The Stories We Tell by Patsy Sims

Author:Patsy Sims [Sims, Patsy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Sager Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“How’s that book about Jane Franklin coming along?” my mother asked, every time I took her out. (We’d go to art museums, mostly. I’d race her around, in a wheelchair.) “Better,” I said.

When Jane was seventy-four, she read a book called “Four Dissertations,” written by Richard Price, a Welsh clergyman and political radical. The first dissertation was called “On Providence.” One objection to the idea that everything in life is fated by Providence, Price wrote, is the failure to thrive: “Many perish in the womb,” and even more “are nipped in their bloom.” An elm produces three hundred and thirty thousand seeds a year, but very few of those seeds ever grow into trees. A spider lays as many as six hundred eggs, and yet very few grow into spiders. So, too, for humans: “Thousands of Boyles, Clarks and Newtons have probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in ignorance and meanness, merely for want of being placed in favourable situations, and enjoying proper advantages.” No one dies for naught, Price believed, but that doesn’t mean suffering is fair, or can’t be protested.

At her desk, with Price’s “Four Dissertations” pressed open, Jane wrote a letter to her brother. “Dr Price thinks Thousand of Boyles Clarks and Newtons have Probably been lost to the world,” she wrote. To this, she added an opinion of her own: “very few we know is Able to beat thro all Impedements and Arive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding.”

Benjamin Franklin knew, and his sister knew, that very few ever beat through. Three hundred thousand seeds to make one elm. Six hundred eggs to make one spider. Of seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, how many? Very few. Nearly none. Only one. Or, possibly: two.

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