Sherry Chandler

Well, okay, the creation museum will open tomorrow, up the road here in Northern Kentucky, and I’ll admit that I find that somewhat embarassing.

Still, I’m not inclined to get real indignant about it, given everything else there is to be indignant about. Kerfluffle and demonstrations just seem to give the place more publicity.

Tiresome as the place is, all the chatter about it is just as tiresome. As far as I know, the place doesn’t violate any laws or constitutional rights. If we jailed people for willful ignorance, our jails would be full.

Oh wait, our jails are already full of drug offenders. No room.

Anyway, I’m all for ignoring this place as much as possible.

If you’re coming to Northern Kentucky and want to tour something, I suggest Big Bone Lick State Park. Not as many bells and whistles, but the science is good, and you’ll find hiking trails and fresh air.

In 1917, like many other writers, E. E. Cummings was serving as an ambulance driver in France. In August of that year, he was mistakenly arrested and imprisoned as a spy because of some letters written by his friend William Slater Brown. The letters supposedly expressed “antiwar sentiments.” As for Cummings, I think his sentiments were more anti-military than anti-war. Harvard educated and well-connected, Cummings doesn’t seem to have adjusted well to the vagaries, prejudices, incompetences of military discipline.

Image of La Ferté Macé from GVSU

Through a bureaucratic snafu, he was held for nearly four months in La Ferté Macé, a military detention camp. The Enormous Room (1922) describes his experience. It was his first published work. Here is a short passage from his introduction to the enormous room:

The darkness was rapidly going out of the sluggish stinking air. I was sitting on my mattress at one end of a sort of room, filled with pillars; ecclesiastical in feeling. I already perceived it to be of enormous length. My mattress resembled an island…

At this moment, at the far end of the room, I seemed to see an extraordinary vulture-like silhouette leap up from nowhere. It rushed a little way in my direction crying hoarsely Corvée d’eau!“–stopped, bent down at what I perceived to be a paillasse like mine, jerked what was presumably the occupant by the feet, shook him, turned to the next, and so on up to six. As there seemed to be innumerable paillasses, laid side by side at intervals of perhaps a foot with their heads to the wall on three sides of me, I was wondering why the vulture had stopped at six. On each mattress a crude imitation of humanity, wrapped ear-high in its blanket, lay and drank from a cup like mine and spat long and high into the room. The ponderous reek of sleepy bodies undulated toward me from three directions. I had lost sight of the vulture in a kind of insane confusion which arose from the further end of the room. It was as if he had touched off six high explosives. Occasional pauses in the minutely crazy din were accurately punctuated by exploding bowels; to the great amusement of innumerable somebodies, whose precise whereabouts the gloom carefully guarded.

I felt that I was the focus of a group of indistinct recumbents who were talking about me to one another in many incomprehensible tongues. I noticed beside every pillar (including the one beside which I had innocently thrown down my mattress the night before) a good sized pail, overflowing with urine, and surrounded by a large irregular puddle. My mattress was within an inch of the nearest puddle. What I took to be a man, an amazing distance off, got out of bed and succeeded in locating the pail nearest to him after several attempts. Ten invisible recumbents yelled at him in six languages.

— The Enormous Room (Modern Library, 1922)