Desert of the Goths

Downtown Eddington, N.M.

Our splendid son-in-law Zvi Ben-Dor came down from New York to check up on me, to visit Joan in the rehabilitation center, and, no doubt, to report on his findings to his wife, our daughter, who is now in Paris, having flown there after a couple of days in Athens.  I thought she was in Los Angeles, but no matter.  Zvi is an erudite and eminent historian at NYU.  One part of his cultural profile is particularly attractive to me. He is a real movie lover—not just a lover of the cinema, but a lover of seeing new releases, and in general knowing what is going on cinema-wise.  So he took me to the movies on Sunday night, at a gargantuan multiplex place on Route One.

 

The movie, the plot of which I grasped only intermittently and with no final certainty, was at least a third too long; and the whole was a mélange of comedy of (rustic) manners and cowboy Grand Guignol.  Its title is Eddington.  The film starts out quite slowly and ends—or at least approaches its end--in the godmother of all shootouts (Two Shooters Division).  You cannot fault the film for lack of ambition.  I think it is trying to crystallize the several crazinesses of the 2020 Covid pandemic, many of which are monsters of the mind as opposed to definite medical pathologies.  Eddington is a small place where no cases of Covid have ever appeared but where the imprecise threat of an ever-impending danger has poisoned most minds.

 

The imaginary village of Eddington, N.M., seems to have a population of about five hundred, around a thousand of whom are woke ‘teen-agers.  This fact caused me some confusion at first, but you have to go with the flow.  The movie’s plot almost demands a vox populi or Greek chorus, and the ‘teen-agers seem to serve the purpose.  In my limited experience it is very difficult to capture in art a convincing picture of protesting crowds, because crowds of fake protestors tend to protest too much. I recently rewatched Doctor Zhivago, in my opinion a nearly perfect cinematic work, and even its protest march seemed formulaic and a bit off.  I am a quasi-expert on student demonstrations, and in no real demonstration I have ever seen has absolutely every potential demonstrator been shaking a sign, hopping up and down in rage, frothing at the mouth, and so on.  Quite a few are more subdued, and some even rather tentative, sort of waiting to see how things go.  They  want to be able to say they were there but are more tentative about actually being there in the moment.  But I suppose that if you have been hired as an extra, you may feel that earning your pay requires more than just showing up.  What it requires is non-stop shouting and menacing body gestures.

 

 

I found a special interest in the film’s setting.  My Dad grew up in Tucumcari, in eastern New Mexico, in the 1920s.  He claimed that the New Mexico state motto—Land of Enchantment—was the most accurate in the forty-eight states.  But of course middle age is ever likely to romanticize the geography of its youth.  That I know well myself. But there is something about the desert that is always awesome, and the thought that men and women have lived there for centuries, whether in honeycombed cliff-faces or small, flat villages with nothing but a telegraph pole between them and the unrelenting sun or the Arctic winds is perplexing.

 

The episode of the cinema threatened to end in tragi-comedy.  The cinema house is in a shopping mall on Route 1, and coming out of it we turned the wrong direction into the vast parking lot flanking it in both directions.  Though approaching ten p.m., the lot was crammed with cars.  We searched fruitlessly, incipient panic stirring at least in my throat, for about fifteen minutes before realizing that we must be looking in the wrong place.  A nice woman accompanied by three ‘teen-aged offspring came to our rescue.  She thought there was something odd about a geezer with a cane stumbling around a dark parking lot.  I was in so flustered a state I could scarce remember the make of car we were searching for, but it came to me eventually.   She pointed out the faint possibility that we had been looking on the wrong side of the building.  So we had!  Since then, thinking over the situation, I have been able to find some semi-plausible correspondences between our situation and that of the sadsack rural sheriff played by Joaquin Phoenix.  That is more likely to be the result of my fancy than my acuteness of perception.

 

Zvi promises to do a return trip at the end of the coming week.  That is a real bonus, especially as he says that the cinema offerings will be better here at that time.  Or maybe he said even better.   Zvi is of Iraqi ancestry and of formerly Israeli nationality.  Perhaps his Cinemania flows from one of those sources.

                                               

 

I never intended to use this blog as a medium for regular reports on Joan’s health progress, but it actually has proved remarkably effective for that purpose.  I would say: so far, slow, perhaps even nearly imperceptible improvement.  Readers can demonstrate their charity by investing their own silent faith or hope.  Then we have the full Pauline trifecta!

Shamus in a High Tower

A fake William Gillette as a fake Sherlock Holmes standing in front of his fake castle on the real Connecticut River 

            I shall perhaps slowly accustom myself to my wife’s probably lengthy stay in a nearby rehabilitation facility, but after sixty-two years of common life the separation seems weird and unsettling.  Geriatric problems are often by their very nature disturbing, disorienting.  Our external social lives have largely consisted of attendance of musical events and the cinema or theater, both highly “social” in character.  I was able to continue it this weekend, after a fashion.  Bill and Anne Charrier have been in town.  Bill is a former student from much earlier days (Class of 1969), retired after a long and successful business career, and a prominent booster of undergraduate theater at Princeton.  The Charriers became personal friends of ours over the years, mainly through a shared devotion to Dante, and last weekend they invited me for dinner and a night at our student playhouse, Theatre Intime.  Joan was of course in hospital.  We went to see a rather wild comedy, Ken Ludwig’s The Game’s Afoot, in a student production.  It has a subtitle: Holmes for the Holiday.  I take the following summary from an on-line source: It is Christmas Eve, 1936. William Gillette, an actor famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, has invited his fellow cast-members to his Connecticut castle for a weekend of revelry. But when one of the guests is stabbed to death, the festivities in this isolated house of tricks and mirrors quickly turn dangerous. Then it’s up to Gillette himself, as he assumes the persona of his beloved Holmes, to track down the killer before the next victim appears. This glittering whodunit has murder, infidelity, wit, and surprises—something for everyone. I found it somehow significant that the play was set in 1936, the year of my birth.  Go figure. 

 

I suppose I would characterize this play as a farce, but a rather “meta” one.  I use this term in its popular literary sense, pointing to a recurrent and possibly significant allusiveness, in this instance directed to works in the standard English literary canon.  I deduce that its author, Ken Ludwig, was an English major.  The dialogue is laced with allusions, at least some of them significant, to canonical English literature.  These allusions are often joking.  The primary source is Shakespeare, and little Shakespeare jokelettes appeared now and then.

 

The word-fun starts with the title, the phrase “the game’s afoot”.  Hard-core readers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may recall that Sherlock Holmes does indeed say that “the game’s afoot”, but in Ludwig’s play there are several games afoot and many feet agaming.   Sherlock found the phrase in Shakespeare, and in no less famous a passage than the “patriotic oration” in Henry V (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends…”)  First of all, the play is historical, or semi-historical.  The main character, William Gillette, was prominent on the American theater scene between the Wars.  He was a slightly odd duck, who did indeed build himself a castle on the Connecticut River.  I myself have a very slight history with Gillette, as he featured in a graduate seminar I took with Alan Downer, a man who seemed to know everything about the history of the American theater.  Of course I cannot for the life of me remember what Downer said about Gillette.

 

The student actors were of course amateurs and a couple of the more important ones amateurish, if you grasp my distinction.  So the play’s intrinsic sparkle was rather intermittent, as though there were a couple of malfunctioning bulbs in a chain of Christmas lights.  But it was still full of energy, surprises, and good laugh lines.  The “mystery” aspect of it was less gripping than the stage high-jinks, but all was received generously by a happy audience.  I was very glad to have been included in the evening.

 

On the domestic front I now need to manage the protocols of nearly solitary living for a spell.  After a blitzkrieg of efficient organization and planning Katy has had to go back to the reality of her important job as head of the Getty Foundation and her responsibilities in Los Angeles.  But Luke, who will be returning from Sri Lanka in less than two weeks now, will be able to spend some time here in August, while Richard, who has invested many hours here in the last couple of weeks, pursues a project in South Africa.  How lucky we have been in our offspring.  As the psalmist says, “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward.  As arrows in the hands of the mighty, so are children of youth.”  Or of middle age, so far as that goes.  The daily aches and pains of old age, as also its more severe blows such as those that Joan and I now have both experienced, are part and parcel of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, otherwise known as the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.  These thousand natural shocks are part of the universal inheritance of the human species.  One can embrace them or rail against them.  But avoid them one cannot.  Yet the gift of children who are “as arrows in the hands of the mighty” is a blessing that can never be fully earned.  So I end by acknowledging our three wonderful children, Richard Arthur Fleming, Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, and Luke Owles Fleming.  

 

 

 

Rehab Ahead

Stonebridge

 

Blog day is upon me, but I have had little time or appetite to think about it.  My wife Joan has been seriously ill and in hospital, where she has had to remain for an extended period.  We are hoping that she can be transferred to the slightly less oppressive environment of a rehabilitation facility by the time I publish this.  She has enjoyed excellent care during her stay, but any long-term bed-confinement is enfeebling, and she is already woefully deconditioned.  She needs to be on a restorative regime as soon as is prudent.  The problems have been exacerbated by my own mobility limitations, but a small phalanx of devoted friends has been ferrying me to and fro.  The future is, as always, uncertain; but I am less worried than I was a week ago.

 

            It took the experts quite a while to come up with a confident diagnosis, but eventually they did: babesiosis.  I had never even heard of babesiosis, which is apparently one of the more exotic (and nasty) of the several tick-borne diseases, all of which seem to be on the rise as the human population spreads over the former woodlands of the northeastern part of our country.  Only twenty years ago there were no reported cases of it.  Now there are about three thousand each year, with the number rising.  For the elderly, a category to which I must reluctantly assign my spouse as well as myself, all such diseases can be quite dangerous.  Certainly the immediate visual effects of this one, which include dramatic debility, are alarming.

 

One of the hospital doctors, in explaining the difficulty in arriving at a diagnosis, told me “These tick-borne diseases can be very tricky.”  The adjective “tick-borne” stuck in mind mind, for the mind has its vagaries, and all too easily wanders down the byways of Locke’s “association of ideas" as developed by Sterne in Tristram Shandy.  Several years ago I became interested in various notorious criminal cases from the Victorian era in Britain. I actually wrote about one or two them in this blog.   One of these cases, which gained considerable notoriety in its day was that of the “Tichborn claimant” or “Tichborn pretender”.  This enterprising fellow was an Australian butcher who put himself forward as the long-lost offspring of a wealthy English dowager, whose young son had disappeared years earlier, very likely in a maritime disaster.

 

There are many historical examples of the desire to believe in unlikely survivals and improbable rediscoveries, such as that of Anastasia, the young daughter of the last Romanovs.  Many Russian exiles in the Paris of the 1920s very much wanted her to be alive and well.  The entire nuclear imperial family had of course been murdered in 1918 by Bolshevik thugs.  More than one vaguely possible candidate presented herself as Anastasia. In similar fashion the dowager had a passionate desire to believe that her beloved child was still alive, and she had placed advertisement in the press throughout the Empire seeking to find him or elicit information concerning him.  One such notice came to the attention of an enterprising Australian butcher in Wagga Wagga, who claimed to be the missing English aristocrat.  (The lost son was the heir of a baronetcy.)  The appearance, speech, and general behavior of this man were those of a proletarian rather than those of a prince.  But the mother, desperate to believe, gave credit to the butcher’s dubious story despite his uncouth affect.  Practically nobody else did, though, and the matter became a famous law case ending with the claimant’s conviction for perjury and a stout prison sentence.

 

Tichborn was an English place name, that of a small English village.  The pronunciation of its ch is “soft” as in church.  Nonetheless a spurious parallel with “tick-borne” instantly invaded my undisciplined mind.  Or perhaps my Celtic ancestry is to blame.  After all the difference between church and kirk is less philological than geographical.  Such are the trivialities in which the mind seeks surcease of sorrow and by incidental fortuity finds a blog topic to boot.  I am hoping that by next week things can be headed in the direction of normality.  It is probably too much to hope that they will actually have arrived there.

 

Even while writing this I received word that Joan will be released from Princeton Hospital today (Tuesday) and sent to a rehab center nearby, the medical wing of a retirement community (Stonebridge) where she has many friends…And since writing that, the transfer took place and Richard and I were able to visit her there briefly.  I hope we are now in a new and happier place.

 

 

 

Lost Treasure

 

            This week’s offering is less an essay than an anecdote that will have interest for few, but just at the moment is rather compelling to me.  Every stage of life has its surprises, but old age—or to use Cicero’s somehow more disturbing term senectitude—is a kind of Brunswick stew of alarums aptly characterized as one damn thing after another.  Very often the things involve physical health.  This time it is not I but Joan who is in the hospital.  The situation is naturally worrying but prospects also hopeful; and her hospitalization provides the context rather than the substance of this little essay.  There is other, literary, indeed biblical context in two of Christ’s parables—the hidden treasure in a field (Matthew 13:44) and the woman sweeping her house to find a lost coin (Luke 15:8-10).

 

            Joan has been hospitalized for several days with some kind of scary viral brain infection in the general category of meningitis.  She is very ill, but the signs have turned in the right direction.  Our adult children in New York have rallied around, but they both have very busy lives and/or demanding jobs.  Circumstances, including unknown and uncertain immediate prospects, are of course disquieting.  At the immediately practical level, I am dependent on others to get to the hospital.  We are blessed in having good friends.

 

            But on to the anecdote of lost treasure. Two days ago, in the afternoon.  I realized with a shock that my wedding ring was not on my finger.  The ring does not date from my wedding.  I got it about ten years later in Italy: a modest gold band which exploits simplicity to enhance significance.  Now it was gone, but not exactly mysteriously so.  I have been reading about “wizened” old men since childhood.  Now I was one.  My fingers had simply shriveled!  And since those fingers spent a fair amount of time at a computer keyboard in my office, I knew where, surely, my wedding ring must now be. I admit that from a conventional point of view my library office might be considered rather cluttered.  I think of the phenomenon as the chaos antecedent to creation.  An uncharitable observer might call it a mess.   

Most things that I can’t find eventually turn up there.  So I began with my long work table.  After extended searching I had found lots of useful stuff, but no wedding rings.  I didn’t really have a Plan B, but I continued searching through more and more unlikely locations in the house.  No luck, only a terrible feeling in the pit of the stomach.  Because that was the only place it could be.  Nonetheless, whistling in the dark, I spent the next two hours searching diligently through places I knew full well would prove sterile.  Eventually I abandoned myself to silent, slightly panicky despair.

 

            The next day we visited Joan, nearly comatose, in her hospital room.  The “we” was Christie (my Ghanaian health aide) and Frank (a close family friend and former colleague).   Joan’s hospital bed, deep in the room near the windows, left enough room for only a single caretaker to walk around it.  I was hovering over her head in that narrow space.  She was in a state of unnerving somnolence, eyes tightly closed.  Christie was on the same side of the bed, but at its foot.  Suddenly she started talking about a “miracle”.  She took a couple of steps forward, leaned down, and picked up the gold ring that had silently slipped off my finger more than a day earlier.  That true story deserves to be in the Legenda Aurea or the Gesta Romanorum.  Late on Tuesday the doctors came up with a diagnosis of which they are confident: babesiosis.  I had never heard of babesiosis.  The strange word derives from the name of its European discoverer, a Romanian pathologist named Victor Babes.  It is a dangerous condition initiated by the bites of infected insects.  I presume it is in the same pathological family as Lyme Disease, though rarer.  There are only about three thousand cases a year in this country.  Wooded areas of the middle and upper eastern states must be full of infected insects.  Babesiosis must be treated energetically.  But it can be treated, and they have begun treating it.  So I must hope that surely old Dame Julian of Norwich was right.  All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

 

 

 

Genuino Nazzaro, M. D.

 

    I write this little essay in memory of my dear friend, Genuino Nazzaro, M.D., who died at his home in Princeton on June 23^rd.  The death of any person of his remarkable character is a loss—to his family, to his community, to his friends, to his noble profession, a loss indeed to a needy world in which human goodness can never be in excessive supply.  But he had certainly had a good run.  He was nearing his hundred-and-second birthday, and only near the very end was the infirmity unsustainably oppressive.  As fate would have it, quite without knowing it we overlapped in the Princeton hospital for a day or two of the last week of his life.  There were other comforting serendipities.  At his funeral on Friday in Trinity Church, Joan and I were seated in the nave not twenty yards from the Lady Chapel, where we were married in 1962.

 

            That may also have been the year I met Dr.Nazzaro, though I think it was actually in the mid 1960s, when I returned to Princeton from Wisconsin as an assistant professor.  I can no longer remember the circumstances that first brought me to his office, but I liked the modesty of the operation with its private house vibe, and its never-empty waiting room presided over by a friendly but firm young lady named Nancy.  The office moved a couple of times, but it was always homey and welcoming,

 

For many years I always called him Doctor Nazzaro and he always called me Professor Fleming, but at some point the formality evaporated, and found I was calling him Gino and he was calling me “Johnny”, an infantilizing name by which I had not been known elsewhere for about half a century.  It is natural, I suppose, that a man should remember his friendship with a medical practitioner in terms of particular pathologies.  For me it was the coincidence of Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal and my Gall Bladder Crisis that cemented things.  Nazzaro did not perform surgery.  So that duty fell to another impressive medical friend and co-religionist, the late Bill Burks, probably in 1973, but Nazzaro was strongly recommending the operation.  When I slightly demurred on the grounds that surely no organ of the body was completely unnecessary, Nazzaro said: “Professor Fleming, I dono why God give you a gall bladder!”  Seldom is medical advice both understandable and succinct.

 

            Geniality was for this man a rule of life, but he had no sympathy with the sloppy immoralism that sometimes passes for sophistication in American culture.  My own cultural instincts on the whole lean conservative, but Gino put me the shade.  He sometimes could sound like a contemporary Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre.  Of his five children, four are women, and I can but imagine the delicacy required when one of them as teenagers introduced him to a young male friend.

 

            He read a lot, though I think almost exclusively medical papers.  He told me in so many words that he wanted to be the best doctor he could be, and for him that involved a lot of technical reading.  As a young man he had engaged with vigor against the power of the Communist Party in mid-century Italy.  When I gave him a copy of my 2009 book The Anti-Communist Manifestos, he was very pleased, though he cannot possibly have had time to read it.  It is a work of literary history, not political argument.  But its title was right down Gino’s line.

 

Though he spent most of his life in America, his English remained colorfully accented, especially when using technical medical language.  And Gino loved to speak medicalese.   One of his favorite words, which worked its way into a surprisingly large number of linguistic settings, was triglycerides.  That’s a pretty big word already, but Gino’s accent infused it with a kind of vatic or mystical dimension demanding not merely respect but actual awe.  I think I sort of know what a triglyceride is, as much as I understand physiological stuff at all, but I was clearly missing the magic of it all. 

 

            In retirement years (for both of us) our get-togethers became much more frequent.  Our houses were a short drive apart, and not even that long a walk.  We moved from joint food shopping adventures to talking about food shopping.  After the death of his wife Geraldine about five years ago, which roughly coincided with the beginnings of my own medical challenges, our visits became more sedentary.  Diminution of bodily dexterity had the recompense of more fluent and adventurous volubility.   We would sit at opposite ends of a large dining table, with me nibbling little bits of nectar-like Parmesan ham and this or that exotic cheese.  On a thoroughly bipartisan basis there was always plenty to grouse about on the political front.  Gino was a most gracious host but also a most reluctant guest.  It was the law of the Persians and the Medes that we meet at his house, never mine.

 

            There is a large and long-established Italian-American community in Princeton.  It was mainly Italian-American master masons who created the mini-Amiens Cathedral that is our university chapel.  Fifty years ago, and probably still today, there were numerous Italian-Americans in all sections of the University’s ever-expanding buildings and grounds divisions. The progeny of the stone masons now include several of the leading citizens of the town and the leaders of town’s business and artisanal sectors.  Dr. Nazzaro was held in reverence and professionally patronized by many members of this group.  In fact nothing was more American about this great American doctor than his living continuities with his fellow Italian-Americans.  The idea of the American sociological “melting pot” has somewhat fallen out of favor, but consciousness of family history is not the same thing as “ethnic identity”.  There is a real pluribus, but is not more powerful than the unum it has succeeded in achieving.  The posterity of the huge Italian immigration to this land is as “diverse” and as “American” as the Cabots and the Lodges or the Hatfields and McCoys.

 

            One of the prices of the longevity I myself have enjoyed, largely a benefit of the excellent health care I have received, is outliving so many friends and contemporaries.  Gino was more than ten years my senior, but I had come to suspect that he was immortal.  Now I am sure of it.  May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.  Genuino Nazzaro, medicus et amicus, 1923-2025.

 

Medical Redux

 

Since I am unlikely to have too many opportunities to draw even vaguely plausible parallels between my own career and that of John Milton, I must grasp at such few as come my way.  Milton pretends to have begun his inaugural masterpiece only under compulsion, which is sort of true.  “Lycidas,” one of the most famous works in the canon of English poetry, is indeed a masterpiece, and we must acknowledge that it came early in his poetic career.  It did indeed put him on the literary map.  But Milton thought, or pretended to think, that is was too soon for him to be forced to take on his task.   

 

It is not to soon to come up with the subject for a blog.  I have to do that every week—but it is too soon for the repeat topic to which I am compelled to turn, which was my latest stay at the Penn-Princeton hospital.  I was there only in February, and this time it was pretty much the same drill, congestive-pneumonia kind of thing, me gasping for air, seemingly dozens of professionals devoted to my care.  The imposing new(ish) hospital is planted on a large plot of land on the east side of US 1, technically I think in Plainsboro but hardly two miles distant from our own Princeton house.  On my last occasion I tried to write an essay in the spirit of the Jimmy Stewart film “Rear Window,” in which a fellow who is constrained by a cast on a broken limb has to solve--from his window in a city high-rise apartment--mysteries he comes upon in his rubber-necking.  But this time my window was on the other side of the building.  My view was that of a large scrub forest, not unpleasant, but with no variety of human activity.  Even in the short period of time since my last visit, they have expanded the already vast parking lot and seem to be starting on high-rises.

 

I have frequently heard or read about “America’s aging population” as though objectively from a distance.  A hospital stay reifies and objectifies this generalization.  I am a drop in the gray ocean of aging Americans enjoying superb Medicare that must be bankrupting the nation.  I got to the hospital before nine in the morning on Sunday.  The Emergency Room was already hopping.  Most if not all of the “temporary” examination rooms had already been turned into “regular” room.   I was quickly triaged into the category of the rolling wounded and spent the next twelve hours on a hallway gurney.  It would be an exaggeration to say that the atmosphere was that of Penn Station—more like the bus station.  The work of medical professionals under these circumstances is truly awesome.  After a quick examination by a super-nurse and significant blood-letting, I was temporarily rehoused in a nurses’ station.  Here I was soon joined by a seriously injured elderly man with a shattered hipbone.  The pain must have been terrible.  Though there was an opaque plastic screen between us, he was in fact only two feet away, and I was very much in on his intake.  He was born in 1927, making me his junior by a decade.  He was crying out in agony as a doctor tried to examine him without torturing him, probably an impossible task.  The middle-aged daughter who had brought him in, and obviously cared for him dearly, even then could not refrain from criticizing the old man for having been doing whatever transgressive thing she thought responsible for his accident.  If having to go to the hospital makes me feel sorry for myself—and it does—what you see when you get there soon enough redirects your pity to more deserving objects.

 

The realization that trying to understand “America’s health crisis” has to begin with an honest and searching look in the mirror is a sobering one.  It is not strange that having lived a long and blessed life makes one's appetite to living increase, not wane.  One’s soul cries out with Faust—“O, stay the passing moment.  It is so fair!”  But there are social costs too.

Fine Day in June

 

AND what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays; Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean To be some happy creature's palace; The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, And lets his illumined being o'errun With the deluge of summer it receives; His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings, And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings; He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,- In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?

 

That is the first stanza of the first poem I remember studying and admiring.  In fact I still have snatches of it by memory.  Its author was James Russell Lowell, a once eminent figure of the mid nineteenth century and in his day considered one of America’s great poets, perhaps even our greatest.  Believe it or not he was once taught in the junior grades of American public schools.  So I have among my readers, several of them like myself of a certain age, who may at least have heard of the poet, but I think on the whole he is pretty well forgotten.  I doubt if any of my English majors at Princeton would even react to his name.  But when the first beautiful days of June arrive, I myself always remember his “June” poem, and am even likely to quote a line or two.  It is the perfect expression of June’s freshness and gentleness as it introduces the welcome doldrums of real summer.

 

The relevance of all this may become a little clearer when I turn to a little experience of the last two weeks.  First you have to know that we have on the long south side of our one-story home a bluestone patio, perhaps twenty feet square, fairly recently installed.  A long backyard slowly descends from the patio to a distant stone wall, beyond which is an open field and a quarter-mile path through woods to the lake.  There is quite a bit of small wildlife in the yard—squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits, mainly, but with foxes, deer, skunks, and opposums by no means unknown.  The bird life is prolific and varied.  And all this is highly visible from indoors through a wall of large sliding glass window/doors.  In spring and summer we have the delightful experience of viewing the Peaceable Kingdom from our living room sofa.

 

A bunny and a squirrel were independently cavorting on different sides of the stone patio.  They were apparently unaware, as was I, that a red-tail hawk was also watching their activities.  Suddenly, and with amazing alacrity this fellow swooped down upon the little rabbit, delivering a blow that was utterly incapacitating but not instantly mortal, leaving the rabbit feebly struggling within the expanded fullness of the bird’s expanded wing.  The hawk, while pinning the dying rabbit to the patio stones, tore at its furry underbelly with  its gruesome talons.  We watched all this with a kind of infirm fascination.  Though we did nothing to intervene, two bluejays, appearing out of I know not where, did.  They attacked the hawk mid-execution.  I doubt that they were motivated by an innate love of rabbits, but they clearly did not want this raptor anywhere around their own bailiwick or accustomed turf.  With amazing dexterity, they repeatedly dive-bombed the hawk.  The attack was doubtless more annoyance than mortal danger, but a serious annoyance.  After a brief time the hawk flew up to a perch beyond our line of sight.  By then his prey was quite dead, its abandoned corpse visibly mangled.  The jays disappeared as suddenly as they had earlier appeared, not to be seen again that day.  We were left with a dead rabbit, its intestines visible at its torn stomach, and a couple of blood-smeared flagstones.  The episode was over—so we thought.  Certainly we hoped so. But even as we were clucking over the Darwinian drama, the hawk descended once more to the arena of his abattoir.  This time he was not alone.  He was accompanied by a trim female hawk, presumably his mate.  This pair then went seriously to work on the lapine cadaver.  They appeared to be tearing sizeable fleshy gobbets, including some furry ones, which they then swallowed down with apparent relish.  What remained after their energetic breakfast was a maimed but surprisingly tidy rabbit residue, with the vague appearance of a tee-shirt as it comes out moist but not dripping from the spinning cycle of a washing machine.

 

Small things may remind you of larger ones.  On All Saints’ Day of 1755, at about 9:30 in the morning, there occurred an event in Lisbon that perhaps permanently undermined the old Christian idea of a providential universe.  A devastating earthquake, accompanied by uncontrollable conflagrations, pretty well leveled the city with enormous loss of life.  Many died in the crowded churches, where masses were being conducted in celebration of the major religious holiday.  Death was dealt out by fire, flood, and hundreds of tons of falling stone.  News of this disaster, as it rapidly spread throughout Europe, had a devastating effect on what might be call conventional Christian morale.  For many throughout Europe, including the six-year-old Goethe who was one of many to have later written about its effect on his tender world view, it was an event that seemed to challenge the most fundamental belief in divine Providence.

 

Tennyson, author of the indelible phrase “nature red in tooth and claw,” was perhaps in his own mind able to defang it with conventional pie-in-the-sky bromides.  There is a lot of that in his famous “In Memoriam,” his poetic monument to a once-in-a-lifetime friendship and the poignancy of early death.  We ourselves don’t like to think too deeply about the jungle morality we see exemplified every day in the popular press.  After all, there is indeed a special perfection to many June days, and I hope to be able to catch glimpses of it during the two weeks of June still to come.  The more sinister implications of the ruthlessness of the natural order but rarely force themselves onto your garden patio, but when they do I have to sit up and take notice.