Good Show for the Brits

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The name's Regina, Elizabeth Regina

A visit to England of more than two weeks—such was my thinking as I sat down to write this morning—surely ought to provide the material for a fairly ambitious essay on “The Mood of Britain Today” or some other grand, comprehensive design.  After all, each day over my morning coffee I read such preposterous titles atop op-ed pieces no more solidly researched.  My first thought was to report on the American election as seen through English eyes.  A moment’s reflection made me realize that in addition to its narcissism, the topic brought with it the risk of acute embarrassment.  There are quite a few things about American political life that are difficult to explain intelligently to oneself, let alone to foreigners.

           

            I can, however, offer a brief summary.  The British press, which is actually worse than the American press, though usually more literate, agrees in a quasi-Hobbesean assessment of the American presidential campaign, to wit, that it is nasty, brutish, and mind-numbingly long.  It regards Barack Obama’s re-election as a foregone conclusion.  As this would appear to differ from the American journalistic consensus only in the foregone part, it doesn’t really seem like much news.  The American press appears to believe that the presidency was Mr. Romney’s to lose, and that he has lost it.  Like Mr. Romney himself, most American journalists appear to be committed to the theory of individual responsibility.

            So it’s back to “The Mood of Britain Today”.  I find that the mood of Britain today is excellent.  In contrast, the mood of America is lousy.  America’s lousy mood has to do with its politics.  No matter what happens in November about half the nation will declare disaster barely averted, and the other half lament disaster fully achieved.  That is not a situation very promising in terms of our shared national need to face up to working together to address some very real problems, many of which neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Romney has the political courage to lay out for us honestly.

            Britain’s politics are not all that much better than ours, certainly not good enough to account for the optimism, the good feeling, and the sense of accomplishment that I encountered everywhere in my travels.  No.  The source of the quite remarkable sense of well-being in Britain at the moment is the national panache with which the Olympic Games were planned and carried out.  This was a gigantic undertaking for London and indeed the whole nation.  In the run-up to the games doubters were prone to be dubious and cynics ready to be cynical.  But the way the Games played out—from the brilliant and slightly goofy opening spectacle to the extraordinary contributions of literally thousands of intergenerational, interracial, multicultural volunteer helpers, guides, and marshals—seems to have left the country with a licit and infectious feeling of rare, communal achievement.

 Olympic volunteers

            Since we arrived in London only as the Games ended, it took me a while to grasp all this.  My understanding began with a train ride.  After an overnight with my delightful stepmother-in-law in St. John’s Wood, we set off the next morning to suburban Kent and the house of my eminent brother-in-law, John Newman in Sevenoaks.  There is a considerable commuter traffic between London and Sevenoaks, but in the morning it is mainly headed in one direction—toward the city.  There are several trains an hour, but even so the inbound trains often fill to capacity.  Outbound from London in those morning hours, on the other hand, the coaches are mainly empty.  I noted with surprise—but without actually thinking about it—that our outbound car was practically full.  It was also quite animated.   Several groups of youngish people speaking various languages, none of them English, kept up a lively buzz.  I thought vaguely that the train must be going on to Dover, and that these were middle-Europeans on their way home.  But to my surprise they all got off when we did, at Sevenoaks station.

            It took me a minute or two to figure out what was happening.  On the platform were several uniformed volunteers, who directed the travelers up a stairway, down a long corridor, and out onto the street where several specially designated Olympic buses were waiting.  Sevenoaks is not far from Brands Hatch, site of one of the well known motor raceways in Britain.  It had been commandeered on this occasion as the venue for the Paralympic bicycle races.  That was where all the surprising people on the commuter train were headed.  It is typical of the British that the general enthusiasm for the Paralympics was not less fervent than that for the “regular” Games.

 Alex Zanardi (Italy) at Brands Hatch

            The whole country is basking in the sense of having come together to do something rather difficult, and in having done it very well.  You might call it “British exceptionalism”.  I wonder if we might not give it a try ourselves

Breathless--and Breathtaking

I last posted nine breathless and breathtaking days ago, but I now find myself briefly domiciled in Cambridge at the home of my wonderful niece Elisabeth and her wonderful family.  And when I say wonderful, I mean wonderful.  There is no greater act of ceremonial hospitality known to the annals of anthropology than the loan of an iMac, which I find at my disposal for the duration of a stint of child-minding.  This is particularly light duty since the children involved are for the moment all at their schools.

Only those who have travelled in Britain can fully appreciate how much rural beauty has been preserved on a small, highly populated island.  The protection of the environment has been a feature of British customary law since times immemorial, certainly since long before the concept of the “environment” even existed.  One wise historian defined patriotism and “the love of locality”; and Britain is a land of thousands of beloved geographical nooks and crannies.  Despite its dramatic urbanization, Britain is still a land a villages.  The village, as it developed in medieval Britain, has practically no American counterpart, even in New England, built by transplanted English villagers.  For the truth is that you can scarcely build a village in less than a quarter of a millennium.  American villages had hardly got started when they were overwhelmed by the architectural chaos demanded by the internal combustion engine.

Most of what I have been doing since my last post is visiting old friends.  Two of those visits—one to Mayfield in Sussex, the other to Cardiff in Wales—I shall perhaps write about on later occasions.  They were particularly intimate in character, and not the easy fare of a public travelogue.  But there has been some upscale tourism as well.  A week ago today my friend John Smith drove me to Barnes station (beyond the river from Hammersmith) whence I travelled quickly back to Waterloo Station in London, changed trains after a brief wait, and an hour later found myself in Peterfield, Hants., in serious Anglo-Saxon territory.  Here I was met by my old friend John Filer who transported me by Jaguar to his (relatively) new abode in West Meon.  You have perhaps not heard of West Meon?  Well, it’s slightly to the west of East Meon—the Meon being a sort of meandering creek that in those parts passes for a river.  It would be rash to hazard a definite opinion as to which is the more gorgeous of the two villages.

Chawton

But for us West Meon was mainly a base camp from which to set out on a day’s culture-crawl, a visit to two famous literary abodes.  The first of these was Chawton), the lovely old house in which Jane Austen spent the final years of her miraculous writing career.  The house is now a well-kept museum, and it is possible to visit every room in it, many of them filled with authentic relics  of one of the greatest novelists the world has ever known.  In a small frame on one wall, in her own clear hand, was one of several beautiful prayers she composed: Give us grace, Almighty Father, so to pray, as to deserve to be heard, to address thee with our Hearts, as with our lips. Thou art every where present, from Thee no secret can be hid. May the knowledge of this, teach us to fix our Thoughts on Thee, with Reverence and Devotion that we pray not in vain.

Historians have often taken a rather dim view of the state of English religion in the eighteenth century.  William Edward Hartpole Lecky, one of the great historians of Britain in the eighteenth century, opines that most Tories of the period probably “regarded the Church as an admirable extension of the police force.”  So it’s good to recall Jane Austen and some others like her.  One of these lived just down the road a piece, at Selborne.  The Rev. Gilbert White was a somewhat eccentric country parson. When his early academic ambitions foundered on the shoals of the eccentricity just alluded to, White went to ground in the village of Selborne where he spent the rest of his life in preaching, in pastoral work, and (above all) in recording his minute observations of the natural world around him that later became famous as The Natural History of Selborne—the pioneering eco-classic, and still the unsurpassed example of English language “nature writing”.  His house, too, along with its splendid gardens, has been successfully turned into a public museum.  In it I spent two inspiring hours.  Austen and White: an impressive cultural double-header!

 Gilbert White's house from the back lawn

Here are three more photographs of beautiful things I saw during the week: (1) Saint Dunstan’s Church, Mayfield, Sussex, where I worshipped last Sunday; (2) Daniel Gabriel Rossetti’s triptych The Seed of David in Llandaff Cathedral; (3) Renoir’s La Parisienne, one of the most famous paintings in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

           

The Para-Blogger

Here in London's it's been all about the Para-Olympics (often called the "Special Olympics" in America).  This will be a para-blog by a para-bloguiste, who finds himself at a slightly wonky machine at an Internet Cafe on the Shepherds Bush Road in Hammersmith.

While Joan hikes along the South Downs Trail, I have been staying for a few days in Barnes with old and dear friends, John and Fiona Smith, whom I see far too seldom.  John and I were up at Oxford together  half a century ago.  He made his career in the Classics Department at St. Paul's School, of which he was long the distinguished head.  It would be hard to imagine a more distinguished post for a classicist than that of "John Colet's Successor," as John could claim to be.

John and I had a high old time yesterday in the British Museum, where he gav me a private tour of and lecture on the wonderful relief sculptures.from the Temple of Bassai.  They are kept in a special room off the beaten track in the museum, and they are not always available to view.  We were doubly in luck.  Not only was the room open, but only four other people (out of the potential forty thousand or so swarming the museum) found it during the half hour or so we spent there.

The carvings are not of the very highest quality of their period, but they are remarkable in the completeness and state of preservation.  The chief theme of Greek political iconography is pretty easily identified: Greeks are good; barbarians are bad.   Good Greeks fight bad barbarians and win; bad barbarians fight good Greeks and lose.  Hence the recurrent subject matter of the combat against Amazons and the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs.

For many decades I solemnly misinformed my students with the etymoligical myth that derives the word "Amazon" from the Greek for a woman's breast prefixed by the negative a, as in a+theist and so forth.  The idea was the these women warriors amputated the right breast in order to facilitate the use of the bow and arrow.  It is really quite amazing that one can believe utter nonsense and teach it with gusto.  If I had spent a little more time with the macromastic warriors of the Bassai sculptures--I refer of course to iconographic study--I would have known better.  My only regret is that the primitive technology to which I find myself temporarily indentured do not allow a visual demonstration.  Like it or not, you'll have to imagine that this is an actual blog essay.

Transition: the Autumnal

           

    Abraham Janssen: Personification of Autumn  

          Today is distinctly transitional.  For starters it is the birthday of Louis XIV, supposed herald of one of the world’s more dramatic transitions (“Après moi, le deluge!”) that, so far as I can tell from the tenor of our political conventions, is still in progress.  Yes, I know it was actually Louis XV who didn’t say that, but history is much better as servant than as master.  Further transition: I have just delivered my latest opus (The Dark Side of the Enlightenment) to W. W. Norton in New York, where it will begin the copy-editing process.  Further yet, I am also preparing—or rather avoiding preparing by writing this blog essay instead--to fly off in the morning to London.  There we have before us a couple of weeks of R&R in the delightful form of visiting family and friends and simply knocking about.

            But the most conspicuous sense of transition is simply calendrical.  So much of what we think of as cultural or spiritual experience is actually climate controlled.  Somewhere C. S. Lewis points out that Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” might really be meaningless to an Eskimo.

            The current essay of my friend Kathy Taylor, a fine writer and the proprietor of the admirable blog “In 999 Words…or less,” deals with the disturbing suddenness of September.  She was writing from Cape Cod, but there seems to have been something particularly definitive about the last day of August widely through the northeast.  It was not particularly cool, but for a day the mugginess disappeared.  We certainly experienced it in the New York area, even though for me the day was blighted by an automotive disaster that preoccupied my attention for several hours. 

            Growing up as I did mainly in the South, I always found the poetic iconography of autumn (as in the justly famous ode of John Keats) strangely artificial.  That is because it derives from the fifty-first latitude north as it crosses England and not the thirty-sixth as it passes across America.  One of the major images in Keats’s “To Autumn” is that of the stubble field.  We know something of the genesis of the poem’s composition from a letter written by Keats to his friend Reynolds in September of 1819.  “How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air.  A temperate sharpness about it.  Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never liked stubble-fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm.”  Warm might serve for the south downs of England, but it would be a distinct understatement for Arkansas.  Often enough some of the hottest days of the year came in September. 

            So also did some of the hottest and sweatiest work—particularly haymaking, which might also be called “making stubble fields.”. So rapid is the pace of technological change that many of the experiences of my youth are more than forgotten.  They have actually vanished from the earth.  I go back a ways, certainly to a time before hay-balers.  On our Ozark farm we did have a mechanical mower and a hay-rake—essentially unchanged from their prototypes of the 1870s.    They were horse-drawn, though a tractor did appear in my teen-age years.

            The hay-raker first made long rows of the sun-dried grass, then cut them up as best he could into roughly similar shocks or piles.  Among these piles the horse (or tractor) pulled a large, makeshift wagon.  One man stood on the wagon and tried to distribute as evenly as possible the hay that was being pitched up by the men on the ground.  It would not be easy to say which was the harder job.  The idea was to get as much hay onto the cart as possible without risking the disaster of its tipping over on the way to the barn, where, incidentally, it was always at least ten degrees hotter than in the hayfield itself.   There still exists, somewhere, one of the few “candid” photographs depicting my teen-aged years.  I am atop a huge load of hay at least the size of that in Bosch’s “Haywain”.  The local population depicted by Bosch is vaguely  reminiscent of the Ozarks too.

            All that is gone—part of a large transition.  Tomorrow night when I step out of the plane at Heathrow, I hope to accomplish a somewhat smaller one.  I hope to to recover something approximating Keatsian autumn.  I cannot guarantee that I will find her “on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, drows’d with the fume of poppies”; but the experience is likely to be somnolent enough to make the blog schedule for the next two weeks a little casual.