Aups
A few subjects of this essay will be our daughter Katherine’s travel itineraries, the beautiful crisp fall weather we are enjoying, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, and the wit and wisdom of Julius Caesar. Saturday’s beautiful weather—bright, chilly crystalline air rapidly warming beneath a brilliant rising sun—was particularly splendid as experienced on the bluestone patio onto which the sliding doors of our glass walled house open at the back. From the front everything about the house is flat and uninteresting. It gives off the vibe of a small, windowless warehouse. It does have the distinction of having been designed by an eminent member of the Architecture School about 1960, a fact that gives me small comfort whenever I contemplate its gray, windowless street front. That is because its backside, which is for our purposes the living side, is almost spectacularly beautiful. The yard slopes down gradually toward a nearly acceptable workshop-tool house; behind that the view from the house includes several beautiful yards of the extensive fieldstone wall I myself built in earlier days. Beyond that a lovely path makes its way through a field on which a younger generation once played baseball, and then along a forested path that leads, after about a quarter mile of forested common land, to a T-junction. There walking paths in either direction follow the cliff side looking down on Lake Carnegie.
This lake is one of the ornaments of our campus and our town. According to legend it was a great disappointment to the university trustees, who had in the first decade of the twentieth century been cultivating Mr. Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist, in the hopes of a gift of some large and imposing public University building. Among the favorite gifts for which he was noted were libraries and “science buildings,” both of which made them salivate—in the very discreet manner in which Presbyterian elders might be seen to salivate, of course. But fortunately Mr. Carnegie had ideas of his own. In the days when a dollar was a dollar, he gave away three hundred and fifty million of them. He knew that what Princeton really needed was a long, thin water reservoir that could double as a recreational site, with special emphasis on the manly British sport of competitive rowing.
I’m sure you follow the sequence here. It was on the bluestone patio looking down toward the path that could eventually lead us to Carnegie’s aqueous bounty that we on Saturday enjoyed a whirlwind visit of an hour and a half from our daughter. All three of our children are notably dutiful with regard to us, the APs (aging parents) but Katherine’s attentiveness can be described only as heroic given the fact that her job, leading a major American cultural foundation with its principal seat in Los Angeles, requires frequent travel to major European capitals—and, as it turns out, at least one not so major. She was on her way to hop a plane to Zurich, the major airport closest to her actual destination—Vaduz. Vaduz??? I faced the humiliation of having to learn that it is the capital of Liechtenstein. It turns out Vaduz is an actual place. You might describe it as a suburb of Davos. They apparently have Davos-style meetings there. I wouldn’t know. Look, I’ve been to the Sulphur Springs Fair twice, but I never heard of this Vaduz place. To my credit I already suspected that Liechtenstein itself might be real, and I was secretly glad to have confirmation. But our daughter was shocked, shocked, by my ignorance. A European capital city! You…a college professor?
In the long run this humiliation excited a competitive spirit. Surely there must be somewhere on my own itinerary that would stump her. I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head, so that my own eventual email riposte probably reached her mid-Atlantic. I inquired how frequently she visited Aups. Gotcha!
Aups is not exactly the capital of anywhere. It is actually a beautiful little village in upper Var in Provence that has been around for a very long time--a lot longer than this jumped-up Vaduz, I’ll warrant. I have been able to visit it a couple of times thanks to its proximity (maybe ten kilometers) to our friend Andrew’s house at Salernes, where we have spent several delightful vacations. In fact, both of the APs are practically Aups habituées. Any place so ancient is bound to have some interesting associations, even if it has been in decline for a couple thousand years. It is, for example, famous for its truffles, at least among trufflers. In an earlier century its Catholic peasantry was badly bloodied up by a mob of Cathars, which is of interest given that the Cathars were usually on the losing side of that equation. But its more interesting fame, for purposes of an obscurity contest, is more ancient yet. For thanks to Julius Caesar Aups has a credible claim to be the most insignificant place in Europe. If you know even a little about Julius you are likely to know that he was much concerned with fine distinctions of social and political hierarchies. He liked arrangements in which the hierarchies were clear and he was at the top of all of them. He happened to pass through Aups on his way to conquering Gaul. He probably regarded the hamlet as nothing more than an inadequate watering hole for his men’s horses. But he is supposed to have made his larger hierarchical attitudes clear by saying: “I would prefer to be the Number One Guy in Aups than the Number Two Guy in Rome.” It was an attitude likely to get him into trouble one day. But as an example of imperious wit it was enough to establish little Aups as the world’s quintessential Loserville. I doubt that my attempt to invoke its legendary obscurity can harm it though. The proper French pronunciation of the place may sound like what an Anglophone might blurt out after dribbling soup down his shirtfront, but Scandinavians now pay half a million for a decayed stable in the area.
Returning to the Number One Guy ever to visit Aups, everyone knows that Julius Caesar was a man of parts. He was among other things quite the wit, and he seldom passed through any part of his expansive and expanding Empire without making some memorable comment especially designed for teachers of Latin 101. His most famous such remark of course is a masterpiece of precision recording his activities when he strayed with imperial intent into a part of the world that wasn’t quite yet fully pacified, as the Romans like to put it. Veni, vidi, vici. Where, I ask you, would introductory Latin students be without veni, vidi vici? “I came; I saw; I conquered.” Just popped out of his mouth, apparently. He also has famous last words. Et tu, Brute? (Or was that Shakespeare?) And into how many parts is omnia Gallia divided?...
