Review: Rum, Yesterday and Today
There comes a moment in our early education when we’ve worked our way up to constructing a whole paragraph and are starting to think we’ve got a handle on this whole writing business. At this point, some well-intentioned teacher tasks us to write something longer, and we get a taste of the exponential phenomenon that is the challenge of organizing our thoughts. Somehow, that five-paragraph essay is not five times harder than writing the single paragraph but something more like twenty-five times harder. But that teacher knows a fool-proof method of forcing an essay into existence: We start by finding facts in books. Each fact goes onto an index card. Cards are sorted by topic into stacks. Each stack is shuffled until its internal order seems right. The stacks are swapped until the overall order seems right. Each paragraph is constructed from a near-verbatim transcription of the facts in a stack. An introduction goes in front. A conclusion goes in back. Voilà! An essay has been conjured.
At another moment, however, we outgrow this method and are expected to construct a narrative. Facts that we once would have presented in an undifferentiated sequence are given a hierarchy: some facts are presented as cause, others effect; some as archetypal, others exceptions to the rule. Most of us manage to make it out of our teens without having come close to being good at this, but hopefully we understand the goal well enough to appreciate books that present something complex with clarity and be frustrated by books that are no more considered than our old index-card constructions. By this measure, Rum, Yesterday and Today is a highly frustrating book.
