Van Winkled

When he awakens from his gin-induced slumber high up in New York’s Catskill Mountains, Rip Van Winkle does not realize that he has slept for twenty years, nor does he realize that while he slept the American Revolutionary War has been fought and won.  He drifted into sleep a British citizen; he awoke an American.  He drowsed off a colonial subject; he arose and made his way back down the mountain the sovereign subject of a democracy.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Rip is bewildered when he returns to his village home.  The place has undergone a singularly disorienting transformation.  Time seems out of joint.  The village’s accustomed demeanor of phlegmatic snugness and timeless tranquility has been transformed, into the clangorous babble of disputatious voices using baffling words like citizens’ rights and Congressional elections and liberty.  The male bastion of Nicholas Vedder’s inn has disappeared and, in its place, stands the Yankee Jonathan Doolittle’s ramshackle Union Hotel.  The inn’s sheltering tree has given way to a liberty pole from which waves a flag bestrewn with stars and stripes.  The inn’s sign, too, has changed, revised to portray General Washington rather than King George.  Rip himself, formerly a village favorite, goes unrecognized, is mistaken for his son, and suspected of being a Tory spy, is threatened with violence.

Confronted with such confounding change, driven to his wits’ end end, Rip comes undone, his sense of identity upended: “I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, . . . and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”  Eventually, however, Rip’s identity is affirmed by the village’s historian, and displacement replaced by replacement, he settles into a new role, a storyteller, a chronicler of the pre-war past, and comes to be revered by “the rising generation” as one of the village patriarchs.

It’s likely that Washington Irving intends Rip to represent the socially ameliorative role the artist can play by suturing the historical past to the cultural present.  But rereading “Rip Van Winkle” as autumn enters the not-to-be-denied bear-hugging embrace of winter, has got me thinking instead about change.

E. B. White says that “The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change – and we all instinctively avoid it.”  I have been such an avoider, I would rather listen to 18 straight hours of 120-decibeled Norwegian Black Metal music than make peace with change.   And gazing at the mounting evidence outside my windows of winter implacably choking autumn’s song in its throat, I find myself resonating to Robert Frost’s claim that such a change of season is, somehow, nothing “less than a treason.”

But then there is Irving’s ending to the story, that accommodation Rip makes, his détente with change, his capacity to roll with it, submit to the rhythm of it, use it, finally, to sculpt out a space in which he can attune it to his specifications rather than become its relic.

Rip is resilient.

*     *     *

Stability is undeniably comfortable; predictability, convenient; the settled, dependable.  Change can seem a snap-jawed disruption that cannot be halted.  Its signature is scrawled across the world in indelible ink.  Change happens, has happened, will continue to happen.  It time-warps our conception of the world and our function and fit into it. Change never stops, and to think it does, or to want it to, is a fantasy romanced by illusion.

Muttering to ourselves at the dusty rear of the caravan is no place to be.

The very fact that disruption erupts, however, means that it can be accounted for.  We cannot control the events and circumstances of the world, but we can control how we think about them, how we react to their turbulence.  There is the fact of change, but there is also the fact of my purposeful response to it, the fact of my pro quo for its quid, my imposition on its imposition. A world sunk in stability is a determined world, a world suspended between tock and tick.  In such a world, we never really reach childhood’s end.

The question is, which Rip will we be: the Rip garrisoned by sleep, impervious to the goings on going on, or the Rip who improvises and adapts, the Rip who intuits that roles change, but the need for one never does.  Do we settle with change or settle for it?  Do we work it, integrate it, or do we avert our eyes and practice careful unnoticing? Can we, even in small, quiet ways, shake the burrs of habit off our clothes; Houdini ourselves from rigidity of thinking and acting; learn what’s necessary, what to engage, what to let pass by?  I think the better part of wisdom says we should, must.  “Prudence keeps life safe.” Samuel Johnson says, “but does not often make it happy.”

Oh, and that relentless change from autumn to winter?  Seasonal change never changes, but I can winterize both house and wardrobe.  And, perhaps, myself:  I find myself itching for a snowball fight, and I’ve retrieved, from its long exile atop a dusty basement shelf, the box that contains my ice skates.