“So, Mr. Sukab, you catch fireflies that fly around the graveyard?”

“Yes, then I breed them.”

“But your fireflies are so much different from the ordinary ones found in the fields. Your fireflies are not the kind explained in the encyclopedia of the world. We don’t find the Latin translation of your fireflies. A billion ordinary fireflies won’t be strong enough to create a sky-supporting column of light, and ordinary fireflies flicker about at night only to be found dead in the morning, while your fireflies can enlighten hearts lost in the darkness.”

“Come on, Mr. Udin Mandarin, don’t exaggerate it.”

“I think you understand, Mr. Sukab, that what I say is not an exaggeration. Is it really possible to breed those mystical fireflies that come from the Mandarins’ nails? Your fireflies are not biological insects, they’re mystical. My question is, what kind of treatment do you give them as farm animals? They aren’t the kind of fireflies that can be bred. Those fireflies are from nail clippings. They come out of the grave at night digging up through the ground. Are they breedable?”

“Mr. Udin Mandarin, I’m just a stupid person, I don’t think with my head. I only follow what my heart says. I never ask myself those questions that you asked me. I don’t even know what you mean by those questions.”

“My question is, if you run out of those nail-clipping fireflies, while in fact they can’t be bred, what will you do?”

Sukab studied his guest. He was an educated Mandarin, and it looked very clear that he never did manual labor. His fingers were well-groomed and looked soft, like a woman’s. His nails were rather long, but very clean, almost as clear as calm water in the pond.

“Mr. Udin Mandarin, Sir, how do you expect me to answer such a question about something that I never do?”

Thanks to Prof. Adams who suggested ‘Twain’s strangers’ as a paper topic, I will try now to figure out who are those strangers? If I cannot identify who the strangers are–what will likely happen–at least I can figure out how Twain came up with those strangers, those prevalent strangers.

So far, I can’t guess a thing. I just have some blind guesses concerning Twain’s strictness with details and facts and the unity of his work. It might be that those strangers come up because Twain does not want to feature a ‘named’ character if this very character does not have a very strong significance to be known by people. If he thinks that this certain character is worth reader’s recognition only for his/her action, not name, not characterization, not even origin, then the very character should not be named, his origin should not be told, and his characterization should be explained…

So far so…

“What light is that?”

“Oh, that’s the light from Sukab’s firefly farm.”

“Firefly farm?”

“That’s right, firefly farm. Nobody in this town thinks the way he does.”

The species of fireflies that Sukab raised was not an ordinary one, but it was the kind from the nail clippings of Mandarin people. That was it. It was believed that Mandarin people always kept their nail clippings. When they died, the nail clippings were also buried. The following night, those small bits turned into fireflies, and they flew out, making the deep dark night in the graveyard bright. Fireflies around the graveyard looked so beautiful, so sweet, as the good heart of man that shines through the dark.

“Fireflies, venturing the woods of pain…”

Thus people usually heard Sukab singing lightly to his guitar in front of his farm. Tourists who were passing always dropped by because they were charmed by the yellowish green or greenish yellow light beaming to the sky, so like a column of light erected by archangels. Ships that passed far away on the sea used it as a signal, as some kind of special lighthouse.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, on the north is a column of light, which means we’re passing the town where the rainbow never fades. That yellowish green or greenish yellow light beaming to the sky comes from a firefly farm. For your information, if you do want to set up a firefly farm in your country, you should know that only fireflies from the nail clippings of dead Mandarin people can be that bright. The night after their burial, fireflies that come from the nail clippings kept during their whole life, from infancy to death, will fly out from the underground. Ladies and Gentlemen…”

*

It all began during a crisis, when life was so hard, and happiness became a rare thing. People suffered, and any hard work did not earn them anything at all. Sukab was thinking about all these when a firefly passed before his face, blinking, as if surrendering. Then Sukab snatched it, kept it in a small pill bottle, covered it with a patch of curtain net, and tied a rubber band around to secure it. All alone, deep in thought, he then meditated on the firefly, and realized how the insect gave a light in the dark. Suddenly, he forgot about his useless life.

That night he went to the graveyard of Mandarin people on the hillside. It was an old graveyard, underneath which were buried Mandarin people from the very far past. Years and years back, in the town where the rainbow never fades, Mandarin people had been hunted as if they were some kind of creature that should be exterminated and were not supposed to live on Earth. They were slaughtered like animals, leaving none, despite the fact that they were the ones who had furthered trade in that town. People said that when the massacre took place, the rainbow, that had never faded, for the first time in the history faded, and even disappeared. Only after people realized that they were wrong, and regretted what they had done, and performed a mass repentance ceremony, the rainbow reappeared. The rainbow that never fades was also another major attraction the town had. Tourists came to touch the rainbow, but of course they couldn’t touch anything because rainbow was not a wall, but light.

It was the story about those massacred Mandarin people that had made Sukab decide to move and live in that coastal town. He liked climbing up the hill where the genocide victims had been buried. There, he saw a thousand fireflies blinking in the dark, flying around like some dance from the dreamland.

“Perhaps, these are the fireflies that come from the nail clippings of dead Mandarin people,” he thought, “their brightness is not an ordinary light of fireflies, it’s an enlightening brightness.”

At first, Sukab only set a small table outside of his hut, and put five pill bottles, each containing a firefly that gave a brightness in the dark.

One of the passing tourists showed interest.

“What’s this?”

“They’re fireflies.”

“What’s a firefly?”

“A kind of small insect that usually flies around in the fields.”

“Aha! The one with a phosphorescent glow?”

“That’s it! Here they are.”

“Why are they sold?”

“Who knows if you are interested in buying them. You don’t have fireflies in Scandinavia, right? Besides, they’re not ordinary fireflies.”

Then Sukab told the story about Mandarin people’s nail clippings. It turned out that the story made people buy his fireflies, and Sukab could establish a firefly farm whose beam became a sky-supporting column. The coming of foreigners who were enchanted by that story finally saved the town from a prolonged economic crisis. Any merchandise related to the story was always sold out. Truly enough, in the town where the rainbow never fades there were various attractions that invited tourists, from those who came for surfing to those who visited sacred caves. However, since the economic crisis started to cause political riots and bloodshed everywhere, the number of tourists decreased. It was Sukab’s firefly farm that stood upright as the major industry to compete with those from other tourist towns, and in fact the seaside town where the rainbow never fades regained its power.

(to be continued)

still, translate by …. (drum roll ever longer) …. me….

This time, nobody’s seeking for a love
Among stores and old houses, among tales
Of masts and riggings. Vessels and boats, anchored,
Are whispering themselves to willingly get cleaved.

Shower’s dragging the gloom faster than ever. An eagle’s flight
Pokes at so grimly, and the day elopes, swimming,
Yielding to the lure of the horizon. Unmoved
are the land and the waveless sea, slumbering.

Nothing else. All alone, I’m walking
Pace by pace down the cape, chest suffocated by hopes
To reach its tip and altogether to wave goodbye
From the fourth beach, my last weep forborne.

1946

*Translated by… ehem-ehem… me…

Chairil Anwar is one of major Indonesian poets from the Generation ‘45 of Indonesian Literature. In his short life, 27 years, he crystallized the spirit of Indonesia (of his age, of course) during the revolutionary era in his works, works that are celebrated to this day, after more than half a century since his death.

Now, we gotta be prepared to take a dip into Dr. Sloper’s characters. By the way, this Dr. Sloper is a very–I bet!–dislikable personality who, almost perfect as he is as a physician, insists on applying his personal values to his innocent daughter, Catherine.

I can say that Dr. Sloper is an almost perfect person in the sense that he is very committed to his profession. He is the kind of worker who works NOT ONLY for money–or, should I say that money is not the most important drive for him to work. He is driven by his ‘indulgence’ to work and study symptoms. We can also call him an ‘ascetic’ doctor, since he still commits himself to his job although he’s married to a very rich lady–which, for most of us, might lead us to idleness, or might lessen our seriousness in improving our quality as a worker. He doesn’t seem to care whether his profession will give him income or not. The point is: work! work! work! In this part, his obstinacy finds a sympathetic expression.

However, when it comes to values in life, he is, so to say, authoritarian, or authoritatively stiff. He insists that his sister, Lavinia, teach Catherine, his motherless sole-daughter, in such a way as to make her a ‘clever’ girl–while ironically he considers Lavinia a goose. When Lavinia argues that Catherine should also be made a ‘good’ girl, he sarcastically states that ‘[someone is] good for nothing unless [he/she is] clever.’ We can even infer that he ‘hates’ Lavinia and his late husband, a person with ‘flowers of speech’ or ‘flowery style of eloquence’ (which can also mean ‘good’ in the sense that all his sayings don’t hurt people’s feeling) but leaving her as a widow without fortune at the age of thirty three. This tendency appears again later in the novel when Morris Townsend, who is comparably flowery in speech and of no particular fortune-making profession, appears for the first time on the page.

He obstinately, yet probably unconsciously, yields to ‘the spirit of American society’ of his time (thanks to Dylan who pointed out in the first discussion, ‘In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it’). A very polite and nice person as Morris Townsend is, Dr. Sloper decides from the first sight that he likes Morris ONLY as a person, and not as a father whose daughter might fall in love with this Morris guy. At first, he doesn’t exactly state that it’s Morris joblessness that makes him judge Morris as a good kind of husband for his daughter Catherine. But we can almost positively tell that joblessness is his main reason for disliking Morris. Look at how, at the end of Chapter VI, he questions about Morris’s ‘means of subsistence’ despite his sister Mrs. Almond’s argument that Morris, who is still ‘at the age of innocence’, might have a pure reason to love Catherine–well, she’s quiet wrong here, because although still young Morris has traveled to Europe and has once, as he confess to Catherine, taken a wrong turn in his life. Dr. Sloper even wants to investigate Morris by visiting his sister to have a clear idea whether or not he ‘lives upon’ his five-childrened sister.

It’s here that I presume his dislike of the late Mr. Penniman echoes. While he (and the narrator) never again touches on this, we can say that it’s already in his blood to dislike to that kind of persons. He argues that this sentiment is the fruit of a ‘thirty years of observations’. And surely what happened to his poor sister Lavinia he ‘observed’ as well. A perfectionist and self-esteemed person as he is, he surely doesn’t want what happened to his poor sister happen to his own daughter.

That’s all now, we’ll talk a bit more on another ‘likable’ characteristic of Dr. Sloperr, that is, his ‘hidden’ charitableness. Sorry I can’t go on with it now. Just wait a minute or two or three until I continue this ‘blogcussion’ ….