Families and friends who read together, stay together.
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 30, 2024 – One of literature’s greatest uses is to serve as a meeting place for people who live far apart, such as my daughter and I do. We discovered this a few years ago, when we happened to be reading the same book, she in Virginia and me in Massachusetts. That book was The Greater Journey, by David McCullough, and it led to our becoming so enamored of Augustus St. Gaudens, that we became pilgrims of his sculpture.
After the omnipresence of construction barricades in downtown Boston denied us a view of his depiction of Col. Robert Shaw and the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, our April roadtrip carried us over the Mason-Dixon line, and we found, in Washinton’s Rock Creek Park, the sculpture commissioned by his friend, Henry Adams. The Adams Memorial serves both as an unmarked gravestone for Adams’s wife, and as a public gathering place for small groups, whether their grief is patent or latent.

“Grief” is the name given it by the ink-stained wretches of the newspaper business, but the artist referred to it as “The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding.” Hence, St. Gaudens chose metal and torch to make his way in the world, rather than paper and pen, as his friend Adams had done. (A historian, great- and grand-son of John and John Quincy, his “The Education of Henry Adams” was named the most important nonfiction book of the 20th century by the NY Public Library (That’s NYPL, not BPL – so you know they ain’t foolin’ around)).
Our current shared reading is a virtual offspring of the first, Americans in Paris, by Adam Gopnik, a hundred or so snippets and samples from a cornucopia of American writers, each of whom sees Paris with personal, customized eyes. As over-eating leads me to torpor, over-reading leads me to writing, and so, at the very start of this virtual trip with my daughter, here are two snippets:
Place Pigalle, poem by Richard Wilbur
To the eye of a poet, earth is populated by human archetypes, besides the women and men, girls and boys of their acquaintance. With his poem, Place Pigalle, Richard Wilbur portrays two people who have traveled together since before the flood, to meet again in the Parisian twilight, after the last world war.
How lucky are the soldier and the whore to have Mr. Wilbur sketch them in this poem. He sees soldiers as “boys with ancient faces,” ladies of the neon-lighted night as “electric graces.”
Excerpt from Satori in Paris, by Jack Kerouac
Re-reading, in 2024, an excerpt from Kerouac’s Satori in Paris, first read a few years after publication in 1966, reminds me what good company was Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac while I was reading my way out of university, as the Days of Rage settled into the placid insanity of the republican magaverse.
It was a blast hopping freights and hot-wiring hot rods with the high school football hero, even if his closeted homo-eroticism and mother-fixation were off-putting. His condition at the fruition of his suicide-by-alcohol should be made required learning for every boy with dreams of beatnik glory.
In memory of Mrs. Robert Gould Shaw
p.s. Since it is located near where I live in Lenox, MA, we also visited the grave of Mrs. Shaw, who lived 44 years after the heroic death of her husband during the seige of Charlestown, SC. It delighted us to find there a well-hewn Celtic cross to attract the eye of passersby.
