Robert J. Chassell wrote:
> ... By the way, speaking in defense of Aristotle, I can tell you
> from personal experience that heavy stones stop moving when you stop
> pushing. Worse, dropped stones seek the center of the earth, even
> if your toe is in the way!)
Julia Thompson,
I'm wondering, now, if you have any first-hand experience to
support or refute any of the ideas put forth by Frost in "Mending
Wall".
Err ... yes. How did you guess? We had two stone walls around the
house when I was young. I helped fix them ...
By the way, the poem, which my father read to me (at another time):
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html
MENDING WALL
Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
"And on a day we meet to walk the line": my father did that.
And in 1957, during such a walk, he hurt his left knee. More
recently, I had trouble with my knee and my cousin, a geneologist and
at that time in his 70s, said, "I bet it is your left knee." I said,
"Why yes, how did you know?" He said, "I have a bad left knee, your
father had a bad left knee, you aunts had bad left knees, your
great-aunts had bad left knees." ...
(By the way, when my father was on his death bed -- not a good time
for me -- I had to threaten this neighbor with a court case before he
admitted and compensated for what would have been obvious to a judge,
that his tree cutters had made a road on our property, inside our
boundary marker. Good fences do make good neighbors.)
--
Robert J. Chassell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
