are vast and complex
reaches between cat feet of
Fog and Remembrance Rock
Adapted from a letter by James Thurber to a Librarian in Asheville, North Carolina on January 30th, 1952, where Thurber writes:
Nobody ever gives me time to get things done, and such a project as yours can’t be batted off. I wouldn’t want to start writing in January something about Carl Sandburg to be finished in January. He may seem as easy to describe as a face carved on a mountain, but there are vast and complex reaches between the cat feet of the “Fog” and ‘‘Remembrance Rock.” I like to think of him informally, without putting on my stiff Sunday critical shirt and shoes. He was up here not too long ago, playing his guitar and singing, sometimes with me, late into the night, although it seemed early. I was proud to have taught him a new verse about Casey Jones, who went through Toledo on an open switch. He is an American institution, not easy to describe within the limits of January. Let the glib boys do that, and give him my love and fond wishes that he will go on forever.
Mr. Thurber also remembered the evening singing with Sandburg with a drawing.
Just fun thinking of the two of them in the same room.
Fog you ask??
Fog is …
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Remembrance Rock is Carl Sandburg’s only novel. Sandburg described it as an epic, weaving the mystery of the American Dream with the costly toil and bloody struggles that gone to keep alive and carry further that Dream.
And there are vast and complex reaches between the two.
