The Darling Buds of -- February?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date…

                                                                        William Shakespeare

            Social scientists are forever warning against the use of “anecdotal evidence,” but it is often the most telling kind.  It is hard to convince me of the reality of Global Warming or even her slightly less apocalyptic sibling, Climate Change, on the basis of “computer projections” that no teacher on earth can explain to me.  Anecdote, on the other hand, I generally grasp with ease.

            Having spent most of my younger life in warm climes, the first time I was ever on ice skates was right here in Princeton, N. J.  It was in the winter of 1961-62, during the year I spent in graduate school here.  We skated on frozen Lake Carnegie, along with what seemed like half the town.  The scene was happy and carefree, a kind of upper middle class version of Breughel.  While I struggled to stay vertical on my borrowed skates, my friend and classmate Chuck Fish, a Vermont native, dazzled us with his easy hockey-player moves, which included an effortless backwards glide.

Then,

and then again

and now

            I returned to Princeton permanently in 1965 as a member of the faculty.  We lived at first in one of the high-rise apartment buildings, named for a defunct one-time president of the university, next to the lake.  I have many happy memories of that age, not least among them skating on the lake.  We lived atop a column of apartments at the bottom of which lived the young family of Bart Giammati, later President of Yale and later still Commissioner of Baseball.  We used to get the Giammatis’ kitchen smells (always delicious) up the shared ventilation shaft.  Skating on the lake was so thoroughly established a custom that the apartment dwellers’ association had formed a standing committee charged with its organization and regulation.

            Years pass.  Life goes on.  We move to the center of town and then again, in the late 1980s, to a house of our own not far from the lake.  While I can offer you no statistics I can tell you with certainty that in no more than half a dozen years in the last quarter century has there been a sustained freeze convincing enough to the local police authorities to allow even a day’s skating.  In many winters the lake has not frozen over at all.

            I think I did see a thin crust for half a day last month, of a strength that might have supported a heavy water fowl.  We did have two snow falls.  The first seemed fairly sensational since it came early enough in the autumn that there was still enough unfallen foliage to wreak havoc with the trees.   I have no sharp memory of the second, in midwinter, but it cannot have amounted to much.  I tend to measure things now in terms of an idiosyncratic index of personal foot-pound expenditure.  Shoveling out our large driveway after the second snowfall barely raised a sweat.  Où sont les neiges d'antan?

             There are other interesting indications.  We have been as lavish as possible in using the fireplace, but my winter woodpile seems only slightly smaller than I left it in October.  Many of the days in February have been so warm as to invite me into the garden to begin a desultory and seriously premature “spring” clean-up in the thin winter sunlight.  It is not I alone who am confused.  Some of the clusters of snow drops in the yard have been in what seems like continual bloom since the late autumn.  Our forsythia buds are swelling.  On campus some of the bushes are in bloom.  The daffodils are coming up, and some of the crocuses are already in bloom.  Not to mention the japonica.  The weather forecast for today is “Wintry Mix”.  I never thought I could welcome such a prediction with something akin to enthusiasm, but I have to say my feeling is “About time!”

            I want to respect the limitations of my anecdotal evidence.  I declare myself innocent of all extrapolation.  I confine myself to the past two decades, and to a single modest sized county in central New Jersey.  I make no global claims, and I draw no conclusions from my flaming shrubbery concerning the wisdom or unwisdom of drilling for oil in Alaska or launching a Manhattan Project for the exploitation of algae.  However, there are certain things that you cannot help noticing.

 not making much progress

Cast Party

 The Cast

            The heroine of this essay will be Ms. Cora Louise Fleming-Benite, granddaughter extraordinaire and, for the brief captivity of a few hundred words, guiltless prey of the social historian.  If you are a reader of history books, certain clichés are probably incised upon your cerebellum.  The most notorious, perhaps, is “the rise of the middle class.” The middle classes have so long been ascending above the pages of our history books as to be visible only with the aid of the most powerful optical instruments.  But there are many others: “index of social change,” “the formation of elites,” “revolutionary consciousness,” “liminality”, etc., etc.

            It is sometimes possible to observe rapid social change very close up.  Take a farm kid from the Ozarks and, just for the preposterousness of it, send him to Oxford, where he will meet and eventually marry the brilliant and accomplished daughter of Edwardian meritocrats.  Let the female issue of the Oxonians, having already begun a stellar academic career, marry an equally brilliant Israeli historian of Iraqi background and terrifying erudition.  Then take the infant products of that union to Paris for four or five years and, upon their eventual return to America, place them in the Ecole Internationale de New York (alias EINY) so as to allow them to maintain their native French.

"What?  Me worry?"

            The Parisian schools in which my granddaughters were enrolled have a very cool institution called the semaine verte—a “green week,” which is a sort of American school “field trip” on steroids.  The kids are rusticated to some gorgeous old farmstead in the Cevennes or somewhere, where they get to breathe the air and milk the cow, or feed the pig, or trample the grapes—in short, to go seriously rural for a few days.

            Part of the authentic Frenchiness of EINY is that they should offer such an opportunity to the cliff dwellers of the concrete canyons of New York City.  But for New Yorkers, the Cevennes region is a little distant.  The obvious destination combining Francophonie with reasonable proximity is Québec.  However, if you are making your trip to Québec in the winter, it is much more likely to turn out to be a semaine blanche than a semaine verte.  Thus did my granddaughter Cora Louise find herself last week at the winter resort of Mont Tremblant to the northwest of Montreal.

            But here social history ends and human drama begins.  Social history might explain why little Cora could indulge in such exotic sports d’hiver as ice fishing and dog-sledding—hyperborean exertions known to her aging grandfather only from the pages of Jack London.  But it was not sociology that determined that on the last day of the school trip, indeed on the last straightaway of the last ski run, Cora Louise should fall and painfully injure her lower right leg.  That will have been determined either by the God of Small Things or the Random Play of Electrons that our godless age seems to prefer to the mellower concept of Providence.  In any event, that is what happened.

 Scene of the Crime: Mont Tremblant, P.Q.

            The battlefield diagnosis, which at the time seemed a reasonable hypothesis, was “sprained ankle”.  The treatment for that sort of thing is three pronged: ace bandage, aspirin tablet, and a certain level of words of comfort from concerned adult supervisors.  That therapy, reinforced by the usual animal energies characteristic of young persons on long bus trips, proved entirely sufficient to return her uncomplaining to New York City.  But the next morning her vigilant mother could tell that all was still not quite right.  Her misgivings were confirmed by a radiologist in the Emergency Room.  Cora’s ankle was not sprained; the ankle bone was broken.

            This means about a month in plaster.  Except that to my admittedly inexpert eye it doesn’t seem to be plaster anymore.  It’s more like gauze reinforced with light-weight kryptonite.  It is no doubt admirably suited to its task, though as a writing surface it is less satisfactory than the old plaster casts of my youth.  Even so I was able to leave my mark—“Gran Dad,” written in a jagged, spidery hand as though the material written upon were a white window screen.  But other inscribers of the cast have sensibly gone for the pictorial, and even since I took the photograph two days ago, it has flowered with cheery images in red, yellow, orange, and green.

            Her school is a fair distance from her home, and even the most modest ambulation is no small challenge under the circumstances.  Little Cora is having to master the use of crutches, and she has faced the awkwardness of it all with determination and a nearly supernatural cheerfulness.  This little girl is one of God’s brighter sunbeams.  In general her most pessimistic category is the glass three-quarters full.  The very least I can do is salute her in “Gladly Lerne Gladly Teche.”

XLII

“Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything,”  Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

As I left for my dawn swim this morning, I still had no idea for a blog essay, but I knew that I could count on the exquisite boredom of natation to serve as midwife to some invention or another, however desperate; and as I made the turn at the end of my forty-first length it came to me in a flash.  Forty-one is followed, almost immediately by forty-two; and according to Douglas Adams, forty-two is the meaning of everything.  Of course Adams has no idea why, nor do any of his enthusiasts whom I have encountered.  The reason is that forty-two is the biblical number of completion.

In Book 9, chapter 19, of War and Peace the novel’s hero, Pierre Bezukhov, arrives at the conclusion that the Emperor Napoleon is the Antichrist and that he, Bezukhov, has the sacred duty to assassinate him.  The first conclusion is child’s play.  First you must adapt the ancient conventions of kabbalistic gematria to  the Latin alphabet in the manner favored by the mystical Freemasons of Lyon, as follows: 

a  b  c   d  e  f   g  h  i    k    l     m    n    o     p    q       r    s    t

1  2  3  4  5  6 7  8  9 10 20   30   40  50  60  70   80  90  100           

u        v        w      x       y       z

110   120  130   140   150    160

You then write out, in French, the title L[e] Empereur Napoléon, cheating ever so slightly by not eliding the e of the article.  Now add it all up to get 666, the Number of the Beast (See Revelation 13: 18).  More important from Pierre’s point of view is that in the fifth verse of that same chapter it is written that the beast will be given authority for a period “forty and two months.”  Pierre, an erudite fellow, knows that when the Bible speaks of “days” or “months” it actually means years.  He knows as well that the year is 1812, meaning that Napoleon, born in 1769,  must in fact be forty-two years old.

 Napoleon, alias Apollyon the Destroyer, alias 666

It takes Pierre a little while to figure out his numerological role in the great scheme of things, but he does so after a certain amount of orthographic jiggery-pokery, this time dropping an e that should be there.  It turns out that the phrase L’ Russe Besuhof (roughly, duh Russian Bezukhov) is also a 666.  So the Beast has come to the end of his allotted days.  Forty-two is all you get.  History buffs and readers of Tolstoy will know that things didn’t quite work out, but that was the theory.

L' Russe Besuhof

Yet that is only the beginning of the biblical forty-twos.  Such chiliasts as Joachim of Fiore were particularly thrilled by what they found in Revelation 11:3, in which the seventh apocalyptic angel gives license to the “two witnesses” to prophesy for a period of “a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.”  Because Joachim knew, as I feel certain my erudite readership also will, that in the genealogy with which the gospel of Matthew commences there are, as it happens, precisely forty-two generations between Abraham, with whom God made the original covenant, and Jesus Christ.

Everyone further knew that there are thirty years in a generation and that 42 x 30 = 1,260, the number of days (meaning of course years) granted to the sackclothed witnesses.  Something very big had happened forty-two generations before the birth of Jesus, and something equally stupendous ought to happen in the year 1260, with the completion of the forty-second generation after his birth.  Joachim thought that the sackclothed fellows would be some new kind of monks.  The Franciscans and the Dominicans, who had appeared on the scene only after Joachim’s death, thought so too.  That is why most of Europe was anticipating The End as the days grew shorter toward the close of the year 1260.  That is why so many medieval writers (such as Dante in the Vita nuova) divide their compositions in forty-two numbered parts.

 How Joachim of Fiore saw things

The definitive trip of all time must surely have been the Exodus out of Egypt.  If you have absolutely nothing better to do you can read through the story, calculator in hand, and make note of the number of times the children of Israel set up temporary camp on their way to the Promised Land.  But since you now know the “number of completion” you could probably work it out in your head without reading anything.

Not every completion ends with milk and honey, of course.  When it comes to prophets, it is best to show them some respect.  As Elisha was passing through the village of Bethel, a bunch of bad little children ran after him, mocking him for his bald head.  “And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them.  And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them” (II Kings 2:23).  The only trouble with doing stuff like this in the swimming pool is that you are likely to lose count—of laps that is, not of wicked children.

 Naughty, naughty boys!

The meaning of all this should be clear: if you regard an important part of good writing to be its alignment with the eternal verities of the cosmos, you must structure its concluding paragraph in precisely forty-two words, not more, not less.

Lessons from the Fun House

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.  Ecclesiastes, 7:4.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".  That is the famous aphorism of Shelley from his Defense of Poetry, and once it was true, or might have been.  Certainly the greatest of moralists were novelists.  Read Tom Jones.  Read almost anything by Dickens.  Read Middlemarch or Vanity Fair.

This perception is perhaps relevant to our current national malaise, which might be characterized as an apprehension of severe economic difficulty transformed to existential crisis by moral confusion.  It is entirely unrealistic to expect that our politicians might address the situation coherently or comprehensively.  Even the few equipped to do so credibly dare not speak seriously, with moral vigor and nuance.  The politician must seek to please, and to do it quickly: in sixty seconds, with perhaps another thirty for “follow up”.   That is not the mode of the prophet—even though the prophets do have all the best short sound-bites, such as “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”  Of course stuff like that does tend to get you banished, stoned, imprisoned, beheaded, or crucified, all of which things are serious impediments to your election or reelection.  Maybe a novelist will rise to the occasion.

It is interesting that the popular image that is catching on is mathematical and statistical: the ninety-nine percent and the one percent.  When it comes to money, how much is enough?  Some clever people at Slate have created a Mitt-Meter, an online tool allowing you instantly to calculate how long it would take you, at your current rate of income, to match Mr. Romney’s 2010 haul.  I am an affluent retiree, so it would take me only the better part of two centuries.  Well, good for Mr. Romney.  He rightly refuses “to apologize for success”, and such concepts as Aristotelian moderation or grotesque excess are obviously subtleties beyond his ken.

            Subtlety was not beyond the ken, however, of our great writer Edith Wharton.  I hope you have read her magnificent novel The House of Mirth (1905), or seen its sumptuous costume-drama cinematic adaptation.  If you haven’t, the present moment of Downton-Abbey-mania would be the perfect time.  The House of Mirth is the tragic story of Lily Bart, a young, beautiful, but unsuccessful aspirant to the flaky upper crust of New York moneyed society, a society in which greed vies with vanity, and both are trumped by hypocrisy.

            

Edith Wharton (1861-1937): Noblesse oblige

               When it came to uppercrustness, Wharton knew whereof she spoke.  She was definitely Old Money, though fabulous sales of her book added a measurable influx of the New.  She was a top-drawer Episcopalian who hobnobbed with the Pierpont Morgans and hung out a good deal in the “cottages” in Newport.  But she happened also to be a deep thinker and a serious Christian, and those were the factors that chiefly inform her novel.  Concerning the broader issues raised in The House of Mirth she wrote as follows in response to a fan letter: “Social conditions as they are just now in our new world, where the sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes, is a vast and absorbing field for the novelist, and I wish a great master could arise to deal with it…”  That was in 1905.  Fast forward a century.  Our world is a little older, but it’s déjà vu all over again.

Wharton’s letter has been published more than once, and I had read it; only this week did I read the letter to which it was a response. Her pen-pal was the Rev. Dr. Morgan Dix, the priest who had officiated at her wedding.  Dix was for a lengthy period in the Gilded Age the rector of Trinity Church, Wall Street, one of Christendom’s more famous (and opulent) parish churches.  It turns out, as I learned last week in an accidental way, he was also an astute literary critic.*  Professor Donald Gerardi, known to me only indirectly as a friend of a friend, is an expert on American religious history, who is just now working on a biography of Morgan Dix. Dix’s letter to Wharton, to which I gained access through Prof. Gerardi, whets my appetite for the completed biography.

Morgan Dix (1827-1908) greets the dawn of photography

Here is a brief part of what Dix had written.  “Though you may demur to my conclusion, let me plainly express it.  I claim you as one of the preachers to this generation; as a preacher of righteousness and pure living, not directly, as we of the clergy preach them in fulfilling our appointed course, but indirectly, by showing what must come when righteousness, and faith, and reverence die out of the souls of men and women, and nothing is left but a mad desire for wealth and the pleasures it procures, and the vast conceit which arrogates to itself a primacy and a superiority based not on virtue, honour, intelligence, or character, but simply on the possession of money, well-invested, and ministering to the pride and lusts of its owner.”

Money well-invested!  That can buy a ticket to the Fun House all right.  One can sense perhaps that when it comes to social critics one is always likely to prefer a Chaucer to a Savonarola.   But one also sees where Edith Wharton was coming from.  “I am sure that you read your Bible as you did when a young girl…” Dix writes. “I know the verse in Ecclesiastes from which you took the name of your volume, those words which strike like a knell through the hollowness of a society devoted to selfish pleasure as the one and only object of pursuit…”  I have read several critiques of The House of Mirth written from the point of view of its “Jamesian techniques” and its “feminist sensibility”.  I’d like to see one now from its own point of view, that of the social teachings of the Anglo-Catholic revival.  That was for Morgan Dix the appropriate “critical perspective”; and far from demurring, Edith Wharton immediately invited him to dinner.

*I had heard of Dix only through an amusing episode of New York social history, in which he comes off as terminally humorless and stuffy, in W. A. Swanberg’s The Rector and the Rogue (1968).

For Better or for Worse

 
GOOD  In pious times, e're priest-craft did begin / before polygamy was made a sin...

I am in the final push in the preparation of a book about the Enlightenment period, and as usual thinking about issues in distant history intrudes upon current perception. If the early medieval centuries were the “Dark Ages,” the thirteenth the “Age of Faith,” and the Eighteenth the “Age of Reason”, what is the defining characteristic of the age that has given us our formation?  Your answer will probably be determined by which of the two large historical schools you fall into: the optimistic, or the pessimistic.

When doctors disagree, its best to attempt a comprehensive review of the evidence.  When Pantagruel went off to study in Paris, his father Garagantua wrote him a letter full of enthusiasm for recent advances in learning, most of which could be attributed to the invention of printing.  “I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such-like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now than doctors and preachers were in my time.”  He does allow that the destruction wrought by another recent invention, gunpowder, might cancel some of the gains won by movable type.

In the eighteenth century Voltaire wrote his immortal novella Candide (subtitled “Optimism”).  Candide is a young fellow schooled in the optimism of the philosopher Leibniz.  He wanders through the mayhem of war, rapine, the Inquisition, and the Lisbon earthquake piously reciting his well-learned mantra: “This is the best of all possible worlds.”  It is not long before the reader perceives that this observation, though acute, is pessimistic rather than optimistic. 

A famous pop-psychologist of the turn of the twentieth century, Emile Coué (1857-1926), gained thousands of followers by getting them to intone daily: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” (“Tous les jours, a tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux.”)   This mode of therapy was called couéisme, which is apparently French for balderdash.  A recent bestseller by Steven Pinker entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature would persuade us that in the Great Scheme, there is a definite uptick.

Another way of asking the question is this: do you detect in history a pattern of progress, as many people since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have done?  As a medievalist I am more inclined to the classical-medieval view of incremental decay.  Several writers of our English Renaissance gave some version of the following derivation of the word world: “World, from wear-old, that thing that groweth worse as it groweth older.”  These writers and their Continental contemporaries had been deeply schooled in the classics, and thus subscribed to the theory of the “Ages of the World.”

            The two greatest poets of classical Latinity—Virgil in the first of the Georgics, Ovid in the first book of the Metamorphoses—had given beautiful expression to the myth of the Golden Age, an age of pre-industrial, indeed pre-agricultural, primal justice and bliss, in which the human race lived in harmonious simplicity, feeding itself from the earth’s uncultivated bounty, and slaking its thirst at the rivulets of its crystalline waters.  This story seemed to such early Christian writers as Lactantius an obvious analogue to the pre-lapsarian state of our first parents in the Garden of Eden.  So it was treated by Boethius in one of his most famous meters (poems), which for a thousand years most people who could read at all were likely to know nearly by heart.  A translation of it was one of Chaucer’s early productions.

 Oxford: Bodleian, MS Douce 195: Comment iupiter oste les genitoires a son pere

(Translation: "This was the most unkindest cut of all.")

            But the myth of a Golden Age, like the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, is one of a paradise lost.  Saturn reigned over the Golden Age, the age of justice.  But the Golden Age came to a brutal end when Saturn’s son Jupiter rebelled against his father.  There is no polite way of telling you what happened.  Jupiter cut off his father’s sexual organs and tossed them into the Mediterranean Sea.  The results, after a certain amount of aqueous bubbling, are well known to you all from a famous painting of Botticelli: Venus on the half-shell!  Yes, lubricious sex entered the world only with primal sin.  “Then the eyes of [Adam and Eve] were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”  (Except that I prefer the reading of the Geneva Bible of 1560, in which they made themselves “breeches”.  The historical human problem has been hot pants, not hot aprons.)

            The fall from gold to silver was, alas, the mere beginning of a continuing downward slope of degradation that saw a steady metallic descent through Ages of Bronze and Iron.  Fortunately the classical period ended before things could get much worse, which they have continued to do ever since.  Though no poet has shouldered the task—How could one?  We have no epic poets any more—the materials are there awaiting.  The world has had its Ages of Ceramic, of Wood, and of Papier-Mâché.  I think we are now in a transitional period between the Age of Cardboard and the Age of Bubblewrap.  Under these circumstances, despite Pinker’s captious statistics, it is hard for me to agree that our own age, the century of Auschwitz and Vorkuta, is a marked improvement over the century of the Seven Years’ War.

NOT SO GOOD : from Goya's "Diasters of War"