the impossible squirrel

Courtney Martin, author of Do It Anyway, in conversation with Krista Tippett and Parker Palmer on the inner life of rebellion.

Also see Palmer on the elusive art of inner wholeness and how to stop hiding our souls.

(via explore-blog)

Probably the most famous American case—Herring leads with it—is that of Homer and Langley Collyer, two brothers who lived in an imposing four-story brownstone at Fifth Avenue and 128th Street, in Manhattan, in the first half of the twentieth century. The Collyers were the sons of a distinguished family. Their great-grandfather built one of the largest shipyards on the East River. Their father was a respected obstetrician. Both boys went to Columbia University, Homer receiving a degree in law, Langley in engineering. But the family had a long vein of eccentricity. The father, on days when his work called him to City Hospital, on Roosevelt Island, is said to have paddled there in his canoe and, at night, paddled back to Manhattan and carried the canoe home.

The brothers worked for a while, but gradually they stopped, and allowed their phone, gas, electricity, and water services to lapse. In time, they began ignoring their tax and mortgage bills as well. Homer eventually went blind, and developed a near-paralytic rheumatism. After that, he did not leave the house. Langley took care of him. He, too, then rarely went out except late at night, usually to find food. But what most surprised the neighbors was the amount of debris that the Collyers seemed to be accumulating. Rumors circulated that the men were rich, and had stashed a lot of money in the house. Hence there were numerous break-ins. The would-be burglars apparently found no cash but, instead, fabulous mounds of junk.

In 1947, a caller alerted the police that someone in the Collyer mansion may have died. After a day’s search, the police found the body of Homer, sitting bent over, with his head on his knees. But where was Langley? It took workers eighteen days to find him. The house contained what, in the end, was said to have been more than a hundred and seventy tons of debris. There were toys, bicycles, guns, chandeliers, tapestries, thousands of books, fourteen grand pianos, an organ, the chassis of a Model T Ford, and Dr. Collyer’s canoe. There were also passbooks for bank accounts containing more than thirty thousand dollars, in today’s money.

As Herring describes it, the rooms were packed almost to the ceilings, but the mass, like a Swiss cheese, was pierced by tunnels, which Langley had equipped with booby traps to foil burglars. It was in one of those tunnels that his corpse, partly eaten by rats, was finally discovered, only a few feet away from where Homer’s body had been found. He was apparently bringing Homer some food when he accidentally set off one of his traps and entombed himself. The medical examiner estimated that Langley had been dead for about a month. Homer seems to have died of starvation, waiting for his dinner.