Et in Arcadia Ego.
Virgil
 |
("And I (death) am even in Arcadia."
"Arcadia" is another word for a pastoral paradise.) |
The ways of God are unknowable to man.
Saint Augustine
The bow of God's wrath is bent,
and justice bends the arrow at your heart.
Jonathan Edwards
All the minds and spirits God ever sent into the world
are susceptible
of enlargement and improvement.
Joseph Smith
I. OCTOBER 8, 1908: A TRAIN
Pulled out of Green River, Wyoming, heading
West toward Salt Lake City. The Mormon prophet,
Joseph F. Smith, was going home from a visit
to Boston, with his traveling companion.
He saw the flash of white butts as a herd
Of antelope, coming in from the north, turned
Away from the train and bounced through the sage,
And he thought how sixty years before, aged twelve, he had
Watched such plenitude of beasts on this same route,
Then on a wagon seat next to his mother
As she managed their team on the pioneer trek
After his father, Hyrum, was shot
With Joseph at Carthage. The car was hot,
So he walked to the back, out onto
A polished wood platform with a wrought iron rail—
And heard a voice say, “Go in and sit down.”
He turned back but then stopped, wondering if he had
Imagined the voice, when it came again: “Sit down.”
Just as he reached his seat, the train hit
A broken rail and the engine and most
Of the cars (not his) went off the tracks.
The companion later wrote that the prophet
Would have been badly hurt if he hadn't sat down,
Because all of the cars were “jammed up bad.”
II. MAY 25, 1999: A TRAIN OUT OF BOSTON
Boston, leaving Providence, Rhode Island,
Struck Julia Toledo, from a
Mormon family in Ecuador
And her four sons, walking on the tracks.
All were killed instantly, except Jose, ten,
Who died in two days. They had just left a
Transition shelter where they stuffed their packs
With clothes, coloring books, tiny dolls—all found
Along the tracks, with shoes, torn packs, a bloody
Bible. Julia had led them through a break
In the fence for a shortcut to someplace,
Fleeing, some said, an abusive husband
Who had tried to steal his sons. But he,
Located in Ecuador, heart-broken, said no,
There was trouble with his in-laws because he was
Still Catholic. Others said it was
Julia's sister, tired of baby-sitting,
Had driven them out to homelessness.
They had climbed a short trail up the traprock
Of the railbed, walked two miles before Jose
Got separated, to the north side.
Julia, carrying Pedro, pulling Angel
And Carlos, was just lunging across
To reach him when the train struck them all.
III. IN MY DREAM GOD IS LISTENING, CAREFULLY,
As I tell him these stories and ask him,
“Which of these trains, children, was in your hands?”
We are both seated, quite comfortably,
On a green satin French provincial
Couch, in a room painted by Watteau—
The transition room in Kubrick's 2001.
God asks me if I am proud or rebellious.
I notice that he is luminous under his robe,
And his face is serene beyond all description,
His skin young, downy, but full of pores.
I can see small white scars across his forehead.
Then tears gather in his eyes, and slowly
Tears begin to drop like blood from every pore.
I ask again, “Which train is on your hands?”
And he sets his face toward me like flint: “Both. All.”
EUGENE ENGLAND
JANUARY 2000
© 2010 Eugene England Foundation. All rights reserved.
Whenever you find yourself,
This isn’t at all what I imagined. No, I imagined family. I
imagined grandmothers. I imagined neighbors clustered outside the door and
friends standing at my side. I imagined the house erupting with the first cry
of the infant. Slaps on the back. Loud laughter. Jubilation.
"We often write seldomest to those whom we love the
most. The distance to which I am removed
has given a new value to all I valued before in my country, and the day of my
return will be the happiest I expect to
see in this life……
O Lord God Father everlasting, which reignest over over the Kingdom of men,
And finally, 
"I believe, right worshipful, that you are not ignorant of
what has been determined concerning me [by the Council of Brabant]; therefore I
entreat your lordship and that by the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here
[in Vilvorde] during the winter, you will request the Procureur [public prosecutor] to be kind enough to send
me from my goods which he has in his possession, 
This single stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected
corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest. It was full of sap,
full of leaves, and full of boughs, but now in vain does the busy art of man
pretend to vie with nature by tying that withered bundle of twigs to its
sapless trunk. It is now at best but the reverse of what it was: a tree turned
upside down, the branches on the earth, and the root in the air. It is now
handled by every dirty wench, condemned to do her drudgery, and by a capricious
kind of fate destined to make other things clean and be nasty itself. At
length, worn to the stumps in the service of the maids, it is either thrown out
of doors or condemned to its last use of kindling a fire. When I beheld this, I
sighed and said within myself, surely mortal man is a broomstick: nature sent
him into the world strong and lusty, in a thriving condition, wearing his own
hair on his head, the proper branches of this reasoning vegetable, until the
axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered
trunk; he then flies to art, and puts on a periwig, valuing himself upon an
unnatural bundle of hairs, all covered with powder, that never grew on his
head. But now should this our broomstick pretend to enter the scene, proud of
those birchen spoils it never bore, and all covered with dust, though the
sweepings of the finest lady's chamber, we should be apt to ridicule and
despise its vanity, partial judges that we are of our own excellencies and
other men's defaults.
