Jacques Barzun (1907-2012)

I reviewed Jacques Barzun's book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2000, 877 pp.), when it came out in 2000. He died yesterday, at age 104.

Aware that some people use the word decadent exclusively to mean "sordid" or "depraved," Jacques Barzun defines the term more neutrally for his readers as "a falling down." "When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent," he writes. When members of the "stalled society" search in all directions for a new faith or faiths, that's another sign of decay. When they confess openly to feelings of intractable malaise, they are themselves decadent. "The term is not a slur," he advises; "it is a technical label. A decadent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist," because no one and nothing is taken seriously anymore.

What has led us to "our present disarray," which includes things like the theory of literary deconstruction? One answer Barzun gives is scientism, another term he defines for us, as "the fallacy of believing that the method of science must be used on all forms of experience and, given time, will settle every issue." Scientism has led to the overvaluation of reason, rationality, abstraction and analysis, and to the polite (or sometimes not so polite) dismissal of non-scientists--artists, philosophers, theologians, historians, and the like--as "dabblers in the suburbs of truth." The witch trials of Salem were rooted in "the work of reason upon fragments of experience," Barzun notes. Marx, too, fell prey to scientism: he thought he had "formulated the mechanics of history and could predict the future scientifically."

Moralism is another reason why our culture is drawing to a close in "disenchantment," according to the distinguished nonagenarian, whose political views cannot be described as other than rightist. (He is anti-affirmative action, a Jefferson apologist, and a defender of Columbus who believes that blaming the Italian explorer for the Native Americans' plight is a case of "retrospective lynching." Not only that, he dares to breathe the sensible words that "a long tradition develops a cultural type that looks genetically produced.") Like Gertrude Himmelfarb, another conservative cultural critic, he defends--and redresses--the popular image of the Victorians. ("Self-control at least develops a self.") A response to the disorder that followed the French Revolution and its sequels, moralism set in long before Victoria's reign--indeed, twenty years before her birth--and is not morality per se but a poor substitute for it, comprising attitudes "ridiculously pompous and dangerously repressive." Think of Louis XVI, Barzun suggests, but also religious fundamentalists of today.

The fragmentation of faith is, in fact, the most basic of all reasons for the decay of civilization. (Less original thinkers, by contrast, consider it a symptom.) The shattering began when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five propositions on the Wittenberg church door. "A common faith is a necessity for any society that wants internal peace and decent government," Barzun says, quoting G.B. Shaw, one of his intellectual idols. Not even the new religion of science can supply it.

Barzun ascribes some of the credit (or blame) for the success of the Protestant Reformation to Gutenberg, since the printing press made more copies of Luther's proposals than human copyists ever could. This, he says, had implications for the general search for verities on the planet: "The one drawback to print is that the uniform finality of black on white leads the innocent to believe that every word so enshrined is true. And when these truths diverge from book to book (for the incentive to write and publish is also increased), the intellectual life is changed. From being more or less a duel, it becomes a free-for-all. The scrimmage makes for a blur of ideas, now accepted as a constant and fondly believed to be, like the free market, the ideal method for sifting truth."

Showing the connection between moveable feasts and moveable type--and making multitudes of other links--is Barzun's special gift. But unlike our faltering western culture, the book is not a pastiche. If a literary masterpiece must be, as he says, "a comprehensive vision of the world," this is one, and a reader does not need to agree with his prognosis to be swept along by it.

The book's blackest, angriest chapters are those about the Great War of 1914-18, later renamed because it had a sequel. World War I was "the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction," asserts the man who, born in 1907, spent the duration of his childhood in wartime France, and like so many others was permanently scarred by the experience. He seems to have spent the rest of his life trying to figure out how such a cataclysm occurred. If books are written because authors are driven to explain something to themselves, From Dawn to Decadence is his exegesis of the event that gave us tanks, mobile cannons, wide-ranging submarines, blimps, various types of airplanes, gas masks, and "Big Bertha," the large-bore gun that could fire a shell at a target seventy-five miles away. Ten million dead is one estimate of the toll. At the Battle of the Somme, where tanks were first used in warfare, the British losses alone were 60,000 in one day. (American dead in all the Vietnam years were 57,685.) But, as Barzun notes, a war's losses of all kinds is a far wider category than "mere" mortalities: "The maimed, the tubercule, the incurables, the shell-shocked, the sorrowing, the driven mad, the suicides, the broken spirits, the destroyed careers, the budding geniuses plowed under, the missing births were losses, and they are incommensurable."

After the Great War, developments in the arts helped destroy the culture, Barzun argues. In the 1920s--long before the cultural rebellions of the 'sixties--elders were judged untrustworthy (after all, what a mess their war had been), and artists were the first to proclaim it. Thus began the attacks on authority, ridicule of anything established, distortions of language and objects, indifference to clear meaning, and the list of genres that begin with the prefix "anti." For the previous four centuries art had been inseparable from virtue. No longer: its moral and social purposes were buried along with doughboys.

Although his erudition is beyond question, Barzun can himself be a quirky reasoner at times. Perhaps not purely in jest he longs for a return of the duel, since it settled matters that now clog courts--personal insults, for example. He also likes to tweak all manner of noses, calling Harvard in its earliest years "a sort of high school." Most inflammatorily, he writes that feminists are the ones who push the damaging female stereotype, for they, not their supposed enemies, characterize women as chattel and drudges. In his opinion, "the notion that talent and personality in women were suppressed at all times during our half millennium except the last fifty years is an illusion."

Quirky, too, are his suggestions for further reading, many of them older titles. ("It is a false analogy with science that makes one think latest is best.") If Barzun were Oprah, there would be a run on some authors who have not enjoyed wide readerships in years, if ever. This reviewer was gratified to see one of her own underrated favorites mentioned, the essayist John Jay Chapman. (It would take the politically incorrect Barzun to make such a recommendation, for Chapman had his regrettable, anti-Semitic moments.) Finley Peter Dunne, an 1890s Chicago newspaper columnist, he calls "a literary genius" and "only one of the great native sons whose neglect is a reproach to the American mind, that is to say the academics and the critics." Dorothy Sayers is the biggest surprise in his pantheon, but the British mystery writer also wrote on theology, and the book of hers that he recommends (twice) is The Mind of the Maker.

These titles, as well as many of the familiar classics, are our hope, Barzun says in the closing section of the book. What may save future generations from their own "brutishness" is a good deal of literature and history from the past 500 years of western culture, "mingled with a sizable infusion of the eastern." He predicts they'll start to read them when they're finally bored to tears by the decadent offerings of their own closing culture. The old texts will be "in odd shapes"--formats he doesn't dare to imagine--but they will lay the foundation of the "renascent" ethos (his preferred word), Chekov's words among them, who wrote in a notebook a century ago, "How pleasant it is to respect people!" (For by the fin-de-siècle, such a sentiment had already fallen out of vogue.) Thus reborn, they'll start to imitate their elders, but quickly move on from there, and, with resurrected enthusiasm, invent a new civilization. True, it's a reckless prediction, given his chronicle. It's a measure of his mastery--and his faith--that he makes it seem almost believable.

Making Peace with Cuckoo Clocks

Where the cuckoo clock was born, Chekov died. That seems to be the sorry crux of it. Never mind the span of over two centuries between the two events. I'm suspended over the precipice, looking down at the gulf between them -- Chekov on one side, failing, finally expiring; cuckoos on the other, reproducing, rising, their doors flying open in unison, and the little birds together crying out their two-note-song that earned them their place of dubious honor in the annals of clockmaking. "Cuckoo! cuckoo!" I despair of finding enough shoes in the world to throw at all of them.

The cuckoo's place of origin is not where Orson Welles put it in 1949, incidentally. If you know the famous line from The Third Man, forget it or revise it in your bank of movie memories. "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed -- they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance," Welles says in the film version of Graham Greene's novel. "In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!" Welles later claimed that the speech was based on a fragment of an old Hungarian play. But the scene of the horological crime wasn't Switzerland; it was the Black Forest of southwestern Germany.

We are told by those who sell cuckoo clocks today that Anton Ketterer invented the first one, in 1670. But all his clock did was make the bird call on the hour, the result of two little bellows of leather and wood or paper and wood; there was as yet no carved replica popping out of a triggered door. Michael Dilger has been credited with adding that feature, and since his dates are 1717-91, it was an "improvement" that came a few generations later.

The existence of these men is unverified, however, merely agreed upon by manufacturers of today's cuckoos. And horologists, who do the serious clock histories in this world, don't seem much interested in getting to the truth about the clock's birth, if information even exists. In the library of my horologist husband I noted that, compared to the number of words written on, say, tall-case clocks, there isn't a lot on cuckoos, not even in the fifty years' worth of articles in the official bulletin of the national clock collector association in the country whose people are unofficially said to buy more cuckoos than anybody else--the United States.

  What is it in our character that attracts us to a bird who lives inside a clock and makes that annoying sound twenty-four times a day? My parents weren't the type to buy me the usual icons of a happy childhood. They tried them out on my older sister first, and weren't inclined to repeat their mistakes. So she is the one who got a Cinderella watch, majorette's baton … and a cuckoo. But how is it that we have taken this up as a symbol of juvenile bliss? For it is a curious one, considering that deep within the nature of the actual animal is an instinct to abandon its young. The common gray cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) of Europe makes no nest. Instead, it lays an egg in the nest of a bird of a similar species. The foster mother sits on it along with her own eggs. When the baby cuckoo is born, it is fed by that mother, not its own. In this way another shameless, so-called "nest parasite" is introduced to family living cuckoo-style. Sometimes it throws the other babies out, leaving itself no competitors for its adoptive mother's care and attention.

In a reversal of sorts, an abandoned cuckoo clock made in the 1970s was left with us a couple of years ago. Our neighbor had noticed it on the sidewalk in somebody's trash, and although she didn't have any use for it, she thought my husband, Bob, the clockmaker might. And he dutifully took it into his workshop, but hasn't rushed to restore it. "These newer ones are the worst combination of cheap and complicated," says Bob, who generally refuses cuckoo-clock repair business. "They weren't meant to be fixed." And those rare clockmaker friends of his who do accept them merely rip out the old movement and replace it with a new one.

Cuckoos are powered by weights hanging on chains that descend over a day's time, tempting many a house cat. Inside the clock the chains are pulling on a succession of gears that apportion the power slowly over time. A car's transmission and a ten-speed bike work on the same principle. One of the cuckoo's gears swings the pendulum, which produces the tick-tock sound. Another pushes a lever on which sits the bird. (Between the bird and the back of the door there is a wire, so as the perched bird is pushed, the door is opened, too.) Yet another gear works to make the bellows puff out the cuckoo notes. Cuckoos also have a gear that trips an hour-counting gong of the stick-beating-a-trash-can-lid variety. If all of that weren't enough potential cause for clock stoppage, a cheap cuckoo's weights are often made purposely too heavy, allowing them to operate without fine tuning but causing premature and often irreversible wear.

So maybe I'm expecting too much of poor cuckoos. They were always a novelty, meant to charm if only temporarily, never prized for their precision. Like all early Black Forest clocks, they were made crudely, by farmers with nothing else to do on long winter nights in the forestlands of Baden-Baden and environs. In the beginning, not only their house-shaped cases but their movements were made of wood, instead of the brass that powered the clocks of more affluent people. Worse, the wood was soft -- less durable than hard wood, subject to swelling and worms -- although it was easier to embellish with carved leaves, nests of eggs, hunting weapons, and stags' antlers. The first weights on many cuckoos were rounded stones fished from the forest streams. Only later did their makers use the decorative pine-cone motif so familiar to us now. By that time, the home craft had become a cottage industry, and in the spring, peddlers carried them on frames strapped to their backs, selling them along with other clocks.
     Like the Good Humor man, these salesmen struck a clock's bell to announce their arrival. They also offered a repair service, often needed on clocks that hung in farmhouses, where cooking smoke permeated every room, and grease and dust inevitably clogged clockworks. In the mid-1800s the first clock factories were established. Schools, too. And workmanship improved. Today collectors covet cuckoos from the turn of the century. I have seen them go at auction for thousands. Once I met a man who boasted that his cuckoo was worth $4,000. "The date inside is 1904, December 26th, " he told me, adding with what I took to be pride, "The day after Christmas, and the Germans are back at work."

Coincidentally, 1904 is the year Chekov died at a spa in Badenweiler, tubercular at age forty-four.

New cuckoos are still made in the Black Forest, where song birds abound, though not as many as there used to be, thanks to pollution. They are sold to Americans touring Germany and prowling stateside gift shops on rainy summer afternoons. Cuckoos can also, of course, be had by way of the Internet, where purveyors seem always to stress the night shut-off feature above all else. The price range is $150 to $1500 and up. Plastic parts proliferate at the low end. In the upper, cases are wooden, purportedly hand-carved, and offer much more than a single noisy bird. Expect hourly or even more frequent shows of dancers and musicians, water wheels, milkmaids tending their cows, goats and sheep, shepherds and wolves, wood choppers who move their arms in time to the cuckoo's call, and beer drinkers who raise their elbows to the same rhythm.

Sometimes a company feels the need to include information on its Website that does not seem to me to pertain. A German firm, for instance, wants us to know that although it is run by the son of the man who started it in 1938, you can rest assured that Junior started "at the very bottom." Much more problematic for me is the link provided by an American importer. It connects to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Pictures of boys and girls are flashed. Click on the individual photo and the face grows larger, and more details are given. The youngsters' hometowns are named -- all the usual big cities, as well as places like Kingfisher, Ohio. We also learn the date of his or her last sighting; and age at that time. You are given a number to call if you recognize any of them.

But in what spirit are you supposed to buy a cuckoo clock after seeing all of that sadness?

I was told as a child that I took things too seriously. I suppose I am taking the cuckoo clock too seriously right now. It is, I'll admit, isolating not to share the enthusiasms of society; to say to myself things like, "Consumer goods are the opiate of the people" and "They wait to be told what to want. It's the nearest thing to waiting to be told what to think. I really see no difference." And "Those people should…" What a curmudgeon I am not to recognize the simple pleasures that cuckoos bring to their owners! I might have argued that they bother me because their popularity drives to the heart of our culture; instead, all I can safely say is that my dislike of cuckoos drives to the heart of me.

The pull of the popular is strong. When did I leave its orbit? There was a time when I had to have my Pappagallos, my weekly Nancy Drew. I was a Girl Scout, earning badges: Dabbler, Cook, Animal, Bird…. Then what happened? No longer a Scout, but still wearing Pappagallos, I started reading real books. Thereafter I would accept no substitutes. But their attraction wasn't that they made me feel superior. On the contrary, they immersed me in the great whole, the real whole, that is much larger than any solitary, cuckoo-clock-loving country.

I know I can't prevent people from buying cuckoos, or anything else; I'd more easily entice someone to read Chekov instead of their usual Clancy or Cornwell. I may as well admit that cuckoos are a part of the great whole, too. And there's another confession. Once, Bob and I did have a cuckoo clock on our own wall, briefly. A combination cuckoo-and-quail, it had come into the house as a purchase Bob made, along with a group of other clocks. We hung it in the living room. The cuckoo sounded every hour, its companion quail every fifteen minutes: "Who-who-who!" It was a question as much as a declaration that we grew to love and we grew to hate. One day, a family of four came over to buy a tall-case clock. When Bob gave the kids a demonstration of the cuckoo-quail, they wanted it, and the parents bought it for them. We saw the father of the family again a few months later. We gave the quail's call in greeting, and he answered us back with the same.

The Egg Man

I have donated some old films and a panoramic photo to the Knights of Columbus Museum in New Haven, Connecticut. They were in the estate of my uncle Dan J. Schinto (1910-2003) of Greenwich. I hadn’t known there was a Knights of Columbus Museum until I read about it in the Antiques & Arts Weekly the other day. I’m so happy that I found a repository for these things.

The films, I was told by my uncle some years ago, are of Knights of Columbus clambakes, the same subject as the panorama. I believe these took place at Tod’s Point (now called Greenwich Point) in Greenwich. One of the boxes is in fact marked “Clam Bake 1943.”

The others are marked “Ferndale” and “E. Elm.” I can’t say for sure that these are Knights of Columbus materials, since I’ve never viewed them, but they now belong to the museum, to do with them what they will.  “E. Elm” probably means “East Elm Street” in Greenwich. It could be that these are actually from events of The Improved Order of Redmen, another organization that my uncle belonged to.

I also gave the museum a couple of photos of my uncle, along with his business card. Calling himself Pine Grove Farm, he had a fresh chicken and egg business in Greenwich from the 1930’s through the 1960’s. The photos are dated 1936. He’d drive up to farms in Connecticut and perhaps also upstate New York and buy wholesale, then sell retail and deliver to the big estates in Greenwich.

It was a time when hired cooks made cakes from scratch and had to feed many servants. As a result, many dozens of eggs, many pounds of butter, many chickens, etc., were required every week. He closed the business because he was using the Merritt Parkway to get to the farms, and commercial vehicles were not allowed to travel that road. He had swapped his truck for a station wagon, but still he would be stopped and finally got tired of it. Also, the estates were using fewer servants, and old-fashioned cooking was going out of style... And probably too there were fewer farms...

After that, he worked at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, in maintenance. He retired at the mandatory age of 80. He was still known as “The Egg Man,” however.

He never married and lived with his mother and two unmarried sisters. He was the last survivor.

Dan (not Daniel) was a devout Catholic and long-standing member of St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich.

My uncle was a wonderful person, never judgmental, very kind, and extremely generous (except with himself). He hated a fuss to be made. 

He never lost his hearing, or his mental abilities. His sight had been bad since childhood, but it was corrected with thick glasses. He was a great story teller and a loud snorer.

He loved fresh fruit; he hated onions and garlic and refused to eat either or anything cooked with them -- a problem for my Italian grandmother, but she abided by the edict.

Cancer and heart problems finally got him at age 93.

"Poor Street: An Introduction"

Until recently, I didn't even come close to being what anyone would call a nature lover. If compelled by friends to go on a hike, I was apt to say, halfway up the trail, "Oh, good! Here comes another sign -- something to read!" My childhood is partly to blame. My family never hiked, much less camped. My father always said two years of sleeping on a cot in the Air Force in Kissimmee, Florida, had been enough outdoor life for him; my mother got her fresh air on tennis courts and golf courses. My own tendencies account for the rest. In my high-school biology class, a look at paramecia under a microscope did amaze me, but what impressed me more were the hairy edges of the magnified letter "e" I had clipped from a newspaper. In college, I read Thoreau and, afterwards, Annie Dillard, but neither inspired me to be a naturalist; instead, they inspired me to stay indoors and read more.

    Behind my house here in Andover, Massachusetts, just across a common alley, there is a string of stores -- bridal salon, hair-stylist, portrait photographer -- not exactly purveyors of staples, but I find watching the activity they generate as necessary as bread. Above the stores are apartments-turned-condos and a lawyers' office. One night someone hurled a woman's wedding ring from a third-story window. A search for it ensued, extending into our back yard. Another night, a cross dresser cruised that alley, teetering in high-heels and trailing perfume. If I'm being honest, I must confess that I find these events much more interesting than any number of wood duck sightings. And yet with increasing frequency, in what began as fits of virtuousness but which now might more accurately be described as moments of continued curiosity, I walk out my front door and across the street to Hussey's Pond. Even if I do sometimes get bored by nature, I don't ever get bored by Hussey's.

    I have a set of yard-sale binoculars, which I use to spy on the geese over there. On summer mornings, coming home from my dog walk, I witness them landing en masse, using their wonderfully rubbery-looking retractable black feet. Other times only one arrives, circa five a.m., while I'm still in bed, then proceeds to honk and honk. But whether it's to call the rest of the flock or to warn it away, I cannot tell you. Nor do I know if it's always the same lone honker (his or her job, perhaps?). I am truly sorry I cannot tell my neighbors apart. About once a summer, no spy glasses are needed, when they all attempt to cross the street to graze on my patch of front lawn. They're welcome to it. And a few of them usually do make it to my side, while most get discouraged or confused, despite the obliging drivers who invariably stop, amused. What has motivated this pilgrimage is something else I do not know. There is plenty of grass on the pond side. Another mystery, but one that seems right to be so, is the behavior of the ghostly blue heron who commutes between Hussey's and unknown points. I sometimes see it -- or what I presume to be it -- flying overhead while I'm driving on I-495. (My certainty that there's only one blue heron in the vicinity -- and that this is it -- is, of course, unprovable but unshakable, like an article of faith. A friend who lives on the opposite side of Andover and who also sees the heron, shares with me this faith.) I've stopped wondering why it's always alone. The other night at the pond, I was within ten feet of it and its long, silvery, serpentine neck as it waited for a fish along the shoreline, and I waited with it. Among other things, herons have more patience than I do; I gave up and went home before I witnessed it swallowing its supper.

    Hussey's isn't big, as ponds go. A dozen strokes of a canoe paddle would take you the length of it. Counting the conservation land that abuts it, it's not quite four acres. (Walden Pond, by contrast, is sixty-two acres.) An 1852 map of the area doesn’t show Hussey’s; one from 1888 does. At some point between those two dates, Elijah Hussey dammed a brook to power his sawmill, and the pond was formed just below it. In the winter, Hussey hired workers to cut blocks of ice for sale to owners of icehouses. The maps show the pond’s lineage -- its family history, so to speak -- which links it to the Merrimack River by way of brooks and tributaries, some of them underground.

    The pond is on the northern edge of town, on a one-way street that isn't well-traveled, and there is no marked entrance to the adjoining conservation land, so it's understandable that many people living in Andover today can't name this pond, while many others don't even know it exists, even though it’s near one of the town’s busiest intersections. Haggett’s Pond is the one townspeople know best; at 250 acres, it’s our major water source. And yet just a few generations ago Hussey’s was a popular public swimming "hole." During the summer of 1936, according to an old newspaper clipping, over 4,500 children swam there under the supervision of Woodrow “Woody” Cowley, a lifeguard who was employed by the town. I once knew a man, now deceased, who was taught to swim by Crowley’s brother, Biddy, at Hussey’s. Jack went on to become a lifeguard there, and in 1948 he made alternate on the U.S. Olympic swimming team. “There used to be a wooden raft out in the middle,”Jack once told me, “and I can remember taking a running start down those cement piers" -- piers so overgrown with brush that I didn't notice them until he pointed them out. Jack, who moved to Pennsylvania years ago and used to return to Andover only for regular visits, also played hockey on Hussey's. Some years, the games began as early as Thanksgiving. He’d eat turkey dinner, then rush off to the pond. The games usually continued through March. Every school day, he said, “there’d be about three [simultaneous] games going on until dark." Then, in 1947, after a series of winter drownings, ice-skating was discouraged on Andover's ponds. In 1950, Phillips Academy, about two miles south of Hussey's, became the first prep school in the country to build an indoor skating rink, and granted ice time to the local citizenry. Swimming in ponds like Hussey's gradually grew less popular, too, not because of tragedy but because swimming pools started being built. Town records show that attendance at Andover’s ponds peaked in 1959. Sixteen-acre Pomp's Pond is Andover's only public pond that remains open and staffed today.

    In the same postwar period, in my Connecticut hometown, ponds as places for public recreation were already starting to be passé. In 1952-53, Frank Franco’s Western Connecticut Builders, a construction company, built a ring of tract houses there, around a half-mile cul de sac, and put an unnamed, never-named pond of an acre or so into the middle of it. Our house was on the outer rim of that circular neighborhood, although it wasn't one of Franco's. It was built by my father, who worked for Franco as a carpenter. Recently, my father told me that each abutter owned a pie-shaped piece of the pond that converged with all the other pieces in the pond's center and that Franco owned the frontage everybody treated as communal. He also said, "When they dug that pond, they found dozens and dozens and dozens of golf-ball-sized turtle eggs." In creating a place where people might ostensibly enjoy a look at nature, Franco destroyed some. But that is an adult perspective; it's contemporary, too. At the time, the Franco name commanded my respect. Not only my father's bosses but the creator of a "man-made" pond, he was, to me, a god of sorts, or one of God's competitors.

    Very little swimming occurred in that pond, and none of it was sanctioned by adults, who said it was polluted. Polluted. The word alone kept us girls out, although not the boys, who enjoyed pushing each other in. Our coastal town had three public beaches; otherwise, that pond might have been a more tempting swimming venue for everyone. Fishing was possible but unproductive. My friend Maureen and I fished there once, futilely, with bread balls, using safety pins for hooks. What self-respecting fish would fall for such a thing? Some ice-skating took place there, but parents preferred to take kids to the larger, town-owned pond in a public park, where the ice was tested, approved, and smoothed by plows, and its weak spots were noted with saw horses. The park pond also had official adult supervision, unlike my neighborhood pond, where we kids, in any season, were more or less on our own. That frontage, after all, was nobody's back yard. Rather, it was a free zone that turned pet dogs into fighters as each vied to claim the turf and from which boys couldn't be banished by somebody’s mother. A boy whom I’ll call Kenny was among the most persistently pugnacious. I can still see his face distorted by rage. Once, he tortured to death a snapping turtle. Kenny and his troubled family lived across from the Franco frontage but were otherwise unlucky and suffered multiple tragedies. Kenny was out of high school when he hanged himself in the garage.

    Better to remember the Kutscher family, who lived almost next door to Kenny’s, but their own proximity to the pond, dangerous but attractive (isn't that always the way?), wasn't the only reason to envy them. It was also because an aunt of theirs had a pool.

    Every summer the Kutschers' aunt had a pool party, and our family was invited -- a special occasion for me, since it was among the few times all season I could swim in coveted chlorine. Like ours, the aunt's neighborhood was newly build and had a pond in the middle of it. Unlike ours, hers was big enough for boating. At one of her parties, my father ventured down to the dock, and stepped onto a raft tied to it. Seizing the opportunity, some boys untied the ropes and began to swim with the raft, and my father. It was a joke -- good-natured Dad was laughing -- but I was terrified, certain he was going to fall into the water, where deadly snakes lived, I'd been told. Embarrassed for him, too, I had never seen him looking so vulnerable. In the end, only his shoes got wet, but the incident reinforced my feeling that ponds were perilous places. One really had best keep one's distance from any of them.

    Despite the liabilities, legal risks now inevitably among the biggest of them, current creators of neighborhoods still include ponds in their plans -- for ponds remain symbols of a good life, if not the good life -- even though the one in the middle of my now late in-laws' Florida retirement community was state-of-the art for being strictly for show. The elderly residents of the place, in Palm Beach Gardens, would no sooner jump into their pond than into a bubbling cauldron. The builders of a short-lived phenomenon known as "Hussey's Pond Lane" didn't even build a pond; they merely usurped the name of the pond nearby. In fact, you could say they went one step further than the Florida builders: they used only the idea of a pond for their purposes, which I learned about only by chance. It happened this way. A couple of years ago, many Andoverites fought hard against the scheduled demolition of the old Joseph Poor house on my street, Poor Street -- in fact, within view of my house --and also against construction of a slew of condominiums on the Poor property. Poor's has the distinction of being among the oldest houses in Andover extant, built circa 1830, as well as a documented stop on the Underground Railway. Citizens did succeed in preventing the house’s destruction, and although they couldn't quash the condos altogether, they did reduce their number. One day, during construction activities, a truck driver, roaming the neighborhood, asked me the way to "Hussey's Pond Lane." Having never heard of it, I asked to look at his printed directions. That's when I realized the developers, apparently not fancying the idea of trying to sell half-a-million-dollar condos on a street named Poor, had rechristened their portion of it. I fumed about this for a few days, even mentioning it to a local reporter whose newspaper had covered the demolition controversy. "Check out the irony of that epilogue," I told him. But no story appeared, and in the end, the name never was entered into town records. The address of the condos is Poor Street, just like mine.

    One could argue that, since the pond had its beginnings in commerce  -- as have had so many artificial ponds that we erroneously consider to be unadulterated examples of good old American pastoralism -- I shouldn't have minded the builders of erstwhile "Hussey's Pond Lane" using it for their commercial interests. (Notably, Franco’s pond was originally made for commercial reasons, says my father. Franco needed its gravel to level parts of the neighborhood.) But I do mind; I may not be a bona fide nature lover, but I know enough to abhor its commodification.

    Meanwhile, the name change was inadvertently prudent. The poor are always with us, but Hussey's may not be. It's shrinking. The purple loosestrife in a far corner inches forward, and the runoff from fertilized and automatically sprinkled lawns has made it very weedy. The pond that Jack Pidgeon remembered as deep is also becoming shallower. Standing at its edge, I can easily see its weedy bottom. At summer's height, a glance at Hussey's might well convince somebody that it's a meadow, not a pond. A neighbor once asked the town what might be done about it; he was directed to the state, and got lost in the phone tree. Even so, I think the message is clear: many of us have had ponds like Hussey's in our pasts; in the future, fewer of us will.

    What alarms me even more, however, is that Andover no longer seems sure what to do with Hussey's Pond, so no wonder others feel free to make whatever use of it they like. A sign stands in the grassy strip in front of Hussey’s: "Reserved for Children 12 and Under. By Order of the Board of Selectmen." It has been there for at least two decades, but I haven’t received a satisfactory reason why it was posted in the first place. A former town selectman told me the town wanted a fishing place for children only. It was that simple. Some other people have said the law was meant to discourage loiterers. I do occasionally find empty, one-shot liquor bottles at Hussey’s, but a hang-out it is not, and if it were to become one, stronger deterrents than that sign would be required. I think the sign's true, perhaps unacknowledged, purpose is to give Hussey's itself a purpose again. The sign's effectiveness is debatable. A few parents bring their sons (rarely daughters) to play at fishing, but they don't stay long, even though there must be fish to catch: otherwise, one might wonder what the heron's waiting for. Only once have I seen a hockey game on Hussey's. A frigid day, in a series of them, brought out a dozen men and boys from somewhere. The conditions haven't been quite as right since; anyway, those players looked too good to wait for the weather. They must make good use of an indoor rink somewhere. (Phillips Academy now has two and offers skating hours to the paying public.) People walking dogs are at the pond more regularly than anybody. (As my dog ages and can’t go very far, I am one.) Sometimes, heeding a second prominent sign posting, they scoop, sometimes not. Goose droppings are more formidable hazards anyway.

    One morning town workers mowed the grass at Hussey's, as they do every couple of weeks in season. One of them rode the sit-down mower while another used an edger. A third stood staring at the water, smoking a cigarette. Since he looked to be well into his sixties, I wondered if he was remembering boyhood swims and skates. Eight minutes later, the trio had put the equipment back on the truck and driven away. None of them seemed fazed by a new structure that has gone up, unsanctioned by any town official. Paul, a dweller in the condos behind me, had taken it upon himself to put in a raised flower-bed. It was not a small project. For two weekends he hammered railroad ties into the night. Without measuring I would guess that the bed is six feet by twenty. Two truckloads of soil were required to fill it. Paul built a bench, too, and placed it at the edge of the pond. I have tried it out. A little hard, backless, it's not for lengthy sits. What I think it does best is reinforce the idea that Hussey's seems mostly just for looking at these days, almost like a picture of nature, rather than nature itself.

    That's how I treat it, too. I look and look, and like any great painting, it's always offering me more. And yet I am frustrated by its remoteness from me. How ego-bruising it is that I am not in this picture. The heron flies off if I startle it. The geese waddle in the opposite direction and into the water when I approach. The ducks don't even venture to my side of the pond; they stay in the far corner with the loosestrife. "My" pond, which is how I sometimes think of it, isn't mine at all. It never even was Hussey's.

    I used to have two recurring fantasies, neither of which would have been difficult to make real. One was to borrow a canoe from friends and paddle around in that pond -- a part of the picture at last. This I finally did. The pond was even shallower than I had imagined. The canoe trip was a short, smelly, disappointing ride, but what did make it worth the effort was seeing my house from the pond’s other side. That sure gave me a new perspective -- the view from behind the looking glass. I felt small, and my house looked small, while the pond seemed very big.

    The other fantasy I’ve had and not yet acted on is to sketch the pond and some of the things I've been seeing in and around it. If I can't always literally be in the picture, I can at least create one. But somehow I know that, even if I do this, I still won't feel what I want to feel about nature.

    Once, on Cape Cod, at the edge of another pond -- Nine Mile Pond, which is so big it doubles as a lake, called Lake Wequaquet -- it happened that I saw a frog, having been eaten by a snake, come back to life, and I liked the feeling that gave me. This is how it was. I lifted up one end of a canoe, getting ready to put it into the water, and there beneath it I saw a snake, and the snake saw me, and in fright opened its mouth, angling that hinge so wide I though it was turning itself inside out. Instead, it was regurgitating the frog it had just eaten. The frog toppled out, reprieved, resurrected, and stood stunned but still breathing, then hopped back into the lake and swam away. Of course, the snake wouldn't have good things to say about the incident. And what was it to me but an opportunity to feel God-like, intervening where I had no business? Though it takes me down a peg to admit it, my business is with the humans -- the ring-hurling, cross-dressing humans. The pond, any pond, really is better off without me.

53 Poor Street, on a late afternoon in October.

Hussey's Pond, covered with a fine, green scum.