Living High off the Hog

“Gladly Lerne, Glady Teche” is threatening to turn into another travelblogue. In principle I cannot object to this development. Travel is among the most authentic of learning experiences, and it certainly offers any teacher unparalleled opportunities. But this blog has pretensions of redeeming intellectual purpose transcending yet another candid shot of Madge and me at the beach. (And don’t be confused, alarmed, or hopeful. “Madge” comes from a Thurber cartoon, or somewhere.) Yet again I must share a word or two about this week’s travels and warn you that next Wednesday I shall be computerless, happily exploring the Holy Land under the guidance of my son-in-law Zvi. I’ll hope to post something on Friday, December 4.

Joan and I just had a wonderful three days in and around the village of Salernes (Var), in the south, where we visited our old friends Andrew and Edith Seth. There is something uniquely precious about old friends. Andrew reminded me, as he tossed a piece of an ancient tree limb into the hearth, of a wonderful apothegm of old Francis Bacon: “Old wood is best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read. “

The adjective “old” here refers of course to the friendship, not the friends. We have all known each other since our Oxford days half a century ago. We have known each other longer than we have been married, and there are not many who fall into that category. Andrew and I were at Jesus College together and even, as I recall, successive presidents of the Junior Common Room. I’ve been trailing ever since. Andrew went on to become the CEO of Unilever (GB); I went on to become one of the world’s pre-eminent experts on medieval Franciscan literature. Therein in revealed the salient sociological distinction between people who own houses in the south of France and people who have friends who own houses in the south of France.

We didn’t do a whole lot except hang out, walk a little, and sit around the fire reading books. The Seths have a sensible rule about the seashore—don’t go anywhere near it between April and August. Since it was November, however, we took a delightful little spin over to Saint-Tropez. (I’m trying to sound casual.) It was a beautiful day, with a sparkle everywhere. Andrew tells me that there are two kinds of people in Saint-Tropez—the haves, and the have-yachts. The latter are so numerous that from the main jetty one cannot actually see the bay, the view toward which is entirely blocked by skyscraping pleasure-craft with Cayman Island registrations. As to the famous swimming beaches of Saint-Tropez, where rock stars and rusticating politicians party through the night on the Quatorze Juillet—ah, there it was a different story! The Seth Doctrine proved its worth. We had the beaches entirely to ourselves. In fact, here’s a picture of Madge and me on the beach at Saint-Tropez. Actually, come to look a little closer, that would be Andrew, Joan, and Edith on the beach. I must have been holding the camera.

We then puttered over to Sainte-Maxime and a fine latish lunch (healthy salads for the ladies, moules marinières for the old Jesuits). Old friends, old books, old wine—but as fresh as fresh can be on the moules front.

I do have a serious episode to explore—the discovery and exploitation of the beautiful library of the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian in its fabulous palazzo in the rue de Iéna. But you know about me and libraries. It will take a whole blog to do justice to this topic. In the meantime I’ll try to sneak a few shots of the library interior—and even better, of the librarians.

But as we are all facing the Thanksgiving ordeal tomorrow, I had perhaps best close with gastronomy. Last night, when our number-one son Richard arrived from Munich to celebrate Thanksgiving before moving on the next day to give a talk at the British Academy, Joan and I wanted to treat him to dinner. As there are only about two hundred thousand great restaurants in our immediate neighborhood, Rich thought it best for to schlep halfway across town to one of his favorite haunts, the Verre Volé, over on the edge of the Canal Saint-Martin near the Place de la République. There is a kind of Parisian bistro too hip even to be “discovered” by hippest of Anglophone food critics writing for airlines magazines, and this was one of them. It’s run by young people—cheerful, smiling, friendly, easy-going young people. They must have got their restaurant license by mistake. One of the guys wears a sweatshirt that says “Muhammed Ali”. (Another guy simply looks like Muhammed Ali). The place, which has room for maybe fifteen people, is encased in bottles of “organic” wine. They do all the cooking on a glorified hot plate. They offer you a choice of about three things that they decided to cook that night. In short, very cool. So, what to eat?

There is a reason that such useful expressions as “the gravy-train” and “porkbarrel spending” play such an important role in the political lexicon. Pork is by its very nature yummy and transgressive, and of all gravies pork gravy is the yummiest and greasiest. Anybody who grew up in the country knows this; and despite the fact that there is precious little country left, the memory of a vanished agrarian simplicity continues to command the depleted metaphoric vocabulary and the annoying moral theology of our politicians. Pork is precisely what the American people want from their elected representatives. Try for a moment to imagine a reforming president threatening to veto a bill “until every last bit of falafel has been cut out of it.” Perhaps you remember, as I do, Barak Obama, Man of the People, sympathizing with the electors of Iowa over the cresting price of—arugula! Let me ask you this: how much arugula would it take to secure Senator Landrieu’s vote on an important piece of legislation? You know there is not enough arugula in the world to do that. Some measley millions in pork, on the other hand—a done deal!

When you have really made a meal for yourself, what is the phrase you use to describe the experience? Well, I’ll tell you the phrase you don’t use. You don’t say, “Boy did I ever yoghurt out!” No, the correct term is pig out. Such porcine thoughts arise not merely because I am a Razorback but because half of my family keeps kosher, often making me the beneficiary of a diet delicious and salubrious, but definitely porkless. Hence I tend to make the most of such opportunities as may arise to eat as the other half eats. Well, among the four entrées (actually reduced to three by the time we came to order) was something called “carne de cochon”. Carne de cochon? How gastronomically incorrect can you be? Well, the name tells it all. Gross and glorious. I do have one suggestion for the restauranteurs. I think that every gourmand ordering this dish might conveniently be supplied with a three by five card. On the one side might be printed a brief reminder about the basic chops for the Heimmlich Manoeuver. On the other side would be a blank prescription, awaiting only a qualified medical signature, for Lipitor.

Dutch Painting Triathlon

It has been a week of major developments in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, as we prosecuted a cultural triathlon that leaves me nearly too exhausted to get on a train in the morning—as our madcap pace requires—to go south to the Var to hang out for the week-end with our dear friends from Oxford days, Andrew and Edith Seth. In the middle of the week, at the invitation of Nick Chriss, we had a luncheon visit to the École de la Légion d’Honneur at Saint-Denis. Nick, who is one of the friends we have made at the American Cathedral, teaches English there. The school is among the great cultural and architectural treasures of France. It is a girls’ school, founded by Napoleon to provide an education for the daughters—and especially the female orphans, of whom his activities guaranteed a continuing abundance—of his most trusted lieutenants. The school takes the adjective “elite” to an altogether new level. To be considered for admission a girl must be the daughter or granddaughter of a légionnaire. And that’s the Légion d’Honneur, not the French Foreign Legion. The school was created atop and amidst the remains of the medieval monastery attached to the cathedral. The dining hall in which we lunched with a table-full of intermediate students of English was the old monastic refectory. The school buildings have managed to include, as well, a good bit of the original cloister plan.


Bright and early the next morning it was off to the Gare du Nord to catch a comfortable and speedy train to the Netherlands. The mission here was to give an after-dinner talk to the assembled Princeton Club of the Netherlands, meeting in the Hague. Our delightful host was Henk Gajentaan, a retired Dutch diplomat of ambassadorial rank, who awaited us on the train platform in an orange-and-black scarf of the kind normally donned only for the P-rade. The dinner took place, and so did the talk. The Princeton Club of the Netherlands has the distinction of being the most erudite such group I have yet encountered. But there was an entirely different high point to our visit, for Henk had arranged a special treat for us.

Some years ago one of my professional colleagues was a professor of politics, Leon Gordenker, a Dutchman eminent for his work on the United Nations and other international organizations. I had a friendly acquaintance with him, but his daughter Emilie actually became real friends with both of our two elder children. She was fixed in my mind as a smiley, freckled, bicycle-riding teen-ager. Well, there have been certain developments in the last quarter century of which I was not entirely aware. Emilie Gordenker went to Yale, where she studied Russian. Then she spent some time in the world of New York fashion and design. After a while, she did a Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, with a dissertation on the great Anthony Van Dyck,

portrait- painter to the stars. She then became one of the curators at the National Gallery of Scotland. But now she is the director of the famous Mauritshuis in the Hague, a museum that is itself an exquisite museum piece, and that holds one of the world’s greatest collections of Dutch and Flemish art, including more famous Rembrandts than you can shake a stick at. (And, yes, I know—that number is very small, unless you want to be carted off to jail. It’s a figure of speech.) Ordinarily you have to be the queen of Sweden to get a personal tour of the Mauritshuis from its

Emilie Gordenker and Dutch painting (left); the Queen of Sweden and Somebody Else (center & right)

director, but Emilie made an exception for the aging parents of her old school chums. Actually this was my second directorial tour. I once happened to be in the National Gallery in London when I came upon Sir Kenneth Clark in the course of giving a private little tour to three friends. I shamelessly followed them, always pretending to be looking at something in the vague vicinity of the painting before which they had halted, but actually eavesdropping. I could hear every word that the great Sir Kenneth uttered, and they were roughly as follows. "I like this one." "I really like this one." "I've never much cared for this one." "It sort of grows on you, don't you think?" Etc., etc. Emilie Gordenker's erudite but sparkling comments were of an altogether different sort, rather like a really fine seminar presentation.

The heady dose of the seventeenth century at the Mauritshuis should have been enough for any man, but you must recall that in my day job I am a medievalist. As it happened there was at that very moment, and hardly an hour away by train, a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of the paintings of Rogier van der Weyden and his extensive atelier. This was in the fine little city of Louvain, site of one of Europe's great universities, and a famous center of international medieval studies. It has a special personal interest as the old stomping grounds of one of my distinguished graduate students, Professor Stefan vander Elst, now in California. I should probably say "the former Louvain". The Flemish language police have taken over in recent years, and the place is definitely Leuven, not Louvain. No exceptions are made even for Flemings who don’t speak Flemish. Like some other mysterious towns one encounters, Leuven has a vast train station, seemingly out of proportion with the modest size of the place. It is as though half of Grand Central had been plonked down in, say, Trenton, though in other regards that pairing doesn’t leap to mind. Nonetheless its numerous tracks and platforms seem in a constant state of bustle, and we were assured that there were so many trains each hour going to Brussels that it was hardly worth trying to fine tune our return.

The town itself has many lovely parts, and I would one day like to spend a whole day or two there. On this occasion we had timed tickets and didn't dawdle on our way to the spectacular and recently completed town museum. My expectations could not have been higher, nor more fully met. I had been made just a tiny bit skeptical by the Internet advertising. They had labeled the show something like "Rogier van der Weyden--Master of the Passions". This was a play on words, and indeed on ideas. Many of Rogier's paintings find their subject matter in the Passion of Christ--Crucifixions, Depositions, Pietàs. But in a much more general sense he and his followers bring a new and powerful sense of human emotion to the whole repertory of Gothic art. Perhaps the most haunting half-line in world literature is Virgil's Sunt lacrimæ rerum. If you want to know what the "tears of things" look like in pigment rather than poetry, Rogier is

your man.The exposition, though inexhaustible, was exhausting. One can consume only so much caviar and champagne. I bought the lavish huge, heavy expensive catalogue, but I have yet to cut into the shrink-wrap. I am going to have to wait at least another week, until I have been able to tame the experience in my memory and imagination. But then I hope to study is closely. From the purely stylistic point of view Rogier--along with Jan Van Eyck and one or two others--most closely approximates the Gothic vision as I find it in the medieval writers I most admire--Dante, parts of Boccaccio, the Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales, the Pearl-poet. One of the books that got me started on my own life's work was Panofsky's still magnificent Early Netherlandish Painting. In the last few days I saw many beautiful things that I had previously known only from that book.

We still hadn't quite finished the art marathon. There is yet another amazing exhibition of Dutch painting on, right here in Paris--"L'Age d'Or Hollandais"--with several score of the finest items from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This was a more athletic event, since the Pinacothèque had sold far too many tickets for each time slot, and since your average Parisian museum-hopper is likely to be, well, assertive. The little earphone-guide things are now causing serious mischief, as they guarantee that there will be a rugby scrum around every major piece on display. Here my sheer body mass, so often an encumbrance or an embarrassment, was my friend. There's more, such as my discovery of a wonderful pictorial anti-Franciscan satire by one of the Saftlevens, but I am beginning to feel like one of those American aesthetes in early Henry James novels. You, on the other hand, may be feeling like the reader of a late Henry James novel. Either way, it's time for me to quit.

Addendum: "The Venetian Rivals"

Here is a brief addendum to yesterday's post. A young friend in Princeton, James Wilentz, supervises the very classy site "Old Masters--New Perspectives". Its purpose it to provide such current information about the work of the Great Masters of European painting as may be of interest or use to art lovers, art historians, and art dealers. He invited me to review the "Venetian Rivals" show that was originally mounted in Boston and is now at the Louvre.

You can read the review here, before going on to the more pleasant task of exploring of James Wilentz's unusual site.

Golden Oldies of Erudition

When my daughter made a short visit to our apartment the other day, I noted that her first and instinctive act was a furtive check of the bookshelves. She was not surveying titles, just shelf space. Our very classy modern glass bookshelves, of which there are seven visible (I don’t count four more possible wooden shelves hidden within a closet) have of course begun to fill up. She commented upon that fact, declaring it to be “good,” though with hesitant tone that disclosed an inner worry. All my intimates think I have too many books. Saint Augustine could imagine a life without love no easier than he could imagine a life without oxygen. I feel that way about books, which indeed have become yet more valuable to me as the amatory and the pulmonary systems face the onslaughts of senility.

Most things in Paris are pretty terrific, but one thing that isn’t is the book market. There is an actual law that makes inflexible the price of new books sold in shops, and even Amazon.fr has been able to negotiate only the most piddling discounts. Hence shopping for new books lacks all sense of adventure, let alone suspense. And since the general vibe emanating from bookshop assistants—that should be “assistants”—is that they don’t give un bon n’importe quoi as to whether they have the book you want or not, book shopping doesn’t encourage enthusiasm. The bookstalls on the quais, needless to say, are now but the memory of a memory of a tourist gimmick.

The second hand market is bad in two ways. There isn’t a lot of volume or variety, and what there is is way overpriced by American standards. The biggest outdoor second-hand market in Paris is in “my” arrondissement, the Fifteenth, though a still good hike away, over in Georges Brassens Park. On Saturdays there is probably about a half acre of tables. The first thing that becomes clear is that the briskest high-end action involves antique leather-bound sets (mainly ecclesiastical in nature) being purchased for purposes of interior decoration. And we are supposed to be the Philistines! My plan, insofar as I have had one, is to try to expand, slowly, my collection of Pléiade editions. So far I have balked at the prices—usually a minimum of 40 euros for a volume not in top-notch shape. I did find one guy selling the multiple volumes (eighteen, I think) of Balzac’s Comédie humaine for 220 euros. I might go for that when I next have a lecture honorarium to spare. I can’t imagine that the books won’t still be available. I did find one bargain in a bricolage stall: four volumes, from a broken set of probably a dozen, of the works of Joseph de Maistre, beautifully gold-stamped on the front covers with the mark of the long defunct Jesuit College of the Immaculate Conception, Vaugirard, a mark I have more than once encountered in the world’s great libraries.

I’ve done a little on the Internet. Abebooks.com of course lists French and other European dealers, and I’ve gotten a few things. I got a paper edition of Madame de Staël’s Delphine, almost certainly from the nineteenth century, but still uncut in its foxing covers. I dipped into it, but I don’t quite have the stomach for a 600-page epistolary novel that relates to my next project. My current project, the Sobolos rios of Luis de Camões forced me to order expensive items from England and Italy (half of the expense, incidentally, in postal costs). To my amazement I learn that it is usually cheaper to buy from American Abebook dealers, even with transatlantic postage! In this manner I discovered an old friend.

When I first joined the Princeton English Department in 1965 there were within its senior faculty a group of old geezers who would sit of a morning in the little departmental library drinking coffee, talking about how literary studies were heading for hell in a hand-basket. One of them assiduously studied the obituaries in the Times, occasionally emitting a sort of sotto voce rasping chuckle: “Heh-heh-heh! Younger than I am!” I was in my blind and farouche youth, and I pitied those old farts with a condescension that now mortifies me. For indeed literary study did go to hell in a hand-basket, and I morphed into one of them; but by then I could apologize only to their tombs.

There was a time when many professors of literature were erudite. I don’t mean clever, hip, flashy, or brilliant. I mean erudite—as in, they knew an awful lot. This was true of my most memorable undergraduate teachers, some of whom had probably never published a word themselves; but it was true in spades of the great scholars in the country’s leading institutions. There were people of truly amazing learning all over the country teaching Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Keats, George Eliot—you name it, they had read it. Unless they had written it, that is.

One such scholar among hundreds was Herschel Baker of Harvard. I never laid eyes on the man. I know nothing about him in a personal way, whether he was tall or short, nice or nasty. But I have read his books. The one I remembered most vividly, because I read it most recently, was a magisterial biography of Hazlitt, probably from the early sixties. I think his real field was probably Renaissance literature. The book of his that blew me away as a graduate student was The Dignity of Man: Studies in the Persistence of an Idea. You won’t find a book like that being published today, and I am not alluding to the politically incorrect title. This book tells you everything that anybody ever thought, said, or wrote about human nature and the composition of the human mind, body, or spirit, between the age of Plato and that of Martin Luther. And, believe me, they wrote a lot. Herschel Baker had read it all.

In one of the poems I am writing about there is a reference to “my three souls”. I remembered dimly, that this was one of the thousand things in Baker’s book—a book not to be found, so far as I could discover, in all the realm of France! So I ordered a copy through Abebooks from a small-town shop in Indiana. One of the signs of our national cultural decline is that most of the books of this sort I buy have been discarded by the desperate or clueless libraries of our institutions of higher learning. Well, Emerson College’s loss was Fleming’s gain.

The three souls—and how could I have forgotten?—were of course the vegetable soul, the sensitive soul (divided between concupiscible and irascible faculties), and the rational soul. Baker answered my query in about thirty seconds, but by then he had me hooked. I had to read the whole book through. What a romp. Here’s a typical paragraph: “The vital spirits rise from the heart to the brain—always, it seems, by something conveniently called ‘secret channels’—and are finally distilled for the third time into animal spirits. These are ‘more excellent than the other and before the rest in dignity.’ As Pierre Charron, the friend of Montaigne put it, the vital spirits are ‘raised’ by the arteries to the brain, where they are ‘concocted and reconcocted, elaborated and made subtile by the help of the multiplicity of small Arteries, as fillets diversely woven and interlaced, by many turnings and windings, like a labyrinth of double net’.” How can you spend good money on Foucault after you have read something like that?

Inbound, from the Internet

If life is what happens in the meantime, I have had a week of living large. We arrived in Paris more than a month ago, but my first fortnight here was occupied mainly with preparing a lecture that I was obliged to give in Cleveland in the middle of October. Regular readers will know about that pleasant event, but they will know, too, that it took a full week counting travel and recuperation time. So in my mind's eye I didn't settle down to what you might call serious work until the beginning of last week. In this context "serious work" has a technical connotation that may not resonate with all readers. Strange to say, some folks just aren't into sixteenth-century Portuguese religious poetry. Serious work, you see, means the composition of a monograph about Sobolos rios que vão, an extraordinary poem by Luis de Camões.

What I Should Have Been Working On

Furthermore, this meant that, turning my back on my recent and exhilarating flirtation with trade publishing, I was returning to a level of scholarship so recondite as to make even my great work on asyndectic parataxis in the Lesser Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor seem vulgar and popularizing. A reputation for true obscurantism is easier to talk about that to achieve, and I refuse to give mine up without a struggle. I did make some progress, meaning I got some pages written; but I had not reckoned on the operation of the Michael Corleone Theorem: "Just when I think I am out, they pull you back in."

What I Was Actually Working On

Before I had left America, in fact a goodly time before I had left America, I had recorded a CSPAN interview about The Anti-Communist Manifestos. This was sort of fun, if somewhat ersatz. The recording took place in a small room in the mid-town high rise campus of Pace University. Around the room were light boxes hoked up with photographs as a fake Manhattan skyline. I hadn’t exactly forgotten about the interview, but I had long since given up expecting its imminent airing—which would in any event be rather academic to me here in Paris. Hence I was taken by surprise by its appearance. I don’t think I did too badly, considering the fact that nobody told me that if I wanted to make eye contact with my television audience I’d have to look at an imaginary spot about two feet above the head of the person I was actually talking to. You might like to see it. Your time will be only slightly more squandered than if you drove out to the mall to watch the Sears truck unload. You can see it here. Or if by any unhappy chance you have not been introduced to my son Richard’s wonderful blog “A Brooklynite on the Ice,” you can dispatch two nerds with one groan by watching it there. Rich has me sandwiched in between Michelle Obama’s sweet-potato and some unclaimed Hallowe’en sweets. You appreciate the unifying leitmotif: sweetness.

I learned about its appearance from a small avalanche of emails. The scholar may often be unsure of whether he in fact has any audience at all. You spend several years researching a learned book, and a couple more years writing it. Add two more years, if you are lucky, for the process of publication. Then maybe after two more a couple of people will write condescending reviews of a page or two, the gist of which is the following: “B+. What this guy should have said...what I would have said...”, etc. But almost anything posted on the Internet is likely to get nearly instantaneous response.

One group of messages is from former students. Any teacher is always thrilled to hear from a former student—even if the communication is a disguised request for a letter of recommendation. A professor of literature is going to be particularly thrilled to hear from former students who listen to or watch programs about literature—especially when (as was the circumstance here) they seem to be doing this in precious moments stolen from their day jobs running the world. I also heard from quite a few B+ types. “Didn’t you mean Germany one time when you said Russia?” Er, yes, sorry. “Did I hear you say that Hiss was convicted of treason? It was perjury.” Well, I don’t think that I said treason, but if I did that was a mistake, because it was perjury, though of course the perjury was a mere emblem of the espionage on which the statute of limitations had expired, and yadayada yad.

One guy (and this was more like D- than B+) went on the warpath about a passing remark made in the book—but certainly not in the interview—about Dalton Trumbo. Now, look. Dalton Trumbo wore very cool hats. Dalton Trumbo may have been a good screen-writer. Dalton Trumbo may have been screwed by HUAC. Dalton Trumbo may still be a Hollywood darling and the subject of a recent hagiographic offering by PBS. But I am here to tell you that Dalton Trumbo was also a Communist acolyte of Joseph Stalin, a denier of the gulag, and a maligner of truth-tellers like Koestler and Kravchenko. He was in short a useful idiot member of the American Communist Party. But I digress...

Among the most poignant messages I received were several from people, mostly of advancing years, for whom the content of my book had vivid associations, often through family members. A man about my age wrote to me from rural New England with an extraordinary story. He is of Finnish-American descent, and he has in his possession, and allowed me to see, three autobiographical essays by relatives or friends of his parents’ generation—American survivors of the gulag! Actually there are quite a few books by or about American “zeks”—the Russian slang acronym for political prisoners. Three of the ones that impressed me most are Alexander Dolgun’s Story, Walter Ciszek’s With God in Russia, and Robert Robinson’s Red on Black. This last touches on the multiply ironic histories of blacks who tried to escape American racism by going to the USSR.

One community that certainly needs its own historian—and I hope my correspondent might be he—is the large group of Finnish-Americans who, abandoning their little farms and the idling factories of the Midwest, took off for the Soviet Union in the early Depression years. Some were members of the Communist Party. Others were enthusiasts of the socialist vision. Still others were simply naïve members of a tight-knit ethic community that had been sold a bill of goods. By the thousands these idealistic immigrants—in common with non-Russians from a hundred nations, including a very large contingent from Finland itself—got caught up in the grinding machine that was Stalin’s gulag. That they were innocent of the crimes for which they were punished is perhaps too banal a point to make. One of the essayists (a woman) reports that her NKVD tormentors actually said to her, “If out of a hundred people we arrest, one is truly guilty, we are doing a good job!”

All three of the essays I have seen are written in a kind of rusty and faulty English miraculously remembered after fifty years of torment. The literary quality is that you would expect of someone with a few years' elementary education in a Michigan school house of the 1920s or 30s. But they are enough to make the very stones weep, and I hope they make it into print. The world is tired of bad news. We all want a respite from misery. In the Canterbury Tales the Monk’s contribution is a sad litany of de casibus tragedies beginning with Lucifer and Adam and coming down practically to the “present day” with Count Ugolino of Pisa, ever memorable from Dante’s Inferno. At last the Knight, tiring of the unceasing woe, interrupts the Monk and cuts him off:

“Hoo!” quod the Knyght, “good sire, namoore of this!.../ for litel hevynesse / Is right ynough to muche folk, I gesse.”

Yes, I guess so too. But as I told my correspondent, a world that is prepared to forget its Trails of Tears, its Armenian genocides, its Holomadors and its Holocausts, its Rwandan massacres—that is a world condemned to experience them again.