Urban Renewal

I didn’t really need another signal that I am losing my marbles, but I got a strong one last week.  There arrived in the post a large, beautiful, and obviously quite expensive art book published by Brepols.  This is a distinguished scholarly publishing house in Belgium, once chiefly known for its edition of patristic texts, but in recent decades perhaps more prominent in the field of sumptuous and pricey medieval art historical studies.  The book is entitled Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem, and lavishly illustrated.  There was nothing else in the envelope, though it did have a return address, that of a Medieval Studies Institute at a Big Ten university.  It looked to me as though some sub-subaltern on the staff of their prestigious journal had by mistake sent me this copy in order that I might review it in their learned journal.  I sent them an email with this surmise.  The subaltern’s mildly annoyed response was instantaneous, and it was accompanied by a copy of my own terse but unequivocal agreement to review the book, written a month earlier before the matter took permanent leave of my memory of it.  How to save face?  “Never apologize, never explain,” as Disraeli, Henry James or maybe somebody else is supposed to have said.  Just write the review—which I shall try to do within two weeks.

 

            But the book’s apparent subject matter—the way certain cities have either in reality or in spiritual imagination been “founded” in earlier ones—set me to thinking.  Especially important was the word “idea”.  During the recent elections I was constantly hearing from pundits that America was not a country but an idea. How, or in what sense might this be true?  On every day of my young life in school I had pledged my allegiance through the surrogacy of a piece of red, white, and blue cloth, to a republic, which was I suppose a kind of idea, but I didn’t think of it that way then.  To choose Jerusalem as the model of Christian urbanization was hardly an original gesture.  For of course the “new” or “spiritual” Jerusalem are ancient and widespread conceits both in antique Judaism and early Christianity.  And they straddle both sacred and profane realms.  Why are the words Tsar and Kaiser variants of Caeser?  That sort of thing: the “new Rome”.    I live in the American state of New Jersey, which seems at first glance quite unlike the Isle of Jersey in the English (and why isn’t it the French?) Channel?  How about our northern neighbor, both city and state, of New York?  Not a whole lot of similarity to old York there.  To get there from here you have to pass through New Brunswick, home to our state university.  New Mexico is sort of plausible from the geological point of view, but New Hampshire?  And how about New Paltz, N. Y.?  A place called “the Palatinate” sounds pretty fancy, but have you ever driven through New Paltz, N.Y.?  It turns out that “Paltz” approaches the way Huguenot exiles pronounced the word in the seventeenth century.  Among my much-thumbed reference books is Webster’s Geographical Dictionary (1949) in which there are upwards of twenty pages crammed with short entries of various News, and that does not even touch upon the German Neus, the French Neufs, and so on.  How many Newcastles, Castelnovos, Chateauneufs, Neudorfs, etc., are there in Europe?  People apparently long to live in the New Something-or-Other.  In Chaucer’s day the town fathers of London came up with a ceremonial name for their expanding metropolis: Troinovant, or New Troy.  Of course the original “new Troy” was Rome itself.  And if you are at all familiar with Augustine’s City of God, you must know that the great imperial city—with its teeming population, architectural grandeur, and moral cesspools was itself a type, simulacrum, or foreshadowing both of great Zion and great Babylon.  But it surely must have required a large amount of chutzpah—to use the technical term in medieval Italian—for the civic custodians of Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities to call itself Jerusalem.  And you can have linguistic renewal in more than one language.  Nova Scotia is a plausible geographical clone, I suppose, but New Caledonia (Nouvelle-Calédonie) in the southwest Pacific?

 

 

            Certain cities have enjoyed allegorical rebirths after their utter destruction.  One thinks particularly of the major North African city-state of Carthage.  Carthage made the big mistake of getting on the wrong side of mighty Rome in the second half of the third century before Christ.  The famous conflict between the two city states—which can be regarded as a single long-running war or a series of discrete conflicts--is one of the great events of ancient history, the Punic wars.  One of the Carthaginian generals, Hannibal, was a storied military genius who took a “cavalry” of elephants (elephantry?) across the Mediterranean and over the Alps to attack Rome from the north.  The annoying initial successes of the Carthaginians caused the Roman historian, statesman, and all-purpose old grump Cato the Elder to utter the single sentence most likely to be remembered by those alumni of Latin 101 who remember nothing else: Delenda est Carthago, “Carthage must be destroyed!”)  He wasn’t kidding either.  The place was utterly obliterated.  According to modern historical myth the site was then “plowed to salt,” so that not even a plant or blade of grass could sprout upon its former site.  The salting never really happened, for it wasn’t really necessary.  When the Romans wiped you out, you were well and truly wiped out.  Nonetheless there are at least a dozen Carthages in America today, and several more important ones elsewhere, especially the one on the Caribbean coast of Columbia (Cartagena).  The gazetteers  of both North and South Americas are replete with names cribbed from classical historians.

 

            And why is Zealand a place in New Brunswick (the Canadian province, not the New Jersey city), and what is new about New Zealand?  Then there all those great places that undergo name revisions on account on of regime change: the Constantinoples and the Saint Petersburgs….but that large subject would demand an essay of its own.