Parnassus on Wheels quotes

I wonder if there isn’t a lot of bunkum in higher education?

I never found that people who were learned in logarithms and other kinds of poetry were any quicker in washing dishes or darning socks.

I’ve done a good deal of reading when I could, and I don’t want to “admit impediments” to the love of books, but I’ve also seen lots of good, practical folk spoiled by too much fine print.

Reading sonnets always gives me hiccups, too.

I never expected to be an author! But I do think there are some amusing things about the story of Andrew and myself and how books broke up our placid life.

I wonder if there isn’t a lot of bunkum in higher education?

I never found that people who were learned in logarithms and other kinds of poetry were any quicker in washing dishes or darning socks.

I’ve done a good deal of reading when I could, and I don’t want to “admit impediments” to the love of books, but I’ve also seen lots of good, practical folk spoiled by too much fine print. Reading sonnets always gives me hiccups, too.

I’ve done a good deal of reading when I could, and I don’t want to “admit impediments” to the love of books, but I’ve also seen lots of good, practical folk spoiled by too much fine print. Reading sonnets always gives me hiccups, too.

I never expected to be an author!

But I do think there are some amusing things about the story of Andrew and myself and how books broke up our placid life.

When John Gutenberg, whose real name (so the Professor says) was John Gooseflesh, borrowed that money to set up his printing press he launched a lot of troubles on the world.

Andrew and I were wonderfully happy on the farm until he became an author.

If I could have foreseen all the bother his writings were to cause us, I would certainly have burnt the first manuscript in the kitchen stove.

“Apple sauce and brown gravy,” I said. “That’s why I’m sure he’ll be home on time. Sometimes he’s late when there’s boiled dinner, but never on roast pork days.

Andrew would never do for a rabbi.

”

I guess I’ll just stick around until Mr. McGill gets home and see if he won’t buy me out. I’ll sell the whole concern, horse, wagon, and books, for $400. I’ve read Andrew McGill’s stuff and I reckon the proposition’ll interest him.

I’ve had more fun with this Parnassus than a barrel of monkeys.

I used to be a school teacher till my health broke down. Then I took this up and I’ve made more than expenses and had the time of my life.”

“Right!” I said. “I’ll do it.”

I, Helen McGill, in the thirty-ninth year of my age!

I ran into the house through the front door, and it struck me as comical to see a copy of one of Andrew’s magazines lying on the living-room table with “The Revolt of Womanhood” printed across it in red letters.

“Here goes for the revolt of Helen McGill,” I thought.

I sat down at Andrew’s desk, pushed aside a pad of notes he had been jotting down about “the magic of autumn,” and scrawled a few lines:

“Lord!” he said, “when you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.

Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night⁠—there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.

Jiminy! If I were the baker or the butcher or the broom huckster, people would run to the gate when I came by—just waiting for my stuff.

“Even the publishers, the fellows that print the books, can’t see what I’m doing for them. Some of ’em refuse me credit because I sell their books for what they’re worth instead of for the prices they mark on them.

They write me letters about price-maintenance⁠—and I write back about merit-maintenance.

Publish a good book and I’ll get a good price for it, say I! Sometimes I think the publishers know less about books than anyone else! I guess that’s natural, though. Most school teachers don’t know much about children.”

They write me letters about price-maintenance—and I write back about merit-maintenance. Publish a good book and I’ll get a good price for it, say I! Sometimes I think the publishers know less about books than anyone else! I guess that’s natural, though.

Most school teachers don’t know much about children.

”

“The preposterous thing about him is that he really can write,” said Mifflin. “I envy him that. Don’t let him know I said so, but as a matter of fact his prose is almost as good as Thoreau.

He approaches facts as daintily as a cat crossing a wet road.

”

“Common sense?” he repeated. “

Good Lord, ma’am, sense is the most uncommon thing in the world.

I haven’t got it. I don’t believe your brother has, from what you say. Bock here has it. See how he trots along the road, keeps an eye on the scenery, and minds his own business. I never saw him get into a fight yet.

“Judging by the way you talk,” I said, “you ought to be quite a writer yourself.”

“Talkers never write. They go on talking.”

There was a considerable silence. Mifflin relit his pipe and watched the landscape with a shrewd eye. I held the reins loosely, and Peg ambled along with a steady clop-clop. Parnassus creaked musically, and the mid-afternoon sun lay rich across the road.

“Oh, Brooklyn?” he said vaguely. “Yes, I’d forgotten about Brooklyn for the minute. I was thinking of my book. Why, I guess I’ll take the train from Port Vigor.

The trouble is, you can never get to Brooklyn without going through New York. It’s symbolic, I suppose.

”

“The art of baking bread is as transcendent a mystery as the art of making sonnets,” said Redbeard. “And then your hot biscuits—they might be counted as shorter lyrics, I suppose—triolets perhaps. That makes quite an anthology, or a doxology, if you prefer it.”

“Yeast is yeast, and West is West,” I said, and was quite surprised at my own cleverness.

I hadn’t made a remark like that to Andrew in five years.

“Ah!” he said. “That’s just the trouble.

New York is Babylon; Brooklyn is the true Holy City.

New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle; Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness. It is extraordinary:

“Now see here Andrew,” I said, “you talk too quickly.

A woman of forty (you exaggerate, by the way) who has compiled an anthology of 6,000 loaves of bread and dedicated it to you deserves some courtesy.

When you want to run off on some vagabond tour or other you don’t hesitate to do it. You expect me to stay home and do the Lady Eglantine in the poultry yard. By the ghost of Susan B. Anthony, I won’t do it!

I remembered that I should have spoken to Andrew about feeding the hens, and reminded him of his winter undergarments.

What helpless creatures men are, after all!

I finished mending the cap in high good humour.

There was his trouser all stiff with blood, an’ he not sayin’ a thing.

Pluckiest little runt in three states, by Judas!

Well, we put him to bed, too, and then the Missus keeled over, an’ we put her to bed. Three of them, by time the Doc got here. Great old summer afternoon that was! But bless your heart, we couldn’t keep the Perfessor abed long.

My feelings were as mixed as a crushed nut sundae.

So the Professor hadn’t gone to Brooklyn after all! What did he mean by prowling after me like a sleuth? Was it just homesickness for Parnassus? Not likely! And then the horrible noises I had heard in the night;

“No,” he said, “I don’t think I have.

I never lie when I know I shan’t be believed.

”

When you see the marvellous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small—like looking at the Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs.

And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you.

“What do you mean by a great book?” said the Professor—I mean, I imagined him saying it.

It seemed to me as if I could see him sitting there, with his corncob pipe in his hand and that quizzical little face of his looking sharply at me. Somehow, talking with the Professor had made me think.

He was as good as one of those Scranton correspondence courses, I do believe, and no money to pay for postage.

Well, I said to the Professor—to myself I mean—let’s see: what is a good book? I don’t mean books like Henry James’s (he’s Andrew’s great idol.

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it.

A story that’s all forehead doesn’t amount to much.

Anyway, it’ll never get over at a Dorcas meeting. That was the trouble with Henry James. Andrew talked so much about him that I took one of his books to read aloud at our sewing circle over at Redfield.

If I ever sat down to read for ten minutes the cat would get into the custard. No woman in the country sits down for fifteen consecutive minutes between sunrise and sunset, anyway, unless she has half a dozen servants.

And nobody knows anything about literature unless he spends most of his life sitting down.

So there you are.

I guess Andrew’s books must be some good after all because he surely does mull over them without end. I can forgive his being a shiftless farmer so long as he really does his literary chores up to the hilt.

A man can be slack in everything else, if he does one thing as well as he possibly can.

And I guess it won’t matter my being an ignoramus in literature so long as I’m rated A-1 in the kitchen. That’s what I used to think as I polished and scoured and scrubbed and dusted and swept and then set about getting dinner.

The folks there stared at me somewhat suspiciously and I half thought they were going to say they didn’t take pedlars; but when I flashed a new five dollar bill at the desk I got good service.

A five dollar bill is a patent of nobility in New England.

My! how I enjoyed that creamed chicken on toast, and buckwheat cakes with syrup! After you get used to cooking all your own grub, a meal off someone else’s stove is the finest kind of treat.

With the permission of the management, and with apologies for disturbing your tranquillity, I will deliver a few remarks on the value of good books. I see that several of you are fond of reading, so perhaps the topic will be congenial?”

They gazed at me about as warmly as a round of walnut sundaes.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” I continued, “of course you remember the story of Abe Lincoln when he said, ‘if you call a leg a tail, how many tails has a dog?’ ‘Five,’ you answer. Wrong; because, as Mr. Lincoln said, calling a leg a tail …”

In a kind of daze I found myself at the Moose Hotel, where they assured me that they catered to mercantile people. I went straight to my room and fell asleep as soon as I reached the straw mattress.

That was my first and only public speech.

The good people of the Moose Hotel were genuinely surprised at the hurry with which I dispatched my lunch. But I gave them no explanations. Goodness knows, my head was full of other thoughts and the applesauce might have been asbestos.

You know, a woman only falls in love once in her life, and if it waits until she’s darn near forty⁠—well, it takes!

You see I hadn’t even been vaccinated against it by girlish flirtations. I began to be a governess when I was just a kid, and a governess doesn’t get many chances to be skittish. So now when it came, it hit me hard.

Here were my hearth and my home—Parnassus, or wherever Roger should pitch his tent. I dreamed of crossing the Brooklyn Bridge with him at dusk, watching the skyscrapers etched against a burning sky. I believed in calling things by their true names.

Ink is ink, even if the bottle is marked “commercial fluid.”

I didn’t try to blink the fact that I was in love. In fact, I gloried in it.

An adventure that had started as a mere lark or whim had now become for me the very gist of life itself. I was fanciful, I guess, and as romantic as a young hen, but by the bones of George Eliot,

I’m sorry for the woman that never has a chance to be fanciful.

Mifflin was in jail; aye, but he might have been dead and—unrecognizable! My heart refused to be altogether sad. I was on my way to deliver him from durance vile.

“Goin’ back to prosecute him, I guess?” he suggested. “Say, that feller’s a devil, believe me. When the sheriff tried to put the cuffs on him he gave him a black eye and pretty near broke his jaw.

Some scrapper fer a midget!

”

I decided to camp where I was. I guided Peg into a field beside the road, hitched her to a fence, and took the dog into the van with me. I was too tired to undress.

I fell into the bunk and drew the blankets over me.

As I did so, something dropped down behind the bunk with a sharp rap. It was a forgotten corncob pipe of the Professor’s, blackened and sooty. I put it under my pillow, and fell asleep.