The Lays of the Land

Laying out the Presidential Plan, wherein lies a recycled blog

“Well, our bill has been laying on the table for months. If the other side has ideas, the American people deserve to hear them.” In such feisty terms did a leading Democratic politician describe the state of play of the alleged “health care debate”. I voted for President Obama. As an English professor my hopes for the new administration were more eccentric, but also more realistic, than those of many of my fellow electors. I was not taken in for a moment by the promise of change I could believe in; what I did hope for was presidential grammar that I could tolerate.

There has been, happily, marked improvement. How could there not have been? One might wish that at some point during his elite education the president had learned that the first-person pronoun “I” (among his favorite words, after all) is a nominative form, and that he really ought not to use it as the object of transitive verbs or in such prepositional phrases as “for Michelle and I”. But this is a venial sin, and compared with his predecessor, who appears to have assigned the theory of the complete sentence to the same category of dubious hypothesis as that in which global warming might be found, Mr. Obama is a dignified speaker.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for his “spokespersons,” as they are now called. Mr. Gibbs is particularly inarticulate; but I entertain the dark suspicion that there is not a person in the White House who can distinguish between the verbs lay and lie. How well I remember the witticism of Mrs. White, my ninth-grade English teacher. The bill is laying on the table, indeed! Whenever one of us uttered a Gibbsism she shot back: “Hens lay. Politicians lie.

It’s a lost cause, but now and again I still fight back. Some time ago, under doctor’s orders, I underwent a “stress test” at an “imaging center”. The purpose of the test, apparently, is to gauge the functioning of the coronary arteries at a time when the exercised heart is beating rapidly. That part of the test, involving a simulated trot up a 14-degree slope on a treadmill, presented little difficulty. The real “stress” was elsewhere. First of all a nurse sticks a horse-needle into the crook of your arm. I am used to nurses who have difficulty finding the right vein. This one was challenged to find the right arm; but he eventually achieved the desired conduit for injecting what the doctor himself, who now arrived on the scene preemptively annoyed, called “the radioactive stuff”.

“This may feel a little cold in your arm, but it has no side-effects and no after-effects. Lay down on the table,” (pointing) “legs that way”. Perhaps if Dr. Goodscalpel had said the magic word “Please” my professorial resistance would not have been engaged; but he didn’t. “Lie,” I said. “Please lie on the table.” He took on an expression in which grumpiness contested the field with dull incomprehension. “Lay is a transitive verb,” I explained. “You pick something up, and you lay it down. Chickens lay eggs. ‘Lay down your arms, and come out with your hands up.’ That sort of thing. Lie is intransitive. ‘Amaryllis lies upon her fragrant bed of myrtle.’” That is a pretty far-out line under the best of circumstances, but if the only Myrtle known to you is your wife’s cousin it apparently becomes kinky as well. But all he said was “Lie, lay—what’s the difference?”

I had of course, just explained the difference; and society should be concerned that a man who finds it inconsequential is licensed to pump me full of “radioactive stuff,” let alone reorganize all of American health care. Distinctions in the lay/lie word families are not insignificant, as I then tried to demonstrate by pulling out my one famous author story.

W. H. Auden, circa 1959

One evening in 1959 the great poet W. H. Auden was in my rooms at Oxford. He was slightly drunk, and indeed spilled most of a bottle of port over four volumes of my Cambridge History of English Literature. (Purple stains of such provenance somewhat removed the opprobrium of the words “Cheap Edition” that were actually gold-stamped on the books’ backs.) Mr. Auden also autographed my own cheap Penguin edition of his collected poems and made a few corrections in the printed text, leaving me with a “rarity” that only increases in value as his fame grows. These very poems, he told me, had very recently been translated into French. “How do you like the translation?” I asked. “For the most part it is exshellent,” he slurred. “I have found only one serious mistake…” He paused for effect. I effected. “Yesh…I had used the perfectly fine old American expression a good lay…”

“And…” I asked.

“And it is rendered as un grand poème!”

“What’s your point?” asked Goodscalpel.

A Marked Man

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Ash Wednesday’

I suppose there are many things to say in favor of Greenwich Village, but just at the moment I have one in particular, and it is this. A conservatively dressed, elderly white man walking down Bleeker Street at nine o’clock in the morning with a large, sooty cruciform smudge on his forehead attracts no attention. None at all. Zero. In fact the facial decoration fits in surprising well, considering that it lacks any hint or gleam of metal.

Still, it is a little disconcerting to have to walk for ten or fifteen blocks in that condition, houseled, aneled, but unabluted, so to speak; and I was relieved to get to a washbasin. The Ash Wednesday liturgy is perhaps no more paradoxical than most religious rites, but it does have a fiercer irony. First a priest reads out a passage of the gospel in which Jesus says some hard things about people who make an ostentatious display of their religiosity, as, for example, by praying loudly on street corners or by hiring a guy to walk in front of them blowing a trumpet as they hand out quarters to homeless street people.

I pause to note that this part is actually rather comforting, just as I have always found comfort in the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt make no graven image.” Because, by God, I never have made a single graven image, not one! Nor have I ever hired a guy with a trumpet. But the next thing Jesus says is really harsh. “When you fast, don’t be like the hypocrites. They disfigure their faces so that people will know that they are fasting.” Having gotten that one out of the way the priest then dips a thumb into a pot of powdered black ash and then, with a kind of disfigure-eight motion, smears it all over your forehead while offering the following cheerful advice: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” You then get to go out and wander around among your fellow citizens as a marked man.

It is probably my tendency to hypertextuality, an undue sensitivity to the authority of the written word, that has caused me, ever since I was a child, to head for the soap and water as soon as possible. Many of my co-religionists seem to have no difficulty reconciling the ashen face with the gospel text. In fact, by the time I got on the train to leave New York this morning there were smudgy folks all over the streets of Manhattan, and quite a few in Penn Station. Some people, indeed, apparently feel no self-consciousness about it at all.

This photograph, I know, looks like one of those contests dreamed up by the New Yorker in which you are asked to supply an appropriate caption for a blank cartoon. Mine would be: “I was born in Scranton. Everybody in the family was a coal miner.” It is actually the vice-president of the United States hard at work, as always, on behalf of ordinary working Americans.

The reminder of one’s dusty nature is doubtless salubrious, but if you are of an age at which you are pretty sure that the large mound vaguely to be discerned on the horizon is the dust heap, it can be a bit of a downer. As a society we have pretty much decided that Mardi Gras is great so long as it doesn’t have to be followed by a Mercredi des Cendres; and we have applied that notion, disastrously, to our economic life. I had in fact come to New York for a fortuitous Mardi Gras meal of sorts. I am a member of a peculiar and old-fashioned club, the only purpose of which is to hold monthly dinner meetings at which the members, dressed in dinner jackets or elegant gowns, sit around a circular table having elevated conversation. We happen to meet on the third Tuesday of the month. With the exception of myself and one or two others who seem to have been elected by typographical error, it’s a very distinguished and erudite group, and last night’s conversation was particularly lively and enlightening. Young Shakespeare, too, as he knelt in the Stratford parish church, would have been told “dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” His greatest tragedies demonstrate how well he appreciated that sentence. But he knew also another truth, to which he had his Sir Toby Belch give amusing voice: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

Bring back the bad old days

Disparate circumstances account for this week’s post. The first is that President Obama, in his recent “State of the Union” address briefly touched in interesting ways upon some questions relating to higher education—the “field” in which I made my career. The second is that I awoke to a snowbound world. Very little is moving yet. The University is actually closed, except for “critical activities”, a category that does not include any classroom teaching, let alone my usual matutinal swim. So I am home, where I shall no doubt remain, especially as the blizzard is supposed to continue through much of the day.

President Obama announced his plans to make higher education more accessible to more young people. Like other proposals in the speech this one stimulated a certain amount of secondary commentary. One strand of commentary—which I have now seen in several versions—is that “higher education should be a right, not a privilege.” There is a parallel here with the claim that has emerged during the current “health care debate”: that for Americans health care should be a right and not a privilege. The concept of higher education as an American birthright, is a fascinating one, and I shall hope to address it within the next month or so. In my opinion, however, there is an obvious prior question.

American higher education is one of the wonders of the modern world. In an age when American manufactured goods are rapidly disappearing from competitive world markets, our colleges and universities remain the envy of the nations. There is probably not a graduate engineering program in this country that could stay in business without its large cohort of foreign engineering students, especially from places like China and India, the very places that are our most ferocious industrial competitors. It takes only half a minute’s reflection to see that there is as much bad news as good news in those enrollment statistics; so for the moment concentrate on the good.

But first things first. There are at present no laws mandating higher education in America, whereas laws in every state establish a requirement of universal public education for children. And when we turn to primary and secondary public education, it is an entirely different story. The proper context here is the cohort of advanced industrial nations, and within it American public education rates somewhere between the mediocre and the pathetic. It was indeed apparent to me for the last several decades of my teaching career that one of the most pressing problems in American higher education was the quality of American secondary education. Before we start worrying too much about whether every American needs a college education, we might do well to try to guarantee that they get a high-school education.

The principal engine of American success has been education. Obviously our colleges and universities here play a great role, but not in fact the greatest. The greatest role has been played by our system of public schools in creating a large educated population. Both of my parents were high school graduates. They often spoke of themselves, in terms of pride, as high school graduates. All that seems like a vanished age. I cannot actually remember the last time I heard anyone say with pride, “I am a high school graduate”. For the truth of the matter is that the concept of the “high school diploma” is increasingly meaningless. My parents knew some Latin. They had studied history, and especially American history, with some breadth. They remembered some algebra. Above all they knew how to read and write the English language. My father, a manual worker all his life, had beautiful “penmanship”, and I treasure the few pieces of his handwriting that have survived. They had read some Shakespeare plays, and knew why Shakespeare might still be important.

As an English professor at Princeton I had the opportunity actually to teach English and American literature to students who, for the most part, were eager to study it and prepared to do so. That was a luxury at least half the English professors in this country do not have. Most of what is taught in the first two years of “college English” in many institutions, and all of what is taught in some, is elementary work that used to be expected of any sixth grader. Remember that fact the next time your local school board boasts about how many computers they have put in the high school. It is quite possible to graduate from high school in this country without having the slightest idea of what an independent clause might be.

I am not really a military history buff, but I do try to read everything that appears in the wonderful “Library of America,” and thus a few years ago I read the memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman was born in 1820 on the frontier in the Western Reserve. He graduated from West Point in 1840, and immediately took up his varied and adventurous career in the military service of the maturing Republic, the most famous episode of which was destined to be the march “from Atlanta to the sea” in the late autumn of 1864.

The book is beautifully written in forceful, unpretentious, limpid prose. Where did this man of action, who spent so much of his life in the saddle or in rough bivouacs, whose chief literary production for most of his life consisted in bureaucratic reports and military communiqués, develop such a distinguished style? Well, he was in the first place a voracious reader, especially (we are told) a reader of the English Bible, of Shakespeare, of the great classical and eighteenth-century historians (Livy, Gibbon), and of the great contemporary novelists—meaning, at mid-century, Charles Dickens or Herman Melville. Sherman was in fact a college graduate—he graduated sixth out of a class of forty-three at West Point—but he got his essential education in primary and secondary schools in the backwoods of Lancaster, Ohio in the 1830s. What did Sherman study in his rustic academy, described as “the best in the place; indeed as good a school as any in Ohio”? Mathematics, chemistry, physical theory, geography (including navigation and cartography), and accounting, among other things. “We studied all the common branches of knowledge,” writes Sherman, “including Latin, Greek, and French.”

At that time Lancaster, Ohio, was a frontier outpost on the edge of a wilderness still largely occupied by Indians. Sherman was describing the experience of youngsters of the age of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. “At first the school was kept by Mr. Parsons; he was succeeded by Mr. Brown, and he by two brothers, Samuel and Mark How. These were all excellent teachers…” Perhaps our educational system could do with a little less “progress”? I recommend some thoughtful, targeted regression.

Homecoming

There are certain dates that are likely to ring a bell for even the most casual of historians among us. For Americans July 4, 1776, is one of them. Most people could at least successfully guess the association of October 12,1492. Surely you recognize December 7, 1941, still and forever living in its infamy. Expand your horizons just a little; include western Europe. How about the famous “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”—i.e., eleven in the morning of November 11, 1918? As for the Quatorze Juillet—July 14, 1789—it’s child’s play. But what about July 29, 1881?

That is a little harder, perhaps? July 29, 1881 is a date that separates the sheep from the goats, or at least the frogs from the toads. Anyone living in Paris, as I have been doing for the last several months, encounters this date every day, and usually many times a day. For it was the day on which the famous law of July 29^th was adopted by the French legislature. Curiously, neither I nor any of the numerous Frenchmen I have interrogated on this subject has ever actually read the law of July 29^th; but we all know what it must say. It is the world’s most famous piece of anti-billboard legislation. Défense d’afficher. That

is so much more elegant than the awkward and usually ineffectual English version: “Post no bills”. Advertising posters are illegal on the city’s public surfaces. Parisians cannot hawk hamburgers from the walls of City Hall. Nor can Parisians promote diet pills in that manner. Since the only thing they can lawfully advertise is the law of July 29, 1881, they tend to do so on every possible occasion. And I presume the law is not subject to repeal, since it is literally carved in stone in numerous sumptuous public buildings and monuments.

I returned to America on Sunday afternoon, and the Americanness of America, for good and for not so good, immediately overwhelmed me. To the latter (not so good) category I had to assign the roadside pollution along Route 1, where there are hundreds of garish billboards, not a single one of which says “Loi de 29 juillet 1881”. But soon enough I was glad to have escaped that law’s clutches!

The latest evidence of the aging process is a severity of jet-lag I have never before experienced. Though exhausted nearly to the point of collapse, I could sleep only a few hours before awaking, unrested and still disoriented, in the wee hours. I got up and went through the motions of doing some work in my study; but by the time the actual dawn approached, it was obvious to me that it would be impossible for me to carry through with my plan of getting back to my daily early-morning swimming routine. Hence, it was only yesterday, Tuesday, that I managed to get to the gym. There, affixed to the wall at the end of “my” aisle of lockers, was the following violation of the law of July 29^th:

While I have no definitive proof of the perpetrator of this outrage, I have the strongest possible suspicions concerning a certain Dr. T. K. Chu of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. No knee-jerk liberal Miranda Rights for Chu. Gitmo now being off limits, I turned to the next best venue. Following our swim I interrogated him ruthlessly over a decaf double latte at the Small World Coffee Shop. Small World in Princeton, NJ, I am happy to report, is one of the few genuinely “Parisian” coffee shops in America. This means that ordinarily you have to take out a second mortgage to finance a double latte; but I made Chu pay for it.

They say that the second day of jet lag is the worst. That is probably true even if one does not, as one in fact did on this occasion, go into New York to see a three-and-a-half hour production of Simon Boccagnegra at the Metropolitan Opera. I was already disgracefully somnolent by the time of our pre-theater dinner with our dear friends John and Susan. By the time of the second intermission I was approaching the comatose. Joan actually secured a taxi in a snowstorm outside Lincoln Center. That’s the kind of aggressive New York street combat that usually rates two stars and an oak-leaf cluster, and it meant that we were able to get the last possible train to Princeton with at least thirty seconds to spare. I stumble into bed about 2:00 a.m.—that is, precisely twenty-four hours after last arising from it.

Hence I was unable to repeat my swimming triumph of yesterday. I didn’t even awaken until after daylight. I was at first inclined to interpret this as failure. But the enforced leisure, as it so often does, soon led to a more mellow view. I looked out of the living-room window, and I was pretty pleased by what I saw.

My sainted mother, dead these twenty years, used to give me advice, even when unsolicited. Perhaps you have such a mother—or are one. She used to say things like “You may live to regret that!” or “Handsome is, as handsome does!” Her apothegms annoyed me intensely. What annoyed me most of all, of course, was that they were invariably true. One of her favorites was “East, West, home’s best!” Given the particular homes involved, I was too often inclined to dismiss that as a defense of provincialism. But as I look about my study, I understand its full force.

As for swimming, there is always tomorrow. And as for a decent blog, there is always at least the possibility of next Wednesday.

What a Prize!

the winner of the Runciman Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Benveniste Prize

Among the splendid properties owned and administered by the admirable National Trust of Great Britain is the Georgian mansion called Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, famous in literary history as the private residence of Henry James for the last two decades of his life. The National Trust does not simply create museums. It tries, whenever feasible and appropriate, to keep the treasures entrusted to its stewardship as living monuments to the national history. The trust sometimes leases its significant “literary” properties to significant living British writers, one of the conditions of the lease guaranteeing both the privacy of the occupants and some public access to certain “museum” rooms at certain appointed times. Thus it was that in the 1970s the tenant of Lamb House was Rumer Godden (1908-1998), who in her long and prolific career published dozens of books, including some famous ones like Black Narcissus and Greengage Summer and who in her time was among the most famous writers of books for young people.

One of her readers was a little American girl whose grandparents by happenstance lived in Rye. Though still too young for Henry James, she had read and savored several books by Rumer Godden. This girl could hardly believe her ears when one day as they walked about the town during a school holiday her grandfather pointed out a fine old house as the actual residence of her currently favorite author. Her enthusiasm was not fully satisfied by the possibility—held out to her by her grandfather—of surveying Henry James’s walking-stick and his writing desk on any Wednesday afternoon between two and five. She wanted to talk to Rumer Godden. So she undertook a private initiative.

Lamb House, Rye (Sussex)

The next day—nicely scrubbed and (as I recall it) wearing her school uniform—she walked up to the mighty front door of Lamb House and rang its bell. A housemaid opened it. Politely acknowledging her awareness that it was not Wednesday and indeed not between the hours of two and five, but rather ten o’clock on a bright sunny morning, she expressed her desire to engage Rumer Godden in literary conversation. The maid, too, was impeccably polite. She asked the little girl to wait at the door for a moment, then retired into the interior. Within two minutes Rumer Gooden appeared at the door. Brief words, formal but not without a tempered cordiality, were exchanged. The famous writer, then in her sixth decade of life, invited the girl, more than half a century younger, to return in a day or two to take tea with her in her private quarters, or, if the weather were lucky, in the garden in which Henry James had once sat burnishing the golden sentences of The Golden Bowl. Thus did Katherine Elizabeth Fleming make, with a typifying independence, her formal debut in the world of letters.

I recognize that pride is a sin, the worst of them indeed, but I hope there might be an exceptional easement in one genre—parental pride. For the pride that her mother and father took in her on that occasion has only increased over the years. For me the latest opportunity to bask in it came two nights ago. Joan is already back in New Jersey, but I know she was there in spirit, as I was in the too, too, solid flesh, when at a grand assembly at the Sorbonne she was awarded (yet another) prize for her latest book—Greece: A Jewish History.

The sponsoring academy, the Centre Alberto Benveniste, is devoted to Sephardic Studies—that is, to all aspects of the Jewish culture of old Iberia and its diasporic filiations. (Sefarad was the old Hebrew name for Iberia). The once vibrant Jewish culture of Greece, long centered in Thessaloniki, had its beginning in one of history’s great crimes and its end in another. Like many other exile Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world most Greek Jews traced their origins to the ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Reyes Católicos at the end of the fifteenth century. The surviving community was virtually annihilated in the Holocaust.

I have some associations with some ancient educational institutions. My alma mater, Sewanee, was founded before the Civil War—making it venerable by American standards. Jesus College, Oxford, where I did further study, was founded by Elizabeth I. Princeton, where I taught for many years, was founded under the reign of George II. But Robert de Sorbon founded the institution that still bears his name in 1259 in the reign of Saint Louis, a contemporary of Henry III! That is the date one sees written large in a gilded aureole on the ceiling of the Salle Louis Liard, the magnificent lecture hall in nineteenth-century imitation rococo, in which the prize ceremony took place.

The Salle Louis Liard at the Sorbonne

In a room like this a meeting of the Baxter County Zoning Board might be mistaken for the Congress of Vienna. In this instance there was a happy symmetry of architectural and intellectual brilliance. The proceedings began with an erudite but heart-wrenching lecture by Prof. Michèle Escamilla, an eminent hispanist, on the subject of the dealings of the Inquisition with children in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I shall allow no summary of its contents to cloud the largely joyous tone of the evening.

Two Beneviste prizes were awarded, one for fiction, and one for scholarship. The winner in the fiction category was the distinguished writer Éliette Abécassis, author of Sépharade. Her work has been much acclaimed, and one of her earlier novels, Clandestin, was among its year’s draw for the Prix Goncourt. Katy’s prize was of course for a work of historical scholarship. Speaking in beautiful French perhaps slightly modulated with a tinge of Provence, where she first spoke the language as a toddler, she succinctly outlined the salient features of a vanished Greek Jewry, and the chief purpose of her book: the recuperation of a fragile history threatened with oblivion. It was a moment that her husband Zvi and her father, privileged with reserved seats in the front rows of the crowded theater, will long remember.

Zvi, a friend, and Katy (with diva bouquet)

The evening in the Salle Liard ended with a fascinating concert of Judaeo-hispanic music, gathered from authentic folk traditions and performed on more-or-less authentic instruments, by a group called Presensya. A large group of us then retired to a restaurant on the rue Monsieur le Prince—a street in which my wife and I had lodged in 1962 when I was conducting research on my doctoral dissertation! There I had the honor of including among my conversation partners one of the daughters of Alberto Benveniste and, at my immediate right hand, the current rector (i.e., president) of the University of Lisbon. Regular readers of the blog will appreciate the timeliness of this fortuitous meeting. Though his field is more modern literature, he is Portuguese, so you can imagine the subject of our conversation: Luis de Camões.

I have been amazed but of course pleased to see that two of our three wonderful children have taken up the scholarly life in which I myself took such great satisfaction. So here is an unblushing paean to Professor Katherine Fleming! I hope that under the circumstances my pride in my daughter is not unseemly, let alone culpable. My whole scholarly career has been devoted to the study of tradition, and I feel comfortable if a little wistful to take my own place in one. I hope somebody, somewhere, still reads Tennyson’s magnificent “Idylls of the King”. As the old Arthur departs into the mists of history he makes a famous speech. Since he was the father to a whole nation, his sentiments are naturally more elevated than mine, though I certainly echo them in a more modest register.

The old order changeth [says King Arthur], yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

I had early warning of the paternal eclipse at an academic conference at least a decade ago. In my business the material rewards are mainly symbolic; and since one will never become rich, one has to concentrate as best one can on becoming famous or rather “famous”, since academic fame is largely spurious and certainly transitory. Well, I did become borderline “famous”—meaning that at academic conclaves I sometimes enjoyed the public respect of my peers, and a kind of toadying admiration from my juniors. Once at some unmemorable scholarly conference in some unmemorable, homogenized Chicago hotel, I was walking through a lobby crowded with anxious young scholars. Someone among this group recognized me. An instant buzz began, and its treacle entered one ear. “Bzzzzzzzzzz-bzzzzzzzzzzzz-bzzzzzzzzzz-Fleming.” The demon of pride, ever by my side, whispered in my other: “Listen: they are bzzzzzzzzing about you!” Only then did I catch one whole sentence from one of the bzzzzzers. “That,” she said in star-struck tones, “is Katherine Fleming’s father!”

From Port-au-Prince to Lisbon

It is difficult for me to believe that there is an intelligent person alive who has not posed the “God question”—that is, “Does God exist?” One of the conveniences of answering that question in the negative is to avoid a second and harder question: How can the God in whose existence I find myself compelled to believe allow the horrors and evils I see about me on every side? Whether you ponder this on the local level (the homeless mothers, the crack babies, the suicidal schizophrenics, the hopeless alcoholics, you name it) or on the cosmic (the Ukrainian famines, the Auschwitzes, the Rwandas and Darfurs, the killing fields of Cambodia, you name it) God would seem to have a good deal of explaining to do.

Leibniz coined a fancy word to denote the attempt to reconcile a good God with the moral and material evil in the world: theodicy. Most of the examples I adduced allow one small loophole, since they are related to human agency and therefore perhaps to human motive. This could conceivably justify removing the responsibility from divinity to humanity. Stalin was a bad guy. Hitler was a bad guy. Pol Pot was a bad guy. Those guys in Rwanda—they were bad guys. But this evasion, even if partially plausible, cannot apply to natural disasters like floods and earthquakes and tidal waves. There is a specific legal term for such catastrophes, chosen precisely to show their independence of human agency, and therefore human indemnity. They are called “acts of God”. This is a phrase that frequently makes an appearance in the small print of insurance policies, usually to the detriment of the policy holder.

I was overwhelmed by “theodicy anxiety” the moment I first heard about the Haitian earthquake. You may have been, too; but in this instance the circumstances in which I first learned of it were also decisive. I was sitting with my son Luke in a very agreeable bar in Lisbon. It was my first visit to that charming city. I was sipping a delicious latte thing and eating one of those scrumptious miniature custard pies, the name of which I never learned, which are a Portuguese specialty. Across the screen of a television set in the corner flashed half-decipherable images of horror. The half-decipherable voice of a Portuguese announcer spoke in a garble of plural sibilants of the mounting toll of the dead—was it a thousand, or thousands, or a hundred thousand?

If there is such a thing as “intellectual” or “historical” déjà vu, that is what I experienced at the moment of learning the news from Haiti as I sat in Lisbon. For in the mid-morning of November 1, 1755 a terrible earthquake struck Lisbon and numerous other places in Iberia and north Africa. That was a major Roman Catholic feast day—All Saints’ Day, the day for which Hallowe’en (All Hallows’ Eve) is the preparation. It was a so-called day of religious obligation, meaning that the faithful were morally obligated to attend Mass. Hence the huge, heavy baroque churches were, many of them, full to capacity when the quake struck. The loss of life within these temples was stupendous, but hardly more so than in the residential quarters. Fire rapidly spread among the ruins, immolating a large if unknown number of those trapped in the debris. Large numbers desperately sought safety in the open squares at the dock-front, or even in the large number of ships always to be found in the busy docks of this great commercial city. Thousands of them were snuffed out in an instant by the tidal wave that followed the quake.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 may be said to have effected a decisive shift in European intellectual history. Many preachers, then as now, seemed willing to justify God by ascribing to him a fit of choleric vengeance that would have embarrassed a self-respecting devil. Almost all religious commentators ascribed the event to God’s displeasure at sinners, though the identity of the specific sinner varied according to the preacher’s inclinations. Some even managed to turn the disaster to the purpose of sectarian polemic. “It is remarkable,” said one English clergyman, “that some of the Priests of Portugal have (as we are informed) taken the Advantage of the Superstition of the People to insinuate, that this dreadful Calamity was a Judgement of Heaven upon them for the great Lenity that had been exercise towards the Protestants since his present Majesty came to the Throne.”

The ruins of the Opera House by Jacques Philippe Le Bas

Such foolishness could not satisfy the philosophers, who could find in the event nothing to encourage or even allow philosophical optimism. Voltaire famously wrote a poem about the earthquake in which he asked the obvious question. If Lisbon had been destroyed for her wickedness, why were people still dancing in the streets of Paris and gambling in the casinos of London? Voltaire was not an atheist. There were very few atheists in the Enlightenment. But the earthquake seemed to confirm that the watchmaker God, having created the intricate mechanism of the universe, had retired from its daily supervision.

Presume not then the Deity to scan [wrote Pope]
The proper study of mankind is man.

In a famous page of his autobiography Goethe (born in 1749) tells us of the disturbing impact that the news of the Lisbon earthquake had on his childish faith. He was hardly alone.

A painted "Allegory of the Earthquake" by João Glama Stoberle (xviii century)

Religious belief, like the thoughtful rejection of religious belief, is mainly a private matter requiring in a modern, pluralistic world, a good deal of tolerance and civility. Ordinarily I abstain from comment on other people’s religious beliefs. But recent remarks of the “evangelist” Pat Robertson to the effect that the Haitian earthquake is but the latest of many unhappy results of a pact made between the Haitian nation and the Devil are so outrageous, ignorant, and in the most literal sense insane as to require comment. Pat Robertson is a senile blowhard whose self-appointed “ministry” is an embarrassment to every thinking Christian of my acquaintance. His remarks would have doubtless remained in the dark void into which they were uttered had they not been discovered by some incredulous Internet detective and rendered viral. Thus in some mischievous way they have been valorized by a medium that loves its religious freaks no less than freaks of any other genre.

The danger now is that somebody might confuse Pat Robertson’s lunacy with an actual “Christian” response to the Haitian earthquake. That response, imperfect though it may be, is visible not merely in the faith of many Haitians but in the vast fund-raising effort and practical relief efforts undertaken by the churches throughout the world. I may have mentioned a brilliant refrigerator-magnet prayer my daughter found somewhere: “Lord, save me from your followers!” It was designed precisely for the likes of Pat Robertson who, alas, are rather numerous in the United States. Thoughtful religious skeptics can hardly take comfort in this reality. If you have any doubt that Christianity is a divine institution the mere fact that it continues to exist despite the best efforts of some of its prominent “leaders” should dissolve them.

There is a famous half-line in Virgil that succinctly expresses a fundamental truth about our human condition: sunt lacrimæ rerum. There are indeed tear-drops in things. It is not the only truth; for things have their smiles and even their belly-laughs too. Often enough there are tears and smiles. But the devastation in Port-au-Prince, like than in Lisbon more than two hundred and fifty years ago, is an event so tear-stained as to challenge any comfortable metaphysical certainties. And the instant communications of our world hardly allow, at least at this moment, the kind of philosophical leisure accorded to a Voltaire. The only possibly adequate existential response is a thoughtful investment of human empathy and generous material contributions in aid of whatever inadequate means of remediation are available. If you want to see the evidence of divine love in the world, you may have to perform some of it yourself.

My inevitably rather blurry photographs come from the remarkable book of essays put together by Helena Carvalhão and Gonçalo Cordeiro: O Grande Terramoto de Lisboa: Ficar Diferente (Lisbon, 2005).

On the Loose in Lusitania

It is back to travelblog mode, I fear. Luke and I are in Lisbon, both of us for the first time, and we find ourselves happily surrounded by numerous inviting possibilities, all of which seem distinctly more attractive than battling with our hotel’s Wi-Fi arrangements or simply tapping on computer keys when we could instead be sampling tapas in one of the delightful little dives in one of the delightful neighborhoods we have been exploring.

We arrived here on Monday night after a less than satisfactory experience with Air France. We were about two hours late in leaving Paris for no good aeronautical reason, so far as I could tell, but because of unexplained difficulties in securing a transit bus to drive us from the alleged boarding gate to the waiting airplane a kilometer away or so. There were several cheerful Air France staff on hand, but none seemed willing to notice the problem, let alone claim ownership of it. Here was yet another proof, as though we needed one, that our lives are controlled by capricious and mysterious powers working through opaque and uncommunicative bureaucracies—a kind of cosmic Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. All that, however, passed into oblivion, the moment we landed in this charming city: charming, but I must also add, rather wet. It’s been raining pretty steadily for the past two days.

12 January 2010: one solitary sodden scholar on the Praça Luis de Camoes

Luke had been worried that his Brazilian Portuguese would prove inadequate for the Portuguese capital, or expose the rusticity of a country bumpkin. Far from it. In the first place the city is crawling with Brazilians. In the second the attitude of Portugal to its vast American former colony seems entirely different from that of England to hers. Everything positive about Portuguese culture is “Luso-Brazilian”. You have Luso-Brazilian literature, Luso-Brazilian music, Luso-Brazilian food. Try to imagine how well an “Anglo-American” restaurant would do in Paris or Perugia. So Luke has proved a wizard interpreter.

That’s a good thing for me. For although I am hard at work on the classical Portuguese author, Luis de Camões, I wouldn’t get very far if I had to get somebody to change a light bulb or explain to me how the little green tickets for the subways work. The relationship between the phonology and the orthography of Portuguese is so distant and suspicious that “book learning” is but a first hesitant baby-step toward communication. This reminds me of a notable occasion in the past when Portuguese orthography was my friend. Many years ago I began giving my wife a Victorian shell cameo every year or two. This was in the early days of eBay, when it still had some pretentions to being an auction before its collapse in the direction of a bad dollar store. One occasionally found good cameos there. It was about the same time that I was trying to put together a small library of Camoniana—i.e., books by or about Luis de Camões. One day my search for Camões items turned up a stunning mythological cameo, one of several camoes offered by this particular seller. It is a signal advantage for a bidder on such items to be competing against dyslexics rather than aesthetes. I got the piece for a song—or perhaps I should say canto.

Yesterday’s tours of the bookshops turned up only books, but some of them dandies. I got Jorge de Sena’s three collected volumes of Camoniana. There is also a signed copy of Vasco Graça Moura’s Camões e a divina proporção. These are treasures, as I am sure you realize, beyond the dreams of cupidity.

Aside from books, museums, ecclesiastical architecture, and the waterlogged streets, we have been taking in a certain amount of Portuguese alimentation. One notices both its very high quality and, when compared with its Parisian analogues, its very low price. Luke is a vegetarian, but the concept of a lunch without at least a smattering of meat strikes your average Portuguese short-order cook as deeply immoral at the minimum, and probably illegal. As a temporary Parisian who drinks no wine, I can share through fellow feeling the sense of social stigma and opprobrium that greets his every order. You feel guilty of some culinary desecration or kitchen crime. Still, we soldier on.