THE REVEREND PROFESSOR ISAAC-FARWELL HOLTON NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

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1 THE REVEREND PROFESSOR NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Isaac-Farwell Holton

2 1812 August 30, Sunday: Isaac-Farwell Holton was born in Westminster, Vermont, a son of William Holton and Olive Rockwood Holton (they named him after Isaac Farwell, a revolutionary commander at the Battle of Bunker Hill). He would commence classical studies in Maine at the academies of South Berwick and Limerick, under the tuition of his uncle Isaac Holton, and complete his preparatory course under the Reverend Simeon Colton at the Amherst Academy in Massachusetts. Daniel Rice Milts of East Sudbury got married with Nancy Baker. Tsar Alyeksandr of Russia met Swedish Crown Prince Karl Johan at Åbo (Turku) and they reaffirmed the April 5th Treaty of St. Petersburg. The Tsar promised 35,000 men for the Swedish conquest of Norway. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Isaac-Farwell Holton Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

3 1836 Isaac-Farwell Holton, Roswell Dwight Hitchcock, and Alexander Hamilton Bullock graduated from Amherst Academy in Massachusetts (named in honor of racist proponent of germ warfare Lord Jeffery Amherst and intended for the education of indigent young men of promising talents and hopeful piety, who shall manifest a desire to obtain a liberal education with a sole view to the Christian ministry. Along with Asa Gray, he would study natural history under Dr. John Torrey, Professor in the College of Physicians and Surgeons. He would enroll at the Union Theological Seminary in New-York. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? NO, THAT S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN S STORIES. LIFE ISN T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Isaac-Farwell Holton

4 1839 Isaac-Farwell Holton graduated from the Union Theological Seminary in New-York and became a home missionary in McDonough, Adams, and Pike Counties in Illinois. Soon he would become a teacher of Greek and Natural History in the Mission Institute near Quincy, Illinois, founded by the Reverend David Nelson, D.D. THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Isaac-Farwell Holton

5 1844 Isaac-Farwell Holton became the principal of a school in Natchez, Mississippi. After teaching in Mississippi, he would become the Professor of Botany in the College of Pharmacy in New-York and make proclamations about the development of the boundless resources of the vegetable kingdom, for our sustenance, protection and enjoyment; for the healing of our diseases, and the alleviation of our wants and woes. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Isaac-Farwell Holton

6 Isaac-Farwell Holton wrote a poem for one of his pupils, Jane Ballard: Oh the music of the past! How it lingers in my brain; Oh the voices I have heard, But shall never hear again! In my memory still they live; I can call them at my will, But in vain I bid them go, They are present with me still The teacher sailed away for the Caribbean coast of South America, to travel upriver and cross-mountains in what is now Columbia and Peru. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Isaac-Farwell Holton Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

7 1847 Isaac-Farwell Holton s ESSAY ON MUSICAL INTONATION & TEMPERAMENT (Paine & Burgess).

8 1848 Isaac-Farwell Holton became Professor of Botany at the New York College of Pharmacy (until 1852). He would fulminate about the development of the boundless resources of the vegetable kingdom, for our sustenance, protection and enjoyment; for the healing of our diseases, and the alleviation of our wants and woes. CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Isaac-Farwell Holton Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

9 1852 From this year into 1854, Professor of Botany Isaac-Farwell Holton would be traveling throughout Granada (a nation which has long since been split into the nations of Columbia and Panama). Starting in Barranquilla and Cartagena on the coast of the Caribbean Sea, he would travel up the Magdalena River via Honda to Bogota, and then venture to Ibaque, Cartago, Buga, Palmira, and Cali.

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11 1854 Isaac-Farwell Holton became a lecturer in Chemistry and Natural History in the College of New Jersey.

12 Winter: Charles Darwin would later comment, in THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, I estimate that the winter of destroyed four-fifths of the birds in my own grounds. It was not this terrible winter, however, that destroyed his hair even at the tender age of 45, it was already long gone: This winter was a terrible one for the soldiers of Russia, Turkey, England, and France, fighting in the Crimea north of the Black Sea. During this emergency all opposition was overcome and Florence Nightingale was able for the first time to staff military hospitals with female nurses. In fact, her Reports of the sufferings of the British army in the Crimea, deprived of its supplies in that winter by the Nobel mines in the harbor of Sevastopol in conjunction with the great hurricane of November 14, 1854, would lead not only to a new form of organization under the name of the Red Cross but also to the fall of a British government. In the absence of Professor of Chemistry John Torrey, Professor Isaac-Farwell Holton was lecturing on the properties of mercury before the medical students of the College of Physicians and Surgeons when he suddenly came to a realization that the name of the white substance calomel derived from the Greek, meaning beautiful, and mel meaning black (this etymology came to his mind as he touched a piece of mercurial chloride with potassa and noticed that it produced a black spot).

13 Lecture Season of 54/55, at the Odeon Hall in Boston: 16th Season of The Lowell Institute Professor C.C. Felton. On the Downfall and Resurrection of Greece Honorable John G. Palfrey. New England History James Russell Lowell. English Poetry Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge. Mediæval History 12 lectures 12 lectures 24 lectures 6 lectures

14 1855 Isaac-Farwell Holton served as a stated supply preacher at Meredith Village in New Hampshire.

15 1856 Isaac-Farwell Holton became the Professor of Chemistry and Natural History at Middlebury College.

16 1857 Professor Isaac-Farwell Holton, M.A. s NEW GRANADA: TWENTY MONTHS IN THE ANDES... WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers. Franklin Square). NEW GRANADA Soon Henry Thoreau would copy from this into his Fact Book and into his Indian Notebook #10.

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18 1858 April 26, Monday: Professor Isaac-Farwell Holton got married in Cornwall, Vermont with Mary-Susanne Warner, daughter of Dan Warner and Nancy Gates Warner. Initially, the bridegroom would be serving as a stated supply preacher in Laurence, Chemung, and Alden, Illinois. The couple would produce two daughters followed by two sons. For some years afterward, he would be pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Lawrence, Illinois. Henry Thoreau was being written to by Benjamin B. Wiley in Chicago. Chicago Apl 26, 1858 H D Thoreau Esq Dear Sir May I ask you to send me or have sent to me Mr Emerson's lecture on Country Life. I am told he is ready to lend his papers to earnest inquirers. I will pay all postages and return the Ms. as soon as read, though, if Mr Emerson do not object, I might wish to copy it. Neither you nor he must think me impertinent. I am where I would almost give my life for light and hence the request. Not having your Wild & Walking to read, I have been walking in the wild of my own Nature and I am filled with anxious inquiries as to whether I had better remain in this business into which I passively slided. At that time I had many misgivings that it was not a wise step and I have been on the anxious seat ever since. I want labor that I can contemplate with approval and continue to prose cute with delight in sickness, adversity, and old age, should I chance to meet with such. I object to this business that it does not use my faculties, and on the other hand I ask myself if all my trouble is not in me. You dont want to hear my reasons pro and con. You too have been at a parting of the ways and will understand me. It is true that while here I have been much helped yet it is in spite of my trade connections which came near spoiling me. If I now leave, I shall probably have very little money, but I think some fire in my belly which will in the long run do something for me, if I live in the freedom of obedience. If I leave, it will be with the expectation of earnestly choosing some sort of Country Life, or, if I remain in a city, something that will make me grow. I believe that were I once fairly on deck I should not want to go below again. I am ready to tread cheerfully any path of Renunciation if Heavenly Wisdom demand it with equal alacrity would I, on that high behest, go to the Devil by the most approved modern, respectable, orthodox methods. It is difficult to reconcile the Temporal and the

19 Eternal. I must at some time so decide it that I can use all the fire in my belly to some purpose I spent, in December, some weeks on a farm in the interior of the State. I walked some distance over the prairie to look at a farm a man wanted me to buy and when the next night I reached my host's house, I took up Walden and came across your translation of Cato s advice to those about buying farms. It was very welcome and I let this farm alone. I would write you a long letter, but I suppose it would only make you smile benignly and perhaps me, too, when, a year hence, I remembered it. Remember me respectfully and lovingly to Mr Emerson Your grateful friend B. B. Wiley April 26. A little snow in the night, which is seen against the fences this morning. See a chewink (male) [Rufous-Sided Towhee Pipilo Erythrophthalmus] in the Kettell place woods. WHAT I M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF Isaac-Farwell Holton Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

20 May 1, Tuesday: Isaac-Farwell Holton was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. The 1st school for the deaf was founded May 1. Plant potatoes; the very midst of early potato planting. I now, as usual, turn up numerous yellow dor-bugs, which are as yet a very pale yellow, not having been exposed to the light. Also those great white potato-worms. The sugar maple keys (or buds?) hang down one inch, quite. Ed. Emerson s snails (the simplest kind) spawned March 28. I see young now as big as the head of a pin. The stones in his aquarium are covered with very minute green polypuses, some of them budded. The incipient ones are like a fine forest. You can only see them against a strong light.

21 1863 From this year into 1865, the Reverend Isaac-Farwell Holton would be serving as a stated supply Presbyterian preacher in McDonough County, Illinois.

22 1864 Isaac-Farwell Holton left his preaching duties in Illinois to become an editor at the Boston Recorder (until 1867).

23 1869 With the beginning of the Boston Daily News, Isaac-Farwell Holton became an editor there.

24 1874 January 25, Sunday: After hearing a most satisfactory sermon by the Reverend Mr. Bryant deriving insights from the 10th chapter of the book of Genesis at the Congregational Church in Everett, Massachusetts, Isaac-Farwell Holton walked to his home in a biting cold wind and sat down in his armchair while still in his coat, made a couple of minor comments, began to snore, and died. He had been serving as clerk of the Senate Committee of Elections in Boston and three of his articles were pending publication in New York periodicals. There would be a proposal to purchase his magnificent Herbarium (proceeds for the benefit of surviving family members) and present it to his alma mater, Amherst College. MAGISTERIAL HISTORY IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Isaac-Farwell Holton

25 COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this read-only computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace resulting in navigation problems allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC Please contact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. It s all now you see. Yesterday won t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. Remark by character Garin Stevens in William Faulkner s INTRUDER IN THE DUST Prepared: January 21, 2015

26 ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT GENERATION HOTLINE This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot Laura (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

27 Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary writerly process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world. First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.