This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
In October of 1898, Geroge Cram Cook of Davenport turned twenty-five. Half my life is over, he wrote in his journal, and I have done nothing. Oh, he had a Harvard degree, had dabbled at university teaching in Iowa City, and at vegetable farming along the Mississippi at Buffalo. He had even written some elegant poems and begun a novel or two, but that mysterious great life's work for which he felt he had been called had eluded him.
It was not that he had to make a living. The Cooks were wealthy and prominent: one of the first families of Davenport. It was simply that everything he tried fell short of his calling.
That idea of a calling had come to him while he was still sixteen, when he discovered great literature. "I want to understand the language of all great souls," he had said. He envisioned a life of culture which would mount at least, he wrote, "to Plato's absolute Beauty."
Everything fell short. He found Iowa City to be a place "where dismal Puritanism waged war with a dismal vice." His friends in Davenport were all socialists, and they resented Cook's vision of an aristocratic pseudo-Greek society founded on slavery.
Cook was even more desperate when he reached thirty-two and realized that the "infinite accomplishments" promised by youth were not so easily attained. His marriage failed. He found it difficult to complete a poem.
In 1924, his vision of a life's work slipping away, Cook finally let the pull of Greece bring him to live on the slopes of Mt. Parnassus, and take up the life of its peasants, whiling away the days telling contemporary Greek poets stories about ancient Greece and its great literature.
Two years later, Cook died in Greece. In Greek fashion, his body was washed in wine and carried to its grave at Delphi by peasants.
But he had lit a fire in Greek poets. In his honor, the Greek Government decreed that one of the fallen stones from the Temple of Apollo be used as his headstone, and in his memory, Greece revived the ancient Pythian Games in the stadium at Delphi.
George Cram Cook of Davenport had found his life work, restoring to Greeks a sense of their glorious past, not by living, but by dying.
Rock Island Lines is underwritten by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and Augustana College, Rock Island.
