The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Read Online Free PDF

what I got!”—pulling us under a torch to show us a tatty old half an encyclopedia, opened to a picture of a black sky over white ground, on which stood two completely white figures and an American flag. “That’s the moon, see? I told you we went there, and you wouldn’t believe me.” “I still don’t believe you,” Steve said, and nearly busted laughing at the fit the old man threw. “I bought this picture for four jars of honey to prove it to you skeptics, and you still won’t believe me?” “No!” Kathryn and I were in hysterics at the two of them—we were pretty drunk too. But he kept the picture (though he threw away the encyclopedia), and later I saw the blue ball of the Earth in the black sky, as small as the moon is in our sky. I must have stared at that picture for an hour. So one of the least likely of his claims was apparently true; and I was inclined to believe the rest of them, usually.
    “All right,” Tom said, handing me my cup full of the pungent tea. “Let’s hear it.”
    I cleared my mind to imagine the page of the book Tom had assigned me to learn. The regular lines of the poetry made them easy to memorize, and I spoke them out as my mind’s eye read them:
    “‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’
       Said then the lost Archangel, ‘this the seat
    That we must change for Heaven?
           —this mournful gloom
    For that celestial light?’”
    I went on easily, having a good time playing the part of defiant Satan. Some of the lines were especially good for thundering out:
    “‘Farewell, happy fields,
    Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! Hail,
    Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
    Receive thy new possessor—one who brings
    A mind not to be changed by place or time.
    The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
    What matter where, if I be still the same,
    And what I should be, all but less than he
    Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
    We shall be free—’”
    “All right, that’s enough of that one,” Tom said, looking satisfied as he stared out to sea. “Best lines he ever wrote, and half of them stolen from Virgil. What about the other piece?”
    “I do that one even better,” I said confidently. “Here you go:
    “Methinks I am a prophet new inspired,
    And thus expiring do foretell of him:
    His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
    For violent fires soon burn out themselves.
    Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
    He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
    With eager feeding, food doth choke the feeder—”
    “That was us all right,” Tom interrupted. “He’s writing about America, there. We tried to eat the world and choked on it. I’m sorry, go on.”
    I struggled to remember my place, and started again:
    “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
    This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
    This other Eden, demi-paradise,
    This fortress built by Nature for herself
    Against infection and the hand of war,
    This happy breed of men, this little world,
    This precious stone set in a silver sea
    Which serves it in the office of a wall,
    Or as a moat defensive to a house,
    Against the envy of less happier lands,
    This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England—”
    “Enough!” Tom cried, chuckling and shaking his head. “Or too much. I don’t know what I think. But I sure give you good stuff to memorize.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “You can see why Shakespeare thought England was the best state.”
    “Yes, he was a great American. Maybe the greatest.”
    “But what does moat mean?”
    “Moat? Why, it means a channel of water surrounding a place to make it hard to get to. Couldn’t you figure it out by context?”
    “If I could’ve, would I have asked you?”
    He cackled. “Why, I heard that one out at one of the little back country swap meets, just last year. Some farmer. ‘We’re going to put a moat around the granary,’ he said.