Tine's Nestor Episode, at Will Warren's Den

Tine and Rubob made their way up Rattlesnake Moutain this afternoon, on a walk to Will Warren's Den. Spring was in the air in the January thaw, and Tine thought it might be a nice day to catch up with old Will. He'd been run out of Tine's village in about 1800, for stealing sheep and not going to church on Sundays. He fled up the mountain and made a home for himself in the wild, in a cave at the base of a rock formation.

As Tine and Rubob were setting off in the vehicle for the trail leading to the cave, Tine noticed a lawn sculpture.



"He said Joyce looked like a heron, Rubob, not a stork," Tine said. She'd purloined Rubob's guidebook to "Ulysses" the night before -- Frank Budgen's work on James Joyce -- for some wool-gathering of her own.

"Who said he looked like a heron, Tine?" Rubob asked distractedly.

"Budgen. You said he described Joyce as a looking like a stork coming up the path, with his long, thin cane and his thick glasses. He said a 'wading heron.' "

"Oh, he did? Well, yes, that makes sense," Rubob said.

They wound their way up Diamond Glen, and when they passed the old millpond, Tine asked Rubob to stop the vehicle so she could get out and have a look at the dam, which was flooding over in the thaw.

"Looks like a bit of water going over that," Rubob said.



The dam looked broken down, thoroughly given over to the wild.



Tine thought of lines from Tennyson's poem"Tithonus":

"The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground."

Tine had been mulling over the lines since earlier in the afternoon, when she and Rubob had been clearing tree limbs that had fallen in Wednesday's tempest. They'd carried the trunk and branches of a fallen dogwood tree into the woods, and Rubob had said, a little ghoulishly, "It's like Indians or Tibetans who put their dead out above ground for vultures. In this case it’s a slower process, with termites, other insects and rot."

Standing by the dam, Tine thought about Tennyson's Tithonus watching the woods decay. In the Greek myth, Tithonus had fallen in love with the goddess of the dawn, and she'd asked Zeus to make him immortal. She'd forgotten to ask Zeus to make Tithonus eternally youthful, and he'd become older and older, uglier and uglier -- a dessicated husk of a man.

"Are you getting back into the vehicle, Tine?"

"Just a minute, Rubob. I'm talking to Tithonus."

"Who's that, Tine?"

"Just an old man, Rubob. I thought I saw him in the woods," Tine said.

"Yet hold me not for ever in thine East," the immortal Tithonus had pleaded with the dawn.

"How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground."

"Tithonus wouldn't mind a place in the woods by the millpond," Tine thought, "with the decaying trees and Rubob's Indians, vultures and termites."

Released from the dam, Tine finally returned to the vehicle, and she and Rubob drove along Reservoir Road and across Route 6 to the head of the trail leading up the mountain.

"A little dessicated looking, don't you think?" Rubob said as they started walking up the trail. "Weren't there apples on the trees last fall?"



"Yes," Tine said, "but that season has come and gone. You'll have to wait until next fall for your free apple. Winter must have been a rough time of the year for old Will Warren."

As they continued up the path, Rubob said, "Look, Tine, the water's running off the trail in those channels. I don't remember those before. It looks like they've been dug."



"And look, Tine -- new trail blazes," he said. "The trail crew's been here."



Tine stopped to take a picture, and Rubob said, "The nice thing about digital cameras is that you can crop things so easily.

"I think Will Warren would like things left uncropped, Rubob," Tine said.

"That's because he was uncropped, Tine," Rubob said. "Nature needs taming," he added, expanding on the theme. "Wasn't it the view in the beginning of the 18th century that nature had to be sort of adjusted? Then along came the 19th century, and the focus was on wildness. Some people would even have craggy ruins built on their property."

"In wildness is the preservation of the world, Rubob," Tine said, quoting Thoreau. "That was Will Warren's lesson for us, like Thoreau's at Walden Pond."

"Will Warren, the old wise man of the village," Rubob said -- "like Nestor, the wise man of the Greeks."

"What was the name of that guy who represented Nestor in the Nestor epidsode in Ulysses?" Tine asked. She'd been reading that chapter in Budgen's "The Making of Ulysses" the night before.

"Mr. Deasy, Tine," Rubob said. "That's the second episode in 'Ulysses,' and it's based on Telemachus' meeting with Nestor. He counsels Stephen Dedalus on the importance of knowing the value of money. 'What's the proudest statement you'll hear from an Englishman?' he asks Stephen. Do you know what it is, Tine?"

"No, Rubob, what is it?"

"'I paid my way,' Mr. Deasy says."

"And what's that supposed to mean?" Tine asked, having no small amount of English blood coursing through her veins.

"That they're proud of being self-reliant, that they know the importance of money -- something Dedalus, who's always broke, who can't even afford to pay for drinks at the pub, knows nothing about."

"I guess Will Warren didn't know much about that, either," Tine said.

"'I stole my way' would be his motto," Rubob said.

"Like in the fall with your apple from the orchard, I suppose," Tine said.

"He must have known a thing or two to live out here in the woods," she said. "And like Stephen Dedalus, he knew all about freedom. Dedalus was a Sabbath-breaker, too, and he would have been run out of the village just as Will Warren was."



The trail became steeper, and wound up the hillside beside rocky outcroppings.

"It's easy following the trail with the new blazes, Rubob," Tine said. "It's like following a story where everything is laid out for us so simply -- not exactly like Joyce."

"Joyce thought his failing as a writer was his inability to tell a tale," Rubob said. "He invested so so much in word play and hidden meanings in part to compensate for his inability to tell a story."

"But Shakespeare was hard to understand, too, Rubob, and he told a fine tale," Tine said.

"I think Shakespeare recognized that the average Londoner was able to understand what he wrote in his plays," Rubob said. "Joyce deliberately chose to make himself obscure. He wrote so that he could be savored by the tiniest, slimmest sliver of humanity. His goal was to create such a puzzle that people would be eking out the meaning for centuries."

Tine thought of critics working on Joyce's body of literature, like Rubob's termites working on the tree trunk in the woods.

"In some ways, a work of art is better left wild," she said to Rubob. "Maybe 'Ulysses' always will be wild. It's like you said the other day; no one can ever know what an author was thinking -- though Budgen helps."

Following the trail blazes, Tine and Rubob scrambled over the rocks.



They came to an outlook with a view over the valley below, and the scene seemed subdued in the pale light of winter.



The rocky trail became more difficult to negotiate, and Tine had to cling to the rocks with her hands at times.



It was hard-going in places, and Tine, who'd taken to her bed with a spot of flu this past week, was feeling weary. As she lifted one leg after another, she reckoned that chasing after Will Warren was a wearisome business.

Tine's thoughts drifted back to Budgen's chapter on Nestor. "Weariness dominates the Nestor episode," Budgen wrote. The episode is about Stephen Dedalus' weary struggle against his past, and the struggle of the boys in his history class to learn about past events.

Joyce represents history as a "nightmare" at times, Tine thought, and she had a picture in her mind of historians gnawing their way through the past the way Rubob's termites worked in the decaying woods.

Tine stopped to catch her breath, and she looked back down the trail at the tangle of tree branches.



"What was Will Warren thinking wanting to live up here?" she asked Rubob.

"He didn't have much choice. He was run out of town. He was a Sabbath-breaker. Can't get much worse than that."

"That might explain what we're doing up here," Tine thought, being a Sabbath-breaker herself.

"Maybe Will Warren was like old Tithonus, in a way," Tine thought. "He fell in love with the dawn and chased it up here."

"Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch -- if I be he that watch'd --
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. "

Falling in love with the dawn was like giving up the past in a way, choosing a new beginning each day, Tine thought. It's what Stephen Dedalus, who renounced his own history, wanted, too. It was falling in love with the infinite, fresh possibilities of the dawning day.

"Freedom, Rubob -- that's what he was after up here -- wildness and freedom."

Thoreau had put it nicely in his essay "Walking":

"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil -- to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that."

The trail, in its effort to escape ministers and schools, wound up through the thickening woods. Trail workers had rerouted it away from the beaten path in places , to help prevent erosion.

Rubob plodded along, immersed in thoughts of his own. As they made their way over some rocks, he began to talk about someone he worked with, saying, "He always takes the easiest and shortest route possible, using the simplest method, looking for the least trouble down the way."

"There's something to be said for that, Rubob."

Rubob, though, seemed to prefer Joyce's approach, the one of greater complexity, and amid his huffs and puffs over the steepening climb, there was much huffing over the worker who always seeks the easiest approach.

"I wonder whether Will Warren's was the easiest route," Tine thought, not just about the path up the hill, but the life he'd chosen to lead in the woods. "And Tithonus, he must have been pretty pleased with himself for a while after leaping into the dawn, but then what?"

It wasn't long before Tine and Rubob reached their destination, the entrance to Will Warren's den.



There was a plaque on the rock marking the site.



And there was a rake -- anachronistically enough -- leaning on the rock wall outside the entranceway to old Will's cave.



"That's something we haven't seen before," Rubob said.

"He must have been cleaning up a bit, availing himself of modern conveniences," Tine said. "Like Tithonus, it must have been too much for him up here with only the dawn to keep him company."

"Who's Tithonus, Tine?"

"I wonder whether old Will had an Indian bride," Tine said. She'd read that Tunxis Indians, who farmed the Meadows by the river in the valley, helped look after him after he fled to the woods.

"He might have been two-timing with the dawn," Tine thought.

She climbed to the top of the rock formation that contained Will Warren's den and peered down the gap in the rocks that would have been his chimney.



But there was no sign of old Will. Tine thought of Tithonus again:

"A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man--
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd
To his great heart none other than a God!"

"She climbed down the rocks and found Rubob venturing farther down the trail.

"Come along, Nestor, we need to turn back. My weary bones can't go any farther today."

"Nestor, is it, little Tine?"

"You're my wise old man of the woods," Tine said. "You didn't run off with the dawn like Tithonus, or with an Indian woman. You consider things carefully."

"Tithonus?" Rubob asked.

On their way back, the woods seemed more tame, less tangled somehow -- maybe because of the new, brighter perspective from above. Maybe it was just that the path was easier because because they were going downhill, returning home. And then, too, they weren't chasing a "white hair'd shadow."



"It looks like one of Elliott Porter's photographs of nature, Rubob," Tine said, referring to one of the books on her bedroom floor, "Intimate Landscapes." "There's nothing arcane about that scene; it's just trees in the winter woods, standing out in the here and now."



"I do not photograph for ulterior purposes," Porter wrote. "I photograph for the thing itself." The leaves on the path brought his works to mind, too.



"The bright maple leaves settle at random, arranging themselves in harmonious patterns that defy improvement as though placed there intentionally," he wrote.

Tine stopped over a rock, and sought to read its cover, as if it were a book left in the path -- a Bible of Wildness, dropped by old Will.



"Rocks by themselves ... are frequently found in fascinating shapes and colors," Porter wrote. "The details of geological formations exhibit the most extraordinary combination of shapes and colors, scarecely suspected on casual observation. The banding of glacial striations and the haphazard occurrence of fractures can be discovered in harmonious arrangements that seem to defy the chance working of natural forces. "

Will Warren had made himself at home in a "haphazard occurrence of fractures," Tine thought -- in a fractured formation of rock, maybe even at home in his fractured life away from the village.

"Was it the simplest path or the most difficult?" she thought, lost in wonder.

At this time of year, the woods by the trail looked a bit "dessicated," as Rubob had said.



"Maybe it would look different in spring, or in the rosy light of dawn," Tine thought.

"Come along, Tine, we need to be getting home," Rubob said.

"OK, Rubob," she replied, thinking of her home down in the village.

Taking her muddy boots off in the entranceway at home, and placing them under a bench, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."