Quotations from *Cup of Gold*, 7 of 11
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 American

It is amazing how this road-mender has his whole life curled like a kitten around four days in London.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“Why, to speak truthfully, Robert, I have taken it in my mind several times—but always there were too many things to think about. I could not take the time to die. If I did, I might not be able to think ever again.

“For up here, Robert, that furtive hope the valley men call faith becomes a questionable thing. Oh, without doubt, if there were a great many about me, and they all intoning endlessly the chant, ‘There is a wise, kind God; surely we shall go on living after death,’ then I might be preparing for the coming life. But here, alone, halfway up the sky, I am afraid that death would interrupt my musing. The mountains are a kind of poultice for a man’s abstract pain. Among them he laughs—oh, far more often than he cries.”

“You know,” said Robert, “my mother, the old Gwenliana, made a last, curious prophecy before she died. ‘This night the world ends,’ she said, ‘and there will be no more earth to walk upon.’”

“Robert, I think she spoke truth. I think her dying words were truth, whatever may have been her other auguries. This gnawing thought comes visiting, sometimes, and because of it I am afraid to die—horribly afraid. If by my living I give life to you, and fresh existence to the fields and trees and all the long green world, it would be an unutterable deed to wipe them all out like a chalk drawing. I must not—yet awhile.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“News of him comes out of the south on a light, inaccurate wind. Rumor has wings like bats. It is said that he rules a wild race of pirates; that he has captured towns and pillaged cities. The English are elated, and call him a hero and a patriotic man—and so do I, sometimes. But I fear if I were a Spaniard, he would be only a successful robber.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“So,” Merlin mused, “he has come to be the great man he thought he wanted to be. If this is true, then he is not a man. He is still a little boy and wants the moon. I suppose he is rather unhappy about it. Those who say children are happy, forget their childhood. I wonder how long he can stave off manhood.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“Song on the End of the World”
Czeslaw Milosz
1911-2004 Polish
translated by Anthony Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

“Parable”
Wislawa Szymborska
1923- Polish
translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Some fishermen pulled a bottle from the deep. It held a piece of paper, with these words: "Somebody save me! I'm here. The ocean cast me on this desert island. I am standing on the shore waiting for help. Hurry! I'm here!"

"There's no date. I bet it's already too late anyway. It could have been floating for years," the first fisherman said.

"And he doesn't say where. It's not even clear which ocean," the second fisherman said.

"It's not too late, or too far. The island Here is everywhere," the third fisherman said.

They all felt awkward. No one spoke. That's how it goes with universal truths.

Quotations from *Cup of Gold*, 8 of 11
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 American

He could not clearly remember his desire. But even though this desire should desert him utterly, he must go on. One failure, one moment of indecision, would scatter his successes like pigeons.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“This woman is the harbor of all my questing. I do not think of her as a female thing with arms and breasts, but as a moment of peace after turmoil, a perfume after rancid filth.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

It was monstrous to think that these men could feel as he did. Such a comparison made him, somehow, unworthy.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“This is not all. There are bulls to be loosed against you—against you cattle hunters.” A laugh followed his last words. Many of these men had lived in the jungle and had made their livelihood with hunting wild cattle.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“Four in the Morning”
Wislawa Szymborska
1923- Polish
translated by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire

The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
— three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come
if we're to go on living.

Quotations from *Cup of Gold*, 9 of 11
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 American

“And I have heard your words so often and so often in Paris and Cordova. I am tired of these words that never change. Is there some book with which aspiring lovers instruct themselves? The Spanish men say the same things, but their gestures are more practiced, and so a little more convincing. You have much to learn.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“When I heard of you and your blustering up and down the ocean, I thought of you, somehow, as the one realist on an earth of vacillation. I dreamed that you would come to me one day, armed with a transcendent, silent lust, and force my body with brutality. I craved a wordless, reasonless brutality....

“I wanted blind force—blind, unreasoning force—and love not for my soul or for some imagined beauty of my mind, but for the white fetish of my body. I do not want softness. I am soft. My husband uses scented lotions on his hands before he touches me, and his fingers are like thick, damp snails. I want the crush of hard muscles, the delicious pain of little hurts.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“I love you,” he said miserably.

“You speak as though it were some new, tremendous thing. Many men have loved me; hundreds have said they did.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

Henry released her and stepped away, wiping his bloody face with the back of his hand. Ysobel laughed at him. A man may beat—may subject to every violation—a woman who cries and runs away, but he is helpless before one who stands her ground and only laughs.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“It is a legend that dying men think of their deeds done. No— No— I think of what I have not done—of what I might have done in the years that are dying with me. I think of the lips of women I have never seen—of the wine that is sleeping in a grape seed—of the quick, warm caress of my mother in Goaves. But mostly I think that I shall never walk about again—never, never stroll in the sunshine nor smell the rich essences the full moon conjures up out of the earth— Sir, why did you do it?”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

Six-Word Memoir
Georgene Nunn

Born in the desert, still thirsty.

Six-Word Story
Gregory Maguire
1954- American

Finally, he had no more words.

Quotations from *Cup of Gold*, 10 of 11
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 American

“I was told that you killed your friend. Is it that which burdens you?”

“I killed him.”

“And do you mourn for him?”

“Perhaps. I do not know. I think I mourn for some other thing which is dead. He might have been a vital half of me, which, dying, leaves me half a man. Today I have been like a bound slave on a white slab of marble with the gathered vivisectors about me. I was supposed to be a healthy slave, but the scalpels found me sick with a disease called mediocrity.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“I think I am sorry because of your lost light; because the brave, brutal child in you is dead—the boastful child who mocked and thought his mockery shook the throne of God; the confident child who graciously permitted the world to accompany him through space. This child is dead, and I am sorry.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“I find I am tired of all this bloodshed and struggle for things that will not lie still, for articles that will not retain their value in my hands. It is horrible,” he cried. “I do not want anything any more. I have no lusts, and my desires are dry and rattling. I have only a vague wish for peace and the time to ponder imponderable matters.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“But I suppose your sins are great. All men who break the bars of mediocrity commit frightful sins.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

Six-Word Story
Orson Scott Card
1951- American

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.

Six-Word Story
David Brin
1950- American

Mind of its own. Damn lawnmower.

Quotations from *Cup of Gold*, 11 of 11
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 American

Captain Morgan went back to the treasure. He sat on the floor and took the coins into his hands. “The most human of all traits is inconsistency,” he thought. “It is a shock to learn this thing, almost as great a shock to a man as the realization of his humanity.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“But if it is wisdom, then wisdom is experience beating about in an orderly brain, kicking over the files.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“I ordered him to come in here tonight,” said the King. “These sailors and pirates sometimes have a tale or two worth repeating. You’ll be disappointed in him. He is—lumpish, I think is the word. You get the impression that a great mass is planted before you; and he moves as though he pushed his own invisible cage ahead of him.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“There are things which so sear the soul that the pain of it follows through life.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

The King was smiling through his wine.

“How is it, John, that such a great soldier can be such a great fool?”

Said John Evelyn, “How could it be otherwise? If great men were not fools, the world would have been destroyed long ago. How could it be otherwise? Folly and distorted vision are the foundations of greatness.”

“You mean that my vision is distorted?”

“No, I do not mean that.”

“Then you imply—”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“Of course he is a fool, Sire, else he would be turning soil in Wales or burrowing in the mines. He wanted something, and he was idiot enough to think he could get it. Because of his idiocy he did get it—part of it.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“Civilization will split up a character, and he who refuses to split goes under.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

He wanted to say, “I won’t want to get to heaven once I am dead. I won’t want them to disturb me.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“Oaxaca 1925”
Kenneth Rexroth
1905-1982 American

You were a beautiful child
With troubled face, green eyelids
And black lace stockings
We met in a filthy bar
You said
“My name is Nada
I don’t want anything from you
I will not take from you
I will give you nothing”
I took you home down alleys
Splattered with moonlight and garbage and cats
To your desolate disheveled room
Your feet were dirty
The lacquer was chipped on your fingernails
We spent a week hand in hand
Wandering entranced together
Through a sweltering summer
Of guitars and gunfire and tropical leaves
And black shadows in the moonlight
A lifetime ago

Six-Word Story
Richard K. Morgan (Richard Morgan)
1965- British

K.I.A. Baghdad, Aged 18 - Closed Casket

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 1 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

She thought: Yet I know these are the happy years. And ahead of us are only great disasters.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

People who did not respond to his art profoundly distressed Houdini. He had come to realize they were invariably of the upper classes. Always they broke through the pretense of his life and made him feel foolish. Houdini had high inchoate ambition and every development in technology made him restless. On the shabby confines of a stage he could create wonder and awe. Meanwhile men were beginning to take planes into the air, or race automobiles that went sixty miles an hour. A man like Roosevelt had run at the Spanish on San Juan Hill and now sent a fleet of white battleships steaming around the world, battleships as white as his teeth. The wealthy knew what was important. They looked on him as a child or a fool.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

She was so desperately in love that she could no longer see properly, something had happened to her eyes, and she blinked constantly as if to clear them of the blur. She saw everything through a film of salt tears, and her voice became husky because her throat was bathed in the irrepressible and continuous crying which her happiness caused her.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

They made love slowly and sinuously, humping each other into such supple states of orgasm that they found very little reason to talk the rest of the time they were together.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“Cargoes”
John Masefield
1878-1967 English

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Six-Word Story
William Shatner
1931- American

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 2 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

She sat all day in her attic room and watched the diamond windowpanes as they gathered the light, glowed with it and then gave it up.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

In fact he continued the practice not from vanity but because he discovered the mirror as a means of self-duplication. He would gaze at himself until there were two selves facing one another, neither of which could claim to be the real one. The sensation was of being disembodied. He was no longer anything exact as a person. He had the dizzying feeling of separating from himself endlessly. He would entrance himself so deeply in this process that he would be unable to come out of it even though his mind was lucid. He would have to rely on some outside stimulus, a loud noise or a change in the light coming through the window, to capture his attention and make him whole again.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

He brushed the grass with the tip of his shoe. Exactly six minutes after the car had rolled down the ramp an identical car appeared at the top of the ramp, stood for a moment pointed at the cold early morning sun, then rolled down and crashed into the rear of the first one. Henry Ford had once been an ordinary automobile manufacturer. Now he experienced an ecstasy greater and more intense than that vouchsafed to any American before him, not excepting Thomas Jefferson. He had caused a machine to replicate itself endlessly. His executives and managers and assistants crowded around him to shake his hand. Tears were in their eyes. He allotted sixty seconds on his pocket watch for a display of sentiment. Then he sent everyone back to work.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“I, Too, Sing America”
Langston Hughes
1902-1967 American

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Six-Word Story
Neal Stephenson
1959- American

Tick tock tick tock tick tick.

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 3 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

He had sensed in Ford’s achievement a lust for order as imperial as his own. This was the first sign given to him in some time that he might not be alone on the planet. Pierpont Morgan was that classic American hero, a man born to extreme wealth who by dint of hard work and ruthlessness multiplies the family fortune till it is out of sight. He controlled 741 directorships in 112 corporations. He had once arranged a loan to the United States Government that had saved it from bankruptcy. He had single-handedly stopped the panic of 1907 by arranging for the importation of one hundred million dollars in gold bullion. Moving about in private railroad cars or yachts he crossed all borders and was at home everywhere in the world. He was a monarch of the invisible, transnational kingdom of capital whose sovereignty was everywhere granted. Commanding resources that beggared royal fortunes, he was a revolutionist who left to presidents and kings their territory while he took control of their railroads and shipping lines, banks and trust companies, industrial plants and public utilities. For years he had surrounded himself with parties of friends and acquaintances, always screening them in his mind for the personal characteristics that might indicate less regard for him than they admitted. He was invariably disappointed.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

He heard through his brain the electric winds of an empty universe.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

I have no peers, Morgan said to the bird. It seemed an indisputable truth. Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world’s value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

He felt if there was something more than he knew, it lay in the past rather than in the present, of whose total bankruptcy of existence he was confident.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Of course at this time in our history the images of ancient Egypt were stamped on everyone’s mind. This was due to the discoveries being reported out of the desert by British and American archaeologists. After the football players in their padded canvas knee pants and leather helmets, archaeologists were the glamour personages of the universities.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
James Wright
1927-1980 American

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Six-Word Memoir
Zak Nelson

I still make coffee for two.

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 4 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

But there was an intensity of expectation about his eyes that attracted a fair number of women. He was always so serious and unhappy that they were persuaded he loved them. They took him for a poet.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

A while later Younger Brother found himself in the Cooper Union down near the Bowery. The hall was hot, crowded to overflowing. There were lots of foreigners. Men wore their derbies though indoors. It was a great stinking congress garlicked and perfumed in its own perspiration. It had met in support of the Mexican Revolution. He hadn’t known there was a Mexican Revolution.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

I cannot sympathize. You think you are special, losing your lover. It happens every day. Suppose she consented to live with you after all. You’re a bourgeois, you would want to marry her. You would destroy each other inside of a year. You would see her begin to turn old and bored under your very eyes. You would sit across the dinner table from each other in bondage, in terrible bondage to what you thought was love. The both of you. Believe me you are better off this way.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

I’ll tell you something. In this room tonight you saw my present lover but also two of my former lovers. We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“I am longing for a kiss”
R.Emujin
Mongolian
translated by Sh.Tsog and Simon Wickham-Smith

I am longing for a kiss.
Oh, my lips are orphaned.
Oh, these days, so old like those in fairy tales!
My feelings are so alive and I can’t bear this loneliness.
Who has left this misery with me alone?
Why love this misery as if it were something precious?
Why accept the way the world is?
How to deal with being so obviously young and
Unleashed, like morning light and evening dusk?
Why care for rumors of not being faithful?
I am longing for a kiss.

Six-Word Novel
Adam

Last man on earth dies smiling.

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 5 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

Spring, spring! Like a mad magician flinging silks and colored rags from his trunk the earth produced the yellow and white crocus, then the fox grape, the forsythia flowering on its stalks, the blades of iris, the apple tree blossoms of pink and white and green, the heavy lilac and the daffodil. Grandfather stood in the yard and gave a standing ovation. A breeze came up and blew from the maples a shower of spermatozoic soft-headed green buds. They caught in his sparse gray hair. He shook his head with delight, feeling a wreath had been bestowed. A joyful spasm took hold of him and he stuck his leg out in an old man’s jig, lost his balance, and slid on the heel of his shoe into a sitting position. In this manner he cracked his pelvis and entered a period of declining health from which he would not recover.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

He remembered his attempt to escape from a coffin, the terror when he realized he could not. The coffin had a trick lid but he had not anticipated the weight of the earth. He had clawed at the earth, feeling its monumental weight. He had screamed into its impenetrable silence. He knew what it was to be sealed in the earth but he felt now it was the only place for him.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

During his absence when she had made certain decisions regarding the business, all its mysterious potency was dissipated and she saw it for the dreary unimaginative thing it was. No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“The girl dreams of her lover”
Konstantin Vanshenkin
1925- Russian
translated by Daniel Weissbort

The girl dreams of her lover at night,
And he of her.
He dreams of her full lips,
Her long eyelashes.

The elderly poet dreams
Of splendid lines.
Never did life call forth from him
Poems so fine.

Of sums and calculations the schoolboy dreams,
Of inkwells.
The happy woman dreams her man’s
Unfaithful.

And all these folk have different,
Incongruous dreams.

While, like children, pilots dream
Simply of flying.

Six-Word Novel
Cameron

No, no, no, no, no...yes.

Quotations from *Last of the Breed*
Louis L'Amour
1908-1988 American

When prisoners were brought before Colonel Zamatev, they were frightened or wary. They had all heard the stories of brainwashings and torture, yet there was in this man no evidence of fear or of doubt in himself. Zamatev was irritated by a faint, uneasy feeling.
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

His smile was warm as he greeted Yakov. "Come! Sit by the fire! It is good to see you!"

"I am afraid there is little time for sitting, comrade. You are to be arrested. You must leave this place at once."
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

So many things worth doing may seem foolish to others, may seem impossible.
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

"There are millions of Americans who would like to see Lake Baikal and the Kamchatka Peninsula. If Russia would tear down the Berlin Wall, and build more good hotels, we Americans would be all over your country spending money, making friends, seeing the beauties of Russia, and making ridiculous all that both countries are spending on munitions."
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

He was not blundering, wishing, complaining, or hopeless. He was going somewhere, and he knew where he was going and how to get there...
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

"Speak to the spirits of the sea, Grandfather. My voice is lonely in the night."
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

“It seems to me I’m resurrected”
Leonid Martynov
1905-1980 Russian
translated by J.R. Rowland

It seems to me I’m resurrected.
I lived. My name was Hercules.
Then, I weighed at least a ton.
Roots and all I tore up trees,
Stretched my hand and touched the skies.
When I sat down I broke the chairs.
I died. And now I’m resurrected:
Normal height and normal size
Like other people. Kind and gay,
When I sit down I don’t break chairs.
But all the same, I’m Hercules.

Six-Word Story
Tobias Wolff
1945- American

She gave. He took. He forgot.

Quotations

Whenever I saw a rich person I would ask where their money was from. Oil would be a common answer, or real estate, or steel... The answer was never, "Poetry—their money's from poetry, Fran."
—Fran Lebowitz

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.
—Dylan Thomas

“How terrible it is”
anonymous
Russian
translated by Bradley Jordan

How terrible it is to trust no one,
to have neither joys, nor friends,
and to never open when someone knocks
at the fettered doors of the soul.

But it’s worse to be the one who knocks,
calling another from inside yourself
to open the door, to see, to take fright,
then quickly to lock up again.

Six-Word Memoir
Bjorn Stromberg

Found true love, married someone else.

Quotations from “The Emptied Prairie”
*National Geographic* magazine, 2008 January
Charles Bowden
1945- American

A torn page from a textbook flutters in the breeze from a broken window in the Gascoyne school. The lesson reads: “Write the Other Word for CRY, AFTER, BAD, ALWAYS, GOOD-BY, LOST, and DARK.”
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

Ghost towns stud North Dakota, and this empty house is just one bone in a giant skeleton of abandoned human desire.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

Bjella explains the man walked the tracks each day for the two miles into town, did this year after year. One day he apparently did not hear the train and was killed. Bjella pauses, lets the tale float almost weightlessly in the air with its whisper of suicide. Self-destruction is not a forbidden subject in North Dakota, and people easily tick off cases in their neighborhoods. One woman came across a death book compiled in the early decades of the 20th century. She says the records show a remarkable number of people killed by trains.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

He’s looked through his granddad’s diary from 1908 and notes, “a lot of the entries are about wind.”

“There were a lot of suicides,” he says.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

He and his brothers and his late friend Oscar all served in World War II. Every winter he’d go by Oscar’s and say, “Well, do you remember how you were years ago at this time?” and Oscar would always answer, “Cold.”
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

You know I sit here alone for six months at a time, nobody comes to see me. I’ve outlived them all.
—Ragnar Slaaen, in “The Emptied Prairie” by Charles Bowden

“Knows Nothing”
Neil Lawful
1970- Irish

Standing there waiting
Waiting patiently
He had not got a care
People came and went
Some even began to stare
He was aware thinking
Sometimes reminiscing
Seen a young couple kissing
Trucks and cars
People and dogs
Oh why do they stare
At the man
Who doesn’t have a care
He will accept and
Maybe sometimes he too will stare
But after all he is
The man who knows
The man who knows anything
Knows he knows nothing.

Six-Word Story
Frank Miller
1957- American

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 1 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

The majority were men who, like himself, thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country ships. They had now a horror of the home service, with its harder conditions, severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved short passages, good deckchairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes—would have served the devil himself had he made it easy enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got charge of a boat on the coast of China—a soft thing; how this one had an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the Siamese navy; and in all they said—in their actions, in their looks, in their persons—could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with a hundred pounds round-the-world tickets in their pockets. There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they would be labelled as having passed through this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person—this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well,—the ship-wrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“This Be The Verse”
Philip Larkin
1922-1985 English

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Six-Word Story
James P. Blaylock
1950- American

Nevertheless, he tried a third time.

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 2 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward! What we get—well, we won’t talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality—in no other is the beginning all illusion—the disenchantment more swift—the subjugation more complete. Hadn’t we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of imprecation?
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find a remedy against the pain of truth...
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

And he had been deliberating upon death—confound him! He had found that to meditate about because he thought he had saved his life, while all its glamour had gone with the ship in the night.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

He was then working for De Jongh, on my recommendation. Water-clerk.... You can’t imagine a mode of life more barren of consolation, less capable of being invested with a spark of glamour—unless it be the business of an insurance canvasser.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

To bury him would have been such an easy kindness! It would have been so much in accordance with the wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency—the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends. Perhaps he did take it too much to heart.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

...still the idea obtrudes itself that he made so much of his disgrace while it is the guilt alone that matters. He was not—if I may say so—clear to me. He was not clear. And there is a suspicion he was not clear to himself either. There were his fine sensibilities, his fine feelings, his fine longings—a sort of sublimated, idealised selfishness. He was—if you allow me to say so—very fine; very fine—and very unfortunate. A little coarser nature would not have borne the strain; it would have had to come to terms with itself—with a grunt, or even with a guffaw; a still coarser one would have remained invulnerably ignorant and completely uninteresting.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Suicide Is Painless”
theme song to M*A*S*H
Mike Altman
1955- American

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see

That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

I try to find a way to make
All our little joys relate
Without that ever-present hate
But now I know that it’s too late

The game of life is hard to play
I’m gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I’ll someday lay
So this is all I have to say

The only way to win is cheat
And lay it down before I’m beat
And to another give my seat
For that’s the only painless feat

The sword of time will pierce our skins
It doesn’t hurt when it begins
But as it works its way on in
The pain grows stronger, watch it grin

A brave man once requested me
To answer questions that are key
“Is it to be or not to be?”
And I replied, “Oh why ask me?”

Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

And you can do the same thing if you please

Six-Word Memoir
George Saunders
1958- American

Started small, grew, peaked, shrunk, vanished.

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 3 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

The time was coming when I should see him loved, trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess forming round his name as though he had been the stuff of a hero.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

He, on his side, had that faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Stein lifted his hand. ‘And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘It seems to me that some would have been very fine—if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don’t know.’ ‘Whether his were fine or not,’ I said, ‘he knows of one which he certainly did not catch.’ ‘Everybody knows of one or two like that,’ said Stein; ‘and that is the trouble—the great trouble....’
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Yes! few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I don’t know how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he felt confusedly but powerfully, the demand of some such truth or some such illusion—I don’t care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference means so little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Shiloh:
A Requiem”
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
O’er the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh --
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain,
Through the pauses of the night --
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh --
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there --
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve --
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.

Six-Word Story
Howard Waldrop
1946- American

Rained, rained, rained, and never stopped.

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 4 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

I knew very well he was of those about whom there is no inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly, without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow. The spirit of the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of innumerable lives. Woe to the stragglers! We exist only in so far as we hang together.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imagination to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions—and safe—and profitable—and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone—and as short-lived, alas!
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

The conquest of love, honour, men’s confidence—the pride of it, the power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds are struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim’s successes there were no externals.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I probably didn’t realize, he said with a naive gravity, how much importance he attached to that token. It meant a friend; and it is a good thing to have a friend. He knew something about that.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Suicide in the Trenches”
Siegfried Sassoon
1886-1967 English

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.


You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Six-Word Story
Steve Meretzky (Steven Meretzky)
1957- American

Wasted day. Wasted life. Dessert, please.

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 5 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

‘I—I love her dearly. More than I could tell. Of course one cannot tell. You take a different view of your actions when you come to understand, when you are made to understand every day that your existence is necessary—you see, absolutely necessary—to another person. I am made to feel that. Wonderful.’
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

The boat fairly flew; we sweltered side by side in the stagnant superheated air; the smell of mud, of marsh, the primeval smell of fecund earth, seemed to sting our faces; till suddenly at a bend it was as if a great hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had flung open an immense portal. The light itself seemed to stir, the sky above our heads widened, a far-off murmur reached our ears, a freshness enveloped us, filled our lungs, quickened our thoughts, our blood, our regrets—and, straight ahead, the forests sank down against the dark-blue ridge of the sea.

I breathed deeply, I revelled in the vastness of the opened horizon, in the different atmosphere that seemed to vibrate with a toil of life, with the energy of an impeccable world. This sky and this sea were open to me.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion? And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly gray. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

‘For the last time,’ she cried, menacingly, ‘will you defend yourself?’ ‘Nothing can touch me,’ he said in a last flicker of superb egoism. Tamb' Itam saw her lean forward where she stood, open her arms, and run at him swiftly. She flung herself upon his breast and clasped him round the neck.

‘Ah! but I shall hold thee thus,’ she cried.... ‘Thou art mine!’
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Ball’s Bluff:
A Reverie”
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

One noonday, at my window in the town,
I saw a sight -- saddest that eyes can see --
Young soldiers marching lustily
Unto the wars,
With fifes, and flags in mottoed pageantry;
While all the porches, walks, and doors
Were rich with ladies cheering royally.

They moved like Juny morning on the wave,
Their hearts were fresh as clover in its prime
(It was the breezy summer time),
Life throbbed so strong,
How should they dream that Death in rosy clime
Would come to thin their shining throng?
Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime.

Weeks passed; and at my window, leaving bed,
By nights I mused, of easeful sleep bereft,
On those brave boys (Ah War! thy theft);
Some marching feet
Found pause at last by cliffs Potomac cleft;
Wakeful I mused, while in the street
Far footfalls died away till none were left.

Six-Word Story
Robert Olen Butler
1945- American

Saigon hotel. Decades later. He weeps.

“Not Waving But Drowning”
Stevie Smith
1902-1971 British

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Six-Word Story
Ernest Hemingway (attributed)
1899-1961 American

For sale: Baby shoes. Never used.

Quotations from an introduction to *The Death of Ivan Ilyich* by Leo Tolstoy, 1 of 3
Ronald Blythe
1922- English

The German physician and literary critic A. L. Vischer has investigated the parallel relationship that exists between a man’s total personality and his relationship to death. “Simple, uncomplicated souls,” he writes, “who do not attach such great importance to their own life, are able to accept their illness, because they accept their fate: life and heart have done their work, time for them to go. By contrast, successful and self-assured people are usually at a complete loss when faced with the reality of physical collapse.”
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

...the thought that he must die harassed him almost to the point of insanity. The very rationality of death became for him the most irrational thing of all.... He felt he could not live if there was death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

“Take the saving lie from the average man and you take his happiness away,” said Ibsen. The biggest saving lie is to accept a friend’s death and not one’s own.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy was highly experienced in death, and from childhood onward his diaries, letters, and books reveal how much it intrigued him. His death “notes” range from the detailed studies he made of slaughter on the battlefield to an execution in Paris, from the animallike acceptance of death by the muzhiks on his estates to the greatly varying reactions he had to the many deaths in his own family.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

With all but two exceptions, those surrounding Ivan Ilyich at his end feel sorry for him, “but not very.” Sorrow is a formality and he himself knows it. Nearly everything in his life has been a formality—his outlook, his marriage, his work, and his hopes—and he is hurt but not surprised by the conventional reaction to his tragedy.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

There is the appalling possibility that the “I” upon whom this whole world of intimate impressions depends will soon have to face its absolute annihilation. The sun will rise as before, and the winds will blow as before. People will talk of the weather in the same tone. The postman will knock as did just now and the letters will fall on the mat. But he won’t be there. He, our pivot and the center of everything, will be nowhere at all.
—John Cowper Powys, in an introduction by Ronald Blythe to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

“Invading the South to the River”
Bayan
1300’s Mongol
translated by Sh.Tsog and Simon Wickham-Smith

The bluish mountains looked about to break at the point of a sword.
The blue river seemed not to have enough water for our mounts.
When a hundred thousand of our warriors invaded the South,
No blood besmirched the points of our spears.

“The Tempter”
Robert E. Howard
1906-1936 American

Something tapped me on the shoulder
Something whispered, “Come with me,
Leave the world of men behind you,
Come where care may never find you
Come and follow, let me bind you
Where, in that dark, silent sea,
Tempest of the world ne’er rages;
There to dream away the ages,
Heedless of Time’s turning pages,
Only, come with me.”

“Who are you?” I asked the phantom.
“I am rest from Hate and Pride,
I am friend to king and beggar,
I am Alpha and Omega,
I was councilor to Hagar,
But men call me suicide.”
I was weary of tide breasting,
Weary of the world’s behesting,
And I lusted for the resting
As a lover for his bride.

And my soul tugged at its moorings
And it whispered, “Set me free.
I am weary of this battle,
Of this world of human cattle,
All this dreary noise and prattle.
This you owe to me.”
Long I sat and long I pondered,
On the life that I had squandered,
O’er the paths that I had wandered
Never free.

In the shadow panorama
Passed life’s struggles and its fray.
And my soul tugged with new vigor,
Huger grew the phantom’s figure,
As I slowly tugged the trigger,
Saw the world fade swift away.
Through the fogs old Time came striding,
Radiant clouds were ’bout me riding,
As my soul went gliding, gliding,
From the shadow into day.

Quotations from an introduction to *The Death of Ivan Ilyich* by Leo Tolstoy, 2 of 3
Ronald Blythe
1922- English

Maeterlinck was amazed by the crudeness of Western man’s thought when it came to the subject of his own death. The fatuity and shallowness of man’s philosophy appalled him. “We deliver death into the dim hands of instinct,” he writes in La Morte, “and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous, remains the flimsiest of our ideas and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power we never look in the face? To fathom its abysses we wait until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of life arrive.”
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

How should I fear death? When I am, death is not; and when death is, I am not.
—Epicurus, in an introduction by Ronald Blythe to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Present trends are to make us conscious of death as a mass social tragedy which, by means of compassion, economics, improved medicine, and the like, can be conquered. Multiple death in wars, famines, epidemics, accidents—even as a statistic issued by the anti-smoke and drink lobbies—is shown as not incurable, and talk of this death sends no shiver down the individual spine.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Ivan Ilyich’s gray tragedy is that of a man who debased life and who tried to fight off death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

What did you do with this divine asset, Life? demands Tolstoy. You made no attempt to live it outside the meanest terms. You played safe according to the most selfish rules. You took care to see that everything you did was done with “clean hands, in clean shirts, and with French phrases.” You never put a foot wrong and so you never stepped out of your rut. Your life has been “most simple and commonplace—and most horrifying.” The bleak indictment continues with Ivan Ilyich’s opportunism, marriage of convenience, vanity, and limitation, and then, with astonishment, the reader finds himself beginning to like this conventional man and to be sorry when he starts to lose out to death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

...we are sympathizing with ourselves and all the little hopes and aspirations we have; aspirations which are so despicable or laughable when put into our dossier or official record but which are so precious to us.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

“Silence”
S.Khadaa (S.Hadaa)
1961- Mongolian
translated by Sh.Tsog and Simon Wickham-Smith

Khar Khorin, slowly shifting clouds.
A strand of grass held in my damp palm.
Something is waiting.
I am not the one waiting.

The early sun is watching me.
I am watching the early sun.
Something desired.
I desired nothing.

“Nomads”
S.Khadaa (S.Hadaa)
1961- Mongolian
translated by Sh.Tsog and Simon Wickham-Smith

On the fire-red desert,
We greet the final day of golden autumn.
The herders slowly lead the camels,
There’s a guarddog too.
Will we travel far from the path we’ve chosen?

We are joined to the broad, wide desert.
From high up, the gers are swaying upon tall humps,
And eyes shine as though upon the highlands.
And in my heart, this great green force will never be broken.
My snowwhite ger is my final resting place.

Quotations from an introduction to *The Death of Ivan Ilyich* by Leo Tolstoy, 3 of 3
Ronald Blythe
1922- English

It was an experiment that was eventually to lead him to excommunication as well as to the meaning of death, pain, and the conflict between loving life and having to accept that it was temporal.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Below him lies a spinning darkness. Agony is created by those above accepting the situation, by even being rational about it. A nonidentifying process has moved across their usual view of him like a filter, and already, with the breath still in him, he is outside their comprehension. One of Tolstoy’s themes is about the inability of the dying to communicate and of the sick to remain inside the old circles of relationships. The very first hint that Ivan Ilyich is poorly begins the pushing-out business, as wife, children, and colleagues prepare to live in a world that will no longer contain him. Self-interest reigns. Gain runs parallel with loss. It is a busy period for everyone and there really isn’t much time for being sad. Afterward, when he has slipped from the ledge and out of sight, empty words are politely muttered in the empty space he has left. There is coarse honesty when the dead man’s friend takes the opportunity to set up a game of whist while viewing the corpse. The widow acts out the grief she is supposed to feel and receives the condolences of those who are not sorry. It is finished—a life that proved to have no meaning for anyone except he who possessed it and who parted with it with fear and incredulity.

Ivan Ilyich is the climax of Tolstoy’s death writing. It also acted as the purgative to his own extreme death fears which reached their crescendo during a visit he made to the town of Arzamas. The incident is crucial to Tolstoy’s obsessional fascination with death in all its variety. Shortly after the publication of War and Peace, when his body had never felt more vigorous or his mind more active, with praise and success ringing in his ears, and when his life should have been bursting with a sense of well-being, he fell into a deep despair that took the form of being irreconcilably opposed to the inevitability of his own death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The trip began happily enough, then the frightfulness started to return, dogging his footsteps, catching up with him just when Sergey’s cheerfulness and goodness promised protection. Saying nothing to the boy, Tolstoy took a room at the inn at Arzamas, and there the classic existentialist nightmare overwhelmed him. The room was death and he was in it. “I was particularly disturbed by the fact that it was square,” he wrote. It was full of torment and the torment was irrevocable. What was in the room with him had to be—this was the delirium of it. There was no escape, no way out—or in, if it came to that. He was. Death was.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

“Loneliness”
B.Batbayar
1941- Mongolian
translated by Sh.Tsog and Simon Wickham-Smith

Just as it always has been,
like being with one who’s deaf and dumb,
I pair up with myself.
I’m telling no-one
of the sadness at my core.

The stars are blinking at someone in the dark.
Why is the craggy moon in tears?
How come everything I see and hear
Seems so alien?
It’s like I’ve come into this world by mistake,
Like a sheep among the goats.
Oh, to hell with it!
I wonder what mother’s up to.

“The Cumberland”
from *Historic Poems and Ballads*
edited by Rupert S. Holland
American

Early in 1862 a war-ship made her appearance at Hampton Roads, off Fortress Monroe, in Virginia, which was destined to change the naval battles of the future. The vessel was a Confederate ironclad called the Merrimac. An old ship had been altered by having a wedge-shaped prow of cast-iron project about two feet in front of the bow, and covering a wooden roof which sloped to the water-line with two iron plates of armor. A battery of ten guns was placed inside the ironclad. So constructed, it was thought that the new type of war-ship could readily destroy the old-fashioned Union frigates, and herself escape without injury.

Five Union ships, the fifty gun frigate Congress, the twenty-four gun sloop Cumberland, and the frigates St. Lawrence, Roanoke, and Minnesota, lay near Newport News on march 8, 1862, when about noon the new ship Merrimac suddenly appeared from the James River. The three nearest frigates, believing they could easily defeat the stranger, immediately slipped their cables, but, as all were of deep draft, shortly grounded in shallow water. The two other Union ships, together with the shore batteries, opened fire upon the strange black vessel that looked like a crocodile or some unknown sea-monster. The their surprise the shot bounced off the sloping back of the ironclad like rubber balls, and seemed to do no damage.

Lieutenant George Upham Morris was in command of the Cumberland, and as he saw the strange ship advancing to attack him he ordered broadsides of shot and shell poured at her. The heavy fire had no effect. The monster steamed on, and rammed her iron prow into the wooden side of the Cumberland. The frigate sank in fifty-five minutes, carrying down officers and crew, one hundred and twenty-five in all. Her flag was still flying as she sank, and her guns fired even when the water had reached the gunwales.

The Merrimac then turned to the Congress, which had made for the shore, and riddled her with shots until she caught on fire, and an exploding powder-magazine destroyed her. The Merrimac finally retired at nightfall to the shelter of the Confederate batteries, having spread consternation through the Union fleet.

Next morning, however, when the victorious Merrimac steamed out to destroy the three remaining frigates, she found that a tiny vessel named the Monitor had arrived at Hampton Roads over night, and was ready to meet her. This Monitor showed only a thin edge of surface above the water-line, and an iron turret revolved in sight, from which two guns could be fired in any direction. As the Northern papers said, this ship looked like a "cheese-box on a raft."

The Goliath of a Merrimac advanced to meet the David of a Monitor, and a three hours' battle followed. Neither could force the other to surrender, but finally the larger ironclad began to leak and had to withdraw, leaving the little Monitor in possession of the Roads.

This marked the beginning of the change from wooden ships-of-war to ironclads.