the kind of fruit and suffered it to drop as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious state” (18).

I became part of the “State” in my head. The small bit of dialogue below my notes allowed my “neighbor” and me to transcend the PSAT scores, grades, and social strata that separated us from each other. Our minds were part of the same consciousness, both residing in a “perfect state” of unity.

I waited for the girl to finish reading and quickly deleted the passage. Even as it vanished, it flashed before my eyes and continued to reverberate in my mind. As I walked out of the classroom, I continued to murmur new lines, considering as I talked with my friends what the characters might say in response. The barriers between the two worlds no longer had such an exact threshold. I didn’t need to step over the rocky slope to transport myself. As I walked down the hall, I felt free and limitless, powerful in my ability to articulate what I imagined in my head, thereby making it a reality. “[I]f one advances confidently in the directions of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined…he will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary… solitude is not solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost: that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them” (“Higher Laws”, 13).

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Memory in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland Eleventh and Twelfth Grade Analytical Co-Winner

Riley Griffin ‘14 Riley is a quintessential senior, both excited and threatened by the thought of completing her last year at Riverdale. Intrigued by the hopelessness of the post-World War One “Lost Generation,” Riley investigated T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in order to better understand the modernist expression of time.

Navigating the fractured past and reconstructed future of Eliot’s intertextual maze proved to be not only challenging but also enlightening. Outside of the classroom, Riley has worked for both The Huffington Post and best-selling author Jenny Han. Captivated by the orchestration of words themselves, she hopes to pursue language, literature and psychology during her time at Duke University.

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A

pril is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. (1-4) T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land draws readers into an intricate narrative that expresses the psychological disorientation and spiritual isolation of the twentieth century. Eliot reflects that the collective memory of civilization has been shattered by the effects of the Great War, leaving humans unable to salvage connections to their past or foster relationships with their present. Tortured by his own nostalgia, Eliot seeks to consolidate romantic literary history with personal experiences.

Breaking many conventions of traditional poetry, Eliot explores the ruins of his own memory, piecing together broken fragments of time and text with an emerging modernist consciousness.

The opening lines of Eliot’s poem immediately set the stage for a “wasteland,” invoking death and despair during spring, the time of year when life should be most vibrant. Though April marks the season of rebirth, Eliot instead conjurs a barren landscape to deliberately contrast the optimistic prologue of The Canterbury Tales, whose language he appropriates and then recasts for his own purposes. By juxtaposing literary allusions with modern imagery and colloquialisms, Eliot reveals a deep nostalgia for a different world. The obvious disparity between what Eliot believes life should be and what life is can be seen through this textual collage, which came to be known as bricolage,

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that manipulates ‘literary memory’ to underscore the sense of cultural degeneration Eliot sees around him after the Great War. Nonetheless, beneath this modern wasteland we anticipate that something is truly “stirring,” as “rain,” “desire,” and most importantly, “memory,” look to revive the dying roots, just as Eliot looks to revive humanity by reconstructing the past.

Eliot follows the opening stanza by posing the question of what particular memories are able to persist, or rather emerge, from the rubble of the “Lost Generation.” He states, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” (19-20).

Rather than seeking an answer, Eliot disregards a response altogether, claiming that “you cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images” (21-22). By invoking the concept of “broken images,” Eliot acknowledges that literary and spiritual history continue to exist, but have an ineffectual presence. Although classical literature and religious texts persist into modern culture, they are unable to generate new memories and experiences. This detachment alone is the cause of Eliot’s personal disillusionment, for the roots between the past and the present have dried up, arresting the fluidity of time.

Not only does memory allow humans to preserve time, but it also connects the internal self with the external world by allowing the divisions between perception and interpretation to be blurred. Eliot seems to share Freud’s view that when disconnected from memory, “the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or...they are actually drawn incorrectly…thus even the feeling of our own ego is subject to disturbances and the boundaries of the ego are not constant” (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930, 27).

Without a solid grasp of his place within history – the collective human past and the individualized present – Eliot finds that his identity is obscured. By layering ancient texts and contemporary idioms, Eliot looks to do more than reconnect the past to the present; his method of grafting the old and the new unmasks his desire to discover a true, individual, modern self.

Although Eliot desperately wishes to reunite memory with the meaning and emotion that once gave it significance, he finds himself doubting the reliability of recounting history solely through literature.

We see this internal insecurity through dialogue, when the speaker wonders, “Do / You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?” I remember / Those pearls that were his eyes. / “Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?” (121-126). Here

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Eliot demonstrates the effects of living through an extraneous self, one that is dictated by memories that have never been experienced. The speaker, in a dream-like state, remembers “the pearls that were his eyes”: a romantic, idyllic representation of love that does not reflect Eliot’s own experiences. By living through such existential memories, the speaker is refusing to see the true dimensions of present reality.

Thus, the ‘nothingness’ of memory is derived from the deception that stems from unattainable ideals.

Rather than consider memory an entity that separates the past and the present, Eliot uses The Waste Land as a device to reunite the continuum of time and memory. By interjecting Dante, Shakespeare and Augustine into his poem, Eliot uproots the historical context of literary memory and thus changes the meaning to be relevant to present circumstances. In his search to find peace, continuity and spirituality, Eliot instead discovers that man must “not merely write with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order…No poet, or artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists” (Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent ” 1919). This reconstruction of history to create a cohesive existence reveals that memory is neither stagnant nor objective. By uprooting experiences from dates and years, Eliot is able to reveal the constants of humanity. He does this eloquently in “The Burial of The Dead”: Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, …You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? (60-63 ; 70-73) The beginning of the passage focuses on describing the urban milieu of World War One, mobbed by the masses, by the cold and by the haste of mindless industry. In one fluid motion Eliot subtly transitions to Mylae, a reference to a 260 BC trade battle, showing that all wars are interchangeable. Eliot exploits the cycles of history, demonstrating that blood-thirst is an aggressive drive that humans cannot seem to

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shake. Perhaps we do not learn or grow, but instead circulate back to the “wasteland” where memory decomposes once again.

After struggling to find a way to reconnect memory and consciousness, Eliot finally reaches a place of enlightenment. Having absorbed the world through literature as well as personal experience, Eliot wonders what impact this storehouse of memory may have on civilization. He asks conclusively, “Datta: What have we given?”

(402). In his response, he explains his yielding to the irrationality of memory, which allows him to find salvation in the continuity of time.

With the power of thunder he decrees, “My friend, blood shaking my heart / The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed” (403-406). Though he may not control the fluctuations of the external world, Eliot finds that he can exist within the correspondence between past and present. He accepts whole-heartedly that memory can be both real and fabricated, parallel and contradictory. In constructing The Waste Land, Eliot dismantles and reassembles himself in order to recreate a collective cultural consciousness for the “Lost Generation.”

This final act of surrender is an artistic sacrifice and release; it is the rain that awakens the thirsting roots; it is the concoction, a poem, that mixes memory and desire.

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Two Ways of Seeing New York City Eleventh and Twelfth Grade Personal Co-Winner

Matt Roffe â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;14 Matt, a senior, has attended Riverdale since Kindergarten starting in the fall of 2001. Having lived his entire life in NYC, Matt was inspired to write this past summer to reflect on his views of the Big Apple.

This essay examines New York City through two diverging lensesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one far more optimistic than the other.

Matt feels his characterization of the city here accurately portrays the curious fusion of feelings he holds for his home.

In addition to writing, his interests include playing baseball, drawing cartoons, listening to music, and running in Central Park.

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1

Now when I had mastered the language of these bustling streets and had come to know nearly every nook and cranny that ran down the island, I knew I’d mastered my city, my home. I am a second generation New Yorker. My great grandparents came straight off an Italian boat carrying nothing but their bag full of black hats, curious pieces of artwork, and books they’d once stored in their library in Turin. Time and time again, drips of rushing water roll down my great grandmother’s crimson cheeks and her typically tranquil voice fluctuates between squealy-highs and booming lows as she tells us of the overwhelming emotion she felt when she first saw Lady Liberty.

“The American Dream is only what you make of it, Matteo,” she says.

“Continue to strive for what you want in this life, find a purpose, and pursue it relentlessly.”

As I think of her words, I often find myself walking down the bright lights of Broadway, watching playbills drift ever so elegantly through the air, tossing and turning as they gently touch down on the cement. New York is a place where groups of young boys play in the middle of the streets, hasty in their pursuit to catch the ball, all dreaming to one day don that famous pinstripe blue. New York is a place where black-suited businessmen send halos of smoke through the air as they hitch yellow rides between gilded buildings scraping the sky. New York City is a place where, walking down Fifth and onto Sixth, I often see amateur artists sitting on old wooden stools, forming icons with a single stroke of a pen. Around me, the aromas of roasting peanuts, pretzels, and hotdogs rise as people left and right move to

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the sounds of cars beeping and jazz playing. For me, New York City is a Holy hub of prosperity, creativity, hope, and success.

2. But looking through the lens of an outsider, New York City is a far different place than the one I see. The city is covered in filth; after all, you’ve never truly been to New York unless you’ve seen rodents and roaches crawl up from the creaky floorboards and onto the walls. The melting pot that is New York City, where eight million people of different cultures, histories, and tongues cram tight between city street corners intimidates many as well. The socio-economic disparities that exist within the city make people often feel uncomfortable and out of place. On the corner of 73rd and Park, a building houses a collection of the wealthiest people in the world, whereas ten miles north of there, the South Bronx has become one of the most impoverished and drug-ridden communities in the nation. Sure, the American Dream exists and, sure, it has brought great prosperity to a handful, but it continues to haunt the spirit of those it has chewed up and spit out; people who innocently came here to better the lives of themselves and those they love but who leave empty-handed, stripped of their hopes, dreams, and dignity.

Setting hopes and dreams aside, the city is a dark, hectic, fastmoving place where danger and crime lie hidden just around every corner. The New York City streets have seen a lot since their establishment; mob murders, son of Sam, plots to destroy certain historic buildings associated with how we, as New Yorkers, define ourselves.

It is the epicenter of worldwide networks, and therefore, the main target for terror attacks against our nation. I was unfortunate enough to have been stuck inside my Bronx Kindergarten classroom, as stuck as I’m sure many other Americans were, helplessly watching on my first day schooling, the towers fall. I can clearly remember asking myself whether in school we always watched people screaming, buildings burning, and things crashing.

But just like these words, through both the many experiences I wish to harbor and those few I wish to forget, it’s by adhering to the contours of our environment that the substance of ourselves, the molten force we are made of, molds and shapes itself. I am New York.

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Cockroach Prosody Faculty Writer

Bill Pahlka, Faculty Bill Pahlka retires this June after 36 years at Riverdale.

After graduating from Yale and spending four years in the Navy, both at sea and as the director of a naval training school, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught upperand middle-school English, ILS, and many elective courses, and served as Director of Studies from 1996 to 2007. He helped to create ILS—in both its original incarnation and its recent remake—and Constructing America. He has always regarded the study of literature as a vehicle for the central purpose and task of English courses: learning to write. While at Riverdale, he has written over twenty essays about literary works his students were studying. Many of those essays are collected in a recently self-published volume, Extracurricular Activity. His scholarly book, Saint Augustine’s Meter and George Herbert’s Will, was published in 1987. The essay in this volume, “Cockroach Prosody,” has nothing to do with the classroom; it reflects a lifelong love of Don Marquis’s Archy and of Krazy Kat, the equally lovable creation of Marquis’s illustrator, Edward Herriman.

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S

everal years ago I found and bought for 25 cents a copy of Don Marquis’s The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel. I had treasured my first copy in adolescence but not so much that I noticed when it disappeared sometime before I reached adulthood. The volume is an omnibus collection of more than 200 free-verse poems that appeared in twenty years of New York Sun and New York Tribune columns, beginning in 1916. Marquis published half a dozen volumes of poetry apart from the Archy series, much of it—but by no means all—light verse and parody. His parodies of poets like Kipling, Longfellow, W. S. Gilbert, and others reveal what might be called a professional interest in poetry and, in particular, poetic modes and rhythms.

Archy is a cockroach inhabited by the transmigrated soul of a vers libre poet, and most of his output is free verse. He nightly bashes out his verses by hurling himself onto the keys of Marquis’s office typewriter, omitting capital letters and punctuation because, as he says, the mechanical exigencies of the case prevent my use of all the characters on the typewriter keyboard Archy’s first message to Marquis concludes: dont you ever eat any sandwiches in your office i havent had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings

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and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine every night you can call me archy Earlier in the note he mentions the cat who will be his companion for years to come: there is a cat here called mehitabel I wish you would have removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for there is a rat here she should get without delay Mehitabel proves relatively harmless. She is a free spirit from the alley, much knocked around and up, an inconstant lover and an irresponsible mother, a raconteur with enough experience in her several lives to fill a saga: one life up and the next life down archy but always a lady through it all and a good mixer too always the life of the party archy but never anything vulgar always free footed archy never tied down to a job or housework yes looking back on it all I can say is i had some elegant times i have seen better days archy but whats the use of kicking kid its all in the game like a gentleman friend of mine used to say toujours gai kid toujours gai he was an elegant cat . . . “mehitabel s extensive past” (30) Between my adolescent experience of Marquis’s poetry and my spending that 25 cents a few years ago, I had done a dissertation on seventeenth-century English prosody and later turned it into a book, but I had never taken any interest whatever in free verse until my reunion with Archy and his “free footed” feline companion. Reread-

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ing Marquis’s verse provided me with some unexpected insight into some of the mysteries of vers libre. The name of Don Marquis does not, to my knowledge, figure in any history or manual of the prosody of the last century, but justice would be well served if it did.

Archy’s variety of free verse is fairly consistent. He doesn’t go in for the sweep and breadth one finds in Whitman, nor is there anything in the way of pattern poems or prose poems. He almost never makes use of visual prosodic effects typical of that other upper-case-challenged poet, e. e. cummings. His measure is the Imagist mode of Pound and Williams: short, compressed lines of narrative or conversation—nothing oceanic or incantatory, except when he has a mind to parody poetry of that sort. For parody is what it often is, as E. B. White notes in his introduction to Archy’s collection: Vers libre was in vogue, and tons of souped-up prose and other dribble poured from young free-verse artists who were suddenly experiencing a gorgeous release in the disorderly high-sounding tangle of non-metrical lines. (xxi) Marquis, says White, was enjoying some of the advantages of free verse in the very act of spoofing it, and I agree, but an even stronger claim can be made: that the poems display genuine poetic character in a legitimate literary mode. They are unquestionably light verse, but they are also dissections and expositions of the dynamics of modern free verse—in one, at least, of its several varieties—that point the way to a possible theoretical justification for free verse as verse. I should put that more modestly, that is, in more personal terms: Archy’s poems taught me a sympathetic comprehension of free verse that no amount of reading in the manuals and histories, or even in the works of other free verse poets, had ever achieved.

Marquis endows Archy with the literary sensibility to renounce and transcend vers libre even as he remains, tragically, stuck with it.

In “the wail of archy,” Archy laments the folly of his past life: gods how i yearn to be human neither a vers libre poet nor yet the inmate of a cockroach a six footed scurrying cockroach given to bastard hexameters longfellowish sprawling hexameters

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rather had i been a starfish to shoot a heroic pentameter (73) These eight lines contain at least five subtle jokes, four of which are jokes about metrical matters. I can’t resist the urge to catalog and explain them.

1. the irony of a writer of free verse (Marquis, not Archy) declaring that no poet in that mode qualifies as human; 2. the notion that insects, with their six feet, are restricted to writing hexameters, and that starfish are superior because, as fivefooted creatures, they are suited to composing in heroic pentameters; 3. the fact that these lines really are, technically, “bastard hexameters,” because they are written in a folk form, often used humorously, known as “half measure” (lines with three isochronic beats) whose name reflects the tradition that pairs of such lines were the historic precursors of the English stress-based hexameters; 4. the fact that Longfellow was one of the very few modern English poets who used hexameters extensively, so that Marquis’s frequent use of half measure often sounds like a parody of Longfellow; 5. and, finally, the implication that the long body of a cockroach is part of the sad predicament of Archy, who aspires to transcend the rather pedestrian long-fellowish mode.

The lines below are marked to indicate the metronomic thumping of their half measure rhythm. The syllables carrying the six beats are in small caps: a SIX footed SCURrying COCKroach GIVen to BASTard hexAMeters Of course, this is not free verse (quite a few of Archy’s poems are not), but the joke of being forced to write hexameters because cockroaches

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have six feet shows Archy’s obsession with metrical issues. The continual refrain of Archy’s “wail” is that his soul seeks the heroic and the tragic (traditionally written in pentameters) while his insect body dooms him to a comic—or worse—longfellowish style.

Of course, Archy doesn’t generally think of himself as a writer of bastard hexameters. Vers libre is his predominant mode. But neither six-footed verse nor free verse is good enough. To write pentameters is human and any other meter (especially free verse) bespeaks something less than fully human. “i with the brain of a milton,” he complains, am forced to pal around with tumble bugs and maggots and rats; “this is the punishment meted / because i have written vers libre” (74). Ironically, his punishment for writing unmetrical verse is something that has been measured (meted) out.

Auden and Borges, among others, declared free verse the hardest form of verse to write. One reason, presumably, is that the poet forfeits most of the traditional resources for establishing the measure and rhythm verse requires. White’s dismissive “souped-up prose” is too flattering for the worst of it, which sounds more like chopped-up prose, and one way to parody free verse is to emphasize that effect: one of the most pathetic things i have seen recently was an intoxicated person trying to fall down a moving stairway it was the escalator at the thirty fourth street side of the pennsylvania station (“quote buns by great men quote,” 230) Part of what is funny about these lines is how prosaic they are, their near total absence of any of the qualities of verse apart from the fact that the lines end before they reach the right margin. If there were no more method to Marquis’s madness than that, it would be hard to explain how he sustains the joke for nearly 500 pages of poetry.

Fortunately, even this one poem undergoes two transformations in its use of the verse line that are enough to make of this metrically

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unpromising start a minor triumph of versification. Here are the next thirteen lines: he could not fall down as fast as it carried him up again but he was game he kept on trying he was stubborn about it evidently it was part of his tradition habit and training always to fall down stairs when intoxicated and he did not intend to be defeated this time i watched him for an hour and moved sadly away thinking how much sorrow drink is responsible for the The rhythm here has taken on a texture it lacked in the opening ten lines, whose two sentences end at line endings. The prosiness of the narrator’s scene setting gives way to a poetry of inebriation. In this segment, five sentences end within the line, and the absence of punctuation affects the way our eyes move through the lines, producing little kinks that require many quick adjustments. Phrasal units are much more fractured by line endings here than in the beginning: as fast - as; kept on - trying; he was - stubborn; down - stairs. The last of these is more than a phrasal unit; it is a single word that has been split, the apparently deceptive omission of the hyphen justified by the universal lack of punctuation. The jamming together of two nouns in “his tradition habit and” would be much easier to read smoothly if the series comma were not missing. Indeed, any reader trying to rationalize the syntax here, having been imprinted by the fifth line quoted above to insert a period in the middle of a line (. . . trying. He was. . . ), would assume wrongly that “tradition” ends one sentence and “habit” begins another (. . . part of his tradition. Habit and training . . .).

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These rough spots establish a counterpoint that constitutes a perceptible rhythmic effect and further, by contrast with the opening, a perceptible shift in rhythmic modes. We can still think of these lines as chopped-up prose, but they are no longer merely so; the rhythm of the chopping has changed. The short, variable lines and the absence of punctuation have, as it turns out, a rhythm-making purpose. The verse is “free,” but it is achieving texture and structure without having to rely on a metrical yardstick. The mode changes yet again for the conclusion of the poem. (“The buns” is twenties slang for “a drunken state.”) . . . the buns by great men reached and kept are not attained by sudden flight but they while their companions slept were falling upwards through the night These lines are a chopped-up parody of Longfellow: The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upwards through the night.

For the most part, Archy has simply made eight lines out of four, but his one deviation from equal division achieves two fine effects: it buries the “flight-night” rhyme and it heightens the ambiguity of pronoun reference of “they” that could be said to be a flaw in the original. Archy also plays on the several oddities of syntax in the original, heightening, for instance, the displacement of the participles “reached and kept” by isolating them in their own line. Longfellow’s lines (in this case not hexameters) have a powerful sing-song rhythm, the opposite of what is generally achieved by free verse, and Archy’s tinkerings do little to obscure the thumping regular beat of the original meter, at least for someone like me, whose father declaimed these lines to me more than once when I was young. The verse is still chopped up and it is still free verse, but the rhythms have been cleverly shifted by stages from prosiness to something approaching incantation.

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A distinctive feature of Archy’s free verse is his avoidance of wildly varied line lengths; most of the lines keep close to some average length, as in this example, “Archy a low brow.”

(Illustration by George Herriman)

His practice of staying within a syllable or two of an average line length implies some flirting with regular meter, but practically everything else about the lines serves to frustrate any sense of metrical regularity. We establish that a line in English is metrical in one of three ways: counting feet, counting beats, or counting syllables. The traditional metrical foot requires sustained attention to complex rules, and it is easy enough to demonstrate that Archy very seldom employs genuine metrical feet. It is also easy to show that his lines are not measured out in equal packets of syllables. Archy does use occasionally use the third kind of meter, built on evenly spaced beats, and that mode looks at first as if it were Archy’s usual free verse mode. There is a tendency in lines of fairly regular length, whether intended or not, for syllables to get magnetized into a series of “beats” evenly spaced in time but separated by varying numbers of syllables. The “bastard hexameter” lines quoted just above are an example, but they are an exception. Archy is very careful (throughout his career) to write verse

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on which it is difficult to impose a sing-song beat. Most of his lines are thus legitimate free verse: unmetrical in all the conventional ways poets achieve measure. When he does use metrical verse, it is usually because he is quoting Mehitabel, who tends to tell the story of her lives with a touch of “literary” artifice.

It is the lack of capital letters and punctuation marks, along with his arbitrary choices about when to go back to the left margin, that most effectively keeps Archy’s free verse from getting sucked into a familiar metrical order. Because the sentence and phrase endings seldom coincide with line endings, the reader is forced to figure out on the fly where phrases and sentences end and the next ones begin.

That difficulty alone is enough to prevent any regular rhythmic beat from emerging. The removal of these other cues makes the line, and nothing but the line—the line rather than the syntax—the “unit” that strikes one with unmediated force, as an independent entity asserting its independent claims. Without the segmental semantic cues provided by punctuation and capitalization, the prosodic element comes to the fore. One feels the visual measure as a heard measure more strongly than it would be if the syntax were more clearly marked.

The lines as independent units are free to dominate and to bring the artifice of the verse line out in the open. The result is a more powerful conflict between rhythm and syntax than even the frequent enjambments and cesuras of a poet like Milton could achieve.

This feature makes Archy’s verse good training for reading other, more difficult free verse by writers like Williams and Marianne Moore. For a good illustration, reread the passage from “mehitabel s extensive past” near the beginning of this essay. Then, read “no snap” below, to which the missing mechanics have been added.

Say, boss, it’s a good thing for you that you don’t pay me any wages for the stuff I write; for, if you did, I would have to have them raised. All these strikes are getting me feverish and excited. One of my long pieces in your column often costs me twelve or

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fifteen hours of steady labor, and I am drowsy all the next day. Butting these keys with my head is no snap, boss.

Anything I got for it would be underpaying me. I wish you would buy a pear and leave it under the metal typewriter case where the rats can’t get to it.

Archy (331; modified) Rhythmically speaking, this punctuated version is a good parody of the flatness and pretentiousness of most bad vers libre. The versification does little to hide the fact that this is just chopped-up prose, an ordinary note left on a typewriter and pretending to be poetry. It does possess the usual charm of satire and is even sassy in the way it manipulates line breaks, but we can get a sense of its rhythmic feebleness by placing it alongside a successful piece of free verse like William Carlos Williams’s “Poem”: As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot.

Even nonreaders of poetry can feel the rhythmic effects of catlike movement that are created by the line and stanza breaks and the deliberate progress of the sentence, but Williams has the advantage of consistent stanzaic measure (3 lines each), which serves to set up a 70

rhythmic pulse that exists across groups of lines rather than within each line, as in normal poetic meters. The best of free verse is often less “free” than it seems.

Free verse has no existence except in relation to unfree verse (unconventional measures imply conventional ones), and Marquis’s free verse is pre-eminently aware of its subtle interactions with metrical tradition. The poem called “peace—at any price” (195-99) illustrates this relationship. It contains a passage that seems to be both blank verse and free verse, if such a thing is possible. Archy, in explaining his mission to “establish some sort of / entente cordiale or / hands across the kitchen sink / arrangement” with humanity, recounts with disdain the fiery speech, “in blank verse / more or less,” of “one big / regal looking roach” who counsels all-out war between the species.

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, and one of its principal uses (outside of Shakespeare’s plays) is for English epic verse. In that guise, it is also called heroic verse, because epics are usually tales of military (the Iliad), national (the Aeneid), or even cosmic (Paradise Lost) actions on a heroic scale. The rhetorical tone of Archy’s regal roach is squarely in the heroic mode, with its call to action against an infamous enemy, couched in elevated language with many internal rhymes and oratorical flourishes. What seems to be missing, though, is the stately measure of iambic pentameter. The passage contains lines of varied length, slightly longer than those in Archy’s usual free verse but punctuated by several randomly inserted shorter ones. On the page, the speech looks almost like the free verse in which it is embedded, but a reader who knows Shakespeare’s plays or Paradise Lost will hear the rhythm of heroic blank verse despite the appearance of irregularity. After all, we have been told that this is “more or less” blank verse.

The first line has the iambic pattern of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables, but it falls short of a true blank verse line by only one stressed syllable at the end, and even with the lopped-off final foot, it clearly has the tone of heroic English poetry: how came / this mon /ster with / the heav /y The next word, “foot,” is delayed to the following line, perhaps purposely to draw attention to the sliced-off final iambic foot. The first three lines spoken by the regal roach

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how came this monster with the heavy foot harsh voice and cruel heart to rule the world can easily be rearranged as blank verse: How came this monster with the heavy foot, Harsh voice, and cruel heart to rule the world?

But why go on piecemeal? Here is Archyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s free verse followed by Marquisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blank verse: how came this monster with the heavy foot harsh voice and cruel heart to rule the world had it been dogs or cats or elephants I could have acquiesced and found a justice working in the decree but man gross man the killer man the bloody minded crossed unsocial death dispenser of this sphere who slays for pleasure slays for sport for whim who slays from habit breeds to slay and slays whatever breed has humors not his own the whole apparent universe one sponge blood filled from insect mammal fish and bird the which he squeezes down his vast gullet friends i call on you to rise and trample down this monster man this tyrant man hear hear said . . .

In the following blank verse version, I have added punctuation and upper case and have marked the original line breaks with bullets; the use of boldface will be explained below:

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rule the world?

gross man,

for sport, for whim; slays

and bird,

Said . . .

The relineation is nearly perfect blank verse, with one forgivable metrical weakness (line 5, where either a very weak syllable, “the,” occupies the stress position or we must accept the generally illegitimate substitution of two consecutive trochees) and only one clear flaw (line 13, where “vast,” an extra stressed syllable, unequivocally derails the meter). The reformatting also makes more visible some stylistic qualities suggestive of heroic blank verse. A brilliant example is the chiasmus “breeds to slay and slays whatever breed . . .” with its skillful verb-to-noun transformation. This device, in the hands of Milton or Pope, would be laid out horizontally in a single line.

Marquis knocks it off balance by distributing its parts through three verse lines, just as the pentameters themselves have been distributed through what looks like free verse. What the relineation shows is that the original version itself is highly metrical, and not simply that it can become metrical through reformatting.

Even the introduction of apparently random line breaks in Marquis’s verse turns out not to be free, since those, too, have a clear metrical rationale. The line lengths in this speech appear to be random.

Instead of the steady measure of ten syllables per line, we get this: 9 8 3 10 9 10 2 9 10 7 4 9 1 10 10 8 2 8 10 8 6

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Recurrent patterning is hard to find here, least of all in the spacing and lengths of the short lines (in boldface): 3, 2, 4, 1, 2. Nevertheless, the short lines observe a rigorous ordering principle. Every short line has exactly the number of syllables needed to complete the blank verse pattern begun in the preceding line. Each short line, added to its preceding long line, brings the total number of syllables for the group to a multiple of ten, except for the second set (10, 9, 10, 2), where a feminine ending (“justice”) makes the total 31. Since blank verse routinely allows for feminine endings (i.e., eleven-syllable lines), the second set is not an exception after all. This pattern—according to which every short line completes with metrical precision a truncated blank verse line—persists to the end of the speech. The point acquires visible immediacy when one looks at the blank verse version above, where the short lines (boldface) are positioned at the ends of preceding lines. The apparently random introduction of short lines is thus governed by metrical principle. The unavoidable conclusion is that Marquis wrote the lines out as blank verse first and then worked up a consistent algorithm for fracturing the passage into something that looks like free verse.

It is amusing to suppose that Archy’s description of the lines as more or less blank verse does not refer to the random-looking line lengths; after all, it is Archy’s own typing that obscures the pentameters, so his condescension must be meant to draw attention to the flaw that appears near the end of the speech. The metrical joke is that the misanthropic insect cannot sustain his heroic bluster to the end without a clunker (the intrusion of an extrametrical stressed syllable, “vast”) that renders his performance only “more or less” blank verse.

Clearly, lines that are both blank verse and free verse are not in the least free. The orderly iambic patterns that are being tampered with for parodic effect are powerfully present here, and even the tamperings themselves possess a logic that weakens any claim these lines have to being “free” verse. Marquis’s parody of traditional iambic measure serves as a window into the nature of free verse.

At the other extreme, free verse cannot really be confused with prose, since prose lacks line endings, and free verse makes quite a thing of its arbitrary, unconventional line lengths. Line lengths thus have some calculated effect or meaning that justifies their existence in free verse. Length implies measure, even if not regular measure.

A sense of measure in free verse, however blithely random, is essential, but its role as a consistent and governing paradigm, as in normal foot verse, is abdicated. Conventional verse is built on a measured

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norm and the richness of its rhythms arises from its flirtations with measurelessness. Iambic pentameter is a system of measurement that allows for a wide range of variations, but those variations are themselves bound by measured limits (like the rule against two consecutive trochaic substitutions or against a trochee that serves as the final foot). Even the “measurelessness” of metrical verse (i.e., its permitted variations) is rule governed.

Conversely, the norm against which free verse strains is measurelessness, and it achieves rhythmic richness by flirting with measure.

Free verse invokes and takes advantage of a system of measurement by acknowledging its presence and refusing to conform to it. Perhaps this formulation is old news, but the verse lines of Marquis’s misanthropic cockroach read rather like a demonstration and dissection of free verse effects, in the tradition of Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism.”

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As you may have noticed, this year’s cover is different from years past. This year, we decided to use an illustration of the Riverdale campus for the cover, inviting the reader to enter the talent of the analytical and creative thinkers we have at our school through the image of our campus. The illustration was based on the school’s iconic photo overlooking the Main Field and was digitally “handpainted” color for color, shape for shape, by Margaret Corn, using the Adobe Photoshop software. We hope that you can be inspired by the campus in the same way that we were.

designed by: Margaret Corn typset and produced by: Margaret Corn edited by: Sarah Banks photography by: Margaret Corn printed by: Minuteman Press of Yonkers

The text face is Book Antiqua™ copyrighted by The Monotype Corporation 1991-1995.