Amazing women authors - an echo essay

Literary Ruffles and flourishes - An echo tribute to the success of women authors.

TRIUMPH OF THE ‘LIT’RY LADY’ published in The New York Times, by Tina Jordan

Tina Jordan

MaineWriter- This essay brought to mind the amazing success of women authors, especially recalling the creative talents who wrote the most popular books ever written, being Harriett Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Mitchell, and Harper Lee.

“The rivalry of the sexes!” blared a Times headline from 1905.

“Is woman crowding out man in the field of fiction?” The paper posed that question to a handful of top publishers, editors and booksellers.

“What woman can write as Shakespeare? Can any woman ever write a ‘Robinson Crusoe’? Did any woman ever live who could have written ‘Huckleberry Finn’? ... And what woman could possibly have written ‘Jude’?” harrumphed the bookseller Simon Brentano.

The publisher George H. Putnam dismissed the query as “absurd,” telling the paper that there were more men and women “doing excellent literary work” than ever before, “and the more both of them do the better.”

By 1907, things had changed. Women, the paper pointed out, had “been busy with their pens ... scribbling industriously, and, in plenty of cases, doing good work” for years. But with a few exceptions — Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë — male authors had long ruled book sales, “marching along proudly, without worrying about competitors in the weaker sex.”

Of the 28 most popular books published between 1895 and 1902, 25 were by men. By 1904, though, the situation had begun to improve — and 1907 was a record-breaking year for women’s book sales, thanks in part to Edith Wharton’s “The Fruit of the Tree.”


“Records of the past 10 years show startling progress by the ‘lit’ry lady’ from the commercial point of view,” The Times reported. “The really striking thing about the encroachments of women on the preserves of man in book writing is not to be found on the purely literary side, but on the business side of the situation. Women are writing more and more best-sellers.”

Flash forward 112 years, and both the No. 1 books are by women — Delia Owens’s novel “Where the Crawdad Sings” tops the fiction list, where it has been for much of the past year, and Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated,” which came out in early 2018, once again rules the nonfiction list.

Westover told Parade recently that “the book has sold better than I could ever have expected. Honestly I don’t think I’ve processed it.” In an interview with She-files, she said the high point came when Barack Obama put “Educated” on his summer reading list. “And he called me. It was weird, totally weird. They called me and asked if I could take a call with him. I was like, ‘I can squeeze that right on in.’”

By Tina Jordan

Book Review: "Soldiers of a Different Cloth"

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/172584
"If ever I felt that I ought to be five priests it was that week:" Chaplains in World War 2

By John Wukovits, a military historian specializing in the Pacific theater of World War II. The author of numerous books including Tin Can Titans(winner of the 2018 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature), Hell from the Heavens, For Crew and Country, One Square Mile of Hell, and Pacific Alamo, he has also written articles for such publications as WWII History, Naval History, and World War II. He lives in Michigan. An exasperated Father Henry Heintskill, C.S.C., a Notre Dame chaplain posted to naval duty in the Pacific, faced the same issue with which almost every military chaplain grappled during World War II—how to perform the multiple tasks that normally required the services of two or three chaplains. “There are all sorts of problems the men have,” Father Heintskill wrote in a letter to his superior, “they’re worried about conditions at home, etc. We have to do what we can.” He explained that after one Friday evening service, at least two hundred men gathered for Confession, requiring him to remain an hour after lights out at 9:30 p.m. “If ever I felt that I ought to be five priests it was that week.”

Chaplains celebrated Mass and helped the men complete government forms. Some soldiers, not long out of high school, wondered what combat would be like. Others asked about the morality of taking another man’s life.

One duty, however, was paramount—to be at the side of a soldier or sailor as the young man died. It was then that the chaplain could administer Last Rites and its promise of dying with a clear conscience.

That was evident as soon as the first day of war, when ninety Japanese aircraft struck Clark Field in the Philippines shortly after noon. Father John Duffy, a Notre Dame diocesan priest from Ohio, eluded bullets and bombs as he ran to the field, littered with dead and wounded, to hear confessions and administer Last Rites. To avoid wasting precious moments by inquiring about the soldier’s faith, he gave Last Rites to any dying serviceman he came across. “I knew it would be effective for the members of my faith & that it would do the others no harm,” he explained later. “There wasn’t sufficient time for inquiry about religious tenets of the wounded.”

Four months later, Father Duffy lay at the receiving end of the sacrament. After enduring severe abuse at the hands of cruel Japanese guards on what became known as the infamous Bataan Death March—“Extreme Unction, Baptism, Confessions administered daily on march,” wrote Father Duffy. “Death, pestilence, hunger, exhaustion, depleted all.”—the priest lay on the ground, apparently dying from bayonet slashes to his body. A Protestant chaplain knelt beside his friend, held Duffy’s head in his hands, and prayed, “Lord, have mercy on your servant. He’s a good man who served you well. Receive his soul.” Within moments another Catholic chaplain came upon the scene and, also thinking the priest was dying, anointed Father Duffy.

The importance of Last Rites extended even to the enemy.

Two and one half years later, during the bitter combat in Normandy following the June 6, 1944 invasion, Father Francis L. Sampson spotted a German soldier lying in a creek a few feet away. He crawled over to do what he could for the enemy soldier, but as Sampson lifted him into his arms, the German groaned a few times and died. Because he saw a higher duty, the Catholic chaplain from Notre Dame, wearing an American uniform, gave absolution to a German soldier dying in a French creek.

Father Joseph D. Barry, C.S.C., recognized that a paralyzing fear for a wounded or dying soldier was to lie alone on the battlefield, left to contend with his fears. During his more than 500 days in European combat with the 45th Infantry Division, Barry exerted every effort to reach a boy prone on the ground and bring him the peace of knowing that someone was there with him. “After 54 years, I can still see Father Barry administering last rites to soldiers in the field while enemy shells exploded all around him,” wrote Albert R. Panebianco, a soldier in the 45th Infantry Division.

On one occasion Barry talked with a soldier who, due to go into battle in a few hours, feared that “this might be my last night.” The soldier confided that he accepted fear as part of his task, but wondered if he would control his panic and still perform when it counted.

Barry inquired if there was anything the priest could do for him. Above all, the boy told Barry, he had wanted to be a good soldier—for his men, his family, his country, and his God—and if he died, would Barry please tell his family that he had fulfilled that wish. During combat later that night, German fire cut down the youth. Father Barry rushed to him, cradled the mortally wounded boy in his arms, and with explosions and combat nearly drowning out his words, shouted into the dying boy’s ear, “Remember how we talked last night. Here it is. And I can say you were a good soldier.”

Father Barry consoled more people than the soldiers he tended. He also penned letters to parents and loved ones, often at the behest of the dying soldier who asked the priest to inform his mother or wife that he loved her. Above all, he made certain that they knew that their son had died with a priest at his side. “I wrote to so many. You could write what they wanted to know more than anything else, ‘I wonder if there was a priest with my boy.’” Barry explained in an interview. “And that is the only reason I wrote,” he said.

In Okinawa, Father John J. Burke, C.S.C., knew the difficulty of fashioning letters to grieving loved ones. After a Japanese torpedo struck the aft portion of his battleship, USS Pennsylvania, on August 12, 1945, killing twenty men, Father Burke mailed twenty responses to loved ones in which he relayed, with dignity and compassion, information about the loss of their son, brother, or husband. Rather than send a similar form letter to each family, he instead crafted similar opening and ending paragraphs, but inserted personal information unique to each individual in the main portion. “God bless you in your present sorrow,” Father Burke began each letter. “As the Catholic Chaplain aboard the U.S.S. Pennsylvania I want to assure you that your son [here he inserted their first name] received Catholic Burial. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was offered several times for the repose of his soul.”

He then added personal information about each sailor. To Mrs. Angeline Ortbals of Ferndale, Michigan, whose son, nineteen-year-old Seaman 1/c Robert J. Ortbals, died, he wrote that Robert “had a heart of gold” and went out of his way to help his shipmates. To the parents of a sailor named Roemer, he wrote that, “I feel that a boy so young must very soon, if not already, be enjoying the eternal happiness of heaven which is beyond human description and to which, in God’s mercy we all look forward.”

Father Burke closed all letters by explaining that their son had recently attended Mass and received Communion, and that as far as he knew, had led a religious life. “It is impossible for me to express anything that will lessen the sorrow which you must endure. You have returned to God your beloved son on your Country’s Altar of Sacrifice. In this supreme sacrifice your son is most like our Divine Savior; and you, I trust, most like his Blessed Mother. God bless you with the humble and Christian spirit of resignation to His Divine Will.”

Though they conducted many rigorous tasks, the chaplains cherished the knowledge that they had comforted dying young men, and subsequently their families, in these final moments. As Father Duffy related, “I did what I could for each regardless of his faith, and a look of ineffable peace came to the face of many a tortured soul in that last bitter hour on earth.”

Political satire - Who is protecting the Trump button?

The Button: A Nuclear Fable

(Believe it? Or not?)

This is an enjoyable fantasy; see this link ..... https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/the-ugly-history-of-stephen-millers-cosmopolitan-epithet-215454

Oftentimes, parody reveals truth- echo fantasy essay published in The New Yorker

When the first nuclear-alert alarm sounded, at approximately two-thirty in the afternoon, the President flipped the switch that locks the doors to the Oval Office with tamper-proof dead bolts and then dove under his desk. His cell phone skittered across the floor during the dive; he was carrying only the cheeseburger he’d been eating. Diving under the desk was precisely what he’d been taught to do during atomic-bomb drills at that military boarding school where well-off parents sent their incorrigibles and slow learners. Within seconds, though, he realized that he was stuck. The Oval Office desk was larger than his desk had been in high school, but so was the President.

Until that moment, the day had seemed like any other day at the White House. Many staffers were in their offices, meeting with their criminal-defense attorneys. Vice-President Mike Pence had been alerted that he might be required to appear in public with the President later in the day, and so, facing a wall on which a mirror and a picture of Nancy Reagan had been placed side by side, he was practicing his adoring smile. 

(Ugly!) Stephen Miller was polishing his response to a newly published book, “Twenty-four Personality Types and How to Deal with Them,” in which the author, the renowned psychologist Sarah Stewart, mentioned him as the personification of a type she called Aggressive Dork.

That morning, Cabinet secretaries, assembled for a meeting in the Cabinet Room, had been passing the time before the President’s arrival by bantering about which description of the President that had leaked to the press was the most accurate. “I was right on the mark,” the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, boasted, of his characterization of the President as an idiot. H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, argued that he’d been much more accurate in depicting the President as a dope. Rex Tillerson, displaying a scholarly streak that surprised his colleagues, pointed out that Merriam-Webster defined “dope” as “a stupid person,” while “moron,” the word Tillerson had used to describe the President, was defined as “a very stupid person.” The door opened, and they all stood and said, respectfully, “Good morning, Mr. President. You are the smartest of them all.”

The tension didn’t start until early afternoon. It had been days since the President and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, had exchanged words about the nuclear buttons on their desks, but when the picture on the Oval Office television set suddenly went dark—it turned out that so many Fox News employees had to be sent to anti-harassment training that there was no one left to operate the cameras—the President, finding nothing else to occupy his time, resumed tweeting. In a tweet aimed at Kim, he wrote, “Hey, Little Rocket Man, my button is a lot bigger than your button—nyeh, nyeh, nyeh.”

“No, it isn’t, Old and Depleted Hunk of Rotting Flesh,” Kim replied.

“Yes, it is, Bad Haircut Dwarf.”

“No, it isn’t, Orange All Over.”

“If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” the President tweeted.

Just then, the President’s chief of staff, John Kelly, alarmed by the tenor of the tweets, entered the Oval Office. He calmed the President by telling him that replacement camera operators were due to arrive at Fox News soon, promising to have the White House mess bring in some extra ketchup for the cheeseburger, and assuring him that he was a genius. Kelly was almost back at his desk when the nuclear-alert alarm sounded.

Within seconds, Kelly was informed by White House security that it was a false alarm, set off by an electrical glitch. Terrified that the President, not having heard the all-clear because of his concentration on his cheeseburger, might respond to the alarm by pushing the large nuclear button on his desk, Kelly ran back to the Oval Office—only to find the doors bolted. He shouted “False alarm!” again and again through the door, not realizing that the President suffers from hearing loss: his right ear is partly blocked, and through his left ear he can hear only compliments.

While Kelly called for a battering ram, the President, from his cramped position on the floor, was indeed feeling around with his one free hand (the other held the cheeseburger) for the nuclear button on his desk. He intended to show Kim Jong Un once and for all whose was bigger. The battering ram was now at work on the bolted door, but the President apparently wasn’t able to hear it. He knew that the button was on the upper right corner of his desk, and he stretched his arm in that direction. He was tantalizingly close, but he couldn’t quite reach it. The door was starting to give way. He shifted his position as much as he could without dropping the cheeseburger. He still couldn’t reach it. He gave up just as Kelly and a Secret Service team burst through the door, shouting, “False alarm!” 

Thus was the world spared a nuclear holocaust because the President’s fingers were too short to reach his button.

Best selling government REPORTS - literature or not?

Robert Mueller's Magnum Opus

This article is about "best seller" government investigation reports, beginning with the publication of the 1964, Warren Commission Report, after the assassination of President John Kennedy. The author challenges these publications as, perhaps,"not real literature". 

 Published in the April 8, 2019, in The New Yorker by Tyler Foggatt.

Maine Writer commentary here - The truth behind John Kennedy's assassination will not be revealed in my lifetime. Likewise, I believe the same is true about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. In both murders, we know the name of the assassins, but the motivation behind the killings have never been completely revealed. (Just my opinion.)  Nevertheless, Foggatt's article is interesting because it raises the question about what people read and why they read it. "A puzzlement".

Yul Brynner (1920-1985) "In my head are many facts; Of which I wish I was more certain, I was sure, Is a puzzlement" by Rogers and Hammerstein

"These are exciting books,” Johnson said. “They remind you of the power of a book and its place in our democracy.” Lyons said.
Robert Mueller, Best-Seller?
Three publishers are racing to print the account of Mueller's Russia investigation, following in the footsteps of classic page-turners from the Warren Commission and Kenneth Starr.

The Mueller report has been awaited with more excitement than—and for three times as long as—Princess Meghan Markle’s baby.

Now that the special counsel’s report is here, sort of, three publishers have announced plans to release it as a book:

• Skyhorse, with an introduction by Alan Dershowitz; 
• Scribner, with supplementary material by Washington Post reporters; and 
• Melville House, straight up. (The document will be in the public domain.) 

“Our printers are ready to print faster than usual,” Dennis Johnson, Melville House’s co-founder and co-publisher, said last week, over the phone. “And we’ll ask the truck drivers to do at least the speed limit to deliver the book.” Tony Lyons, the president and publisher of Skyhorse, said that he’d received thousands of pre-orders, and he’s been touting his edition’s Dershowitz bonus. “Alan was right from Day One,” he said. “He was the only pundit whose cautious predictions proved to be correct.”

The first government report published as a trade book was the Warren Commission’s 1964 report on J.F.K.’s assassination, which sold more than a million copies. In his novel “Libra,” Don DeLillo calls the report “the megaton novel that James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.” Three decades later, the independent counsel Kenneth Starr, with help from Brett Kavanaugh, authored the Starr report, which three different publishers released as a four-hundred-plus-page potboiler. (It sold almost two million copies in two days.)

Adam Gopnik, in this magazine, argued that the Starr report could be read “as a novel in the classic tradition,” with Bill Clinton as the scapegrace hero. Others likened the work to soft-core porn. Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian, asked, “Why did Starr and Kavanaugh put all the sex in it? Well, they didn’t do it to sell a lot of copies.” Gopnik acknowledged, “The laboriously recounted instances of near-ejaculation, the orgasms achieved and enumerated—it’s all there for the reviewers.”

Then came the 9/11 Commission Report, a doorstop of nearly six hundred pages, written in what the Post called the “ultra-spare, purposely unemotional—yet quietly seething—language of American pain.” The Harvard historian Daniel Aaron, the librettist Leslie Dunton-Downer, and the lawyer Harvey Silverglate went further, arguing in a 2005 article that the literary genre that the 9/11 report belongs to is the epic. The terrorists are our Grendel, and the Twin Towers, like Heorot, are “too lofty and too visible” for their own good. “Bereft of a miraculous rescuer like Beowulf,” the authors write, “the 9/11 Commission Report calls on the American people to serve as their own collective hero.”

The report sold more than a million copies in the first four months, and, in 2004, it was named a finalist in the nonfiction category of the National Book Awards, cited for its “literary style.”

Sketchpad: To pass the time as we wait for the Mueller report to be released to the reading public, we asked five graphic designers to create book covers for the special counsel’s masterwork, twenty-­two months in the making, which is said to weigh in at more than three hundred pages. This one was designed by Michael Bierut.

Harold Bloom, the eminent Yale literature professor, finds the idea of such reports having literary merit offensive. “If a Harvard professor thought that the 9/11 report could be compared to ‘Beowulf,’ they achieved an abyss of absurdity,” he wrote in an e-mail. As for the Warren Commission report, he said, “I am very fond of Don and of ‘Libra,’ but there are limits: Joyce in Iowa City is like visualizing the eighty-nine-year-old Harold Bloom climbing mountains in Tibet.”

Stephen Greenblatt, a professor at Harvard and Bloom’s sometime rival in Shakespeare criticism, was more open to the idea of the Mueller report as literature. “Quite a large number of people have been indicted. Some of them are going to jail,” he said. “I would have thought those individual instances would be quite gripping, both as stories and as outcomes.”

If the Warren report is a modern novel, the Starr report a bodice ripper, and the 9/11 report an epic, then which genre will the Mueller report fall into—assuming we ever get to read it? “Like a lot of people, I was led to believe that the Mueller report might resemble Richard Condon’s ‘Manchurian Candidate,’ ” Greenblatt said. “But I gather from the Attorney General’s letter that it’s most likely to resemble a postmodern novel, like DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’—one in which there isn’t a big bang at the end.” Wilentz had doubts that the Mueller report would be nominated for a literary prize. “It’d be a political statement, in a way that nominating the 9/11 report was not,” he said. “Regardless of what the report says.”

But, the publishers are more optimistic. “These are exciting books,” Johnson said. “They remind you of the power of a book and its place in our democracy.” Lyons said, “The reports that have been released in the past have been of the highest quality. I have no reason to believe that the Mueller report would be any different.”

But Greenblatt is skeptical that Americans will be racing to the bookstore to purchase the next “Infinite Jest.” “If the report turns out to be a postmodern novel with interesting and complex threads that go in different directions but don’t lead into a grand, clear narrative, then it’ll probably have less appeal,” he said. “More like something that people would just look at online.”

Tyler Foggatt is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.

Opinion - Tax money is paying for human rights violations

An echo opinion by Ester J. Cepeda published in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, in Texas

CHICAGO -- To those of us who have been following reports of the inhumane ways immigrants have been treated along the southern border, it comes as no shock that there’s a Facebook group in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents made puerile* (evil!) jokes about the deaths of migrants, suggested how to humiliate Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility and posted a vulgar sexual illustration targeting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

Considering that nearly 1,500 allegations of sexual abuse in immigration detention settings involving employees of the Department of Homeland Security were reported between 2012 and March 2018 -- a figure that is surely undercounted, given the power imbalance between victims and aggressors -- this dehumanizing behavior shouldn’t come as any surprise.

In a just world, millions of Americans would be protesting in the streets to free the children, women and families detained at the border who are, according to news reports, being denied access to medical care and basic supplies like soap, water and adequate food.

The same goes for the immigrants currently in detention centers in the interior of the country who are having their human rights violated. Lifesaving medicine is being withheld, and pregnant women have been forced to give birth in shackles. The list of barbarities goes on and on. But these people, who are marginalized on the edges of society, go largely unchampioned.

Which makes me wonder who will stand up for me, or my dad, mother, aunt or two cousins, should we find ourselves in the crosshairs of this country’s deportation machine, even though we are all U.S. citizens. (In fact, I have considered this issue with regard to anyone who has immigrant grandparents.)

It’s not a thought experiment.

The number of U.S. citizens who had encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- meaning that they were interviewed, screened and given a determination about whether they are lawfully present or not -- rose sharply from 5,940 in 2016 to 27,540 in 2018.

This is according to a new analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data by the American Immigration Council. The AIC had to sue ICE in order to get the figures.

“And we think this number is undercounted because there is an ‘unknown’ category [in the ICE data set] and this could be more U.S. citizens who were swept up in removal actions because they ‘appear deportable,’” said Emily Ryo, professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and a co-author of the analysis, during a press briefing.

We could spend a lot of time unpacking the notion that ICE agents appear to have such latitude and poor training in their work that they seemingly rely on looks to determine who they should approach. Instead, let me highlight a few other key findings:

-- ICE encountered and arrested proportionally more women during the beginning of the Trump administration than during the last part of the Obama administration. In many cases, these were “collateral” arrests, where the women just happened to be present when someone else was being targeted by ICE.

-- Between January 2016 and September 2018, more than 85% of people deported by ICE had either no criminal convictions or no convictions for crimes classified as violent or serious.

-- ICE enforcement actions are disproportionately concentrated in certain parts of the country. From 2016 to 2018, custodial arrests increased 118% in the Phoenix, Arizona, area, 124% in Buffalo, New York, and 151% in Philadelphia.

Taken all together, a picture emerges of an agency that seems to disregard the civil liberties of people who “look” deportable and is spending precious federal resources in a scattershot manner with no prioritization for the so-called “bad hombres” that President Trump has said he wants to get out of the country.

These are our tax dollars at work -- separating mothers and fathers from their children and families far from the southern border, even if they have no criminal history. (And for the umpteenth time, residing in the country without permission is a civil, not a criminal, violation.)

Call your representative in Congress. Tweet at them, post on their Facebook page or fax them.

However you want to do it, reach out and ask them why we’re spending so much of our money on ripping parents and family members with roots in their communities away from their U.S.-citizen children instead of prioritizing violent criminals.

This crisis may be happening quietly and sometimes far from the border, but it’s no less a humanitarian crisis for the people who are scarred by it.

Esther Cepeda is a columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group

*childish? How about "evil"!

A book introduction mindful of spiritual evolution

Lascaux Cave, France*

Obviously, because my blog identity is "Maine Writer", the title of the book, "Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine", by Alan Lightman, caught my attention, when it was on the "recommended reading", table, at the Topsham Public Library.

This meditative book ponders the transcending human quest to understand our perspective in the universe, from the author's point of view. I am transcribing the short introductory chapter titled "Cave", because the prose succinctly describes the evolving human condition, in relation to our never ending quest to understand, and ponder nature's beauties and civilization's mysteries.

Cave

1979. Smell of damp earth and stone. In the dim light, a small group of people talk in hushed voices as if entering a church, spellbound by the paints on the rock wall: bison and mammoth and horse, colored with red ochre** made from dirt and charcoal and bound with saliva and animal fat. I am without words, another ghost in the primordial cave in southwestern France. Font-de_Gaume it is called. The cave paintings date to 17,000 BC and were discovered by a local schoolmaster century ago. Hand-drawn shapes swerve and flow following the natural contours of the stone walls in one image, a fat horse bends down as if nuzzling a bison with bent head. Elsewhere, a herd of horses gallop across the stone plains, including a large animal with orange torso and black neck, and smaller beasts speckled in black and white. One painting in particular steals my attention - an entire bison drawn from what appears to be a single flowing line.

Clearly, these early humans were consummate artists with a heightened connection to nature. Did they also believe in an ethereal world? Did they believe in the invisible? What did they think of thunder and lightening, wind, stars overhead, their own beginnings and ends? They rarely lived past the age of thirty. 

Clad in the skins of animals they had killed and aware of their own impending demise, they must have looked up toward the unchanging stars with awe, and desire. In the foothills beyond the caves, these ancient people buried their dead in sewn garments and surrounded the prone bodies with tools and food for the next life. Was this time and this place where the longing began?

Nearby, someone strikes a match, against regulations and we all turn in surprise to watch the small fire. Shadows shift on the walls. Then the flame is gone, like these primitive ancestors of eons ago, like all living things, like the material world. 

*A Palaeolithic cave situated in southwestern France, near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne region, which houses some of the most famous examples of prehistoric cave paintings. Close to 600 paintings – mostly of animals - dot the interior walls of the cave in impressive compositions. Horses are the most numerous, but deer, aurochs, ibex, bison, and even some felines can also be found. Besides these paintings, which represent most of the major images, there are also around 1400 engravings of a similar order. The art, dated to c. 17,000 – c. 15,000 BCE, falls within the Upper Palaeolithic period and was created by the clearly skilled hands of humans living in the area at that time. The region seems to be a hotspot; many beautifully decorated caves have been discovered there. The exact meaning of the paintings at Lascaux or any of the other sites is still subject to discussion, but the prevailing view attaches a ritualistic or even spiritual component to them, hinting at the sophistication of their creators. Lascaux was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list in 1979, along with other prehistoric sites in its proximity.

**ocher- a natural clay

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine was published in 1918, by Pantheon Books, New York.