“If it were not for mosquitoes,” Hearn remarked in the accompanying commentary, “we should all become terribly lazy in this climate. We should waste our time snoring upon sofas or lolling in easy chairs, or gossiping about trivial things, or dreaming vain dreams, or longing after things which belong to our neighbors, or feeling dissatisfied with our lot. . . . Idleness is the mother of all vices; and mosquitoes know this as well as anybody, and not being lazy themselves they will not suffer us to be lazy.”
The Hearn in question is Lafcadio Hearn, one of those Victorian guys who sticks his head out of obscurity every so often and waves at me. Yesterday, he appeared for no reason at all: I hadn’t been reading anything about him, nor had I even finished a book he had written about his two years in Martinique. But somehow, I was thinking about Hearn.
Hearn was born of a Greek mother and an Irish father. His childhood was marked by departures: first his mother decamped and returned home to Greece (after they had moved to Ireland), then his father married a childhood sweetheart and left him in the care of an aunt. The aunt fell victim to the charms of a fortune hunter and lost her money. Lafcadio at age 17 was sent to live with his aunt’s former maid in London’s East End. A couple of years later, Hearn ended up in Cincinnati: “moneyless on the pavement of an American city to begin life.”
Hearn began writing for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, and soon became one of its most lurid journalists. He also married a black woman, a former slave, which led to his firing at the paper. (Mixed marriages were illegal at the time, and Hearn had managed to annoy a number of prominent citizens.) Hearn divorced his wife and moved to New Orleans, which he embraced. More than embraced, he “invented” New Orleans as an exotic, violent but ever-alluring place. He spent a decade there, and then took off for Japan.
Hearn spent the last fourteen years of his life in Japan: he married a Japanese woman, taught English literature, and fell in love with the culture. He was entranced by Jujitsu, and later wrote: "What Western brain could have elaborated this strange teaching, never to oppose force by force, but only direct and utilize the power of attack; to overthrow the enemy solely through his own strength, to vanquish him solely by his own efforts? Surely none! The Western mind appears to work in straight lines; the Oriental, in wonderful curves and circles."
He wrote with Victorian doggedness: his writings about Cincinnati and New Orleans were complemented by translations from the French: Hearn remains an important translator of Flaubert and Gautier. He delved into Russian literature as well. But it was really in Japan that he seems to have found a home at last.
He had four children, published a series of articles about Japan in The Atlantic Monthly, and converted to Buddhism. His books were widely read, and remain popular even today. Martin Fackler wrote in The New York Times:
For many Japanese, Mr. Hearn’s appeal lies in the glimpses he offered of an older, more mystical Japan lost during the country’s hectic plunge into Western-style industrialization and nation building. His books are treasured here as a trove of legends and folk tales that otherwise might have vanished because no Japanese had bothered to record them.
Not being Japanese himself, he saw the Japanese as they could not see themselves. I get the concept because I’m a victim of it myself. I am intelligent, but not smart enough to keep myself from obsessing about a small problem, which a normal person would dismiss.
(Like that bus driver yesterday who came barreling around the curve near the beach I sometimes go to, who saw me struggling to get up from the deeply curved seat of the bus stop, and who went sailing past! Leaving me fuming in the 95-degree heat at midday in the tropics.)
I worry the small problem just a bit, because it feels sort of good—this little jolt of self-pity…though is it? Isn’t there a place for self-empathy? And if we have a word like “self-pity,” and no word like “self-empathy”….well, isn’t that the problem? What’s wrong with saying that life has handed me a couple of lemons, over the years, and God knows I’ve taken them with a glad smile and cheerful heart! Oh, I’ve made a glass of lemonade or two in my life, I can sure tell you that!
(And the worst of it? The bus driver knew I was there! He made eye contact, and the bus slowed infinitesimally. So he COULD have stopped, but he didn’t!)
A normal person, of course, steps right out of the rabbit hole, glances around to see if anyone is looking, dusts himself off, and goes on his way. But that little bit of self-empathy completely blows the roof or rather the floor off the rabbit hole, and I am now suddenly very, very far down. There’s no light down here, in fact, and no rabbit. Just me and the hole.
(So the bus driver KNEW! YES! HE KNEW! And would he have stopped for somebody else? Somebody, perhaps, who didn’t have formerly blond hair and currently blue eyes and spoke much better Spanish??? WELL??? WOULD HE?)
I tell myself that I need to practice mental hygiene—which was a beloved concept to the Victorians and still worth thinking about today—but first just let me say, and then I’ll drop it… I promise, I really do. Anyway, I don’t want to exaggerate, but…
(THIS MAN IS A NAZI!)
The bus thing happened at 11 AM, so it … it was no big deal to wait a couple minutes, when the next one came by. Thirty years ago, when I first arrived on the island, the buses were much worse, actually.
(Well, the bus driver is clearly Adolf Hitler’s mentor, there’s no doubt about THAT! And what about all the other passengers on the bus, who ALL—TO A MAN—saw me struggling to my feet, and who ALL burst into spasms of hilarity when they saw the look of agony on my aged, lined face! HAH! No better than all those German peasants who built the death camps in their backyard, lived with the smell of burning flesh for half a decade, and then claimed they knew NOTHING about the death of six million Jews!)
Actually, right after Hurricane Maria there were no buses at all for several weeks, since all the fuel on the island was going to the truck drivers and the generators to keep the hospitals running. Remember sitting on the sidewalk outside the club house, when we had no electricity for three months, and how excited you got that first day you saw a bus? Ahh, the halcyon days of my youth, when we used to do Alcoholics (not-so) Anonymous on the sidewalk!
(Speaking of which, do you wanna hear about my life? Because my life has NOT been easy, buster….)
You see how this goes. I am twice as smart as the woman behind me in the supermarket line, but also twice as stupid, at least as far as judging or especially moderating my own behavior. The woman behind me in the supermarket line knows perfectly well that she will spend more time in this line than most people spend in graduate school, but who cares? There’s air conditioning, and some chips she can eat (she’ll pay for them, since she has to give the greasy bag to the cashier, who will throw it away for her) and a very nice lady behind her, who undoubtedly would like to see pictures of her grandchildren. And surprise! She has grandchildren of her own!
(OH PERFECT! The Nazis have stormed the bus stations, overtaking the buses! And now these two little old ladies have fallen into each other’s arms and are showing pictures of their grandchildren to everybody in line! Including the woman in front of me, who should be putting her food items on the conveyor belt AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE TO THE CASHIER! And who should be standing, as I am, with the correct change in hand while staring at the cashier. This will, with any luck, keep her in her place and keep her doing her lot in life. Which is to scan! To scan now, to scan always, to scan when scanning is impossible, when everything within and everything without you screams to rest, to lay down your burden, to gaze at the innocent faces of grandchildren. BUT SCAN SHE MUST!)
And scan she doesn’t, since the cashier has grandchildren too, and she has photos of them! Surprise! We’re all having a perfectly wonderful time except for the guy with the hair / eye anomalies, and the lousy Spanish accent. In fact, strangers are pouring into the store, drawn in by the waves of love for grandchildren which are positively leaping out of the store and lapping down the street. All are enticed, all have photos, and the petty nonsense of commerce and economy is forgotten.
The little old ladies are now exchanging names (of themselves and their grand-progeny) and phone numbers. I am naming people too.
(The guy with the three cans of Goya gandules? Heinrich Himmler!)
I cannot, in short, take a bus or stand in a supermarket line—that’s how smart I am. I cannot even write a blog post about Lafcadio Hearn, while at the same time making a few pointed references to the president of the United States. In fact, my mind is completely undisciplined, which is why I went off on a tangent up there, for two or three pages. I was thinking about Lafcadio Hearn, and what I was going to say about him, and then thinking about John Toohey Morales, and how a meteorologist I had listened to for years and revered for decades had stopped forecasting and told the audience the truth. If there aren’t planes diving into the eyes of hurricanes and dropping weather balloons in the right spots—well, he can’t tell us where the hurricane is, or what it’s likely to do. So the only thing to do, apparently, is to call up Elon Musk and see if anybody at SpaceX can see anything moving around in the Caribbean.
Yes, this was supposed to be a post about Lafcadio Hearn and Donald Trump. True, there was gonna have to be a bridge about as long as the Seven Mile Bridge that connects Key West to the mainland between the very distant shores of Trump and Hearn. But a tidy writer, an efficient writer, would have built the bridge several pages ago. He wouldn’t have needed to tell you, as I did in the most exquisite of detail, how I pass my days at the grocery story.
Or the bus stop.
He would simply have told you the story of the evening, back in the 1990’s, when I sat by myself in a very large and very empty living room while a storm raged outside.
I was alone in the living room, but I had a radio, and I was listening to the English -language radio station that broadcast at that time. Toohey Morales was taking calls from listeners. Most were from anxious people sitting alone in their living rooms, but one was from the captain of a small ship whose boat had lost its mooring, drifted out into the middle of San Juan harbor, and had grounded itself on some rocks, or a sandbar, or something.
Toohey Morales had been the model of calm during the storm—nothing he had seen or heard that evening had been anything out of the ordinary. He had all the facts, all the data, and he could soothe and assuage with complete assurance. But the ship captain was something else—an opportunity to collect valuable, raw data from a unique source. Toohey Morales sprang into action and peppered the captain with questions about the wind source, the strength, how large the waves were, what else was happening in the harbor at the time.
The captain was more than happy to provide the information, and for a pleasant ten minutes, I listened to two intrepid men discussing the waves that were crashing over the deck of the ship grounded and taking in water a quarter of a mile away. I considered the possibility that I could have been on that ship, that the next wave would shatter the bow, that the pumps would fail and the ship would sink.
For that matter, I could be one of the other callers, sitting in a wooden house on a mountain top. I could be the homeless person who had refused shelter in the hallway of our building, preferring to huddle in a recessed doorway down the street rather than accept help from a stranger.
There were many things, I realized, that I took for granted—that I could be sitting safe on dry land in a house with three-feet masonry walls, for example. That the grocery store would open, at some point, and that life would get back to normal. That we would all muddle through, as we scrambled to find ice and D batteries and ate tuna fish spread on Saltine crackers.
I realized how much I had taken for granted, and how lucky I was. But the one thing that never occurred to me was that, one day, John Toohey Morales would not be there. Or that he wouldn’t have all the answers. Cancel that—he never had all the answers. What he did have was all the data that could be had, all the experience that anyone could ask for, and all time and resources to do his job.
Well, he doesn’t now. Apparently, there are weather stations so under-staffed that they operate on banking hours. No one is around to read the barometer or talk to people on the ground—or stranded at sea. Toohey Morales—now at the end of his career—is going out on a distinctly low note. Not for himself but for the profession he loved and the people he served. He once had all the tools at hand to save people’s lives.
Now he doesn’t.
