Maps And Rabbit-Holes

________________________________________________
Title:     Maps And Rabbit-Holes
Author: Charles S. Brooks [More Titles by Brooks]

In what pleasurable mystery would we live were it not for maps! If I chance on the name of a town I have visited, I locate it on a map. I may not actually get down the atlas and put my finger on the name, but at least I picture to myself its lines and contour and judge its miles in inches. And thereby for a thing of ink and cardboard I have banished from the world its immensity and mystery. But if there were no maps--what then? By other devices I would have to locate it. I would say that it came at the end of some particular day's journey; that it lies in the twilight at the conclusion of twenty miles of dusty road; that it lies one hour nightward of a blow-out. I would make it neighbor to an appetite gratified and a thirst assuaged, a cool bath, a lazy evening with starlight and country sounds. Is not this better than a dot on a printed page?

That is the town, I would say, where we had the mutton chops and where we heard the bullfrogs on the bridge. Or that town may be circumstanced in cherry pie, a comical face at the next table, a friendly dog with hair-trigger tail, or some immortal glass of beer on a bench outside a road-inn. These things make that town as a flame in the darkness, a flame on a hillside to overtop my course. Many years can go grinding by without obliterating the pleasant sight of its flare. Or maybe the town is so intermingled with dismal memories that no good comes of too particularly locating it. Then Tony Lumpkin's advice on finding Mr. Hardcastle's house is enough. "It's a damn'd long, dark, boggy, dirty, dangerous way." And let it go at that.

Maps are toadies to the thoroughfares. They shower their attentions on the wide pavements, holding them up to observation, marking them in red, and babbling and prattling obsequiously about them, meanwhile snubbing with disregard all the lanes and bypaths. They are cockney and are interested in showing only the highroads between cities, and in consequence neglect all tributary loops and windings. In a word, they are against the jog-trot countryside and conspire with the signposts against all loitering and irregularity.

As for me, I do not like a straight thoroughfare. To travel such a road is like passing a holiday with a man who is going about his business. Idle as you are, vacant of purpose, alert for distraction, _he_ must keep his eyes straight ahead and he must attend to the business in hand. I like a road that is at heart a vagabond, which loiters in the shade and turns its head on occasion to look around the corner of a hill, which will seek out obscure villages even though it requires a zigzag course up a hillside, which follows a river for the very love of its company and humors its windings, which trots alongside and listens to its ripple and then crosses, sans bridge, like a schoolboy, with its toes in the water. I love a road which goes with the easy, rolling gait of a sailor ashore. It has no thought of time and it accepts all the vagaries of your laziness. I love a road which weaves itself into eddies of eager traffic before the door of an inn, and stops a minute at the drinking trough because it has heard the thirst in your horse's whinny; and afterwards it bends its head on the hillside for a last look at the kindly spot. Ah, but the vagabond cannot remain long on the hills. Its best are its lower levels. So down it dips. The descent is easy for roads and cart wheels and vagabonds and much else; until in the evening it hears again the murmur of waters, and its journey has ended.

There is of course some fun in a map that is all wrong. Those, for example, of the early navigators are worth anybody's time. There is possibility in one that shows Japan where Long Island ought to be. That map is human. It makes a correct and proper map no better than a molly-coddle. There can be fine excitement in learning on the best of fourteenth century authority that there is no America and that India lies outside the Pillars of Hercules. The uncharted seas, the _incognova terra_ where lions are (_ubi leones erunt_, as the maps say), these must always stir us. In my copy of Gulliver are maps of his discoveries. Lilliput lies off the coast of Sumatra and must now be within sight of the passengers bound from London to Melbourne if only they had eyes to see it. Brobdingnag, would you believe it, is a hump on the west coast of America and cannot be far from San Francisco. That gives one a start. Swift, writing in 1725 with a world to choose from, selects the Californian coast as the most remote and unknown for the scene of his fantastical adventure. It thrusts 1725 into a gray antiquity. And yet there are many buildings in England still standing that antedate 1725 by many years, some by centuries. Queen Elizabeth had been dead more than a hundred years. Canterbury was almost as old and probably in worse repair than it is now, when Frisco was still Brobdingnag. Can it be that the giant red trees and the tall bragging of the coast date from its heroic past?

Story-writers have nearly always been the foes of maps, finding in them a kind of cramping of their mental legs. And in consequence they have struck upon certain devices for getting off the map and away from its precise and restricting bigotry. Davy fell asleep. It was Davy, you remember, who grew drowsy one winter afternoon before the fire and sailed away with the goblin in his grandfather's clock. Robinson Crusoe was driven off his bearings by stress of weather at sea. This is a popular device for eluding the known world. Whenever in your novel you come on a sentence like this--On the third night it came on to blow and that night and the three succeeding days and nights we ran close-reefed before the tempest--whenever you come on a sentence like that, you may know that the author feels pinched and cramped by civilization, and is going to regale you with some adventures of his uncharted imagination which are likely to be worth your attention.

Then there was Sentimental Tommy! Do you remember how he came to find the Enchanted Street? It happened that there was a parade, "an endless row of policemen walking in single file, all with the right leg in the air at the same time, then the left leg. Seeing at once that they were after him, Tommy ran, ran, ran until in turning a corner he found himself wedged between two legs. He was of just sufficient size to fill the aperture, but after a momentary lock he squeezed through, and they proved to be the gate into an enchanted land." In that lies the whole philosophy of going without a map. There is magic in the world then. There are surprises. You do not know what is ahead. And you cannot tell what is about to happen. You move in a proper twilight of events. After that Tommy went looking for policemen's legs. Doubtless there were some details of the wizardry that he overlooked, as never again could he come out on the Enchanted Street in quite the same fashion. Alice had a different method. She fell down a rabbit-hole and thereby freed herself from some very irksome lessons and besides met several interesting people, including a Duchess. Alice may be considered the very John Cabot of the rabbit-hole. Before her time it was known only to rabbits, wood-chucks, and dogs on holidays, whose noses are muddy with poking. But since her time all this is changed. Now it is known as the portal of adventure. It is the escape from the plane of life into its third dimension.

Children have the true understanding of maps. They never yield slavishly to them. If they want a pirates' den they put it where it is handiest, behind the couch in the sitting-room, just beyond the glimmer of firelight. If they want an Indian village, where is there a better place than in the black space under the stairs, where it can be reached without great fatigue after supper? Farthest Thule may be behind the asparagus bed. The North Pole itself may be decorated by Annie on Monday afternoon with the week's wash. From whatever house you hear a child's laugh, if it be a real child and therefore a great poet, you may know that from the garret window, even as you pass, Sinbad, adrift on the Indian Ocean, may be looking for a sail, and that the forty thieves huddle, daggers drawn, in the coal hole. Then it is a fine thing for a child to run away to sea--well, really not to sea, but down the street, past gates and gates and gates, until it comes to the edge of the known and sees a collie or some such terrible thing. I myself have fine recollection of running away from a farmhouse. Maybe I did not get more than a hundred paces, but I looked on some broad heavens, saw a new mystery in the night's shadows, and just before I became afraid I had a taste of a new life.

To me it is strange that so few people go down rabbit-holes. We cannot be expected to find the same delight in squeezing our fat selves behind the couch of evenings, nor can we hope to find that the Chinese Mountains actually lie beyond our garden fence. We cannot exactly run away either; after one is twenty, that takes on an ugly and vagrant look, commendable as it may be on the early marches. Prince Hal is always a more amiable spectacle than John Falstaff, much as we love the knight. But there are men, however few, who although they are beyond forty, retain in themselves a fine zest for adventure. A man who, I am proud to say, is a friend of mine and who is a devil for work by which he is making himself known in the world, goes of evenings into the most delightful truantry with his music. And it isn't only music, it is flowers and pictures and books. Of course he has an unusual brain and few men can hope to equal him. He is like Disraeli in that respect, who, it is said, could turn in a flash from the problem of financing the Suez Canal to the contemplation of the daffodils nodding along the fence. But do the rest of us try? There are few men of business, no matter with what singleness of purpose they have been installing their machinery and counting their nickels, but will admit that this is but a small part of life. They dream of rabbit-holes, but they will never go down one. I had dinner recently with a man who by his honesty and perseverance has built up and maintained a large and successful business. An orchestra was playing, and when it finished the man told me that if he could write music like that we had heard he would devote himself to it. Well, if he has enough desire in him for that speech, he owes it to himself that he sound his own depths for the discoveries he may make. It is doubtful if this quest would really lead him to write music, God forbid; it might however induce him to develop a latent appreciation until it became in him both a refreshment and a stimulus.

There are many places uncharted that are worth a visit. Treasure Island is somewhere on the seas, the still-vex'd Bermoothes feel the wind of some southern ocean, the coast of Bohemia lies on the furthermost shore of fairyland--all of these wonderful, like white towers in the mind. But nearer home, as near as the pirates' den that we built as children, within sight of our firelight, should come the dreams and thoughts that set us free from sordidness, that teach our minds versatility and sympathy, that create for us hobbies and avocations of worth, that rest and refresh us. If we must be ocean liners all day, plodding between known and monotonous ports, at least we may be tramp ships at night, cargoed with strange stuffs and trafficking for lonely and unvisited seas.

[The end]
Charles S. Brooks's essay: Maps And Rabbit-Holes

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN