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.