Word: jim
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Ever since the Jordan, people have used rivers to find something (Jim and Huck's escape) or someone (Conrad's Kurtz or Coppola's). But in America rivers have meant more than quests and more than entrances and borders. They have been tests of what the country wanted of its wilderness and of itself--reminders of the beckoning wilderness of the American mind. Water seems always to be where the great national story unfolds--Melville's ocean, Dreiser's lake, Fitzgerald's bay. But as Twain suggested, nothing was ever as deep as the river. The Atlantic becomes transformed into...
...wonder so many American artists have written, sung, painted and even gone round the bend, gone mad, in the name of rivers. In his overboard essay on Huck and Jim, Leslie Fiedler wrote that the river supports "the American dream of isolation afloat." Out of that isolation in motion comes every inspiration, from contemplation (Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers") to adventure (Hemingway's stories) to despair. The poet John Berryman looked down into the Mississippi and jumped to his death. The river is expanse, but it is also loneliness; Huck finds a loving relationship with Jim...
Twain placed Huck and Jim on the river because the river was time, motion, beauty, baptism and violence, but mainly because one could not see around the bend. Civilizations are formed by bends in the river--the Nile, Congo, Thames, Yangtze--a twist of the land, water and fate that, by making it impossible to see what comes next, raises hopes of the possibility of everything...
...determines the country's worth. Somewhere in that curve is the capacity to start over and do it right. Somewhere too is Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in which no lesson takes hold. The river carries the country into its sin and grandeur and magnificent contradictions. Deciding to free Jim and himself, Huck says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell," referring to salvation...
After school reopens next fall, teachers all over California will be making house calls--not to tutor children but to encourage parents to get more involved in their kids' education. Jim Sweeney, superintendent of a Sacramento district where such home visits are already in place, says they have "changed the whole relationship" between teachers and parents. Test scores and attendance are up, and discipline problems are down...