Down the Road East
Ward, Leo R.
424 T H E C O M M O N W E A L August 28, I929 States thousands of persons suffering from its ravages, even though only a few hundred new cases are discovered and reported to state health...
...With the benefit of these measures and the serious attention of trained workers, definite improvement can be secured in the present rather alarming state of affairs...
...Here in this hazelbrush, barked August 28, i929 THE COMMONWEAL 425 last winter by the rabbits and showing only a live shoot or two, is a flock of quail chicks that merely breaks covey and runs cheeping out of your reach...
...We knew where an unhealthy elm rose out of woolly grey mullens on your left, half-way up the third hill as you went east...
...That Eddi's Life"--as B. W. Wells confirms (English Historical Review, I89I, VI, 535)--"is the work of a partizan appears even from a cursory reading and is generally recognized...
...Oh, yes, but those were the old days, ancient times when people could know a road so familiarly...
...But if you heard someone coming down the next hill you began to pull out and to figure how you could make room to pass...
...we move faster now...
...The hill people for me...
...it was discovered by Mabillon, who says that he found in this work "the proof confirming the spread of the Benedictine rule in England made by the disciples of Saint Gregory, Augustine and others...
...f x en And if you went away Leaving me behind, I would seal a certain Corner of my mind...
...As things at present stand for these patients, adequate relief and treatment can be secured only at private institutions at an expense that is usually beyond the means of most...
...COMMUNICATIONS MONTE CASSINO Rome...
...Yet "it is not probable," as Wells goes on, "that Wilfrid became there first acquainted with the Benedictine rule, as Eddi's local pride makes him assert...
...The plains were at our back, but we never ranged toward them...
...Just stop and look around...
...Or you can pick grapes that leave a purple-pink stain, not snipping them off in a dainty way but running a whole branch through your fingers...
...I would find the greatest pleasure in going for a walk today down the road east...
...Near the peak of this last hill, just where you go down, you can reach up from your horse's back and help yourself to plums that, though of a scabby, cholera look and a lumpy meat, can be turned into an excellent jelly...
...its space is inconsiderable, but the space-time of it is avoided...
...Such neglect is a disgrace to enlightened civilization...
...They are entirely conscious of their plight, rarely living in the happy dream world, not caring what others think or say about them...
...where pinoaks and hickories thinned toward the tops of hills and the soil soured and would grow only a wiry grass specked with red and the sheep-sorrel that ate into our tongues and the lining of our cheeks...
...From Kent, relates Eddius, Saint Wilfrid brought also masons and cantors, among them Eddius himself...
...Plant a second iris By the weathered gate, Lest you should surmise my Ver/om, or my hate...
...In our hills and on our road, you would be somewhere...
...and if he found the rule there, obviously the rule existed in England before him...
...One may read, in his preface to the monumental Acta Sanctoram, O.S.B.,T.I., the fifth and eighth chapters: "De S. Mauri missione in Gallias," and "Augustinum sociosque monachos non tantum Fidei Christianae, sed etiam rei Benedectinae esse auctores...
...L~o KENNEDY...
...and I thought to myself, still pursuing, "Man, you are somewhere now, if you'd only stop...
...Indeed he relates that Saint Wilfrid from Sussex went back "ad sedem coenobialem" (i.e., to a monastery...
...I killed a snake yesterday, a leathery livid bull, on this second hill, east side, going down, at the spot where that post is broken off in Big Man's fence...
...Eddius's Life was unknown to the Bollandists...
...No effective means of curbing its spread is now protecting us...
...There may be a mask-like face, double vision, stupor, speech difficulties, behavior disorders or extreme irritability, but these patients are not insane and should not be classed or confined with the insane...
...Often without conspicuous deformities to excite pity, the emotional unbalance of the sleeping sickness victim makes him hard to associate with, and causes lack of sympathy and understanding...
...Look at the road out here, black with cars...
...In spite of themselves, people of the prairies look out on a sameness and flatness...
...If hospitalization and spiritual treatment are provided in connection with well-supervised farms, many of the individuals will earn their own support with limited indoor and outdoor work, and be less of a burden to themselves and others than they are now...
...massage, baths and especially psychotherapy are suggested treatments...
...I prefer its calm...
...I think they must have a way of renewing themselves, for, though they stand out in the weather, time tells very little on them...
...I would twist an iris From its narrow stalk...
...Even though there is no definite mental confusion, there is difficulty in the emotional control field...
...All this has an organic basis--the patient is not simply % neurotic...
...But hundreds of historians, among them Mabillon, Hergenr6ther, U. Berli~re, Gasquet, give these statements as a history, not as a tradition...
...Heddius, Bedae carus," as Hurter says (Nom...
...DOWN THE ROAD EAST By LEO R. WARD A YELLOW sierra of hills lay to the east of our place, down the road...
...where the clay was gravelly, blue-veined, marlish...
...Surely it needs only the thorough awakening of public opinion to bring about the required legislation, and to attract the attention of private philanthropy...
...The real question might be this: Does there exist one shred of documentary or archaeological proof against these traditions ? A different criterion could easily lead one to deny--as has happened-----even the historical existence of Jesus, or of Saint Peter, or of Saint Clement Roman, or of Saint Benedict, etc., etc...
...In many of the serious nervous disorders, unfortunately, the mental processes are involved in an indirect way...
...There is often a great depression of the spirits, a loss of will power, poorly controlled impulses with violent outbursts of temper, loss of interest in surroundings and unfounded fears and anxieties...
...There does not exist one shred of documentary or archaeological proof confirming them as authentic history...
...I know there tends to be about them something scraggly and angular, like the shell-barks and burr-oaks holding on to the clay of the hills...
...But tradition does not mean legend, nor imply opposition to, or defect of, truth...
...Giordani, in The Commonweal for June x2, tells us: 'Saint Maur introduced monasticism into France...
...Then around a jog or two was another choppy row of them that we called "the Washboard...
...Epidemic encephalitis is perhaps caused by an unidentified microbe that invades the brain and spinal cord, without involving the higher cortical or thinking centres of the brain...
...Now Kent is in England...
...The seven or eight miles around are regarded by practical people as much shorter...
...as you note, has more mobility...
...Persons of all ages, classes and conditions of living are open to its attack...
...But, I am glad to say, the road east is in no danger of becoming an auto run, though it might do to mark an airway...
...I was taken out of the bit of quiet that a city affords and hurried through the streets one day last summer by a friend who wished to go faster than the human flow, and as I followed I could only catch at the thought that he had got it into his head that if he did not hustle and keep "on the go" he would never get anywhere...
...We knew every rise of every slope, as you know the mounds on the lawn or the turns of your face, and with the help of landmarks, little individual ins and outs of the hills, we could place anything exactly for one who knew our world and our language...
...But there is less of the monotony that goes with the plain...
...The symptoms are much like those presented by an extremely neurotic person...
...424 T H E C O M M O N W E A L August 28, I929 States thousands of persons suffering from its ravages, even though only a few hundred new cases are discovered and reported to state health departments each year...
...As a result, a great many of these unfortunate victims are not receiving what their condition demands...
...Our houses, our pigs, our orchards, everything that we had, as well as ourselves, hung on the side of the hill...
...we played there and went down the hilly road to school...
...I, 650) "scripsit saepe panegyr/stae in modum vitam S. Wilfridi...
...It was our road, the hills were ours, intimately made into our lives...
...We gazed toward the light that breaks over the point of a hill and we watched our steps down into the valley every day of our lives...
...Eddius, however, is not so reliable as Dom Gray believes...
...Their horizon is an unbroken piece, almost a conventional thing...
...We were baptized in clay, and as we grew up they were there, always the same, before our opening minds...
...Epidemic encephalitis is to be feared, for it is a disease from which no one is immune...
...I understand...
...Many a useful member of society is thereby lost, and a definite economic burden is created which must ultimately be saddled on federal pensions, state aid and private charity...
...At least this seems to be the interpretation given to his words by Dora Gray...
...This road was never trafllcky...
...From his monastery on the Caelian he [Saint Gregory] sent Augustine, who with forty companions set foot on English soil in 596' 'And from this time Saint Benedict seems to have taken possession of England as his own.' Dom Gray ought to write: "Cardinal Gasquet tells us," because I was summing up his last book on Saint Benedict...
...where the greater black-oaks and elms spread out on the slit of the bottoms...
...But they left a mark on all us hill people...
...It was a saying with us that hills are the oldest thing in the world...
...Hardly anyone ever goes down the road east any more, and the mile of it, which before Einstein was the shortest distance from end to end, is seldom measured...
...That is, Mabillon found exactly the contrary to what has been seen by Dom Gray...
...In many instances these innocent victims are totally disabled, yet wofully neglected...
...then he went to Kent, whence he returned with the rule of Saint Benedict...
...A dozen persons went this way afoot or ahorseback or in rigs from dawn to dusk in summer, and a January snow might lie unbroken for weeks...
...But . . . if you came again Some cool afternoon, I would break the silence Of that dusty room...
...everything, perhaps llfe itself, is speeded up...
...O the Editor:--Dom Bede Gray, in his letter of July xo, x929, writes: "Mr...
...With the increase in prevalence, does not our chance of catching it increase ? The treatment of epidemic encephalitis cases, with the residual aftermath, also calls for more scientific study, care and hospital observation...
...If Dom Gray had cited all the words attributed to Wilfrld...
...Scrawl upon your gate-post Ribaldries in chalk...
...I should say, however, that Eddius was not so partizan as to deny the most obvious truth...
...A hill man is disappointed when he goes to live on the plains and finds so great a lack of diversity and color in nature and in the people's lives...
...We were taken up and down them, as a child is taken to church, before we knew hill from plain...
...If that were so, the very principles of religion and history would be broken...
...Here is the Squire's place, burry and unproductive as it has always been, here is J. C.'s, here is Susie's timbered eighty...
...For his objection, Dom Gray relies on a statement attributed by Eddius to Saint Wilfrid, according to which the Benedictine rule was introduced into England by this saint...
...We trundled along over their feet, rested a moment leaning on their sides, and saw the world from their brows...
...Litt...
...The symptoms in the chronic forms of the disease are largely those of disordered muscular control, disturbances of the emotions and inability to make a living...
...where you are-that is somewhere...
...Mabillon, for instance, quotes and examines critically more than one document, before reaching those conclusions...
...Special measures, including careful cleansing of the nose, mouth and throat...
...All these points lald down by Gasquet are for Dom Gray "nothing more than traditions...
...In epidemic encephalitis we have a serious disease of the nervous system in which further study and proper hospital care may mean more than words can tell...
...Our fathers plowed the steep wall and planted it...
...Even today many states do not require reports on this disease, and no state legislature seems fully aware of the need for any legislation...
...Saint Placid . . . was sent to Messing...
...In cities, also, life is dull, and the people, pressed like prairie dwellers with nothing new to see, are apt to take to drinking, or hurrying...
...We took physical shape and, I think, mental turns from looking seldom on a level but up and down their slopes, and if we became a little earthy they became very human...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 17
