Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief

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{This text has been transcribed, corrected, and annotated from its original periodical appearance in Graham's Magazine (Jan.-Apr. 1843), by Hugh C. MacDougall, Secretary of the James Fenimore Cooper Society (jfcooper@wpe.com), who welcomes corrections or emendations.}

{Introductory Note: "Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief" was James Fenimore Cooper's first serious attempt at magazine writing, and Graham's Magazine would publish other contributions from him over the next few years, notably a series of biographic sketches of American naval officers, and the novel "Jack Tier; or The Florida Reef" (1846-1848). Though hardly one of Cooper's greatest works, "Autobiography" remains significant because of: (1) its unusual narrator—an embroidered pocket-handkerchief—that is surely the first of its kind; (2) its critique of economic exploitation in France and of the crass commercial climate of ante-bellum America; and, (3) its constant exploration of American social, moral, and cultural issues. This said, it must be admitted that the telling of Adrienne's sad plight in Paris becomes a bit overwrought; and that the inept wooing of Mary Monson by the social cad Tom Thurston is so drawn out and sarcastic as to suggest snobbery on Cooper's part as well as on that of his elite hanky. Finally, the heroine-handkerchief's protracted failure to recognize her maker, when she has proved so sensitive to her surroundings in every other fashion, is simply unbelievable. Still, there is enough to reward today's reader, if only in the story's unique "point of view" and in the recognizable foibles of Henry Halfacre and his social-climbing daughter.}

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I think I can still hear this learned and devout man—for his soul was filled with devotion to the dread Being that could hold a universe in subjection to His will—dwelling with delight on all the discoveries among the heavenly bodies, that the recent improvements in science and mechanics have enabled the astronomers to make. Fortunately, he gave his discourses somewhat of the progressive character of lectures, leading his listeners on, as it might be step by step, in a way to render all easy to the commonest understanding. Thus it was, I first got accurate notions of the almost inconceivable magnitude of space, to which, indeed, it is probable there are no more positive limits than there are a beginning and an end to eternity! Can these wonders be, I thought—and how pitiful in those who affect to reduce all things to the level of their own powers of comprehension, and their own experience in practice! Let them exercise their sublime and boasted reason, I said to myself, in endeavoring to comprehend infinity in any thing, and we will note the result! If it be in space, we shall find them setting bounds to their illimitable void, until ashamed of the feebleness of their first effort, it is renewed, again and again, only to furnish new proofs of the insufficiency of any of earth, even to bring within the compass of their imaginations truths that all their experiments, inductions, evidence and revelations compel them to admit.

"The moon has no atmosphere," said our astronomer one day, "and if inhabited at all, it must be by beings constructed altogether differently from ourselves. Nothing that has life, either animal or vegetable as we know them, can exist without air, and it follows that nothing having life, according to our views of it, can exist in the moon:—or, if any thing having life do exist there, it must be under such modifications of all our known facts, as to amount to something like other principles of being." "One side of that planet feels the genial warmth of the sun for a fortnight, while the other is for the same period without it," he continued. "That which feels the sun must be a day, of a heat so intense as to render it insupportable to us, while the opposite side on which the rays of the sun do not fall, must be masses of ice, if water exist there to be congealed. But the moon has no seas, so far as we can ascertain; its surface representing one of strictly volcanic origin, the mountains being numerous to a wonderful degree. Our instruments enable us to perceive craters, with the inner cones so common to all our own volcanoes, giving reason to believe in the activity of innumerable burning hills at some remote period. It is scarcely necessary to say, that nothing we know could live in the moon under these rapid and extreme transitions of heat and cold, to say nothing of the want of atmospheric air." I listened to this with wonder, and learned to be satisfied with my station. Of what moment was it to me, in filling the destiny of the linum usitatissimum, whether I grew in a soil a little more or a little less fertile; whether my fibres attained the extremest fineness known to the manufacturer, or fell a little short of this excellence. I was but a speck among a myriad of other things produced by the hand of the Creator, and all to conduce to his own wise ends and unequaled glory. It was my duty to live my time, to be content, and to proclaim the praise of God within the sphere assigned to me. Could men or plants but once elevate their thoughts to the vast scale of creation, it would teach them their own insignificance so plainly, would so unerringly make manifest the futility of complaints, and the immense disparity between time and eternity, as to render the useful lesson of contentment as inevitable as it is important.

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