Novalis, "Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren"

One of the most famous works ("When figures and numeric shapes") by this German poet.  You can read the original here.

When figures and numeric shapes,
No longer show us moons or apes;
When those who merely kiss and sing,
Trump scholars taught in everything;
When to free life the world retreats,
And in the world this free heart beats;
When then anew by light and shade,
True clarity will be displayed;
When we in fairy tales and verse,
See history from its first birth;
Then at One secret word's delight,
This whole wrong being will take flight.

The Game

This film begins with a simple premise, a man at life's midway with nothing to live for except the accumulation of wealth, takes an absurd turn towards madness, then sees its premise all the way through to its natural conclusion.  How can there be a natural conclusion to madness?  If the natural conclusion to everything is corporal death, a rational man should have no fear of perdition if he believes that his soul will be salvaged.  That is to say, when his lot is drawn, his inventory of personal emotions and memories should be in order: grudges should have been forgiven; loves should have been cherished and remembered to their utmost; and everything should have been done for others that could have been done.  Imagine what a kinder and better place the world would be if we all approached our earthbound existence with such equanimity, a term that cannot possibly apply to Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas).

Our plot will prove to be patently ridiculous, but a few words should be said about this Van Orton fellow.  Middle-aged, fit, attractive, a sartorial splendor, he is utterly devoid of human interest; his only perceivable character trait is greed, which seems to trickle out a twisted corner of his mouth.  People reluctantly perk up when he speaks because they know heeding a banker such as Van Orton could make them very rich, even if they cannot necessarily countenance the attendant measures he might suggest.  His cheerless and magnificent residence, once that of his beloved parents, is occupied only by him and the family's trusted (and now quite aged) housekeeper Ilsa (Caroll Baker), replete with all the patience and gestures of a long-suffering spouse.  Van Orton has long since given up hope for human beings and their idealistic quests, perhaps because all his own childhood ideals – the subject of recurrently hazy flashbacks – were not met.  The Van Orton household was certainly one of privilege, but privilege is a distinctly adult invention; children really only need love and acceptance, although the occasional plaything might not hurt (the Van Ortons interpreted "occasional" as "daily and extravagant").  As is so often the case for those whose childhoods were miserable or loveless, the adult versions of these spurned children continue to bask in resentment never forgotten, in this instance, old videos of little Nicholas's birthdays past.  Birthdays past?  Why yes, our film opens on his forty-eighth birthday, exactly the day when his father, the patriarch who hovers like a clouded sun in each one of his flashbacks, would commit suicide before his son's very eyes.

This boilerplate persona, that of the mirthless and ruthless robber baron, has stained so many products of questionable artistry that when such a bastard is summoned within a laudable work, one must assume it plans to relate his utter damnation or redemption.  We have seen the trick pulled off by a genius on a telling day, that of the birth of all days; Van Orton's forty-eighth is so drab and dreary, however, that it is better left unremembered, a favor with which his staffers cannot be bothered.  So all throughout the day he is congratulated, invariably as an afterthought to a task-oriented exchange; a call from his ex-wife, now someone else's spouse and an expectant mother, is one of those quietly horrific disasters you would expect in a desperate Scandinavian drama ("Did you have a great birthday?" she asks, to which he replies: "Does Rose Kennedy own a black dress?"); and as Ilsa leaves for the night, he finds a hamburger and fries, presented as elegantly as such fare can be presented, waiting for him in the oven.  But just before his umpteenth night alone with cable news programs and the finest wines – one has the impression that he lives vicariously through the headlines and newsreels of a world wholly foreign to him – he gets an invitation to a posh restaurant from someone who calls himself Seymour Butts. 

In the cinema, at least, we know a name like that cannot simply be a name like that, and our suspicions are confirmed when the person in question turns out to be Van Orton's younger brother Conrad (a bleary Sean Penn), the babe we see a flashbacked child Nicholas cradling in his arms.  Their interaction reveals a love for one another that has been nearly eradicated by time: Conrad is as unstable, unpredictable, and unkempt as Van Orton is the model of sleek and gainful acquisition.  Both have reason to be concerned about one another.  (They don't speak for long, but the elder sibling manages to squeeze in references to an "escort service" and "medication," while Conrad boasts he once bought drugs off the restaurant's maitre d'hôtel.)  Since it is Nicholas's birthday and Conrad's behest, the conversation turns to what to give a predatory and sardonic investment banker on his birthday ("What do you get for the man who has just slightly more than everything?" quips Conrad).  The answer: a business card for a company, Consumer Recreation Services, that cannot possibly be real or, at the very least, must be concealing some form of illicit business dealings.  And the services provided?  In a rather enigmatic word, "fun" ("Their only guarantee is that you will not be bored," Conrad insists), a premise to which one would expect Van Orton to react with derision and disbelief.  Yet something stirs within him, some dim tie to his brother and his deceased parents (his mother, the brothers mention almost ritually, died four years ago) and the siblings part a little less cloven than they were before.  And it is after masticating on the hamburger and phone call with his ex-wife that Nicholas van Orton stares at that business card and, as he has done so many times with other people's money, tacitly makes a dangerous and fateful decision.

We have not broached the matter of the game itself, and for good reason.  The world that our cutthroat banker enters, with no small hesitation, has the makings of many a Hollywood movie, which might thrill some but which Van Orton, quite in keeping with his character, finds absolutely terrifying.  Many reviews of The Game seem preoccupied with our protagonist's (often hilarious) indignation and tend to read the film as an indictment of runaway capitalism – which of course it most certainly is, although any fictional work with that as its sole aim is not worthy of our attention.  Yet that is clearly not what the director seeks to achieve.  If art, to paraphrase this writer, comprises "beauty and pity," then we needn't look any further than the quandary of Nicholas Van Orton.  Van Orton is supposed to follow in his father's path because he has evinced, just like his beloved progenitor, nothing akin to a lust for life.  The day begins early because crooks always need a leg up; the day ends late because tired clients are always easier to exploit (a method popularized by a famous dictator who will never taste these pages).  But even in his splendor, his snarling Bentley, and his perfect suits, he is merely a boy who blames himself for not having been good enough of a son to make his father want to watch him grow up.  So what does acquiring all that avarice and opportunism can yield give a man who has "just slightly more than everything"?  Perhaps a favorite toy or two.   

Borges, "La supersticiosa ética del lector"

An essay ("The superstitious ethics of the reader") by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original here.

The destitute condition of our letters – to wit, its inability to seduce readers – has engendered a superstition regarding style, a distracted interpretation by the partially attentive.  What those afflicted with this superstition understand by style is not a page's efficacy or inefficacy, but the ostensible habits of the writer: his similes, his sound, the occurrences of his punctuation and his syntax.  They remain indifferent, however, to his convictions or his emotion; instead they seek out tecniquerías (a word coined by Unamuno), "games of technique," which will tell them whether or not what is written has the right to please them.  They have heard that adjectivizations should not be trivial and will think a page poorly written if it does not contain surprises amidst the junctures of adjectives and nouns, even if its final aim has been realized.  They have also heard that concision is a virtue and deem concise those who restrict themselves to ten short sentences, and not those who write one long one.  (Normative examples of this charlatanism of brevity, of this sententious frenzy, can be found in the diction of the celebrated Danish statesman Polonius of Hamlet, and of the real-life Polonius, Baltasar Gracián.)  They have heard that the close repetition of a few syllables is cacophonous and will pretend that such a phenomenon causes them pain when they read prose, although its appearance in verse gives them a special pleasure, which, I think, is just as feigned.  That is to say, they do not see the efficacy of the mechanism, only the layout of its parts.  They subordinate emotion to ethics – rather, to an undisputed etiquette.  This inhibition has been so generalized that no more readers, in the ingenuous sense of the word, will remain, only potential critics.

So widespread is this superstition that no one would dare admit an absence of style in any works he comes across, especially if these works are alleged 'classics.'  There is no good book without stylistic attribution, which no one can do without apart from, of course, the writer.  Let us take as our example Don Quixote.  Criticism, Spanish criticism, prior to the proven excellence of this novel, had not wanted to consider that its greatest (and, perhaps, its irrecusably single) value was psychological, and attributed to it gifts of style which would strike many as mysterious.  In reality, it is sufficient to review a few paragraphs of Don Quixote to sense that Cervantes was not a stylist (at least not in the present acoustic and decorative meaning of the word), and that the destinies of Quixote and Sancho interested him far too much to allow himself to be distracted by his own voice.  Baltasar Gracián's Agudeza y arte de ingenio – so laudatory of other prose narratives such as Guzmán de Alfarache  – decides not to remember Don Quixote.  In jest Quevedo versifies his death and forgets about him.  One might object that these two examples are negative;  Leopoldo Lugones, in our time, presented this explicit opinion:  "Style is the weakness of Cervantes, and the ravages caused by his influence have been very serious.  A paucity of color, an uncertainty of structure, gasping paragraphs that never come to an end, devolving into interminable convolutions; repetitions, a lack of proportion, all this was the legacy of those who, not seeing the supreme realization of an immortal work in anything but its form, remained gnawing the helmet whose bumps concealed strength and taste" (El imperio jesuítico, page 59).  Our Groussac also commented: "If things must be described just as they are, we will have to admit that a good half of the work is composed in too lazy and slovenly a form, which very much justifies the 'humble language' that Cervantes's rivals have imputed to him.  And by this I am neither merely nor mainly referring to the verbal improprieties, the intolerable repetitions or plays on words, or the snippets of weighty grandiloquence that overwhelm us, but to the generally unconscious contexture of this afternoon prose" (Crítica literaria, page 41).  Afternoon prose, chatty and not recited prose, this is the prose of Cervantes and he needs no other.  I imagine that this same observation would be justified in the case of Dostoevsky or Montaigne or Samuel Butler.

This conceit of style is hollowed out into an even more pathetic conceit, that of perfection.  There has never been a metrical writer, even with a chance as close to zero as possible, who has not carved out (the verb ought to be part of his conversation) his perfect sonnet, his miniscule moment which contains his possible immortality, and which the novelties and annihilations of time will have to respect.  This is generally a sonnet without fluff, but the whole thing is fluff: that is to say, a residue, a futility.  This fallacy of persistence (Sir Thomas Browne: Urn Burial) was formulated and recommended by Flaubert in the following phrase: "Correction (in the highest sense of the word) creates with thought what the waters of the Styx created with the body of Achilles: it makes it invulnerable and indestructible" (Correspondance, II, page 199).  The judgment is categorical, and yet I have never had any experience that might confirm it.  (I am doing without the tonic virtues of the Styx; this infernal reminiscence is not an argument, it is an emphasis.)  The page of perfection, the page on which no word could be altered without any damage done, this is the most precarious of all pages.  Changes in the language erase additional senses and nuances; the "perfect" page is the one consisting of those subtle elements that wears out with great ease.  Inversely, the page that contains the vocation of immortality may traverse the fire of its mistakes, of its approximate versions, of its distracted readings, of its incomprehensions, without losing its soul in this crucible.  No line fabricated by Góngora can vary without impunity (as confirmed by those who restore his texts); but Don Quixote has won countless posthumous battles against its translators and survives in the most careless of versions.  Heine, who never heard the work in Spanish, was able to celebrate it endlessly.  More alive is the German or Scandinavian or Hindustani specter of Don Quixote than the anxious verbal artifices of the stylist.   

I did not intend for the morality of this verification to be understood as one of desperation or nihilism.  I do not wish to foment negligence nor do I believe in the mystic virtue of the clumsy sentence or the vulgar epithet.  I admit that the voluntary emission of these two or three minor pleasures – the ocular distractions of the metaphor, the auditory distractions of the rhythm, and the unexpected distractions of the interjection or hyperbole – tends to prove to us that the passion of the subject in question is commanding the writer, nothing more.  The asperity of a sentence is as indifferent to genuine literature its softness.  Prosodic economy is no less foreign in art than are calligraphy, orthography, or punctuation: the certainty that the judicial origins of rhetoric and the musical origins of song always remained hidden from us.  The preferred equivocation of the literature of today is emphasis.  Definitive words, words which postulate the wisdoms of a fortune-teller or an angel, or resolutions of a greater than human assuredness – only, never, always, all, perfection, completed – compose the habitual trade of every writer.  They do not think that saying one thing too many times is as unskillful as not saying it at all, and that a careless generalization and intensification is a poverty, which is how it is perceived by the reader.  Their imprudences cause a depreciation in the language.  This is what occurs in French, whose phrase je suis navré tends to mean I won't go have a cup of tea with you, and whose verb of love, aimer, has been reduced to the meaning of like.  This hyperbolic tendency of French is the same in the written language: take, for example, Paul Valéry, hero of lucidity who organized and translated some forgettable and forgotten lines of Lafontaine, then declared them (in an argument with someone): ces plus beaux vers du monde (Variété, 84).

Now I wish to remember the future and not the past.  Reading is already done in silence, a happy indication.  There is already a silent reader of verse.  There is a tireless journey to be made between this stealthy quality and purely ideographic writing – the direct communication of experiences, not of sounds – but it is always less distant than the future.  I re-read these negations and think: I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

Scarface

I always tell the truth, even when I lie.

                                                                                                      Tony Montana

It is April 1980.  After twenty-odd years of bitter enmity the United States and a small, troublesome island nation, whose choice of allies almost brought the world to war, quietly agree to carry out one of those one-way exchanges that authoritarian regimes like to caption with a smug "good riddance."  In this case, however, there may have been something more to such a sentiment.  The result was the ingression of around 125,000 Cuban immigrants to Florida and, eventually, to other parts of the United States.  I say "ingression" because we are informed that a large percentage of these political refugees were very recent inmates at a range of correctional facilities, some for the insane, others for the lawless.  Reason suggests that every government dreams of foisting its prisoners on another state, especially one it happens to loathe, but reason and the Castro regime do not seem to have been on speaking terms.  So when we glimpse grittily uplifting footage of the Mariel boatlift and snide rhetoric from Castro in full barbalia, we assume what follows will be political in tenor.  Instead we get nothing less than the greatest organized crime film ever produced.

Our title character, with a wide slash over his left cheek and eyebrow, is Antonio "Tony" Montana (Al Pacino in a role of a lifetime).  Montana's personality may remind the viewer of a medieval mace: spike-laden, rock hard, and destined to leave bloody mayhem in its wake.  His facial expressions and manner of speech, however, were as new to cinema in 1983 as the latest computer-generated imagery seems today.  We meet him, not by accident, in a Miami police interrogation room where he has persuaded no one there, including himself, that he is merely another political refugee ("There's nothing you can do to me [that] Castro didn't do").  Yet unlike many other prisoners, he is able to conduct the interview in English because, he claims without a dab of conviction, his allegedly American father allegedly took him to see American movies with "Cagney and Bogart."  To no one's surprise, we later learn that Montana's father was never around and "never a father" to him.  An important point, not only because broken homes tend to beget broken children, but also because attributing Montana's demeanor and style to the gangster films of yore unwittingly foreshadows the film's influence on a generation of young minds.  Like all career criminals, Montana is a pathological liar; like many such underworld types, he has an inflated sense of his own honor ("All I have in this life is my balls and my word, and I don't break them for no one").  Although Montana would kill a man (he purportedly detests harming women and children, as showcased in a late scene) for five dollars if he felt like it, he expects us to believe he is trustworthy and imbued with a strict code of proper conduct.  Watching the film for the third or fourth time I noticed how Montana exudes an undeniable charm even when it is clear – painfully clear – that every word out of his mouth is a fabrication.  This quality can be attributed to Pacino's superhuman performance, but it is very much in keeping with Montana's character, as evidenced in the quote beginning this review.  That is to say, he openly and loudly proclaims his rise in this cutthroat world and cuts enough throats to be a man of his word.  A Goodyear blimp will furnish him with a motto and a mission, but the rest will be in his own bloody hands.

Montana is shipped to the ironically yclept Freedomtown, which uncannily resembles a prison camp with a basketball court and a lack of internal policing.  There he joins forces with a former army buddy, the somewhat younger Manuelo "Manny" Ribera (Steven Bauer).  Manny has sidekick written all over him, a bastion of calm and reason while Montana grows progressively more paranoid and deranged, and in keeping with the usual fate of sidekicks, Manny is destined to do many things that the big boss man will not like.  In Freedomtown, Manny and Montana get their first stateside assignment: the murder of a Cuban refugee who, they are told, was responsible for the torture and murder of the brother of a Cuban-American crime lord called Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia).  Montana stabs his target with nary a thought towards the veracity of the accusations, a feat which impresses Lopez but which does not get the two promoted within his organization.  Getting passed over especially irks Montana, perhaps because he cannot admire other people's affluence with Manny's more typical remove and lackey-like envy.  So as the duo slaves away at a greasy spoon, another, much more dangerous offer is proposed, one involving Colombians, cocaine, a suitcase full of greenbacks, and a hotel room with remarkably soundproof walls.  This scene, one of the most spontaneously violent you will ever see, tells us all we need to know about Tony Montana except one thing which is answered much later on.  He watches a friend get butchered, stares down his own imminent death with fatigue and disdain, then kills a man in front of about a hundred witnesses.  Shortly thereafter he informs Lopez's lieutenant Omar (F. Murray Abraham) that he, Montana, will be delivering the dope and the money to Mr. Lopez instead of the lieutenant, emphasizing that he was able to retain both.  Lopez invites Montana and Manny to his mansion, introduces them to his cokehead mistress Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer), and takes them to his favorite club.  Elvira and Montana exchange an unmistakable look and we suddenly understand that the breadth of his ambition could never be hampered by common sense or self-preservation.  Regarding the club of (nightly) choice, Elvira quips: "Frank, if anyone wanted to assassinate you, you wouldn't be hard to find."  So when Frank resorts to the half-nervous chuckling riposte, "Who would want to kill me?", it is Montana whom Elvira beholds not the speaker of the rhetorical question.  For which, of course, we now have an answer.

The anti-capitalist slant to Stone's script – obvious even if one didn't know of his avowed leftist tendencies – portrays, somewhat simplistically but with devastating effect, the mirror image of the American dream.  Instead we see the inherent peril of unchecked avarice, Mafia oneupmanship being a prime example, here and elsewhere, of social Darwinism, with Tony Montana being in such a realm an alpha predator of the first disorder, which brings us to another point.  There are, Lopez informs Montana, whose pupil-like avidity and energy suggest the immediacy of a 'crash course,' two rules to the drug trade: don't get high on your supply and don't underestimate the greed of others.  Critics have made far too much of the first rule (which Lopez, sneering at Elvira, actually lists second) to explain Montana's downfall, as if his frequent and often grotesque abuse of cocaine as the movie progresses could really account for his actions prior to such luxuries.  Montana's real drug is money; the fact that he cannot viably snort dollars and get the same kick as a line of blow leads him to the depressing if inevitable capitalist conclusion that someone else is getting more bang, literally and figuratively, for his yeyo.  About fifty minutes into the film, another complication arises: Montana's Mom, who clearly fears and despises him, and his younger sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) turn out to be residents of the Miami area (when questioned by the police in the opening scene, Montana stated that he had no known relatives alive).  Montana's unabashed sexual attraction to his sister has been underscored time and again as a symbol of his insanity – Montana is not quite insane, although terming him sane does not do justice to his temperament – yet it dovetails perfectly with what we already know of him.  Had he been respectful or conventionally and platonically loving towards Gina (who on earth gives his sister a pendant engraved, "To Gina, from Tony always"?), this would have diminished the invulnerability of his personality.  As it were, Gina's worship of her brother will manifest itself in her attraction to underworld types, which Montana correctly interprets as a compliment to himself, but which displeases him to no end.

Should imitation indeed be the sincerest form of flattery, Scarface can genuinely claim to be the most flattered film in the history of cinema.  It has spawned literally thousands of knock-offs, its uncouth, uber-capitalist protagonist much more marketable than a bunch of respect-hungry hitmen from the Italian old country, its underworld reality much harsher and truer, one imagines, than Coppola's paunchy family novel generously sprinkled with evil.  It is believed that Scarface taught countless rappers how to act and talk; what it most surely conveyed was bravado and testicular fortitude of the kind rarely seen on screen and completely original at the time (the very bang-bang ending was also not common in 1983 apart from in some westerns, although those films would have organized their bodycounts according to some antiquated pecking order).  Pacino's Montana is not only cinema's most unforgettable gangster, he represents one of the greatest and most enthralling performances of all time.  The movie is hypnotic until Montana achieves his goal of money and power; once he's there, it necessarily loses its momentum and like a roller coaster car pausing at the top, careers downward into a spectacular demise.  But the first two-thirds of the film can be watched again and again with unstinting pleasure.  Strange as it may sound, it feels more dramatically correct that Tony Montana and Manny Ribera only really excel at killing people and spending money.  Even for Manny, a strikingly handsome fellow, picking up women does not come quite as naturally as one would think.  After one failure in particular, Montana tells his "junior partner" (a label Manny will come to resent) that women are the third integer, following money and power, of an equation in which all parts are joined by equals signs.  So when Montana slaps down a thousand dollars on his mother's kitchen table and tells her and his sister that he's "made it," his mother quickly refutes his claim to being a legitimate businessman.  She knows her son Antonio all too well, which must have made what she then tells him all the more painful.  As if Tony Montana cared about anything or anyone apart from Tony Montana.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The non-believer may already understand that what preys upon the unsuspecting plagues the believer even more greatly, but he likely misinterprets the foundation of such fear.  He will claim that the strongly religious see goblins and ghouls because they wish to devolve to these beings responsibility for men's crimes; the Devil's existence being as laughable as that of some Higher Entity, he may add that such believers need to counteract the goodness in their hearts with the evil emotions that sometimes overcome them.  But here is a question of heads and tails.  Responsibility for the evil done unto others lies in our hands – this even the believer knows.  And yet somewhere between the headlines of gore and wickedness one senses another presence, a dark whisper that feels like the wind, a rattling of one's bones that would normally be a shiver.  What this really is has many scientific explanations, and perhaps they are all in a way not untrue.  Yet even as children and without any parental encouragement, those of faith sense something stirring beneath the surface of our plain and pleasing world.  Occasionally it even appears at brief junctures in a shadow, a vision, an eerie, unexplained whistle during an otherwise noiseless night.  And what lurks in the heart of men, good and bad, forms the core of this classic tale.

In the vein of proper horror stories, our exposition of the facts should begin with a warning.  We land in a village in the state of New York, a "spell-bound region" populated by cruller-eating, Mynheer-saying Dutch settlers who have remained isolated from the world abroad and its sweeping turns.  In this case the warning comes in the form of a legend whose stalk has grown well past the landscape's other weeds:

A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere .... Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie.  They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air.  The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions .... The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head.  It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind.  His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance.  Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.

The alleged historical details implicate the entirety of Sleepy Hollow in the plot – not that there really could be a plot from a few hints provided later, but much like the Horseman I am getting ahead of myself.  What is vital is the understanding that the location possesses an eerie power to infect even temporary visitors, including the gangly Puritan schoolmaster Ichabod Crane.  Crane is one of those literary creations who remain with us as we age because we sense that we will eventually espy him in a slightly altered form in our own reality.  He is not so much a caricature as a living characteristic, and that characteristic is Puritanism itself.   Crane is a stern lecturer and a frugal bird who carries all his worldly belongings in a large handkerchief; he favors the meek over the more privileged, guests at the houses of his pupils, shines as a learned singer of psalmody, and spouts the wisdom credulously culled from this book.  He compensates for his feeble appearance with pigheaded courage and blinding optimism that someone more cynical than I could easily mistake for feelings of superiority.  How then can he earn epithets such as "wonderfully gentle and ingratiating" and "a kind and thankful creature"?  Because, at times, he is those as well; at least until he makes the acquaintance of Katrina Van Tassel.

Katrina is young and beautiful with child-bearing hips and a sizeable inheritance.  In a word, she is as nubile as they come.  Crane, like all solitary fools, believes himself fated to meet a lass who could easily do a hundred times better than Crane – and that says little against our schoolteacher.  What she exudes in voluptuousness and luxury Crane omits within his mangy, thrifty shade; they could not be any worse matched.  To make matters even more difficult, there then appears a suitor who is more up to up the task:

A burly, roaring, roistering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood.  He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance. From his Herculean frame and great powers of limb he had received the nickname of BROM BONES, by which he was universally known.  He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar ... The neighbors looked upon him with a mixture of awe, admiration, and good-will; and, when any madcap prank or rustic brawl occurred in the vicinity, always shook their heads, and warranted Brom Bones was at the bottom of it.

Katrina's choice is complicated – or at least such an appearance is desired.  Between Crane and Van Brunt lies a vast and indefinite canyon of education and culture that brawny attraction and headstrong heroics will not be able to overcome in the course of a healthy human life.  Yet Crane cares little for such antics, and he is drawn to Katrina as he is drawn to the opulent feasts at her father's mansion, feasts that start him re-imagining a future he has never considered in bright color:

As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burdened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness.  Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee – or the Lord knows where!

For all his beliefs in the supernatural, in the ghoulish, the grim, and the ghastly, Crane's tragic flaw could be precisely his lack of imagination.  He cannot imagine a world in which he, simple beast, could not meet his needs; nor a world in which the strong spirit within him could fail in its fortress against the materialist barrage.  Is Puritanism nothing more than fear of the wicked, damnation of their accomplices, and the strength derived from prudence and restraint?  That would explain much of Crane and his fantasies.  And those ghost stories on long winter evenings with old Dutch women?  Few things have ever cost a man so dearly.