Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Dear Reader,

Thank you for subscribing! My hope is for Here Was One to be a weekly newsletter about literature and life. But in this inaugural issue, I think I owe it to you to give a little bit more background on (1) why I’m starting this newsletter; (2) what the format and subject matter will be; and (3) what my hopes are for this publication going forward.

Why This Newsletter?

I’m starting this newsletter for two reasons. First, my daily cultural diet is pretty much crap. When I take my kids to school in the morning, and when I go for runs, I gorge myself on podcasts. In the evenings, my wife and I usually savor an episode or two of some television series. (How about those Succession and Ted Lasso finales, eh?) During work breaks and late at night, I snack on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. Every time I put the phone down and try to get some sleep, I feel like I’ve just binged an entire bag of Halloween candy.

It’s not that these cultural products are necessarily bad. The podcasts I listen to cover current events, politics, sports, and other interesting topics. There’s also no denying that much of the best writing comes to us today through television. Even social media, which so often exposes the worst of humanity, can turn up real gems of creativity and genius, if you don’t get discouraged with the digging. Each of these outlets is fine in its own way. In fact, because I’m a nerd, a lot of what I watch, listen to, and interact with even involves poetry, prose, and other art.

But there’s a difference between receiving something and engaging with it. There’s also a difference between a device that tricks your attention and one that commands it. And, of course, there’s an obvious difference between a two-dimensional picture and a three-dimensional object (even if that object only exists in your imagination). I miss the payoff of reading and experiencing literature firsthand, without any moderation, mischief, or simplification.

Second, I really believe that literature can offer something to everyone. I’m not a scholar or an academic. I’ve probably spent more time in the last decade reading legal briefs and memos than poems or prose. But there have been countless moments in my life when I’ve read a passage or a line, or closed the end-cover of a book, and felt forever changed.

When deciding on a title for this newsletter, I settled on a passage from Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse:

I think that’s what the best literature can offer: not a coherent vision of existence, but a flame that illuminates a face or a room or a door. And to the extent I can hand you the matchbox, it’ll all have been worth it.

Format and Subject Matter

The newsletter will be short—much shorter than this first issue. I have a job, a mortgage, kids, dogs, &c. I can’t be churning out 5,000 words a week. My expectation is to pick one piece of literature—a poem or a novel excerpt or a short story—and briefly explain (1) any background, context, or technical elements that I think are important for understanding the piece; and (2) what I think it offers us.

As a sample, here’s the first work that I chose:

Background

Frost (1874-1963) was an American poet, who for much of his life worked as an English teacher. He frequently focused on rural settings and used more traditional verse forms and techniques (e.g., rhyme) during a time of radical experimentation in poetry. He won a record four Pulitzer Prizes and wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in a few minutes, after staying up all night working on another, longer poem.

The poem has four stanzas of four lines each (i.e., quatrains) and the meter is iambic tetrameter (i.e., da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM). The first and last line of each stanza rhyme, and the third line of each stanza rhymes with the first line of the next, except for the last stanza where every line rhymes.

What It Offers

A lot of you probably read this poem, like I did, when you were in elementary or middle school. Frost is often one of the first poets that students encounter because the formal elements of his poetry are pretty noticeable (and thus more teachable) and his writing is accessible to a normal reader. Part of the reason I picked “Stopping” is because it’s the first poem I remember reading and thinking: Wow, that’s something.

I return to it often now because, while the poem’s widely regarded as a masterpiece, readers can’t seem to settle on a satisfactory interpretation. You can find respected critics and scholars who differ wildly in their understanding of the text. Is it a contemplation of suicide? Is it about the alienation of humans from nature? Both? Neither?

What I think it offers is one of the best attempts to capture—in written form—an ineffable but probably near-universal experience. Most of us have stood outside at night when it’s cold and there’s snow on the ground. There’s something that happens, not unlike the feeling you get when you find yourself on a beach at night. It’s an overwhelming sense of mystery—something heavy, quiet, different—like the sky itself has dropped down and wrapped itself around you. This poem allows me to say with certainty that Frost had the same experience. This poem allows me (and you) the ability to claim that, while we might be separated by time and space, we’re all connected by these moments. And while we can’t stay in them long (after all, who doesn’t have promises to keep), the ephemerality does nothing to diminish the power of the experience.

Frost remembered, and now we remember with him.

My Hope Going Forward

There was an old show on NPR that I used to love called Car Talk. Listeners would call into the show, and the two hosts—Tom and Ray Magliozzi—would try to answer their questions about what was going wrong with their vehicles. I don’t know anything about cars, but I loved Car Talk, because Tom and Ray had such an amazing exuberance for solving the callers’ problems. They would chat and laugh and puzzle and explain, with boundless curiosity and good humor.

When I think about the most interesting people in my life, they’ve all had that same passion for their subject matter—whether it was music, food, triathlons, or life itself. I have it for literature. So even if you aren’t big on poetry, even if you hated English class in high school, my hope is that there will be something here for you too. My hope is that you can tune in—once a week—and experience vicariously the passion and curiosity and love that animates this endeavor.