Virgil's Georgics: A First-Century Foxfire?

if ftï M •«? OT VIRGIL'S GEORGICS: A FIRST-CENTURY FOXFIRE? Parks Lanier But thou—oh, why run back where fears destroy Peace? Why not climb the blissful mountain yonder, The cause and first beginning of all joy? Virgil to Dante (Inferno I, 76-78, trans. Sayers) Just as we do not always know what might kill us, neither do we always know what might help us survive. A tortoise dropped by an eagle onto Aeschylus's bald head (which the bird mistook for a rock) is said to have killed the tragic poet. In a moment of mental crisis, John Stuart Mill idly turned to Wordsworth's poetry, only to discover in it "mental relief," the survival of his sanity. Sources of survival seem as random and as unexpected as the sources of our destruction. Some of us are faced with larger flying tortoises than others, but the issue is still the same: 44 survival. We might find it in a book, or we might not. Fifteen years ago, Eliot Wigginton met his tortoise, and his book, at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in Georgia, and we have all been richer because of Foxfire. Now the magazines and the books are studied and stored by the "survivalists" who hoard them against the day when decline turns to fall and they have to "go to the wilderness/ In the dread last of trouble,"as Davidson expresses it in his poem "Sanctuary." But whether one ever has to use them to learn how to kill and dress a hog (or catch one, for that matter) when there are no more Oscar Mayer weenies on the shelves, the Foxfire materials still have "survival value." There is strength to be gained just from being able to look through them as joyously and as randomly as Mill discovered Wordsworth. One of my great-great grandmothers could have told me that; indeed, she did tell me that, though she was in her grave long before I was born. AU we have left of her is a pair of spectacles, a small pile of Christmas cards from her children and grandchildren—last heard of in places like Independence, Missouri, and Opportunity, Washington—and a small newspaper clipping that lists several dozen quaint superstitions, some weather lore, and several home remedies. Put these few shards with a fragmented genealogy: born 1827; lived and was twice married in the mountains around Murphy, North Carolina; bore nine restless children who made her migrate with them to the flatter lands of Georgia—and it doesn't seem to amount to much. But the small newspaper clipping tells it all. Publius Virgilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), author ofthe Georgics and the Aeneid, would have understood. If Anchises, the father of Aeneas, had found such a clipping, he might have survived that forced migration from Troy. He left reluctantly, borne toward the sanctuary of the mountains on his son's shoulders. But it was not long afterward he was to go to his grave, not in the shadow of Mount Ida but near Mount Eryx, in Sicily. One can easily imagine the heartbreak of Anchises. For him the confirmation ofsurvival lay not so much on this side ofthe grave as the other, where he was later visited by his son. But for my great-great grandmother, there came a confirmation ofsurvival in the form of a small newspaper column, anonymously written, that must have given her migrant heart a longed-for sense of security. I do not believe she clipped the superstitions and the remedies because they were interesting as "exotic" material. No, she saved them as one might save a last letter from home. They were her mountain heritage, those words looking up at her from a Georgia newspaper, a heritage given a new dignity and worth by virtue of their appearing in print in a widely approved source. In a sense, the clipping was her citizenship papers. And she found herself a citizen of the world. The clipping could have been almost any page of Foxfire. Or almost any page of Virgil's Georgics, the survival manual he wrote before he wrote his Aeneid. Was there somewhere on the...