The Portable Veblen: A Novel by Mckenzie Elizabeth

Author:Mckenzie, Elizabeth [Mckenzie, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

11

THE SPEECHLESS OTHERS

In April the days warmed fully, demanding new exploits. A thinning scrim of wildlife rustled in the coastal mountains’ hidden gullies and groves. Bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, skunks, and possums still foraged the damp forests above the peninsula, between the ocean and the bay.

By contrast, Palo Alto was now a community of unimaginable material wealth and prestige, and traces of old, humble Palo Alto were growing scarce. What others wished to raze, Veblen cherished. What others saw as rundown, Veblen saw as real.

Such as the spot eight miles from town, up on the ridge where Thorstein Veblen had dragged the chicken coop to build his getaway, and where she and Paul now stood. Paul was filming her with his phone. Veblen’s contact at the Norwegian Diaspora Project, Aksel Odegaard, had expressed interest in some video content in a general announcement to all contributors.

“Vi står på toppen av den gamle La Honda Road, nær Skyline Drive, i San Mateo County, California,” Veblen said, speaking to the camera, and though the presentation had to be in Norwegian, she would provide an English transcript as well. “Under oss er Silicon Valley”—Paul panned the peninsula—“where fortunes are being made every day in the technology sector. But I wonder how many people here stop to remember that Thorstein Veblen, best known for his searing critique of society in The Theory of the Leisure Class, came to the small town of Palo Alto in 1906 to teach at the young campus named for the beloved son of the railroad baron Leland Stanford, who’d contracted typhoid and died on a conspicuously unnecessary but status-prescribed grand tour of Italy. Not many, I bet.

“Mr. Veblen was a true renegade, and had seen enough of the jockeying for power and money that goes on in the institutions of our higher learning. To get away from it all, he spent as much time as he could in a cabin just up here—” Veblen indicated the ridge, feeling stirred by their proximity to this history. “The cabin was built from a chicken coop he carried up the mountain in a cart pulled by his horse Beauty, where it sat for years suspended between two giant redwood stumps.” Now she had Paul zoom in on a photo of the cabin she’d found in the Stanford library after work one day.

“Han ble urettmessig oppsagt from the University of Chicago and would soon be unfairly dismissed from Stanford as well. So he skewered academia in his book The Higher Learning, initially subtitled A Study in Depravity. He loved to think about how conventions solidified and spread. He was passionately curious. He loved the out of doors and wrote nearly every day on the seasonal progress of trees and flowers. He wrote about everything from anthropology and economics to the squandering of the American frontier, even about the mass scalping of the fur-bearing mammals, which was pretty farsighted in those days. He honored animals and plants by calling them the speechless others. He showed his stepdaughters how they could walk through a cornfield and hear corn grow.

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