The Elusive Primary Source

The mysterious Count Cagliostro (Houdon it)

“The beginning of wisdom,” said my great teacher, “is the primary source.” He was trying to get us to focus on Chaucer before focusing on what other people had said about Chaucer. This week I am immersed in Cagliostro, and the experience has reminded me once again of the large void between primary and secondary sources: the ambiguous space in which most history is actually written. You may know that Cagliostro was a colorful eighteenth-century character, “an Italian adventurer” and “a gifted conman.” Those phrases I lift from the Chambers Biographical Dictionary, a standard reference source; but similar ones will be found elsewhere in other dictionaries and encyclopedias and, indeed, in almost every account of the man published since 1833, the year in which Thomas Carlyle published what he called a brief “biography of the most perfect scoundrel that in these latter ages has marked the world’s history.”

The only significant primary sources for the life of Cagliostro are the following: (1) various dossiers compiled by the police of Louis XVI; (2) some scabrous articles in the journal Courier de l’Europe for 1786; and (3) reports of reports made by the Inquisition in Rome, justifying throwing the man into the prison from which he would never emerge alive. Now the Paris police would do anything the royal party instructed them to do, and the royal party wanted Cagliostro’s scalp. Practically any number of the Courier de l’Europe, run largely by blackmailers, would make Rupert Murdoch seem like Louisa May Alcott by comparison. And the Holy Inquisition was a far greater iniquity than any it pretended to expose. Hence, one may wish to entertain doubts. Carlyle chose not to, and his brilliant but dubious essay, for want of competition, became a pseudo-primary source for the next century and more.

Primary and secondary sources: DO NOT CONFUSE

That can happen when primary sources are too few, but a surfeit of primary sources may cause other problems for a scholar. When I first joined the Princeton faculty two of my senior colleagues (Carlos Baker and Lawrence Thompson) were engaged in writing the authorized biographies of two major American writers (Hemingway and Frost), for which the copious primary sources to which they were given privileged access taught them more than they wanted to know. They slowly discovered that the men whose brilliant work had attracted their life-long admiration often behaved, in those categories of deportment usually thought of as human decency, like scumbags. Such discoveries did not halt the biographers, but it made their task less pleasant.

In terms of primary sources the historian may perhaps hope, like Goldilocks, for that happy medium between too much and too little. The reason we can have a thousand plausible versions of Jesus and a hundred of William Shakespeare is that although for both men we have excellent primary sources, they are of the sort that give us a workable grid, yet leave it up to us to plot the essential coordinates.

Another difficulty: the sources we use to know about the past have been skewed by historical vagaries of which we are often unaware. Consider for a moment Anglo-Saxon literature. All surviving Old English poetry fits into a set of six octavo volumes, volumes occupying about seven linear inches in my library. With the famous exception of Beowulf and a few much shorter pieces, all of this poetry is very explicitly religious. Most of the poems are biblical paraphrases or versified saints lives. If all we knew about Anglo-Saxon society had to be deduced from its surviving poetry we might justifiably conclude that the place was populated mainly by monks, that most folks visited a church thrice daily, and that what made Merry England most merry was a good psalm-singing competition. But of course we do have other sources, which amply supply the poetically absent quotient of secular rapine, war, ethnic strife, indentured servitude, subsistence agriculture, frequent shipwreck, and various other nasty and brutish aspects of the daily life of our remote forefathers.

Hidden faces of Anglo-Saxon England

The explanation for the documentary “imbalance” is not hard to find. Practically the only people who could read and write were monks. Monks lived in monasteries. Libraries are the places where most books are preserved, and monasteries had the only libraries that have survived even partially. Monastic libraries—just like your library or mine—tended in general to reflect the interests of the people who created them. But it is no easy thing for a manuscript to survive for upward of a thousand years. Beowulf, replete with beer parties, monsters, and dismemberments, somehow survived, though barely. Having by near miracle made it through the Middle Ages and safely into the hands of Renaissance antiquaries, it came within an ace of burning up in a library fire in the eighteenth century.

Think of it this way. Imagine, God forbid, that a thermonuclear firestorm wiped out our entire nation tomorrow. Hundreds of years hence archaeologists sifting through the cinders find some pieces of surviving print: one copy of a supermarket tabloid with the headline “Dead Mum Gives Birth to Child in Coffin,” three Budweiser labels, a Harry Potter novel, twelve Gideon Bibles, a bumper sticker reading “Obama: Change You Can Believe In,” the July, 2002 issue of Penthouse magazine and 112 pristine copies of the 1040 income tax form. How accurate a picture would you then have of American civilization in the early twenty-first century? All too accurate a picture, perhaps, but only because I chose my texts carelessly. I’m sure you get the point.

Grace Abounding to the Least of Bloguistes

a graceful treasure 

Though I have made great strides in reorganizing my library after the seismic upheaval caused by having to leave a large, book-stuffed office of thirty years’ accumulation, I still face the occasional embarrassment of being unable to lay my hands on a book I am sure I own—or owned. There is paradox here. The more obscure the book, the better my chance of finding it immediately. It is the volumes I frequently handle, carry about, read on park benches, or loan to others that are likely to go missing. I have in such manner lost two successive copies of a certain treasured title to which I shall turn in a moment. It reappeared in my life this week through the cooperation of Grace and an eBay auction.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Its gracious reappearance demonstrated a principle that happily haunts my life: the principle of commodious concurrence. For I have been writing this week about Jansenism. You probably don’t want to know, and even if you should you have much better resources than a professorial blog. I could recommend at least two classic works of French literature. If you have a week to spare, you would do well to browse about in the Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal (1656). If you have a couple of months you might try Sainte-Beuve’s huge Port-Royal from the mid-nineteenth century. If you have five minutes you’ll have to take my word for it that Jansenism (a pejorative term used by its opponents) was a spiritual movement within the Roman Church in seventeenth-century France that, at the doctrinal level, was all about divine grace.

The cemetery at Port-Royal des Champs before its desecration by the Jesuit party

Grace means help, support, comfort, encouragement. Women sometimes carry the personal name Grace, just as others carry the names of the theological virtues—Faith, Hope, or Charity. According to legend, a bishop whose wife was named Grace used to have trouble with the Eucharistic prayer for the whole state of the Church on account of the paragraph beginning “Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all Bishops and other Ministers…” The concept of grace informs some of the all-time greats of religious literature, such as Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and “Amazing Grace”—the hymn for people who don’t know any hymns.

To believe in divine grace does require a belief in a divinity. A surprising number of us still do entertain that belief, but even if you get your help, support, comfort, or encouragement from shrinks, sit-coms, or sauna baths, you can understand the concept of grace. Despite the view famously articulated by A. E. Houseman that “…malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man,” it is my aim this week to advocate poetry as a means of grace.

Poetry As a Means of Grace is the astonishing title of a yet more astonishing book published in 1941 by Charles Grosvenor Osgood (1871-1964), for many years the Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres at Princeton. He had been one of the original preceptors hired by Woodrow Wilson when he instituted his new system of undergraduate education in the first decade of the twentieth century. I never met him. He retired the year after my birth and died the year before I joined the faculty! He was a man of enormous and wide-ranging erudition—“the dean of Princeton humanists,” in President Dodds’s apt phrase. He made many lasting contributions to literary study. Especially famous is the Variorum edition of Spenser, in which he played a major role, and his extraordinarily erudite translation and edition of Boccaccio on Poetry.

When I called Poetry As a Means of Grace “astonishing,” I referred to its content; but the same adjective could be used of it as evidence of the rapidity of social change of the last half century. English professors don’t have titles like that any more. We have titles like Liminality and the Heideggerian Quest in the Fiction of Armand Bol. (This is an imaginary title, used for exemplary purposes. Armand Bol never existed, and some of us heretics have our doubts about liminality and the Heideggerian quest as well.) It is nearly inconceivable that an Ivy League professor would write such a book as Osgood’s today, and flatly impossible that it would be published by prestigious university presses (Princeton and Oxford). For the “humanism” displayed by Osgood is the humanism of Erasmus, Thomas More, Rabelais, or Cervantes, all of whom believed with him that the purpose of literary study was to support “the art of living a good life,” meaning one spiritually informed. He writes, he says, for “all young people who wish to keep themselves articulate and to insure the perennial flow of their springs of spiritual life against the drouth of routine in business or profession.” The path to this goal is the habitual and informed reading of good poets. Here is “job counseling” of a most precious kind, but scarcely to be found, alas, in our academic Offices of Career Services.

Osgood chooses by way of example four great literary figures: Dante, Spenser, Milton, and Samuel Johnson. To each he devotes one lecture (chapter), but he makes it clear that these are merely exemplary. Indeed choosing your “own” poet, one with whom you have a particular and perhaps idiosyncratic rapport, must be done with patience and care. It is the first step to “grace”.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Do not be astonished, incidentally, to find Johnson in the list. He was not primarily a poet, and Osgood hardly touches upon his poetry, justly believing that with a man like Johnson the life is the poem. In such a life malt and Milton were not exclusive. “A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity,” said the great doctor. Meanwhile if among my readership there be anyone who knows what became of either of my two earlier copies, please be in touch.

The Cemetery: Princeton, NJ.  The sleep of the gracious

Ripeness Is--Most of It

Greg Hicks as Lear

            Readers of this blog have already “met” our remarkable friends Susan Saltrick and John Meyer with whom we have had such delightful summer experiences along the littoral of the Mediterranean crescent running from Livorno to Barcelona and, on one recent memorable occasion, on a boat between those two places.  Susan and Joan were the pilgrims, John and I the motorized support team who would show up at the end, vainly seeking to earn the crown without the inconvenience of first bearing the cross.  Well, our adventures continued on Saturday last when they treated us to a delicious brunch at their Manhattan apartment, then treated us to a matinee performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s King Lear at the Park Avenue Armory.

            I am always pleased when things I have been saying for years on faith actually turn out to be true in empirical fact.  Heraclitus said that you cannot step into the same river twice, and Fleming has been saying that you cannot read the same book twice.  I have read King Lear many times, taught it more than once, and remember at least two earlier stage productions.  What I saw on Saturday was something entirely new to me.

            I am not referring to novel features of David Farr’s production, though some were notable, not to say spectacular.  The Armory building, for those who have not visited it, is itself spectacular, accurately described by its promoters as “part palace, part industrial shed”.  I learned from my friend John that the palace part—capaciously conceived and sumptuously decorated reception rooms—was the fruit of a collaboration between Stanford White and Louis Comfort Tiffany.  The shed part, which has been the venue for nearly every conceivable genre of event and exhibition, including the antiques extravaganza, has for this summer season been turned into a kind of Erector Set version of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. 

 a palace...

 ...and an industrial shed...

...in which to rebuild the Globe Theatre with industrial strength Lego...

Its remarkable engineering allowed us to look down from the highest rung of its heavens, as one might from a helicopter or a mountain peak, at the pitiable carnage below.  That mountain might perhaps be Olympus, for as the blinded Gloucester says,

                        As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,

                        They kill us for their sport. (IV, i, 37-38)

Those are great lines.  I had forgotten, indeed, just how many great “quotations” there are in this one play: sharper than the serpent’s tooth, come not between the dragon and his wrath, eater of broken meats, ripeness is all, the rack of this tough world…an anthology nearly endless.  But great lines are not necessarily true lines.  That was the new thing I saw this time.  Neither the play’s tragedy nor its horrors—and one can pretty clearly distinguish between the two—are brought about by the gods. 

No, the secondary evils of the play are almost exclusively the work of Edmund, whose very essence embodies the plenitude of illegitimacy once resident in the now archaic word bastard.  He does get aid, not to mention comfort,  from the two bad daughters, but they are his victims as well.  As for the principal evil, it is all of it, every inch, brought about by old King Lear himself.   He is stupid.  He is foolish.  He is vain.  He is self-righteous.  Indeed, I left the experience with the feeling that there can be few other “tragic heroes” in the dramatic repertory less justified in claiming, as Lear memorably does:

I am a man
More sinn'd against than sinning.  (III, ii: 58-59).

Does Lear have even that minimum of grandeur and dignity that would be demanded by any even vaguely Aristotelian sense of tragedy?

            Well, yes, when you see this production.  But he claims it on the basis of Shakespeare’s language, not on that of his deeds.  Lipstick on a pig actually improves the pig considerably.  This is, I know, heresy, for which I could be stripped of my English professor epaulettes.  But it is the conclusion I reached on Saturday.  The reason you cannot step into the same river twice is because the river is always changing.  The reason you cannot read the same book twice is because you are always changing.

            After seeing the play we sought out the New York Times review by Charles Isherwood so we could know what we were supposed to think.  It turned out that the RSC production “can be strongly recommended for hypersensitive souls,” that it was a “competent but immaculately unwrenching production”.  I do not know Mr. Isherwood, but I am guessing that he is probably not a foolish fond old man negotiating the Great Generational Shift, nor the father of three adult children.  As a matter of fact this is my own first experience of Lear from that particular perspective, and I found it plenty wrenching and the hero maculate as all get out.

 "Howl, howl, howl, howl!"

A Political Mess

I have not written a “political” essay in many months. To begin with, it seems to me that there are already far too many political blogs, and that their ratio of good sense to verbal volume is unpromising. I myself have neither academic expertise in political science nor practical experience in politics. Such developed political ideas as I do have are frequently offensive to my peers. Under these circumstances it seems to me best to honor the classical adage: Cobbler—stick to thy last!

The current mess in Washington is so appalling, however, as to suggest that leaving politics to the politicians is a mere acquiescence in disaster. Do not go gentle into that good night. It is hard to know where to begin. We face some very serious problems, many of them related to a world economy so complex that only fools pretend to understand it entirely. We depend for their solution upon the actions of largely incompetent and partially corrupted legislators, chosen by a largely ignorant electorate who share with them a spiritual attention deficit disorder.

One of our major political parties has spent half a century creating a vast base of dependency which it now proclaims it a sacred duty to protect. The other has managed to reduce the noble concept of Burkean conservatism to a superstitious mantra concerning tax policy, while actually pushing the country into a staggeringly expensive war in Iraq and a huge and wholly unfunded increment to Medicare. But according to the partisan political blogs the one is staunchly “defending ordinary Americans and working families” and the other bravely opposing “job-killing taxes on the wealth creators”. Both are claiming to focus like laser beams on “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.” Is it any surprise that this Congress enjoys job-approval ratings of seventeen percent?

It may not actually be possible to get out of this mess, finally. Nations, no less than their individual citizens, can be subject to powers largely beyond their control, the influences of which they can but exacerbate or attenuate. Certainly we are not going to get out of it swiftly enough to meet the national code of instant gratification. But we are unlikely to get anywhere at all without combining serious reductions in government expenditures with substantial increments in tax revenues. For identifying this “mother of all no-brainers,” David Brooks has been clubbed with the Club for Growth.

Longevity often has the curious side effect of insulating the long-livers from the full intensity of current realities. We have prior spiritual commitments, so to speak. I hope you can believe, however, that there are quite a few folks who know a lot despite the fact that they aren’t even on Face Book. They may know, for instance, that the idea that the New Deal “brought us out” of the Great Depression is pretty hokey. That is an idea I have encountered repeatedly in the web essays of various youthful pundits, who seem to regard the New Deal as a benign model for governmental “stimulus,” such as that in the “Cash for Clunkers” program. I even have a relevant personal anecdote. For a while in 1937 or 1938 my Dad worked for the WPA putting in some railway trestles on the north fork of the White River in Arkansas. His later description of the experience was this: “We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.” Many years later I heard the same “joke” quoted as an anti-Soviet witticism emanating from the eastern bloc.

Insofar as some dramatic intervention “brought us out” of the Depression, that intervention was the international disaster called the Second World War. That did indeed rev up the American economy, at the expense of millions of lives lost or blighted, and left us for a time fortuitously unchallenged by the economies of our natural industrial competitors, which were either flattened by our bombs or simply exhausted by a supreme effort. But it also invited the slowly maturing national self indulgence that over six decades has brought us to our present pretty pass.

Are any of my readers old enough to remember the old American work ethic? There is indeed a national “job crisis”. One part of it is this: many of the limited number of jobs that are available, though socially necessary, are ones that “nobody” wants to do. Hence the invasion of the Latino army, concerning which our national hypocrisy daily reaches new heights. If you are a suburban New Jersey householder, you will be predictably faced on a regular basis with the need to remove snow from your sidewalks and driveways, to cut your grass and tidy your gardens, and to engage in various other seasonal chores needed to maintain and preserve your property. If you are an aging householder, or a preoccupied one, chances are that you would be happy on occasion to hire someone to help you with such chores. There was a time in living memory when wholesome looking teen-aged males, often the offspring of friends or neighbors, would appear on one’s doorstep soliciting such work. They were “saving for college,” or trying to get the money together to buy a jalopy, or to rebuild one they already had. I have had no such visitation by a native speaker of the English language in the decades I’ve been living in our current house. I’m not even sure I’ve had a magazine subscription scammer.

A Safe and Sane Fourth

For the last several years we missed the impressive Town-Gown Fourth of July Fireworks display mounted in our community, and we were on schedule to miss it again. Our fecklessness and indolence bear some responsibility, but so do the unknown civic organizers. One fairly predictable thing about a Fourth of July event, in my opinion, should be that it take place on the Fourth of July. But here the town fathers, most of whom are mothers, have adopted a Precept of Approximation according to which the Second of July will do just as well—in fact, even better. So there we were about nine o’clock on a Saturday night, contemplating the prospective comfort of bed, when several loud boom-boom, ka-boom-boom-boom noises, emanating from the west, rattled the house.

I must pause to say a couple more words about our house. It is in most respects a splendid house, but it has one serious liability: a flat roof. The academic architect who designed it long before our tenancy was apparently dreaming of summers in Marrakesh, or maybe Bristow, California. Flat roofs are not recommended for central Jersey. Quite apart from its intermittent failures, I spend too much time on the roof, sweeping away debris and trying to keep the gutter spouts clear. For this reason there is usually a ladder leaning against it.

"Take me to your ladder.  I'll see your leader later."

A second point is this. Until about a year ago there was a huge linden tree that blocked out most of the skyline west of the house, but it blew down in the Tornado of Twenty Ten, missing the house by inches.

As is well known, it is an ill wind that blows no good. Joan, who is quite acute at seeing unlikely connections, intuited a way to combine two deficits—a flat roof and a lost linden—to create an unanticipated asset. “Let’s climb up on the roof and watch the fireworks,” she said. And we did so. The prospect of two septuagenarians with waning eyesight (one of them in his bedroom slippers) clambering in the dark up a ladder to roam around their roof is perhaps not one to make the heart of an insurance adjuster sing. But for the septuagenarians themselves, who after all were the principals, it was a tuneful experience indeed, and one that brought to mind madcap ventures jointly undertaken half a century ago in and about Oxford University.

The view was perfect, like a carefully cropped I-photo that isolates the essentials and discards the distracting periphery. A darkened tree line blocked out all but the upper reaches of the rockets’ ascent and the pyrotechnical bursts themselves. Only as the scintillating fragments were falling did we hear the reports of the explosions that had sent them skyward, followed by faint and muffled oohs and aahs of spectators so unfortunate as not to have their own distant rooftop from which to watch. The effect was, in a pleasing way, rather like that of my misbehaving Samsung 630 television set, from the screen of which a lean and dapper young man silently moves his lips, then purses them emphatically, after which the set says “I’m Alan Cumming, and this is Masterpiece Mystery.” It was an experience that vindicates Saint Augustine’s theory of the primacy of sight in the hierarchy of the senses.

I grew up in a climate of pyrotechnical deprivation. Our idea of a big Fourth of July time down on the farm was to explode a couple of blasting caps with .22 rifle shots. Blasting caps were used (and I assume still are) to make a small explosion sufficient to encourage a huge explosion in a pack of dynamite. The origin of these caps was mysterious. They were generally attributed by my uncle to “a guy I know at the quarry”. If they were the “wrong” kind, they couldn’t be detonated by percussion at all. But the “right” ones did make a hell of a noise.

the Royal Fireworks of 1749 threatened to burn London down

I had heard of cherry bombs and ladyfingers, but I could only fake familiarity with the exotic names of devices sometimes invoked by my classmates. No doubt a comprehensive investigation of these names would yield an interesting study A few years ago, when I was working on some eighteenth-century musical materials, a librarian friend directed me to one of our library’s treasures: the original printed schedule for the Royal Fireworks of 1749, ostensibly celebrating the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, for which Handel wrote his deathless music. The list is an orgy of technical terms deriving, apparently, from the nomenclature of battlefield artillery, already greatly developed by the middle of the eighteenth century. The were no Black Mambas or Whistling Busters, but practically anything else you can buy today on the Tennessee interstates is there.

My first experience of real fireworks was deliciously unreal. It was in the wonderful Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief (1955), which is about upscale criminality on the Riviera. In it there is a memorable scene in which literal and metaphorical fireworks spice up an encounter between Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. Its effect on my adolescent consciousness was to render the national American holiday permanently if subliminally erotic.

in congress assembled

Monasticats

One of the more complex pleasures of my profession is to have played some role in the education of brilliant undergraduate students who later go on to become famous scholars. If you have ever heard of William of Champeaux—which is at least possible—it is only because he was the teacher of Abelard, of whom you have certainly heard. One of several Abelardian eminences whose reflected glory combats the falling shadows of my senectitude is the provost of Georgetown, James J. O’Donnell. He has appeared once before in this blog, around which we conduct a laconic and intermittent correspondence.

O’Donnell has produced the definitive edition of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, but he is also what you would call a “general reader”. It is he, for example, who introduced me to Chic Sale’s The Specialist, the ne plus ultra in outhouse humor. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the “prince of travel writers,” died on June 10. As comment on this sad event, a week or so later Jim forwarded to me one of his favorite Fermorian prose gobbets, a description of a religious liturgy in a two-man Greek Orthodox mini-monastery:

The church, which is scarcely larger than the oratory of a castle, is dedicated to All the Saints. A lowered sanctuary lamp and the tapers that lighted the breviaries of Father Christopher and Bessarion dispelled a little the surrounding shadows. But outside their narrow pools of light, all was dark. I leant in one of the miserere-stalls that lined the small semicircular bay on the right of the chancel. The corresponding apsidal concavity on the left was lost in gloom. The three of us were alone in the church. As Bessarion chanted the office, I attempted to follow the neumes and flexions and quarter-tones in the oriental-sounding monody by the dots and the rise and fall of the slender curves and pothooks in scarlet ink above the text on the taper-lit page. The hair of both the monks, usually twisted into buns and tucked under their headgear, now tumbled in long twists half-way down their backs. From below, the candle-light threw peculiar shadows on the waxen features of Bessarion and sharply defined the deep eyesockets, the fiercely bridged nose and quizzically wrinkled brow of Father Christopher, when, censer in hand, a magnificent colossus in splendid and threadbare vestments, he emerged from the altar. His deep voice groaned the responses to the higher pitch of Bessarion. At a pause in the liturgy, the deacon swung the pyramidal lectern round on its pivot, turned the pages, and began intoning the panegyric of St. Demetrios. Makry the tom cat stalked slowly into the church and up to the rood-screen; the light from the central arch cast his elongated shadow portentously across the flagstones. Nimbly he leapt on the high, mother-of-pearl-inlaid octagonal table supporting the lectern and, curling his tail neatly round his haunches, sat gazing at the page. Without a break in the chanting, Bessarion pushed the raised paw away form the margin and gently stroked the tortoiseshell head as he sang; and slowly the long liturgy unfolded.

 

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)

A glorious piece of writing, indeed, a  tribute alike to an author’s power and a reader’s taste. I had not read the book from which it comes (Roumeli), and one detail in it captured my special attention: the tortoiseshell cat. That is because among the four-foot shelf of Fleming’s unpublished (because unwritten) books is a study of monks and animals: The Monastic Menagerie.

In it cats would claim an important chapter. The best known is probably the industrial-sized cat who is Saint Jerome’s constant eremitic companion, just as in the secular tradition, and for nearly identical reasons, he is the companion of Androcles. But the most delightful monasticat is surely the humble mouser, Pangur Bán, who crept about the scriptorium of the famous island abbey of Reichenau, in the Bodensee, probably sometime in the eighth or ninth century. In the margins of one of his manuscripts a nameless Irish monk, far from home, wrote in his native vernacular tongue a charming poem about Pangur Bán, whose Irish name means something like “Whitey,” “Snow White”, or rather (with a scriptural allusion to Mark 9:3) “Transfiguration White”.

Bulger Bán and Pangur Bán, alias McCavity, the Mystery Cat

"For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity." 

(Irish expatriates appear to be partial to the name “Whitey”, whether for felines or felons.)

Here are its opening lines:


I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.
'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net…

You should read the whole poem, which has been rendered into English by many eminent hands, including several well-known Irish poets. I want to recommend this translation of the English medievalist Robin Flower, because he so clearly presents the poem’s actual subject, which is that special mode of scriptural exegesis called by the monks the lectio divina. The lectio divina (“sacred reading”) was to the pleasures of the heart and mind what the Slow Food Movement is to the pleasures of the tongue and gullet. The medieval monks savored their readings in the Bible, which they sometimes compared to the extraction of honey from the comb or marrow from the bone. For they sought what they called the “spiritual sense” of a text, its veiled or allegorical meaning. That is what the old Irish poet meant by capturing a meaning with the net of his thought.

Reichenau today

Our own English poetry was born of the monastic life. Bede tells us as a notable wonder the story of the poet Caedmon, an uneducated agricultural worker in the coeducational monastery at Whitby in Yorkshire. Though illiterate, Caedmon, through divine inspiration, was able to transpose into English verse the Bible stories read to him by the brothers. Bede draws his very traditional monastic simile from the bovines rather than the felines: “And he was able to learn all that he heard, and, keeping it all in mind, just as a clean animal chewing cud, turned it into the sweetest song.”

The word hermit literally means a “desert-dweller,” and the old practitioners of the lectio divina associated themselves metaphorically with the four little critters of the wasteland (Proverbs 30:24) that are “the least upon the earth, yet exceeding wise”: the ant, the grasshopper, the rock-dwelling rabbit, and the lizard (stilio). It is this association that explains the recurrent zoology and entomology of learned medieval and Renaissance pictorial treatments of ascetic themes.

Saint Jerome with friends

Upstate Adventures

The Falls in the Huyck Nature Preserve, Rensselaerville NY

We have just returned from a nearly magical place called Rensselaerville, near Albany, where my wife had been invited to preach at the bicentennial celebration of the local parish church.  As the church is dedicated to the Trinity, and as it was Trinity Sunday, the topic of the sermon naturally had to be that most exalted and mysterious doctrine; and aside from perhaps Saint Augustine and Dorothy Sayers, I doubt that anyone has done a better job.  My part in the event consisted entirely in receiving graciously the lavish hospitality afforded us by various fascinating residents of the place.

Trinity Church, Rensselaerville NY, founded 1811

            Worthy though it be, however, Rensselaerville will serve this blog post only in an ancillary fashion, providing the excuse for a couple of nice photographs, and acting as an antiphrastic counterpoint to my first experience of Upstate New York, which was singularly bizarre.  For Joan has her calling, and I have had mine.       

About forty years ago I participated in an academic conference held at the State University of New York at Binghamton, probably a hundred miles west of Rensselaerville. There is at that institution a Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.  It is today a kind of living skeleton, but five or six budget-slicing governors ago it was pretty lively.  Its comparative prosperity was fostered by a director, a senior scholar in my field, who practiced unconventional economies.  He asked me if I could help save the budget a little stress by staying not at a hotel but at his daughter’s apartment, which was not far from the campus.  The daughter would return to the parental home for the week-end, and I would be joined at her place by another participating scholar, a friendly acquaintance of mine from the University of Illinois.

            Naturally, I agreed.  Elaborate three-way communications among Binghamton, Princeton, and Champaign-Urbana took care of driving instructions, the location of a secreted key, and one or two other details.  I drove up on a nasty autumn afternoon.  By the time I reached Scranton, with fifty miles still to go, the shades of night were falling fast, and snow, which had been threatening all afternoon, began in earnest.  So I was glad to get to Binghamton safely, to find the apartment after only negligible misstep, to find the key immediately and, what’s more, to find that it opened the door.

            What I did not find was my Illini friend, who never showed.  It later turned out that he had been overtaken by the storm and sought shelter in an Interstate motel.  But this was in the age before cell phones.  So I put the key back in its hiding place, wrote him a note, left the light on in his presumed bedroom, and went to bed in my own.  About three in the morning the telephone wakened me.  I intended simply to wait it out, but it continued with insistence—I mean twenty rings, maybe thirty.

            At last I answered it: “Hullo?”

            After the briefest pause, an instantly angry, feral, male voice, in which I seemed to detect chemical additives, shot back: “Donna!  Where’s Donna?”

            “Uh, Donna’s not here.  She…”

            “Listen, ---- ----, put Donna on the line, and do it now!”  He sounded scary, very scary.  Under these circumstances of nearly maximal disorientation I did not acquit myself well.  I tried, not very plausibly, to give an account of the situation.  My grandfather had an old saw: “When a man argues with a fool, the fool is doing the same thing.”  I found myself saying ridiculous things.  “Look,” I said.  “I’m a speaker.”  This fatuity merely gave him an opening for his redneck repartee.

            “Oh, yeah?  Well, I’m a speaker, too.  And I’m speaking to you right now…And I’m telling you I know exactly where that bitch’s place is.”  He spoke next about his gun and its caliber—thirty-eight—which he intended to take with him on his speaking tour, the first stop of which was apparently the bitch’s place.  The next topic was what he intended to do to me and Donna upon arrival.

            He finally got off the line.   It was then I discovered that I was alone in the house, that Prof. Illinois was a no-show.  That night I slept no further.  I reclaimed the key from the icy front porch—for all I knew he was accustomed to finding it there himself—then sat for three hours in the pre-dawn dark watching the dimly lit street through a crevice of Venetian blind.  Nothing but wind and waving limbs.

            I was not in the greatest form for my speaking role the next morning, but I got through it.  As I sat listening to other papers, very few of which reached the standard of my wife on the Trinity, I wrestled with an inner moral dilemma.   The matter seemed to me delicate.  I didn’t know Donna from Adam—or Eve either, for that matter.  I knew Donna’s father only slightly.  But I myself was a father—of quite young children, to be sure—and I had to imagine that any father would want to know, and need to know, about the maniac on the phone.  So seizing my courage in both hands, I took the distinguished Professor X aside at the afternoon coffee break.

            “Uh, Bernie, look…this is very awkward, but I have to tell you about a disturbing thing that happened last night…”

            “Yeah?  Really?  What’s that?”

            “Well, there was this phone call…it was for Donna, but of course I answered it.  There was a man, maybe drunk, maybe high, but violent-sounding…and…he seemed to have some relationship with Donna, and he…”

            My host, looking very puzzled, cut me off with a query: “Donna?  Who’s Donna?”  His daughter’s name was Susan.  I had apparently been terrorized by a seriously wrong number.