“Hanging On”
by Chet Raymo
“I change the desktop image on my laptop every now and then, generally when I come across a new image I like. In the last year or so you’ll remember that I wrote about Caravaggio’s “The Rest on the Flight Into Egypt” and Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid.” Live with an image for a while and it’s inevitable that you learn something from it. Here is the painting I’ve had as my desktop in recent weeks, Winslow Homer’s “Snap the Whip”, 1872, one of America’s sentimental favorites.
A simpler, more innocent time. Boys at recess, barefoot in the grass. Hand-me-down clothes. Autumn wildflowers, trees turning to red and gold. A fumbling Ulysses S. Grant is in the White House, the country is at peace after a horrendous civil war, and the Panic of 1873 and subsequent depression is still in the offing. Anyway, all of that political and economic stuff is a bit of a pother and far away. The sun is high in the sky, there’s an apple in the pocket, and only the oldest boy is thinking yet about the eternal mystery that is girls.
Yes, a lovely sentimental anecdote to the busy rancor of our own time, the incessant noise of the television, the attack ads, the news of war. How blissful to be twelve years old again, fit and healthy with the grass between your toes. Never mind that these boys had a life expectancy at birth of about 40 years, and that many of them had probably already lost a sibling or parent; when the sun’s out, and it’s recess, and you’ve got eight pals to play with…
But that’s not why I like the painting. I love the way the arc of the whip reflects the curve of the hill. The vanishing point of the red schoolhouse and three white shirts – everything converges on the two adults in the distance, the grown-up world that inevitably awaits.
Between the three boys who anchor the whip and the six who resist the centrifugal force that breaks the chain is the schoolhouse, the open door and window bracketing the anchor’s grip. Maybe it’s because I was a teacher all my life, but I like to think that the “message” of the painting has to do with education, with what goes on when the boys and girls are called back inside by the teacher’s bell – the glue that holds a civil society together when the whiplash of events threatens to tear us apart. Not indoctrination. Rather, reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, the basic skills that enable an individual to explore the world creatively. History, geography and science, with their lessons of diversity, tolerance and respect for empirical fact. The ameliorating influence of poetry and art. And one of these boys, maybe the oldest in the center, will become a teacher himself, maintaining an unbroken chain of accumulated knowledge that anchors us to the past and propels us together into a mutually supportive and secure future.”
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