Midway

well defended birds, Midway atoll
 

Our eldest granddaughter, Sophia, is about half way through her pregnancy, and I am allowing my mind to savor the impending prospect of my own great-grandparental apotheosis.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, as one thought leads to another, I have been thinking about my own parents, now long departed with their entire entourage of my uncles and aunts.  In particular I have been thinking about my Dad, a man whose life was both commonplace and extraordinary, as were so many of the lives of the parents of my contemporaries, for whom the great upheaval of the Second World War was the defining episode. 

 

For our family, it was almost as if there were two different wars.  My Dad’s two brothers, one older and one younger, were in Europe fighting Germans.  Dad was half a world away in the South Pacific.  The only historical source available to me is family lore, but I think it is at least as reliable as the Chanson de Roland.  All three of the Fleming brothers signed up almost immediately after Pearl Harbor.  Dad had conned my mother into believing that he had a safe non-combatant place in the hastily created Seabees (CB=naval Construction Battalion), as indeed in theory he had.  But he was somehow actually already attached to a Marine unit at the Battle of Midway in June of 1942.  That was only six months after Pearl Harbor.  If you have ever seen a map of Midway Atol—it’s about five square miles in size—you will appreciate that it is a place-name rather than a place.  The slaughter played out in ships and planes.  As it turned out, Midway was a turning point that suggested to the savvy—of whom there were not all that many at the time—the inevitable doom of the Japanese Empire.  As I was six years old when that battle took place, I am dependent upon oral tradition and military historians for my understanding of its significance.  American geography played a large role in how American civilians experienced the War.  We were living in Denver, refugees taken in by my maternal grandparents, and our principal local spiritual fears were “western”, the prospect that the West Coast might be a bloody battlefield.  In retrospect this seems absurd, and probably should have at the time, but life is not lived retrospectively.  The so-called “greatest generation” of Americans is now almost entirely extinct.  Their progeny, among whom I number, will join them in the dusty halls soon enough. But in the meantime, I marvel at the current widespread oblivion of, or indifference to, the extraordinary feats they achieved.  My father, though nearly a stereotype of rugged old American masculinity, was a kind and even gentle person.  But he became a committed warrior.  In his eyes the atomic bombing of a huge civilian population was not merely justified but in some sense required by the barbarism it paused, if it could never fully redress.

 

Midway Island gets its name from its location, roughly halfway across the Pacific Ocean from the coastal United States.  It is usually classified as being a part of the Hawaiian archipelago, though it is not a part of the state of Hawaii.  It has no permanent inhabitants.  From one point of view it’s a pretty good place to fight a war.  There is no civilian population to be its innocent victims.  But from another and saner perspective its insignificance is nearly absurd.  The idea of two violent armadas contesting its possession is rather tragic in itself, an emblem of the vanity of human wishes.

 

This essay was born of my larger pondering of the rapidity of social change, especially in America, and more especially as I find it in my own family history.  I cannot say that my father didn’t give a second thought to the obvious truth that it was the use of the atomic bomb that ended the war in the Pacific.  He was too intelligent and too humane for such thoughtlessness.  But he fully believed in the justness of the Allied cause and had seen much evidence that persuaded him of the barbarity and fanaticism of the Japanese military machine.  His American patriotism was almost instinctive, but it was far from mindless.  He didn’t revel in it.  Much of his early life had been difficult, and he felt that he was fighting not merely against an urgent existential threat but to make a better world, better first of all for his own family, but also superior in an ethical sense, a better world for all.  Those attitudes, or others very like them, dominated the thinking of the “greatest generation,” and must have been practically universal among those who had actually fought in the war.  He lived long enough to hear such attitudes mocked and deplored by what he called “pipsqueaks” who had never heard of Kwajalein, let alone sought it out on a map.  His attitude to “pipsqueaks” was that of a democratic American: “People are free to speak as they pease.  It’s a free country”.  It was a satisfaction to him, in his own eyes, that he had done his tiny bit to keep it free.

 

The Battle of Midway was the beginning of the war for my Dad, but in his allegorizing mind the beginning of the end for the Empire of the Rising Sun.  He was in good military company on that score.  Admiral Yamamoto actually thought the same thing, and even seems to have said so at the time.  My Dad never read Dante, but like Dante he faced the great adventure of his life in “the middle of life’s road”, that is, around his thirty-fifth year.  As for so many millions of others, that stupendous war was and remained for my father the central event of his life, though lurking silently in the background. The Book of Job can always be counted on if you need an accurate pessimistic spin: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling.” (Job 7:1).    But in life’s adversarial aspects one feels also the warmth-giving fires of life.  We sit astride the shoulders of giants, and however midget-like is our actual perspective, we perforce can see a more distant horizon than could they.  I now have every hope, and every reasonable expectation, soon to greet the arrival of a great grandchild. And that’s just great.  My own great father never had that privilege.

 

In memoriam: Marvin Dale Fleming (1906-1980) 

 

 

Watery Places

 

Perhaps the best-known character in Chaucer--her name at least will ring a bell for most of my readers--is the Wife of Bath.  But I cannot proceed much further and get to the actual aqueous subject of my essay without a brief philological preparation.   “Wife” in modern English is a noun of relationship, referring to the female partner in the marriage of a man and a woman.  In earlier English wif meant woman more generally, but  by Chaucer’s time it often had the relational meaning that it has now.  In modern German, “my man” still means “my husband.”  For Chaucer, however, think “the woman from Bath.”  The Wife of Bath, Alison by name, is actually a widow, but she has a long marital history.  Bath is of course a place name, an ancient town in southwest England.  Not far away is another beautiful town, Wells.  From the natural springs in the location the ancient Romans built an elaborate watering place, in later centuries a kind of resort where people “took the waters,” thought to be healthy and indeed medicinal.  In modern times visiting Bath was often a luxurious amusement of the affluent, as we can see in several well-known English novels.  Chaucer, a very clever writer, makes much of her watery associations.

 

Chaucer evidently connected her in his mind, and therefore in ours, with another aqueous literary character—namely, the anonymous “woman at the well” in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel. The connection is not some subtlety invented by me.  You cannot miss it.  Certainly, the Wife of Bath herself doesn’t miss it.  It was basic to Chaucer’s plan.  Jesus, tired from walking all morning, sits down to rest at a well-known watering hole, namely Jacob’s Well.  (We are not certain of the location of this well, but the ancient Semitic legend was that it had been dug by the patriarch Jacob.)  As he sat there, a Samaritan woman came to fetch water, and the two entered into one of history’s more interesting recorded conversations.  Her Samaritan identity is of significance, for as she says, Jews are supposed to avoid Samaritans.  A slightly transgressive air hovers over the scene.  Like the Wife of Bath the Samaritan woman, it turns out, has had four husbands and was now living in concubinage with a fifth man.  So here we have a biblical model, or perhaps the better word is “type”, of the much-married medieval milliner from Bath.  Jesus asks the woman to give him a drink, as he has no cup of his own.  Then he says: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.”

When compared with Chaucer’s, my interest in place names will probably seem rather conventional or eccentric; but I have my own little agenda.  I have been making frequent journeys to visit Joan in her rehabilitation facility in a place called Stonebridge.  The journey is short, but it begins in one county (Mercer) and ends in a second (Somerset). About half of the trip is on a road running parallel to the south bank of the little Millstone River.  The road is naturally called River Road.  That set me to thinking about all the topographic names one encounters that reflect their watery origins.  Growing up in Arkansas, the nearest “big city” was Springfield, now the third largest city in Missouri.  I’ll wager there’s at least one Springfield in every state of the Union.  At least two of them (MA and IL) played major roles in our national history.

 

The obvious need of human beings to drink water and to irrigate edible crops of course explains the ubiquity of these watery names, but there are interesting nuances in, for example, the idea of sacred wells and medicinal springs.  There is justice in the linkage of water with origins to be found in the word source.  The word spa is of uncertain etymology, but took on a generally medical aura in the nineteenth century.  Some watering holes have been of high social prestige.  You could soak up some class while you were in the drink.  The German sister of English bath is bad, as in the various European Badens, including conspicuously Baden Baden.  I’ve never seen that place, but I have visited it a dozen times in novels.  Anyway, a bad is a good thing.  The name "Karlovy Vary" comes from Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, who founded the city in the 14th century.  I don’t know quite how the Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico got named, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Carlsbad was the principal aqueous resort in central Europe.  That place was named in honor of a fourteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor.  Strange continuities with Middle Ages show up with a surprising frequency in America, though we seldom notice them.

 

Now and then I find myself pursuing a topic that reminds me just how young our country is.  I live in Mercer County, N.J.; Joan is in rehab in contiguous Somerset County.  Mercer County is named after one of our local heroes, General Hugh Mercer, a Scottish physician killed at the Battle of Princeton in 1777.  Somerset County is named after a beautiful county in England’s south-west.  In England there would be a thick, minutely detailed county history I could turn to.  Shortly before Queen Victoria’s death (1901) scholars launched a gigantic project, still underway (commonly known as the Victoria County Histories) that goes into great detail concerning every mud puddle in the land.  The volumes vary somewhat in quality, but they all are nearly fantastic in their ambition and detail. Ordinarily in one of its volumes you get to Magna Carta only in the third volume, or on about page 1308.  American local history is usually the work of dedicated amateurs or partisan family members and varies enormously in completeness and detail.  In America we still need another two or three centuries for local historians to find their feet.  I can but hope to God they get them.

 

As to the watery content of our literature, the cataracts are too overwhelming even to contemplate.  I do not have primarily in mind “sea stories,” whether that sea be wine-red, ashen, or slatey gray.  I have in mind potable drink.  There is the paradox of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink”.  There is the yet starker realism of Kipling in “Gunga Din,” a poem about the native “water boy” serving a British imperial army regiment in battle:

 

You may talk o’ gin and beer   

When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,   

An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;

But when it comes to slaughter   

You will do your work on water,

An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.   

 

In our own literary moment, in which some writers think no paragraph is complete unless it features the f-word as at least three different parts of speech, it may be difficult to appreciate how artfully transgressive that bloomin’  was! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Kuhn

Professor Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)

 

Our household, meaning mainly myself, is in a state of transition.  That word, transition, is an improvement over what I first wrote: disarray.  This is the week that our son Luke’s family has had to return to Montreal.  Melanie, John Henry, and Hazel were able to have some days in Greenville with the South Carolina grandparents, but they have had to hurry home to get the kids prepared for the new school year.  But my stalwart friend and aide Chrstie Kadelu is still here.  I now have to arrange some commercial ferrying operation to take me to and from Joan’s rehabilitation hospital on a regular schedule.  She is holding her own there, and many friends are stepping forward to help me.

 

In terms of the weekly essay it is perhaps time frankly to admit that at eighty-nine one has definitely entered the Age of Reminiscence, probably quite soon to be followed by the Age of Oblivion.  One of our sons suggested that anecdotes concerning Colleagues Past might offer material, and I think I might give that a try.  One of the greatest pleasures of a long career has been the opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of famous colleagues.

 

There are literally dozens of these.  Picking one almost at random among so many I remember with a special admiration I might begin with Thomas Kuhn, a philosophical historian of science or a scientifically trained philosopher—hard to characterize.  He was a bit of an academic gypsy, and he spent only about fifteen years here between appointments at Berkeley and MIT.  But they were heady years.  And during that time he chaired a committee I served on.  It was informally and very transgressively denominated among us as the “War Crimes Committee”.  Was there, as some alleged, a danger of allowing government money to divert scholars, however subtly, from pure research to, well, less pure research.  How could something as transgressive-sounding as an Institute for Defense Analysis (the dreaded IDA) be allowed to have a presence on our campus?  Our mandate was not to reach conclusions but “ask smart questions”.  Maybe we did, but they weren’t all that smart, and we didn’t come close to answering them.  We did learn quite a lot about our fellow committee members, though.

 

Prof. Kuhn had been chosen by the President for this particular task partly because of the extraordinary way in which Kuhn’s work appealed to both natural scientists and humanists.  He was the author of a still famous book that demonstrated the breadth of his prowess.  Some books are of such scholarly influence and importance that they—or their publishers—practically demand sequels or extensions.  So it was with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which Kuhn had published in 1962.  I think I understand the gist of his famous book, but I don’t quiz me on it.  I get the ideas of scholarly paradigms and paradigm shifts, both of which have at least fairly clear parallels for humanistic subjects as well.  In any event there appeared posthumously from the University of Chicago Press in 2002 a somewhat miscellaneous collection gathered together by admirers at the University of Chicago and entitled The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview.  So we have a famous scholar who has now become the subject of other scholars.  This is a not unfamiliar pattern in the history of scholarship.

 

 

Many memories crowd my mind, including one that combines in typical academic fashion the ridiculous and the subline.  In the heady days of my friendship with Kuhn, the faculty clamored much about their independence and the semi-sacrality of their deliberations, which were not to be profaned by the presence of outsiders of any stripe.  That is, faculty meetings were “closed”.  The idea that any “outsider” might wish to crash a meeting of the Princeton faculty should seem bizarre to you, but rare occasions did arise.  In May of 1970, in response to the Ohio National Guard rampage at Kent State University, undergraduate journalists from the Daily Princetonian petitioned for admission to the emergency faculty meeting at which the Kent State slaughter seemed certain to be addressed.  For this meeting there was a huge turnout.  There was actually some ambiguity surrounding much of the campus “unrest” of the period.  But that unarmed students walking across campus should not be gunned down by inexperienced and undertrained members of a state’s National Guard did seem a no-brainer to most Americans who were not the governor of Ohio.  That American college professors should protest the slaughter of American undergraduates also did not seem a dangerous political aberration.  College faculties, whose skills in formulating and passing ceremonial motions, were busy passing them all over the country.

But here, with the world burning around us and half the campuses in America in tumult, the assembled Princeton faculty began its conclave with approximately an hour’s  Talmudic debate about the barely thinkable suggestion that in these extraordinary circumstances a representative student journalist might be allowed in to observe our discussions.  What seemed an inessential and peripheral question to me had for some others all the force of the laws of the Persians and the Medes.  Very seldom had I seen even among college professors such an eloquent engagement with the irrelevant at the expense of the essential, or such an elevation of surface at the expense of substance.  After about a full hour of this, Prof. Kuhn was recognized.  He began with a shock.  He was an outspoken liberal.  Yet he opposed observer rights for a few undergraduate student visitors, a novel possibility which seemed a popular idea to many younger faculty.  Perhaps the suggested innovation lacked the gravitas of an actual paradigm shift? “Because,” Kuhn said, “if the next hour of this meeting is as stupid as the last hour, we surely do not want any observers.”

I never knew Tom Kuhn well.  We were simply friendly colleagues whose paths crossed for a short if dramatic moment in American academic history.   I lost touch with him when he moved on from Princeton.  He died in 1996.  But if in general one aspect of an academic career is its steadiness and comforting predictability—a never-failing succession of student generations both always the same and never quite the same—it has its many moments of high spiritual satisfaction born of the nobility of its goals, and at times the fatuity of their means of expression. And amidst all the Arnoldian high seriousness there are a few good laughs along the way.

 

    

Literary Tidal Wave

 All scholars like to believe, or at least plausibly to imagine, that the course of professional life they have chosen is one of social utility and consequence.  But in most instances this goal is supplementary to others more personal and more easily measurable.  For it is obvious that to one so inclined a scholar’s life is replete with the delights of variety and uncommon satisfactions unknowable to so many of the world’s other toilers.  The scholarly life offers unusual opportunities both for individual spiritual growth and for participation in a large social enterprise in which one is interacting with many remarkably intelligent, learned, and (if one is lucky) congenial colleagues.

 

But now and again one encounters among the learned some few whose love of learning inspires them, usually unintentionally,  to what amounts to public heroism. And they, in their turn, inspire others.  I have this week been reading, in a typically beautiful Library of America volume, some of the earlier writings on one of one of those I consider a true American culture hero, Rachel Carson (1907-1964).  Rachel Carson, who looked pretty much like many middle-class midwestern American maiden ladies of the middle of the last century, was a marine biologist whose work inspired a deep sense of environmental responsibility that continues, against sometimes powerful commercial habit, to make our common lives as planetary dwellers just a bit more thoughtful and humane.  She could neither have undertaken her project by intention nor stumbled into it by chance without a deep, precise, and ever expanding scientific scholarship.  But even less could she have done so without the gift of her extraordinary powers as a writer.  She has to be one of the greatest in the great tradition of American “nature writing,” a tradition that began earlier than Audibon or Thoreau. Her name deserves to be honored as among the few greatest in that category.

 

Rachel Carson came into something like public prominence in 1963 with the publication of Silent Spring.  Lots of books make waves.  This one made a tidal wave.  It was the book version of a series of essays that had already appeared in the New Yorker magazine.  People are still likely to characterize it as “the anti-DDT book”, but that is a near travesty of underestimation.  It certainly true that it stimulated some powerful commercial forces to do all they could to discredit her.  If your company’s motto is “Better things for better living through chemistry” you may be dismayed to have it pointed out that there might also be worse things for worse living through chemistry.  It might have seemed a convenient fortuity to the Montsanto Corporation that Rachel Carson died the very next year.  One of its better-selling products was a rather indiscriminate herbicide called “Round Up”.  But like the spirit of old John Brown, Rachel Carson’s kept marching on, and marches yet.  It continues to frustrate the ambitions of some would-be purveyors  of convenient and highly profitable agricultural poisons.  The “Environmental Movement” is among the most consequential, large, and continuing spiritual impulses of our own lifetimes.  Like most “movements” it is of ambiguous potential.  Perhaps the spotted owl has unreasonably harmed the economic health of rural Oregon.  And certainly the “environmental review” might be the quarterly publication of a National Association of Nimbies.  Very little good public policy is so good that it can overcome its distortion or manipulation by what are euphemistically called the “special interests.”

 

The works I have been reading ante-date the Silent Spring controversy—to the degree that we can actually submit to the word “controversy”.  Any polemicism they exhibit is almost accidental.  They mainly concern the biosphere of which we human being know the least, that of the vastness of the world’s waters, what the Bible calls sometimes simply “the deep”.  Everything I have read in her is beautiful, and no small part of it needs a grander adjective, sublime perhaps. I certainly want to us that adjective of The Sea Around Us (1951), the book that perhaps first won for her popular fame. The preface to the revised edition begins with a sentence that perhaps states the premise her life’s scholarly work.  The sea has always challenged the minds and imagination of men and even today it remains the last great frontier of Earth.  For we (meaning the species of human beings, homo sapiens), we are seldom entirely absent from her arguments, and never from their implications.  The sea—with its awesome powers, its unique beauties, its terrible dangers, its physical and imaginative majesty—is the background of the ancient imaginative epic.  In our great literature the sea has been the province of adventure and the arena for the exercise and testing of our physical powers and preposterous audacities.  Several famous scholars have argued in varied and ingenious fashion of the importance of one little sea in particular, the Mediterranean, in the formation of “the West”.  I refer to such much-discussed works as Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972).  Carson is a natural scientist, not an historical analyst, but she has a special interest in the ever-changing boundaries of the meeting points of terra firma and the Great Deep.   For her the rapid increment in human understanding in the various fields of oceanography was one of the great enterprises of modern science, or from an alternative point of view one of the paradoxical upsides of human bestiality.  “The awakening of active interest in the exploration of the sea came during the Second World War, when it became clear that our knowledge of the ocean was dangerously inadequate.”     

                     

                                                     tidal line kaleidoscope

When Sherlock Met Irene

  

Suddenly, things are moving rather fast in this household.  The change in pace and tenor is easily enough explained.  Melanie and our two Canadian grandchildren, John Henry and Hazel, arrived in their big Dodge van from Montreal.  And Luke, of course, is already here.  That whole family is fresh off a fairly extensive trip in Sri Lanka and Kerala state in southern India, the kids still full of excitement at what they had been seeing and doing.  Both of them have grown considerably since we last saw them in Canada, which was at Christmas.  We have already been able to get up to the Stonebridge Medical Center with them a couple of times, where Joan is making very slow but still perceptible progress; and the extra vehicle, plus the perhaps even more important extra drivers will make my life more efficient while they are all here.  And no grandfather has greater joys than his grandchildren.

 

Connected to all this in ways in ways that are technically explicable though too complex actually to explain without making the explanation the subject of this essay, is the topic I am in fact going to pursue briefly.  Amazingly, perhaps, I do have a subject in mind.  A whim encouraged me, in my escapist reading, to pick up a copy of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and the literary achievements of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suddenly seemed relevant.  Don’t ask.  Please just take my word for it.  It seemed a plausibly logical turn at the time.  Conan Doyle, of course, was the literary inventor of Sherlock Holmes, who by any reckoning has to be one of the most widely known invented literary characters in world literature.  Just recently, seated beside my slumbering spouse, I had the occasion to reread, slowly and pensively, one of the longer of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, A Scandal in Bohemia (1891).  I think this was one of the very first of the stories featuring the legendary detective.  It is gripping in its highly fantastic plot and very probing in its psychological and sociological motivations.  But I find it particularly impressive in its unexpected dimension of social criticism.  I won’t say it is founded on the principle of social equality, but it certainly finds a target in the social rigidities of Victorian middle-class life.  And it does all this while being a mysterious page-turner.   It helped to create the vogue for “detective literature”, and it invented what I will call the iconography of detection: calabash pipe, deerstalker hat, all-purpose magnifying glass, snappy, barbed dialogue, and so on.  The novella is of course misnamed.  It is not about a scandal in Bohemia, but about how one was avoided there.  Nor is its fantastic plot much more fantastic than the actual chain of historical events that would lead to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.  And there are reasons other than its historical premonitions to admire the plot.  Its heroine, who outwits Sherlock Holmes and everybody else, is a brilliant American woman, indeed a New Jersey girl, Irene Adler.  I’d like to think she is from Mercer or Hunterdon counties.  She has "the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men."  Sort of like Saint Augustine’s mother.  There is no reason such a woman might not have achieved fame in London as actress or singer.

 

Conan Doyle
 

Here, briefly, is the plot.  Holmes’s friend and roommate, Dr. Watson fears that Holmes, out of boredom, is set to go on one of his cocaine benders.  Actually, Holmes is animated by the challenge of a potential case. He is expecting the arrival of a visitor, who turns out to be the youthful hereditary king of Bohemia.  His Majesty soon arrives at the famous Baker Street flat in mufti with a delicate (and ignoble) mission.  He is set to marry some unidentified noblewoman of the highest degree back home.  The marriage is properly motivated by sound dynastic reasons.  He fears that this arrangement could be ruined, with disastrous implications, were his previous friendship with the American beauty Irene Adler to come to light.  And that might possibly happen because of the existence, somewhere, of a photograph in which the Bohemian king and the beautiful American expatriate make a joint appearance.  He is in short not merely a royal pain but a royal cad, and he wants Holmes to fix all this.  However, Ms. Adler, as brilliant as she is beautiful, outsmarts them all, marries a Mr. Right of her own, and blows town, leaving even the formidable detective in the dust.  Vague historical parallels of the “high society actress”—such as Lola Montez or Sarah Bernhardt—offer plausibility to her fictional presentation.

 

            We shall never know where Irene Adler went, but this single literary appearance alone is enough to have made of her something of a feminist heroine.  Allusions to her in other stories show that she stuck in her inventor's mind.  Conan Doyle has seldom been credited with progressive social thought, and one can doubt that he himself would recognize or claim such a strain in his own work.  Yet a sympathetic reader of the Sherlock Holmes stories may find numerous hints of exactly that throughout the body of the work.  I seem to find some social criticism vaguely adumbrated also in his neglected novel The White Company.  That book, set in the Hundred Years War, though hardly too scrupulous in historical details, shows evidence of serious historical research and makes some attempt to imagine the Middle Ages in a rather different way from that favored by so many romantic Victorian medievalists.  For years I was wont to underestimate Conan Doyle, largely I think because of his flirtations with the cookiness of Spiritualism.  But every historical age has its aberrant obsessions, and our own no less than others.  If we can overcome our temptation to judge the writers of a past century by the dogmatic certainties of current cultural whim—a very big if, of course—we might be able to see Conan Doyle as I believe we are able to see Rudyard Kipling—as a kind of genius in, and of, his long historical moment.  So this royal dilemma is basically another case of hot pants in high places, one of my special fields of interest.  (I wrote a whole book about Chaucer’s Troilus.)  But the ingenious American lady outsmarts them all, marries a Mr. Right of her own, and blows town, leaving even the formidable detective in the dust.  By a wonderful contrivance—and readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories have to forgive many such—Holmes himself (heavily disguised as a proletarian rough) manages to get himself dragooned to be the necessary civil witness at her wedding!  The art of disguise is frequently implausibly employed by the Grandfather of the Private Eye. But a reader gets used to this sort of thing, and actually to lapping it up, in Conan Doyle’s stories.

 

 

Medical report on Joan:​  Improvement, agonizingly slow but still measurable.  Much gratitude from us all for many kind and prayerful thoughts.

 

 

 

The Days of Our Lives

          

                                                      Pages from an old diary

          Our words diary and day book (sometimes daybook or day-book) are cognates, though the latter is disappearing from common use.  Everybody knows what a diary is.  A diary is the written record of the happenings of a day in the life of the person who writes it down.  A diary is generally considered to be a highly personal and private document, the exclusive property of the person who writes it.  In fact to snoop in someone else’s diary is transgressive, the act of a cad.  The day book is a different sort of document.  It is in general a sort of commercial or business form of a diary, usually a record of the daily running financial dealings, including both income and expenditure, of a commercial operation of some sort.  There is no expectation of personal sentiment or reflection in a merchant’s ledger.  It aims to record stone-cold facts.  That is, it is meant to be an objective record of objective factual data deployed on a day-to-day basis.  While not usually an absolutely personal document, as a “business record” its access is controlled by the proprietors of the business involved.  

The foregoing verbiage began as a prologue to a brief history of the old practice of the diurnal recording of time—that is, recording it by days with special associations: All Hallows, Saint Swithin’s Day, Lammas Tide, etc.  One of the most famous battles of British history—certainly of British historical lore--was that fought at Agincourt in northwestern France on October 25, 1415.  It is memorialized, among other places, in an immortal speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V.  Historians naturally enough call it the Battle of Agincourt, the site of the battlefield..  But Shakespeare does not identify the geographical place-name or secular calendrical date.  For him it was fought on Saint Crispin’s Day.  Crispin is a saint so obscure that nobody has even heard of him except by reading Shakespeare, but the Bard’s first readers still knew what his feast day had been. 

One of my own long favored books for random dipping into and meandering about in  is a huge large-format two-volume nineteenth-century continuation of the medieval tradition: Chambers’s Book of Days.  The author/editor of this remarkable anthology was Robert Chambers, one of a dynamic pair of Scottish literati brothers active (and one might even say hyper-active) around the middle of the nineteenth century.  His bibliography is enormous, and it includes one volume (Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation) that is taken by some to anticipate important features of Darwin’s Origin of Species.  The book’s somewhat fuller title is The Book of Days: a Miscellany of Popular Antiquity in connection with the Calendar.  Casting about for ideas as blog day approached, I opened this book on August 3^rd to see what Mr. Chambers had to say about that particular day.  For an amateur letter-press printer (which I used to be and still technically am) there was a kind of cornucopia.  It turns out that that date saw both the birth (1509) and the martyr’s death (1546) of Etienne Dolet, printer and condemned heretic.  A very poor birthday present for one of our important free-thinking printers.  But it was likewise the birthday of Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, also know as Charles Mahon, FRS (1753 –1816), the inventor of the printing press that bears his name.  Dolet’s story is a story about the victory of obscurantism and bigotry, Stanhope’s a monument to useful invention and progress.  So I’ll go with Stanhope.  “It is rather a remarkable circumstance in connection with the typographical art,” writes Chambers, “that from the period of its first introduction up to the latter half of the eighteenth century, no alteration took place in the form or mode of working the press.”  That is both true and somewhat puzzling.  For while Stanhope continued Gutenberg’s basic principle of pressing a sheet of paper against a stationary type-block under deflected levered lateral pressure, he replaced the wooden parts of the printing machine (press) with heavy iron—also now used for the press frame—to achieve revolutionary results.  We today still speak of the presses “rolling”.  But for the entire early history of printing they were instead “squeezing”.  I find all the instruments and accoutrements of the early printing craft to be things of beauty, especially the nearly supernaturally accurate planes of the press beds, but I must say that the Stanhope press was a particular masterpiece of industrial design.  And once invented, the Stanhope press was continuously improved over decades.  Soon enough it would be realized that through fine engineering it was possible to automate both the inking of the type faces and their striking of rapidly inserted paper sheets against a fixed platen.  Since the machine was/is practically indestructible, there are many surviving Stanhope presses, in all their subtly different iterations.  Johannes Gutenberg will possess forever his well deserved titles of originator; but the massive increase in the productivity of printing machines, a phenomenon with obvious cultural significance, especially for popular culture, owes a great deal to the aristocratic English tinkerer, Lord Stanhope.                                     

     A beautiful Stanhope press

But I must make at least a feint of an attempt to get back to the theme of the day as a unit of measurement.  In the old lore of the “days” there is a mixture of the fabulous and the scientific, as in our distinction between astrology and astronomy, both of which claim to be study of the stars.  As a mode of seeking truth astrology seems superior at least to another ancient mode of sooth-saying, namely haruspication.  In that art the meaning of all things was thought be most fruitfully searched out in the entrails of slaughtered fowl.  The old ideas concerning auspicious and inauspicious days were usually related to astrological forms and movements.  There were lucky and unlucky days, often related to lucky and unlucky astral configurations.  Christianity sanctified certain days.  A holiday is manifestly a holy day.  Many holy days were calendrically fixed.  But the holiest of all, the Feast of the Resurrection (Easter) is variable, determined by astronomical circumstance nearly as mysterious as the event it memorializes.  Technological progress and linguistic change are not always precisely in synch.  A journey is no longer the distance a man can walk in a day.  And turgid academic journals do not make their appearance daily, thank the Lord.  We do still, however, speak wistfully of the days of our lives.  I have already had more than 30,000 of those!

 

Desert of the Goths

Downtown Eddington, N.M.

Our splendid son-in-law Zvi Ben-Dor came down from New York to check up on me, to visit Joan in the rehabilitation center, and, no doubt, to report on his findings to his wife, our daughter, who is now in Paris, having flown there after a couple of days in Athens.  I thought she was in Los Angeles, but no matter.  Zvi is an erudite and eminent historian at NYU.  One part of his cultural profile is particularly attractive to me. He is a real movie lover—not just a lover of the cinema, but a lover of seeing new releases, and in general knowing what is going on cinema-wise.  So he took me to the movies on Sunday night, at a gargantuan multiplex place on Route One.

 

The movie, the plot of which I grasped only intermittently and with no final certainty, was at least a third too long; and the whole was a mélange of comedy of (rustic) manners and cowboy Grand Guignol.  Its title is Eddington.  The film starts out quite slowly and ends—or at least approaches its end--in the godmother of all shootouts (Two Shooters Division).  You cannot fault the film for lack of ambition.  I think it is trying to crystallize the several crazinesses of the 2020 Covid pandemic, many of which are monsters of the mind as opposed to definite medical pathologies.  Eddington is a small place where no cases of Covid have ever appeared but where the imprecise threat of an ever-impending danger has poisoned most minds.

 

The imaginary village of Eddington, N.M., seems to have a population of about five hundred, around a thousand of whom are woke ‘teen-agers.  This fact caused me some confusion at first, but you have to go with the flow.  The movie’s plot almost demands a vox populi or Greek chorus, and the ‘teen-agers seem to serve the purpose.  In my limited experience it is very difficult to capture in art a convincing picture of protesting crowds, because crowds of fake protestors tend to protest too much. I recently rewatched Doctor Zhivago, in my opinion a nearly perfect cinematic work, and even its protest march seemed formulaic and a bit off.  I am a quasi-expert on student demonstrations, and in no real demonstration I have ever seen has absolutely every potential demonstrator been shaking a sign, hopping up and down in rage, frothing at the mouth, and so on.  Quite a few are more subdued, and some even rather tentative, sort of waiting to see how things go.  They  want to be able to say they were there but are more tentative about actually being there in the moment.  But I suppose that if you have been hired as an extra, you may feel that earning your pay requires more than just showing up.  What it requires is non-stop shouting and menacing body gestures.

 

 

I found a special interest in the film’s setting.  My Dad grew up in Tucumcari, in eastern New Mexico, in the 1920s.  He claimed that the New Mexico state motto—Land of Enchantment—was the most accurate in the forty-eight states.  But of course middle age is ever likely to romanticize the geography of its youth.  That I know well myself. But there is something about the desert that is always awesome, and the thought that men and women have lived there for centuries, whether in honeycombed cliff-faces or small, flat villages with nothing but a telegraph pole between them and the unrelenting sun or the Arctic winds is perplexing.

 

The episode of the cinema threatened to end in tragi-comedy.  The cinema house is in a shopping mall on Route 1, and coming out of it we turned the wrong direction into the vast parking lot flanking it in both directions.  Though approaching ten p.m., the lot was crammed with cars.  We searched fruitlessly, incipient panic stirring at least in my throat, for about fifteen minutes before realizing that we must be looking in the wrong place.  A nice woman accompanied by three ‘teen-aged offspring came to our rescue.  She thought there was something odd about a geezer with a cane stumbling around a dark parking lot.  I was in so flustered a state I could scarce remember the make of car we were searching for, but it came to me eventually.   She pointed out the faint possibility that we had been looking on the wrong side of the building.  So we had!  Since then, thinking over the situation, I have been able to find some semi-plausible correspondences between our situation and that of the sadsack rural sheriff played by Joaquin Phoenix.  That is more likely to be the result of my fancy than my acuteness of perception.

 

Zvi promises to do a return trip at the end of the coming week.  That is a real bonus, especially as he says that the cinema offerings will be better here at that time.  Or maybe he said even better.   Zvi is of Iraqi ancestry and of formerly Israeli nationality.  Perhaps his Cinemania flows from one of those sources.

                                               

 

I never intended to use this blog as a medium for regular reports on Joan’s health progress, but it actually has proved remarkably effective for that purpose.  I would say: so far, slow, perhaps even nearly imperceptible improvement.  Readers can demonstrate their charity by investing their own silent faith or hope.  Then we have the full Pauline trifecta!