Here's Hazel

         

           The simple and pleasant purpose of this brief post is to introduce my readers to the future in the most attractive form of Hazel Elizabeth Fleming, my newest granddaughter.  Yesterday we flew to Montreal, where Hazel lives with her mother and father and brother.  The journey seemed to have an allegorical dimension, moving from an almost fetid over-ripeness to a revivifying freshness.  Technically, we are still in spring, but it was one of those hot and saturated mornings that suggest the New Jersey state motto (The Garden State) ought, to accord with federal “Truth in Advertising” laws, be known as the Jungle State.   Here in Canada we found a perfect early summer day, its air soft but also fresh and dry, with every green leaf bright and articulate.  In school I was made to memorize some lines of Lowell—a poet from whom I probably could quote no others—and they now came to mind. “And what is so rare as a day in June?   Then if ever come perfect days…”  That was the feeling as, by mid-afternoon, we were all sitting on the stoop of our son’s house chatting and watching the neighborhood children play, as Hazel snoozed in her little carry-crib.

            Snoozing is young Hazel’s principal occupation at the moment.  Eating is a fairly distant second.  Of fussing and crying there is very little.  Augustine took the view that the doctrine of Original Sin was empirically demonstrable in the naked self-centeredness of infants.  If only he had had the chance to meet Hazel Fleming, the whole history of the Pelagian controversy might have been different.  Surely she merits the adoring attention, stopping only short of babyolatry, of all those surrounding her?  Or nearly all.  Her brother John Henry (æt 2) reserves the right to evidence occasional ambiguity toward the new and minute person whose arrival has inevitably caused such a major revision of his Weltanschaung.  But on the whole his chivalric instincts prevail, and he often joins his elders in the prevailing reverential fascination.

            Here she is, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, yet distanced from me by a vast, intriguing alterity.  Hazel is 195 pounds lighter that I, and four and a half feet shorter.  She is seventy-eight years and three days younger.  I lay my hand next to hers to find hers the size of two joints of my little finger.  Was my crinkled old skin, tanned and spotted with purple blotches, ever so smooth, rosy, creamy as hers?  I myself can barely credit the world into which I was born.  How astonishing would it be to her?  How more astonishing yet will be the world in which she will find herself when she is my age?  All newborns are, or should be, children of promise.  Hazel’s promise practically glows from her crib.  She sets out in life endowed with the priceless capital of a splendid mother and a spendid father.  May this beautiful child, who brings joy to all who look upon her, who has already improved our needy world simply by coming into it, thrive, growing in grace day by day.

           

           

Just þe þing

Home of Iceland's law-makers

            I am in the midst of preparations for departure for France, with a quick detour to Montreal to meet the newest Fleming, Hazel Elizabeth, born on May 23rd.  For the latter weeks of June I shall be in Paris, all too briefly, where I shall mostly be chained to a library desk while my spouse is at a violin boot camp for string-quarteters in the Rhône-Alpes.  Still, it’s not exactly hardship duty, even if I must gird my linguistic loins.

            In this blog I occasionally refer to myself in the third person, in a light-hearted and self-deprecating way, as your bloguiste.  And about one out of three times that I do so I get an email from France, seldom light-hearted in tone, telling me that bloguiste is not an actual French word.  Though I am prone to blunders and hilarious mistakes in French, I actually knew all along that bloguiste is not an actual French word.  But I try to take a view to language analogous to Marx’s view of the world.  “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways,” he writes; “the point is to change it.”

            In the early years of my professorial career I used to teach a course in Old English.  I don’t need to remind this audience that Old English is not the language of Chaucer—that’s Middle English, with a lexicon that is already bloated with Frenchisms—but a family of early Germanic dialects that would require nearly as much work for Chaucer to comprehend as it requires of us.  Old English is the language of Beowulf.  To make significant progress in Old English in one semester is an ambitious goal, and a teacher does well to sugar-coat the pill.

            Hundreds of beautiful and useful Old English words have been lost to us.  I wrote a post about this some years ago.  In my Old English course we addressed this situation in the following way.  At the beginning of each semester we would select an attractive obsolete English word.  Members of the class were then asked to start using this word in their ordinary conversations. They could define it if people asked, but were not supposed to say anything about the Old English class.  The idea of the experiment was to see if a small number of trend-setters could make an impact on the campus vocabulary.  We had pretty good success with gnorn (sadness, sorrow), hwosta ( a cough) and sele-dream (gleeful party noises).  We managed to infiltrate these words into the campus vocabulary for a time—so if you want bloguiste or any other word to become “real,” just start using it.  “That isn’t in the dictionary” is a pauper’s argument.  The dictionary is not the language; it is a treatise upon the language.

            We really hit pay dirt with the risqué rarity wifcuþu, which is roughly the equivalent of the current campus slang “hook up” described from the male perspective, and of course much classier.  In the link given above I go into the tragic-comic context of its appearance in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.  Here I have other things on my plate.  The old meaning of wif was simply “woman”, as in the Wife of Bath, meaning a female resident of that watering hole.  The most common occupation of women being marital, it came to mean “married woman”.  Mann still has an analogous meaning in German and in the archaic English of the Prayer Book’s marriage service: “I now pronounce you man and wife.”   The verb cuþan meant “to know” or “be familiar with”.  Xenophobia explains the still current meaning of uncouth, as what is unknown or unfamiliar may seem uncomfortable to the unsophisticated.  It is unfair that only the negative form is in widespread use, since couth itself would be a most useful term.

The Old English alphabet

            The odd-looking letter in cuþan, something like a b superimposed upon a p, was called thorn.  It was one of two lost Old English letters with the value of modern th.  By Chaucer’s time scribes were often using þ and th interchangeably, but in highly conservative forms of writing, such as some legal documents and pub signs, the graphic form outlived people’s comprehension of it.  It looked a little bit like a y—so folks started pronouncing it as one!  That is where all the cutesy “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe” stuff that one finds in colonial towns on our eastern seaboard comes from.  The next time you see one of these yee-oldies,  read þe and pronounce it, unstressed, the.

From the Wycliffe Bible (late 14thc) : In the bigynnyng was/the word & the word...

old and not so old yee-oldies

            Perhaps if we tried hard enough we could reclaim the thorn as well.  I am sure the Icelanders, who have thorns galore, would be happy to let us have a few fonts on credit.  An Icelandic legislative council is a þing and the national Parliament the Alþing or “all-Thing.”  They have been doing their þing since the tenth century, more than two centuries before the British Magna Carta.

            Westminster may be "the mother of Parliaments," but "parliament" itself is manifestly a French word.  And "Congress" (Latin, obviously) is not much better.  Surely Anglo-Saxon sensibilities demand something a little more yee-oldy and Englishy?  Perhaps Milton can show the way.   The All Devils’ Parliament in Paradise Lost is called Pandemonium. We might render that in early English as the helle-þing and relocate it from the Styx to the banks of the Potomac.

Trigger Happy Academics

A month ago I had never heard the phrase “trigger warning”, but now that I am up to speed, I am ready to issue one myself.  I must alert my readers that it is conceivable that this post could excite stupidity in stupid people.  So if you are stupid, you may wish to quit reading now.

            I doubt that any reader is in the dark as to my allusion, but just in case…One of the moment’s most publicized campus issues—which is rather different from saying most important--is the proposal that professors should preface their course syllabi, or perhaps even their individual lectures, with warnings to students that they may find parts of the course or lecture so disturbing, offensive, or even traumatic, that they may choose to avert their psychic eyes, so to speak.  Sexual violence is repeatedly mentioned as being particularly triggerable, but in general so are, potentially, all episodes of “sexism, racism, heterosexism, ableism…and other forms of oppression”.  Oberlin College, which has been something of a barometer of advanced academic sensitivity in recent years, has been teased, perhaps unfairly, for floating a proposed trigger warning policy now hastily recalled for further study.

            It seems a vapid truism that education is likely to be challenging; so maybe a single alert to that effect, carved in marble at the college gate, might be sufficient?  Certainly any literature professor knows that the stuff they read in college can really be disturbing—such stuff, for instance, as the dismemberment of Grendel, the blinding of Gloucester, the harpooning of Moby Dick, or Bill Sykes’s murder of Nancy.  Only a few writers are sensitive enough to give their readers a heads-up.  Chaucer, in introducing the “Miller’s Tale,” a narrative positively reeking of sexual violence, sexism, ageism, geezerism, undergraduatism, Biblicism, dandyism, and flatulentism, gives a trigger warning, and even recommends that the sensitive reader should “turn over the leaf and choose another tale,” one free of oppression and positively oozing with “morality and holiness”.  Of course, the only result, so far as I can tell, is that the Miller’s Tale is the best known part of Chaucer’s oeuvre. 

            God knows, I could have used a few trigger warnings myself with regard to my undergraduate courses, especially as regards ableism.  My college career might have been measurably less stressful if only my math professor, on the opening day of the calculus course, had said quite openly: “Fleming, I have to give you fair warning.  I don’t think you are going to be able to do very well in this course.”

 

No trigger warning: May 4, 1970

            Serious matters do call for serious discussion, though they don’t always get it in the academy.  On May 4, 1970, incompetent and undisciplined soldiers of the Ohio National Guard shot to death a number of students on the campus of Kent State University.  Protest demonstrations sprang up at colleges and universities throughout the country.  At Princeton there was an emergency faculty meeting so well attended that it had to be relocated from the hallowed Faculty Room of Nassau Hall to one of the largest lecture rooms on campus.   The President and Clerk sat on a spare, raised stage that looked like a set for Waiting for Godot, with the faculty before them in an amphitheatre of rows of fixed chairs in graduated ascent.

            There was only one practical action that our faculty could take, and that hardly a potent one--to pass a resolution about the Kent State shootings.  Almost immediately, however, the greatest minds in Mercer County seized upon an adventitious, peripheral issue and shook it like a ferret.  The undergraduate managers of the campus radio station, WPRB, were at the gates, petitioning to be admitted in order to broadcast the faculty meeting live.  The request was unprecedented, but so also, it seemed to many, were the circumstances that had triggered, so to say, the demand.  Should the faculty’s deliberations, by long tradition held in camera, now be broadcast to the world?

            The question was subjected to a searching debate of Talmudic complexity and Jesuitical subtlety.  There was thrust.  There was parry.  All points of view were carefully considered, especially those having nothing to do with faculty meetings or radio broadcasts.  There were more on the one hands, and on the other hands than one might find in a large colloquy of Hindu deities.  I need hardly add that intellectual scrupulosity is seldom briefly displayed.  The discussion went on, and on, and on.

            At some point the late, great Professor Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the father of the “paradigm shift,” sought and gained the recognition of the chair.  I shall remember what he said to the grave.  Indeed, I believe I can give you his exact words.  “Mr. President,” he said, “I submit that if the next hour of this discussion is as stupid as the first hour, exposing the deliberations of the Princeton faculty to any wider audience whatsoever could inflict irreparable damage on the institution.”  It was actually an hour and twenty-seven minutes, but let that pass.  The faculty voted not to go live.

 Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)

A Whiff of California

 Palm Drive, from the entrance of the Stanford University campus

           We just returned from Palo Alto where I participated in an academic conference that had been to some degree inspired by my recent book, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  This fact would have been rewarding enough even had the papers not been, as they in fact were, so rich in their variety and so impressive in their quality.  I really ought to report to you on some of them.  Did Comenius compromise his Enlightenment credentials with his embarrassing interest in popular prophecies?  Did Pope Benedict XIV succeed in bringing “enlightened” standards of anatomical and physiological science to the Church’s medieval process of canonization?  But instead I am choosing another topic, the vagaries of unbidden memory and the remarkable role played in the mechanism of memory by the olfactory sense.

            I had a wonderfully happy childhood on the whole, considering.  For only a period of about three years—roughly late-1945 to early-1948—was I sometimes consciously aware of being unhappy, even if fearful of admitting it.  My father, returned from long absence in the war, took us all to California, where Okies and Arkies had been going since time immemorial for all I knew, in search of an obscure destiny.  He was animated by the fantasy that the unique camaraderie and competence of men fighting for their lives in the malarial jungles of the Solomon Islands could be transferred to a civil partnership of house-builders in the East Bay.

            We landed in a grim place called Richmond.  At first we were in a housing project shoddily built for shipyard workers late in the war.  Later we moved to a modest rented house in what passed for the nicer side of town.  The school was an ordeal, crowded, full of mean, dumb kids and bullies and what are usually called “racial tensions”.   The enterprise of my Dad and his friends began foundering immediately on the shoals of selfishness, indiscipline, and alcohol.  I was ten years old, and I could figure it out.  Why couldn’t they?  I don’t think that those popular historians who talk so blithely of the “Greatest Generation” have taken adequate account of the war’s terrible trauma as evidenced among its veterans.

            My elder brother and I sought spaces of our own.  He was six years older than I, which meant his susceptibility to dangerous distractions was much greater than mine.  What I did mainly was take very long walks, sometimes with Pete but more often alone or with a like-minded school friend.   In those days the rising steeps of Contra Costa County from El Cerrito to the Berkeley Hills, today a Gold Coast of five or six miles of million-dollar houses, were almost entirely open country.  In spring the profusions of eschscholzia (California poppies) was magnificent, but the poison oak was everywhere.  The views could be great.  I actually saw part of the action in the so-called “Battle of Alcatraz”, a spectacular failed prison-break attempt of May, 1946, from a perch high above El Cerrito.

            Toward the Berkeley side of this expanse were two or three small plantations of eucalyptus trees with their distinctively semi-medical aroma and their weirdly peeling bark.  I loved one of these little groves in particular.  I would lie in the sweet grass on my back in the half-shade looking up through the trees to the blues and whites of the sky high above.  I had not yet read Wordsworth, but I was prepared, when I did meet him, for the meaning of “the bliss of solitude.”

A eucalyptus grove

            The Enlightenment conference began with a session late Friday afternoon, and we had most of the earlier part of the day to knock about.  Our only definite destination was the University art museum (vaut la visite, incidentally).  We had assumed it would open at ten, but arriving there at ten forty-five discovered that we were still a quarter of an hour early.  The bright, cloudless day had begun almost cool, but by now, with the sun already high in the sky, it was almost hot.  Some other early arrivers sat waiting in the full sun, but we looked around for some shade.

            One of the striking features of Stanford’s magnificent campus is the lavish open space at its entrance.  From its architecturally imposing front gates where University Avenue and the town of Palo Alto begin, there is a straight broad avenue, aptly named Palm Drive, that in the other direction runs for the better part of a mile down to the main old quadrangle and its imposing neo-byzantine church.  On either side of Palm Drive are many acres of open ground, tended with that exquisite care that alone can leave the impression of being untended, of distinctive northern California semi-desert.  Looking out into this artful wilderness from the museum steps we could see, perhaps fifty or seventy-five yards away, a couple of shaded rustic benches.  Thither we repaired.

            It is fortunately not necessary to have read every word of Proust to know what a Proustian experience is: a sharp, unanticipated attack of memory triggered by sensory experience.  In this instance it was the aroma of the eucalyptus combined with the faint brittle rattle of the breeze blowing through pin oak leaves, the synaesthesia of a peculiar geography, that instantly transported me back more than six decades to a world that no longer exists and to thoughts that I would have imagined had been so deeply buried as to be beyond mental excavation.

Let Us Commence...et caetera

 I just work here...

            On campuses all over the country it is Commencement season.  Even at Princeton, where the graduation comes late, there are clear signs that it’s arriving soon.  The little pointed stick fences that define the precincts for the class reunions, stored in some unknown warehouse for eleven and a half months of the year, have been up for a week or more.  And if it is Commencement time it naturally is Commencement speaker debacle time.  I speak of the world at large.  On this campus there is, by laudable ancient custom, no Commencement speaker.  Instead, the President makes brief remarks.

            The Commencement speaker debacle takes a couple of forms, with the first and most obvious being inherent in the dubious genre of the academic oration.  There are simply a lot of really bad Commencement addresses, and if one thinks about it for a moment it is probably surprising that there are not more.   The reasons for this situation will be found in the want of consensus concerning what a commencement address should be.  Many institutions, hoping of course to honor their graduates but hoping even more to achieve something of a public relations coup seek out popular celebrities, and in our country such celebrity is but rarely combined with intellectual distinction or oratorical ability. 

            I well remember the Commencement speech at my own graduation from Sewanee in 1958—meaning that I remember that I couldn’t remember one thing the guy had said the next day.  The guy in this instance—and I think I do remember this part—was the CEO of the United States Steel Corporation.  We were all puzzled why this captain of industry should be addressing the graduates of our little liberal arts college.  In those days I was so innocent about the realities of governance and finance in American higher education that I did not realize that struggling colleges need rich people and seek them out in oblique ways and try to shake them down with such flattery as they command.

            The actual close connections between the ivory tower and the workaday world are highlighted by a second kind of Commencement Address debacle, that of the Commencement speech that never gets delivered on account the disinvitation or coerced withdrawal of the featured speaker.  In general it may be said that the undelivered Commencement address gets a good deal more public notice than it ever would if delivered.  “Heard melodies are sweet,” writes Keats, “but those unheard are sweeter. 

            Since the Campus Culture Wars began in earnest in the late sixties there have been quite a few such episodes, and this spring we have already had a bumper crop.   The three most prominent instances that have come to my attention so far involve some serious institutions of higher learning: Brandeis, Rutgers, and Smith.  All three of the distinguished dissees have been women: Ayaan Hirsi Ali (usually categorized as a “feminist activist” but occasionally as a “celebrity atheist”), Condoleezza Rice (one-time Provost of Stanford University and a former Secretary of State) and Christine Lagarde (the current head of the International Monetary Fund). 

            On what basis the powers that be at Brandeis decided to offer Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree along with her speaker’s gig would be difficult to say.  She has been quite voluble and on the whole rather negative concerning the religion in which she was raised and genitally mutilated; but the Brandeis board had apparently not heard about that part.  When they did, they concluded that she did not share Brandeis “core values” and therefore did not merit a Brandeis degree.  One cannot discern whether President Frederick Lawrence of Brandeis is at all shamefaced about this, since his face is thickly covered with egg down to about the level of the knee cap. 

            Had the Rutgers power structure consulted me early on about their proposed invitation to Condaleezza Rice I might have been able to warn them.  Shortly before I retired from Princeton our Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs was celebrating its dequascentennial.  (You don’t get a chance to use that word every day, so grab the chance when it comes!).  The dean issued an invitation to Dr. Rice to give a talk at the event.  From my obscure point of view an invitation from a school of public and international affairs to a professor of public affairs who happened also to be a Secretary of State seemed at the very least plausible, but it was bitterly opposed by a faculty petition.  The dean, I am proud to say, ignored this collegial gnashing of teeth.

            My ignorance of the dismal science, so fatal to my understanding of the modern world generally, prevents me from knowing why Smith College sisterhood proved so weak as to weasel out of an invitation to Christine Lagarde, the French antitrust lawyer who is now head of the International Monetary Fund.  I know little about her except that she replaced Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which has to be a good thing, and that her English-speaking voice is very appealing, especially when compared with that of Janet Yellen, the American native-speaker who is another eminent female economist of the moment.  True, I have difficulty imagining the degree of undergraduate excitement spurred by this invitation in the first place.  “Guess who our Commencement speaker is going to be!  The head of the IMF!”  But Smith has ordered things in a way sufficiently disgraceful to allow the Huffington Post to huff and the Wall Street Journal to wail.

Mrs. Jesus

Crist was a mayde, and shapen as a man,
And many a seint, sith that the world bigan;
Yet lyved they evere in parfit chastitee. -–the Wife of Bath

Man with no wife meets woman with five husbands

            Considering that he is the most famous human being who ever lived, Jesus is a real mystery man when judged by the common expectations of biography.  We know absolutely nothing about what he was doing for most of his life, what he looked like, or whether he had any formal education.  Did he have a happy childhood?  Did he enjoy sports?  Music?  What were his family’s relative financial circumstances?  The evangelist John, who of all the gospel-writers is the one with the most exalted theological view of the man, seems aware of the biographical poverty.

            “And there are also many other things which Jesus did,” John wrote,  “the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”  (John 21:25)  That is literary hyperbole, but Jesus certainly had to do a lot of unrecorded things, and one is almost compelled to speculate about them.

            One hot topic of the moment is this: did Jesus get married?  Most men who have ever lived, after all, have had intimate sexual relations with women, mainly in the context of matrimony.  The invocation of social and cultural norms cannot take us very far.  It would have been most unusual for a Jewish man of Jesus’s age not to be married, but Jesus is so far off the “Most Unusual” chart in so many ways that one hardly notices the aberration.  Yet for reasons that have little to do with the content of the gospel and lots to do with the development of ascetic theology in the early Church the very suggestion that Jesus might have been married has taken on the status of a desperate blasphemy that has allowed Dan Brown to mislead millions and make macro-money with a puerile book founded in an interpretive travesty of “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci.  And should you think these remarks are animated by vulgar jealousy, you would be right.

           Jesus and a special friend

           Dan Brown has had an academic analogue of sorts in the person of Professor Karen King of the Harvard Divinity School.  A couple of years ago she came up with a supposed fragment of ancient papyrus, not too much bigger than a magazine address label, with a few words of an apparently otherwise unknown Coptic text in which Jesus, speaking in the first person, speaks of “my wife.”   I use bold face because that is how the phrase is treated in the supposedly ancient fragment!  Mystery surrounds the provenance of this piece of paper, naturally.  Apocryphal gospels are very in at the moment, and this scrap immediately became the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”.

 Puzzling papyrus (with unattributed English translation taken from the Internet)

1) ... not [to] me, my mother gave to me li[fe] ...

2) The disciples said to Jesus, "...

3) ... deny. Mary is worthy of it ... (or, alternatively, Mary is not worth of it ...)

4) ..." Jesus said to them, "My wife ...

5) ... she will be able to be my disciple ...

6) Let wicked people swell up ...

7) As for me, I dwell with her in order to ...

8) ... an image ...

            To find in the twenty-first century eight lines of a previously undiscovered religious text of great antiquity, containing two words that reverse the consensus of two millennia of scriptural exegesis, would be a scholar’s dream, of course.   But, alas, things that seem too good to be true generally are.   I fear Professor King’s apocryphal gobbet falls into this category.  If somebody hands you an old coin stamped “42 BC”, and tells you it came from the Mount of Olives, you should react with reserve.  In scholarship, perhaps even more than in some other fields, the wish is father to the thought.  About a third of my own published great ideas could confirm that truth, though fortunately I do not write about stuff likely to be taken up by CNN or the Wall Street Journal.

 Scholar at work (without magnifying glass or deerstalker)

            I am no scholar of ancient religious texts, and especially not ones written in Coptic; but all it takes to curb one’s enthusiasm in this particular instance is a modicum of literary sophistication.   Humbert Humbert,  the narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita, remembers having read in his youth a French detective story in which the clues were actually printed in italics, or perhaps I should say in italics.  The author didn’t want you to miss them.  The scribe of the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” apparently sought to offer similar aid to his readers with his cunning calligraphic bold face.  Professor King and several of her colleagues took it in stride.

            But the italicized clue, according to Humbert Humbert, “is not McFate’s way”—McFate being Humbert’s playful personification of the force that eventually reveals the mysteries of our lives.  An actual Coptic scholar, Christian Askeland at Wuppertal in Germany, has blown the whistle on the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”.  In fact it was only from reports of the exposure of the spurious nature of the text in the popular press that I first became aware of it—sort of like arriving two hours late to the football game just as everybody is exiting the stadium.

            This merry prank thus leaves us no closer to knowing whether Jesus took a wife or not.  The strong preponderance of textual and historical implication—one can hardly speak of evidence—is that he did not.  As a Christian I am still allowed to hope that he might have been married.  A married Jesus would add emphasis, and maybe even italics or bold face, to the Church’s claim that “he lived as one of us, yet without sin.  To the poor he proclaimed the good news of salvation; to prisoners, freedom; to the sorrowful, joy.”

The Beaux Arts, on the Spur of the Moment

 

 

            I have developed a new answer for the casual inquiries of the genre of “And what do you do?”  I tell people that I am a natural-born retiree.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t do anything, or even that I don’t do very much.  I do a fair amount, actually, but more and more I feel that in doing it I am the one in charge of my schedule.  In particular there are fewer and fewer non-negotiables inhibiting me from jumping on a train to New York for a day at the galleries or museums.

            We had a particularly exhilarating triple-header at the end of last week. In recent years we have spent a good deal of time in Paris, so that we noted with interest some months ago the announcement of a forthcoming exhibition of photographs of Old Paris to be mounted at the Metropolitan Museum.  Most visitors to the French capital learn that the distinctive shape of New Paris is largely the visionary work of G. E. Haussmann, who supervised a gigantic urban reinvention project under Napoleon III in the middle of the nineteenth century.  What did Paris actually look like before Haussmann?   When I was living in Paris I read several of the books by the historian-antiquary G. Lenotre, so that I knew how very little of Old Paris was still there to see.  We had already tentatively planned to see the photography show last Friday when late-breaking news altered the course of our planned outing even as it now must alter the course of this essay. 

Philippe de Montebello

            There is a terrific weekly PBS program on NY channel 13 called NYC-Arts (formerly Sunday Arts) , a weekly review of what is new and happening in the visual arts, drama, and music in the Big City and its environs.  It has two hosts.  Philippe de Montebello, the former and nearly permanent Director of the Metropolitan Museum, is an aristocratic art historian with successful aspirations to be a popular television personality.  Paula Zahn, a Middle American beauty queen, is a popular television personality with the qualifications of an art historian.  They meet in the middle of NYC-Arts.  There is considerably more brain-power on display in any Thursday half-hour of this program than you will see in a month on Meet the Press.

Paula Zahn

            On Thursday night NYC-Arts had a brief review of a current show at the Asia Society: “Golden Visions of Densatil: A Tibetan Buddhist Monastery”.   Densatil is an ancient and remote religious site dating from the twelfth century CE, destroyed only quite recently by Mao’s political vandals in their ludicrously misnamed “Cultural Revolution”.  We had become fascinated by Buddhist temple architecture and practice during our still recent visit to Sri Lanka, and I knew I had to see this show.  Then on Friday morning itself Joan found a write-up in the Times of a new mini-expo at the Met devoted to four and a half Goya portraits of members of the hyper-aristocratic family of Altamira.  One of these is among the best known pictures in the world: the child portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (1784-1792), alias "Red Boy."  ("Red Boy" is probably even better known than Gainsborough's "Blue Boy"!)  For this show the Met has briefly reunited "Red Boy" one of the treasures of its permanent collection, with borrowed portraits of his father, mother, and two brothers.  One of the brothers is by a collaborator and imitator of Goya's: hence, only half-credit.  I cannot remember another instance in which I learned about a New York show at eight in the morning and was visiting it by eleven-thirty.

Red Boy

            So we did enjoy Charles Marville’s photographs of Old Paris, though they were not the high point of my day.  If you really hurry—the show closes on May 4—you can judge for yourself.  I generally find really old photos rather creepy.  That may be because one reproduced photo I saw as a child—of the condemned members of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy standing hooded on the gallows moments before being hanged—has the power to haunt me still.  Marville’s photos have nothing overtly sinister in their content, of course, but for me there’s still a bit of the old creepiness about them.

            It was a beautiful sunny spring day in the city, and we enjoyed the short walk downtown from the Met to the Asia Society at 70^th and Park Avenue.  We had been vaguely looking for a place for a modest late lunch—not very likely in that particular neighborhood—only to discover the perfect place in the dining room at the Asia Society itself.  Then we mounted the elegant stairs to the rooms in which the Densatil show is temporarily housed.  Golden Treasures, indeed!

            We had seen many fine Buddhist stupas in Sri Lanka, but nothing so gorgeous and lavish as Densatil must have been—to judge from recollected relics and photographs taken on a scholarly mission in 1948.  No western analogue is likely to be particularly useful, but what it brought to my mind was Iberian baroque, with the dazzle of unrestrained gilding on everything.  American Buddhist friends have in the past told me that Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion.  It may simply be a matter of terminology, but I had trouble crediting that after my visit to the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy and participating in the ceremony of the display of the relic.  Coming face to face with Mahakala, the Destroyer in the Densatil show has done little to change my impression.

 

Mahakala (in a Metropolitan Museum tapestry, not from the Densatil Show at the Asia Society)