First, ostensibly, for trout that, half-hidden, flashed and glimmered opalescent in mountain streams; from too-crowded national parks to his favorite “secret” place on a river in a remote corner of eastern Idaho, my grandfather and I would cast flies and he’d talk to me.
I say “he’d talk to me” because I was brought up under the old-fashioned notion that “children should be seen and not heard”; this, on top of my innate shyness, and combined with a boy’s lively curiosity, made of me a practiced observer and listener. I recall little by way of specifics — this was, after all, close to fifty years ago — but the overall burden of his conversation, which ranged from the nature of fish to (tempered to a child’s understanding) the nature of God, and usually delivered with humor, has stuck with me; and, like fingerlings in deep, invisible currents, precepts were hatched that would rise to the surface at a future season when there was good bait.
“Soul to soul can never teach the things that to itself were taught.”
I read that line many years ago, and conceded that there was a truth to be taught in its contents.
Grandpa wrote that in what he called an “epistle” near the end of his life. And from my perspective, it’s a perfect representation of his philosophy. He took the line, slightly garbled, from a poem by one of the lesser Transcendentalists, and his misquote tells me that he spoke true about having read it long before. Here’s the original:
Thought is deeper than all speech,
Feeling deeper than all thought:
Souls to souls can never teach
What unto themselves was taught.
Grandpa surely knew the rest of the poem; it fits so well with everything I remember about his way of thinking:
We are spirits clad in veils;
Man by man was never seen;
All our deep communing fails
To remove the shadowy screen.Heart to heart was never known;
Mind with mind did never meet;
We are columns left alone,
Of a temple once complete.Like the stars that gem the sky,
Far apart, though seeming near,
In our light we scattered lie;
All is thus but starlight here.What is social company
But a babbling summer stream?
What our wise philosophy
But the glancing of a dream?Only when the sun of love
Melts the scattered stars of thought;
Only when we live above
What the dim-eyed world hath taught;Only when our souls are fed
By the Fount which gave them birth,
And by inspiration led,
Which they never drew from earth,We like parted drops of rain
Swelling till they meet and run,
Shall be all absorbed again,
Melting, flowing into one.
Like all human personalities, Grandpa’s nature encompassed and ultimately reconciled seemingly contradictory impulses. Adamantly patriarchal, yet tenderhearted; sometimes fearsomely gruff, yet always prone to helpless giggling; lover of Scripture and deep thought, lover of silly (and sometimes rather salty) jokes; faithful Mormon, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. He was a genuinely pious man who when vexed would let fly with an exasperated “Oh crap!” or “Hell’s Bells!” (exasperation that would, often as not, end in laughter all around). In my childhood I regarded him with more respect than fear, and as much love as respect. And I never doubted that he loved me back.
From him I learned — not so much through words, but by his living example — to see the world through transparent eyeballs, to understand nuance, to have compassion for human failings; thanks to him, I was prepared to appreciate and (try to) assimilate values I would later encounter when I read for myself his favorite philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Commodity (“all those advantages which our senses owe to nature”)
Beauty
Language
Discipline
Idealism
Spirit
He never went to college, yet made of himself a man both educated and wise, a man whose own history showed me that life itself is a school, an ongoing quest for greater light and knowledge (part of what his faith characterized as “eternal progression”); from him I learned to believe Emerson’s dictum,
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.
And there is no fish that, given patience sufficient to the task, cannot ultimately be caught.
Grandpa was born one hundred years ago today.
As for trout, Grammy would fry them up in butter over the campfire and serve them to us, warm and delicious. That was one of her gifts, both metaphorically and in fact; but it’s a subject for another time.
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