"With"

The Victorian boys' adventure novelist G.A. Henty (who, imperialist though he be, I really must read one of these days) was terrifically fond of starting titles with With: With Clive in India; With Kitchener in the Soudan; With Roberts to Pretoria. I find that exciting, anticipatory, and altogether brilliant, frankly. He is promising the reader: You are going to be right there. And where else would you want to be?

Part of the charm of the mid-Sixties television series The Time Tunnel, which I've written about here before, is that it put me "with" the scientists Doug and Tony in some of the most interesting episodes in history (the Tunnel never placed them in a housewife's kitchen in Kansas, although that could be interesting too, in a different way). Now, as I read, watch, and listen my way across broad reaches of history and geography, I still consciously enter the "with" mode. So at the moment, among other places, I'm with the Jia Clan in 18th century China (Cao Xueqin's novel The Story of the Stone); with Andre Gide's characters in inter-war France (The Counterfeiters); with the film director Jean Vigo as he makes Zero for Conduct during those same years (the P.E. Salles Gomes biography of Vigo); with the Blasket Islanders (see last post); with William Cobbett as he travels through England in 1821 (Rural Rides); with Machine Gun Kelly as he tries to elude the FBI in 1933 (Public Enemies); and so on.

When I bed down at night, I think of the people and places I'm "with" as I drift off to sleep, and the thoughts are most interesting.