Far from sated with sites commemorating literary greatness, we went the very next day down to Amherst to invade the sanctuary of Emily Dickinson, whose birthplace and lifelong home is now a museum.
In spite of the apparent size of the house, the tour only includes four rooms, one of which is not furnished other than with modern chairs. Nonetheless I enjoyed the tour, as the guide speaks for about ten minutes in each of the rooms, and the information is generally interesting. I find as I get older that I like going on guided tours, provided that the guide is at all capable. It is pleasant to walk leisurely through an old building listening to an intelligent person talk, regardless of the comparative importance of the facts being relayed.
The tour did not go into great detail as far as breaking down the actual poetry of Emily Dickinson, the greatness of which I must confess even at my advanced age I have a hard time truly convincing myself. And this is a real failure, because it is something that is so obvious to serious literary scholars that not to grasp it is to relegate oneself eternally to a lower status of literacy than all genuinely educated people. It is not that I do not like the poems of Emily Dickinson, or that I am not happy that they exist. To this point however I am incapable of seeing that they are great in the way that Donne or Sir Philip Sidney or Herrick seems to me to be really great. At this point I have no choice but to keep plugging away. It is too late for me to try to pursue expertise in any other worthwhile area of human endeavor.
I have noted this elsewhere on the internet, but I really enjoyed being in Amherst for the day. College towns are wonderful places, and it will be a sad day if they disappear because everybody is spending the years from 18-24 acquiring job skills on the computer at their parents' house, and not only because I have five children and am desperately counting on some of them leaving the house once in a while before they are thirty-five. The combination of youthful energies, above average intelligence, and free time in which to indulge in the course of an average day is highly attractive, to me anyway.
Because we have little children still, we had to go on alternate tours, mother and children 1 & 3 on one, and myself and child 2 on the other. But I liked this, as it enabled us to wander around town a little, which we probably would have neglected to do otherwise. At one of the parks there were a number of hyper-progressive looking student types about, female mainly, unsmiling towards me, and reading and writing out longhand notes on paper just like the old times, when my two year old daughter decided to skip around the fountain singing "I'm a princess, I'm a princess", much to my horror as you can imagine. She did not pick this up from me, I assure you.
Along the walk to the other house on the property, where Emily Dickinson's brother lived. I would have liked to seen that too, but to see that required going on a combined tour that was an hour and forty minutes long, and seeing as we had to go on two separate tours as it was I thought that would be pushing it.
In front of the other house.
The main entrance, with a full view of the front of the house.
The West Cemetery in Amherst, where Emily Dickinson is buried, is a bit shabby, and is occupied by a number of people of the sort who look like they dropped out of college many years back and now hang around the cemetery all day acting weird.
I don't know why I included three different grave pictures, I guess to give a feel for the setting, which, in contrast to most cemeteries I go to, was not very peaceful. It is small and is bordered by a gas station and the business district of Amherst, and all sorts of people are constantly tramping through, and there are the aforementioned people who are camped out there for no apparent reason and watch you tramping dutifully to Emily Dickinson's grave.
I do not know what the significance of the toy chair is, though I suspect it is something obvious, even juvenile. Nonetheless, it eludes me.
One more--and then I have to go to bed.
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