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Mesdames and Messieurs, are we all mad? Or am I? Or is life?Is the whole thing, what it appears to be to so many, an aimless, insane, accidental jumble and gibberish? We articulate or put together out of old mysteries new mysteries, machines, methods, theories. But to what end? What about all the Hauchawouts, past, present, and to come, sons, daughters, and relatives, and all the fighting and the cruelty and the parading and the nonsense?

The crude and defeated Ida. And this fumbling, seeking, and rather to be pitied dub with his rhymes. Myself, writing and wondering about it all.

VI

A letter written several years later by my relative’s wife adds this for my enlightenment:

“He has taken to religion now and interprets the Bible in his own fumbling way, coming to me occasionally for help. He plows his fields and meditates, expecting God any minute to come in the form of a dragon or giant and finish him and all men. He has figured out that the world will come to an end in this wise: God will appear as a dragon or a gigantic man, and wherever he places his foot, there life will cease to exist. That will be the end of the world. Yet he has no notion that the world is any larger than the United States at most. I said to him once, ‘But it would take Him a long time to step over all the world and crush out all life.’ ‘Yes, that’s so,’ he replied; ‘but I guess His feet are bigger than ours — maybe as big as a barn,’ — those great barns! — ‘an’ mebbe He can walk faster than we can.’ He has lost himself completely in the Bible now and reads and meditates all the time, applying everything he reads to his own few acres. He still lives alone and does his own cooking. His chief dish is cornmeal mush, which he boils and pours into saucers or flat plates to the thickness he wants, because he doesn’t know how to pour it into a deep dish and slice it.”