We approach the end of our Provençal idyll. Two of our number left early this morning for the station at Les Arcs, thence to be whisked by TGV to Paris and some quick museum hopping before a later departure on the Eurostar and home to London. We who remain—Joan and I and the hosts—are feeling more than a little wistful suddenly facing the approaching end of another—another what exactly? House party? Long country home week-end? How to characterize a unique event that is at once refreshing and exhausting, at once a party and a taxing seminar? A partially useful parallel comes to my mind. Just about this time of the year somewhat more than sixteen centuries ago, in a landscape not unlike the one in which we now find ourselves, the young Augustine began an extensive rural vacation at a large country house near Milan in northern Italy. The spot was called Cassiciacum, and it deserves its place in the geography of intellectual history alongside the Stoa, the rue Saint-Jacques, the Berlin Akademie, or the two Cambridges. For it was at Cassiciacum in the year 386 that the young Augustine came to certain conclusions destined to have a huge impact on more than a thousand years of our intellectual history. Augustine retreated to Cassiiacum with quite an entourage in tow: including his mother, his son, his frequent sidekick Alypius, and another friend and colleague, a rhetorician named Verecundus. The seekers after truth met daily, mostly in the open-air classroom of a small garden nook. But sometimes, presumably led by Verecundus, their discussions took place in the partial shade of the still laden or recently despoiled grapevines that were an important part of the place’s agricultural activities. Just as the poetry of Homer has played an important role in all aspects of Greek education—including that being pursued by doctors and lawyers in training—the Aeneid of Virgil had become the fundamental textbook for Latin learners. How we might wish to have the lecture notes of Verecundus or of Augustine himself! How sweet an idea it is: reading through and discussing a book of Virgil’s epic lounging among the vineyards! Our daily seminars at Salernes in the “middle” Var, though perhaps less philosophically consequential, were probably a good deal more vinous. We have been a smaller group than that organized by Augustine, smaller and considerably older. There are, or were before today, eight of us distributed into four couples, We are all octogenarians, Some of us have been friends for more than sixty years, with the origins of friendship in our shared undergraduate days at Oxford. Several others are united by collegial ties in the British business world going back many decades, And the topics we have discussed endlessly have been fairly light on theology and very heavy on politics. With the world in such a mess this is perhaps inevitable. From that point of view the parallel with Augustine’s Cassiciacum is inexact. But there was also much great talk about books and music, endless captivating anecdotes from personal and professional experience. We are emerging from a fortnight’s festival of friendship. And, given our ages and the way of the world, we can hardly be certain that there might be another, or even others, in the increasingly uncertain future. So we face our own departure for America tomorrow with hearts full of gratitude to our hosts Andrew Seth and his partner Lee Godden, but also with a wistfulness ever to see associated with the unique sights, sounds, and perhaps above all the smells of an old Provençal farmstead.
