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!

Shamus in a High Tower

A fake William Gillette as a fake Sherlock Holmes standing in front of his fake castle on the real Connecticut River 

            I shall perhaps slowly accustom myself to my wife’s probably lengthy stay in a nearby rehabilitation facility, but after sixty-two years of common life the separation seems weird and unsettling.  Geriatric problems are often by their very nature disturbing, disorienting.  Our external social lives have largely consisted of attendance of musical events and the cinema or theater, both highly “social” in character.  I was able to continue it this weekend, after a fashion.  Bill and Anne Charrier have been in town.  Bill is a former student from much earlier days (Class of 1969), retired after a long and successful business career, and a prominent booster of undergraduate theater at Princeton.  The Charriers became personal friends of ours over the years, mainly through a shared devotion to Dante, and last weekend they invited me for dinner and a night at our student playhouse, Theatre Intime.  Joan was of course in hospital.  We went to see a rather wild comedy, Ken Ludwig’s The Game’s Afoot, in a student production.  It has a subtitle: Holmes for the Holiday.  I take the following summary from an on-line source: It is Christmas Eve, 1936. William Gillette, an actor famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, has invited his fellow cast-members to his Connecticut castle for a weekend of revelry. But when one of the guests is stabbed to death, the festivities in this isolated house of tricks and mirrors quickly turn dangerous. Then it’s up to Gillette himself, as he assumes the persona of his beloved Holmes, to track down the killer before the next victim appears. This glittering whodunit has murder, infidelity, wit, and surprises—something for everyone. I found it somehow significant that the play was set in 1936, the year of my birth.  Go figure. 

 

I suppose I would characterize this play as a farce, but a rather “meta” one.  I use this term in its popular literary sense, pointing to a recurrent and possibly significant allusiveness, in this instance directed to works in the standard English literary canon.  I deduce that its author, Ken Ludwig, was an English major.  The dialogue is laced with allusions, at least some of them significant, to canonical English literature.  These allusions are often joking.  The primary source is Shakespeare, and little Shakespeare jokelettes appeared now and then.

 

The word-fun starts with the title, the phrase “the game’s afoot”.  Hard-core readers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may recall that Sherlock Holmes does indeed say that “the game’s afoot”, but in Ludwig’s play there are several games afoot and many feet agaming.   Sherlock found the phrase in Shakespeare, and in no less famous a passage than the “patriotic oration” in Henry V (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends…”)  First of all, the play is historical, or semi-historical.  The main character, William Gillette, was prominent on the American theater scene between the Wars.  He was a slightly odd duck, who did indeed build himself a castle on the Connecticut River.  I myself have a very slight history with Gillette, as he featured in a graduate seminar I took with Alan Downer, a man who seemed to know everything about the history of the American theater.  Of course I cannot for the life of me remember what Downer said about Gillette.

 

The student actors were of course amateurs and a couple of the more important ones amateurish, if you grasp my distinction.  So the play’s intrinsic sparkle was rather intermittent, as though there were a couple of malfunctioning bulbs in a chain of Christmas lights.  But it was still full of energy, surprises, and good laugh lines.  The “mystery” aspect of it was less gripping than the stage high-jinks, but all was received generously by a happy audience.  I was very glad to have been included in the evening.

 

On the domestic front I now need to manage the protocols of nearly solitary living for a spell.  After a blitzkrieg of efficient organization and planning Katy has had to go back to the reality of her important job as head of the Getty Foundation and her responsibilities in Los Angeles.  But Luke, who will be returning from Sri Lanka in less than two weeks now, will be able to spend some time here in August, while Richard, who has invested many hours here in the last couple of weeks, pursues a project in South Africa.  How lucky we have been in our offspring.  As the psalmist says, “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward.  As arrows in the hands of the mighty, so are children of youth.”  Or of middle age, so far as that goes.  The daily aches and pains of old age, as also its more severe blows such as those that Joan and I now have both experienced, are part and parcel of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, otherwise known as the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.  These thousand natural shocks are part of the universal inheritance of the human species.  One can embrace them or rail against them.  But avoid them one cannot.  Yet the gift of children who are “as arrows in the hands of the mighty” is a blessing that can never be fully earned.  So I end by acknowledging our three wonderful children, Richard Arthur Fleming, Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, and Luke Owles Fleming.  

 

 

 

Rehab Ahead

Stonebridge

 

Blog day is upon me, but I have had little time or appetite to think about it.  My wife Joan has been seriously ill and in hospital, where she has had to remain for an extended period.  We are hoping that she can be transferred to the slightly less oppressive environment of a rehabilitation facility by the time I publish this.  She has enjoyed excellent care during her stay, but any long-term bed-confinement is enfeebling, and she is already woefully deconditioned.  She needs to be on a restorative regime as soon as is prudent.  The problems have been exacerbated by my own mobility limitations, but a small phalanx of devoted friends has been ferrying me to and fro.  The future is, as always, uncertain; but I am less worried than I was a week ago.

 

            It took the experts quite a while to come up with a confident diagnosis, but eventually they did: babesiosis.  I had never even heard of babesiosis, which is apparently one of the more exotic (and nasty) of the several tick-borne diseases, all of which seem to be on the rise as the human population spreads over the former woodlands of the northeastern part of our country.  Only twenty years ago there were no reported cases of it.  Now there are about three thousand each year, with the number rising.  For the elderly, a category to which I must reluctantly assign my spouse as well as myself, all such diseases can be quite dangerous.  Certainly the immediate visual effects of this one, which include dramatic debility, are alarming.

 

One of the hospital doctors, in explaining the difficulty in arriving at a diagnosis, told me “These tick-borne diseases can be very tricky.”  The adjective “tick-borne” stuck in mind mind, for the mind has its vagaries, and all too easily wanders down the byways of Locke’s “association of ideas" as developed by Sterne in Tristram Shandy.  Several years ago I became interested in various notorious criminal cases from the Victorian era in Britain. I actually wrote about one or two them in this blog.   One of these cases, which gained considerable notoriety in its day was that of the “Tichborn claimant” or “Tichborn pretender”.  This enterprising fellow was an Australian butcher who put himself forward as the long-lost offspring of a wealthy English dowager, whose young son had disappeared years earlier, very likely in a maritime disaster.

 

There are many historical examples of the desire to believe in unlikely survivals and improbable rediscoveries, such as that of Anastasia, the young daughter of the last Romanovs.  Many Russian exiles in the Paris of the 1920s very much wanted her to be alive and well.  The entire nuclear imperial family had of course been murdered in 1918 by Bolshevik thugs.  More than one vaguely possible candidate presented herself as Anastasia. In similar fashion the dowager had a passionate desire to believe that her beloved child was still alive, and she had placed advertisement in the press throughout the Empire seeking to find him or elicit information concerning him.  One such notice came to the attention of an enterprising Australian butcher in Wagga Wagga, who claimed to be the missing English aristocrat.  (The lost son was the heir of a baronetcy.)  The appearance, speech, and general behavior of this man were those of a proletarian rather than those of a prince.  But the mother, desperate to believe, gave credit to the butcher’s dubious story despite his uncouth affect.  Practically nobody else did, though, and the matter became a famous law case ending with the claimant’s conviction for perjury and a stout prison sentence.

 

Tichborn was an English place name, that of a small English village.  The pronunciation of its ch is “soft” as in church.  Nonetheless a spurious parallel with “tick-borne” instantly invaded my undisciplined mind.  Or perhaps my Celtic ancestry is to blame.  After all the difference between church and kirk is less philological than geographical.  Such are the trivialities in which the mind seeks surcease of sorrow and by incidental fortuity finds a blog topic to boot.  I am hoping that by next week things can be headed in the direction of normality.  It is probably too much to hope that they will actually have arrived there.

 

Even while writing this I received word that Joan will be released from Princeton Hospital today (Tuesday) and sent to a rehab center nearby, the medical wing of a retirement community (Stonebridge) where she has many friends…And since writing that, the transfer took place and Richard and I were able to visit her there briefly.  I hope we are now in a new and happier place.

 

 

 

Lost Treasure

 

            This week’s offering is less an essay than an anecdote that will have interest for few, but just at the moment is rather compelling to me.  Every stage of life has its surprises, but old age—or to use Cicero’s somehow more disturbing term senectitude—is a kind of Brunswick stew of alarums aptly characterized as one damn thing after another.  Very often the things involve physical health.  This time it is not I but Joan who is in the hospital.  The situation is naturally worrying but prospects also hopeful; and her hospitalization provides the context rather than the substance of this little essay.  There is other, literary, indeed biblical context in two of Christ’s parables—the hidden treasure in a field (Matthew 13:44) and the woman sweeping her house to find a lost coin (Luke 15:8-10).

 

            Joan has been hospitalized for several days with some kind of scary viral brain infection in the general category of meningitis.  She is very ill, but the signs have turned in the right direction.  Our adult children in New York have rallied around, but they both have very busy lives and/or demanding jobs.  Circumstances, including unknown and uncertain immediate prospects, are of course disquieting.  At the immediately practical level, I am dependent on others to get to the hospital.  We are blessed in having good friends.

 

            But on to the anecdote of lost treasure. Two days ago, in the afternoon.  I realized with a shock that my wedding ring was not on my finger.  The ring does not date from my wedding.  I got it about ten years later in Italy: a modest gold band which exploits simplicity to enhance significance.  Now it was gone, but not exactly mysteriously so.  I have been reading about “wizened” old men since childhood.  Now I was one.  My fingers had simply shriveled!  And since those fingers spent a fair amount of time at a computer keyboard in my office, I knew where, surely, my wedding ring must now be. I admit that from a conventional point of view my library office might be considered rather cluttered.  I think of the phenomenon as the chaos antecedent to creation.  An uncharitable observer might call it a mess.   

Most things that I can’t find eventually turn up there.  So I began with my long work table.  After extended searching I had found lots of useful stuff, but no wedding rings.  I didn’t really have a Plan B, but I continued searching through more and more unlikely locations in the house.  No luck, only a terrible feeling in the pit of the stomach.  Because that was the only place it could be.  Nonetheless, whistling in the dark, I spent the next two hours searching diligently through places I knew full well would prove sterile.  Eventually I abandoned myself to silent, slightly panicky despair.

 

            The next day we visited Joan, nearly comatose, in her hospital room.  The “we” was Christie (my Ghanaian health aide) and Frank (a close family friend and former colleague).   Joan’s hospital bed, deep in the room near the windows, left enough room for only a single caretaker to walk around it.  I was hovering over her head in that narrow space.  She was in a state of unnerving somnolence, eyes tightly closed.  Christie was on the same side of the bed, but at its foot.  Suddenly she started talking about a “miracle”.  She took a couple of steps forward, leaned down, and picked up the gold ring that had silently slipped off my finger more than a day earlier.  That true story deserves to be in the Legenda Aurea or the Gesta Romanorum.  Late on Tuesday the doctors came up with a diagnosis of which they are confident: babesiosis.  I had never heard of babesiosis.  The strange word derives from the name of its European discoverer, a Romanian pathologist named Victor Babes.  It is a dangerous condition initiated by the bites of infected insects.  I presume it is in the same pathological family as Lyme Disease, though rarer.  There are only about three thousand cases a year in this country.  Wooded areas of the middle and upper eastern states must be full of infected insects.  Babesiosis must be treated energetically.  But it can be treated, and they have begun treating it.  So I must hope that surely old Dame Julian of Norwich was right.  All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.