War, Identity, and Reading Aboard the NYC Subway

            As a young adult, I lived continuously subject to the possibility of military induction; in fact, I had avoided being drafted only by enrolling in college and receiving a student deferment. Deferment of my anxiety regarding life and war took a bit longer.

            The war in Korea, what then-President Harry S Truman characterized as “a police action,” had ended; nevertheless American involvement in Asia was pronounced as the Chinese on the mainland harassed rebellious exiles by shelling the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait (the fact that I retain the names of two remote Asian islands suggests my anxious consciousness at that time). And my nation at the time was led by a decorated war hero, former Gen. Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower.

            At the prospect of becoming a military man, as both of my older brothers had, I steeped myself in popular literature about war. In a relatively brief period of time, I read Audie Murphy’s heroic autobiography, To Hell and Back. In serial fashion, I read a handful of war novels, most of which had been turned into films: From Here to Eternity, Battle Cry, Away All Boats, The Caine Mutiny, The Young Lions, and, in a lighter vein but decidedly militaristic, Mister Roberts.

            Most of my reading was done as a commuter aboard the Sixth Avenue Independent Subway Line of New York City, which probably accounts for my affinity for noisy reading places. I rode the subway daily for more than an hour each way getting to and from the Bronx campus of New York University, and later to a job near Columbus Circle in Manhattan, and still later to another job in Long Island City in Queens and simultaneously as an evening student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood.

            This passionate reading coincided with my evident identity crisis as a young man suddenly introduced to the rigors of college, the demands of employment,  the angst of independence from home, the fear of war, and my quest for God—who met me about the same time via my inquisitive reading of the New Testament.

            Only on much later reflection did I sense the reading of war novels and biographies provided me with vicarious maturation of the kind that shows in veterans of war who return to college and civilian responsibility from a harrowing battlefield.

            Simply put, I fought my personal wars while riding and reading aboard a New York City subway, winning some, losing several, but always finding strange strength in reading of others’ struggles with their enemies and demons.

What is being wasted

The child, no more than eight or nine years old, stood at the white board in an empty classroom waiting for Sunday School to begin. He stood filling the lower quarter of the board with black lines and curves magically flowing from the dry-erase marker in his hand. None dare interfere with his excursion of inky discovery. I watched him with quiet joy for several minutes before the room began to fill with others, and he stopped.

The scene reminded me of the conflict I once felt with a despotic and dictatorial teacher who chastised students when they leisurely wrote upon the white board in his classroom. Sarcastically, he asked guilty students, “Are you going to pay me to replace those markers you’re wasting?”

Incidentally, the school paid for the markers, and only a fool or a misguided instructor would interfere with the magic of exploration.

The  title of “teacher” must be a humbling, gentle appellation and not become a license for enslaving minds and quashing imaginations.

When will they ever learn? And I speak not of the students.

Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine

One of my favorite lines in the annals of church hymnody comes from a stanza of "How Firm a Foundation":

"When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply.
The flames shall not hurt thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine."

Historians remain uncertain of the writer of these lines, but usually the credit goes to an 18th-century Baptist layman in London, Robert Keen, writing in the late 1700s. This was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, especially during the years when blast furnaces turned base metals into iron and turned England into a world power. Keen, or whoever wrote this hymn, was apparently familiar with the metallurgical process that left the useless waste--the dross--on top of the liquid metal.

The English word dross, which appears in several places in the King James translation of the Bible (e.g., Ezekiel 22; Proverbs 25) is a translation of the Hebrew word seeg, which refers to a turning back or a turning away (by inference, meaning unwanted or waste). The earliest use of this English word occurs around 1050 CE, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Floss, according to the OED, has been around since about the 15th century in French and about the 18th century in English. It refers most often to silk strands. A New Orleans dentist, Levi Spear Parmly, is credited with inventing dental floss and encouraging flossing of teeth in the early 1800s. The practice of flossing gained popularity around the time of WWII when nylon replaced silk as the major flossing material.

One might say the purpose of floss it to remove the dross from teeth; it is, thus, a refining tool.

What's this mean to me? Good writers (and editors), I think, are excellent at word flossing. They are very good, too, at flossing the memory. The task of a good editor surely is "thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine."