Robert Hollander

 

 

 

            Robert Hollander, the eminent Dante scholar, died about a week ago at the age of eighty-seven.  For more than a decade he had faced with great courage a series of daunting medical challenges.  His last months were spent living with his son’s family in Hawaii, and at the very end, comforted with familial love, he departed in repose and peace.  I call him the Dante scholar, and that is certainly accurate enough, though wholly insufficient.  With equal justice I could call him one of Princeton’s legendary scholar-teachers, one of America’s national leaders in the humanities, memorable conversationalist, amiable bon vivant, admirable husband and father in an impressive family.

           

            Obituaries now in preparation will document Bob’s extraordinary contributions to the study of medieval Italian literature.  They will include rich bibliographies and an impressive list of honors, prizes, and awards.  I may well have some part in writing one of them.  But the category on which I feel most moved to speak in this venue is something quite other: Hollander as friend.  We were friends, close friends, for fifty years.  We were also colleagues, collaborators, and occasional co-conspirators.  There is no greater trial of advancing age than the capricious but inexorable disappearance of old associates.  So many dear old companions of the way are gone, and I have now lost the closest of them all.  Yet I had had some insulation from the bad news, having experienced its premonition two years ago in another devastating blow.  That was when Bob’s wife Jean died.  Bob had himself long been seriously disabled, and he and his children decided that he would leave New Jersey to live with them in the West, alternating between households in Alaska and Hawaii.  Travel arrangements had already been made when a group of family and friends gathered, in what was also a farewell to their lovely house in the Hopewell countryside,  for a mellow meeting in Jean’s memory.  It was a lovely event, if one doubly bittersweet; for we recognized at the time the probable finality of the goodbyes.

 

            Cicero famously defined friendship as “a complete identity of feeling about all things in heaven and earth: an identity which is strengthened by mutual goodwill and affection.”  In my opinion that better defines a cult or a crush than a friendship, but it includes some of the right elements.  Our friendship was certainly based in shared common interest, respect and  affection; but it was also one long, continuing, and movable debate about fundamental aspects of medieval literary aesthetics.  Then, again, even I can recognize that if the beef is about “fundamental aspects of medieval literary aesthetics,” it may not actually be life-threatening.

 

            Our friendship mainly played out, naturally, in our shared professional arena of Princeton University; but many of its most memorable moments occurred far from its campus.  Years ago, the university owned a magnificent white elephant of a vacation “cottage” of robber-baronial dimensions on a Maine island.  Before the Administration got rid of it in a spasm of defeudalization, the Dean of the Faculty used to run an annual lottery that allowed a few interested professors to spend a week or two of the summer in this blissful place.  One year very early on the Hollanders won a spot and invited us to join them.  That was the beginning of periodic social interchanges for the next four decades, and the premonition of marvelous Italian adventures yet to come.

 

            Every university has certain famous courses, and among the most famous at Princeton has been the undergraduate Dante course as established by Hollander.  As notoriously demanding as notoriously rewarding, the course aspired, as Milton’s Paradise Lost had done, to a “fit audience if few.”  So each year the course attracted a few of the institution’s most brilliant students, and thus, over time, developed one of its more intellectually adventurous alumni subgroups.  The annual Class Reunions are a huge deal in this institution, and at some point the burgeoning body of Princeton dantisti—Hollander himself being a member of the Class of 1955—decided that the Purgatorio was preferable to blow-pong as a Reunion activity.  Thus the “Dante Reunion” made its intellectual intrusion into a traditionally saturnalian weekend.  Still later certain alumni, perhaps having grown somewhat thicker of wallet and possibly of girth, had a real brainwave: how about a week-long summer Dante Reunion seminar in some nice, sunny place, for example a trecento castle in Tuscany?  This fabulous place is near Certaldo, home town of Boccaccio; and it was known among the elect simply as “Il Castello.”  There Bob conducted alumni seminars.  As a teacher he was not flamboyant, yet he was nearly magical.  Teaching really difficult materials at the undergraduate level is a special art.  His forte was such teaching.  Italian Studies are not prominent in America, and he had few graduate students.  Fortunately one of those few, the brilliant and charismatic Simone Marchesi, today continues the distinguished tradition of Italian medievalism at Princeton.  Around the millennium I was lucky enough to be included as an ancillary spear-bearer in several of the Castello summer seminars.  Our experiences there remain, and will continue to remain, among the happiest we have ever had.  Most people who read Dante once return to read him again, and then probably yet again.  I certainly do, and as I do I will always remember Bob sitting at the head of a huge mahogany table surrounded by eager students of several generations.  It was through the Castello seminars that Joan and I first met some of our dearest friends.

 

 

 Jean and Bob Hollander in a photo publicizing their three-volume bilingual edition of the of the Divine Comedy, a superb text and mini-encyclopedia of the poem's scholarship

  

            Though I am eschewing any serious discussion of Bob’s copious publications, which would require a book chapter rather than a few blog paragraphs, I do have to make one exception.  Walking on Dante (1974), one of his tomes perhaps lesser known in the scholarly world, is known intimately to me.  That is because I hand-set the type for it, printed it, and bound it.  This book, rather this beautiful book—if I say so myself—is a collection of twenty-two of Bob’s poems, most of them previously unpublished.  Both Bob and Jean were serious poets, a fact that contributes uniquely to the excellence of their highly praised Dante translation.  Jean, indeed, published several volumes of her poetry, and for many years taught courses in poetry writing.  She left behind an admiring alumni body of her own in the Princeton area.

 

            I had only the smallest role in selecting the poems to be included in Walking on Dante.  There is a certain sprightliness to a few of them, as might be suggested by the flagrant musical pun in the title; but a quite serious one for which I’d like to claim some credit for its having been included is called “L’Annunziazione”.  I might describe the poem’s subject as the Italian character.  It reminds me rather of Auden’s famous “Musée des Beaux Arts”, as it is a poet’s reflection inspired by his viewing a painting.  In this instance it was a traditional religious painting by the fifteenth-century Italian artist Marco Palmezzano.   I am no expert on Palmezzano, who produced more than one “Annunciation,” but the painting Bob had in mind must surely be that most often identified as “Annunciation with seascape,” in the Vatican Museums.  Not that it actually matters for the meaning of the painting or that of the poem.  “Palmezzano understood / How things should be announced, /  From bodiless spirit to spiritless flesh;/ And so the two become / Embodied inspirited one.”  Any painting or poem about the Annunciation necessarily reenacts its theological subject even as it describes it: the subject of Incarnation, that is, the word made flesh.  Bob was an agnostic, not a religious believer; but he tolerated believers like me.  Indeed he knew more Catholic theology than many a seminary professor.  Dante, whose aesthetics are fundamentally grounded in an incarnational vision, demands no less of his most serious students.  As a dantista I am myself and will remain an amateur—a fairly knowledgeable one, I hope, but still an amateur.  Like Dante the pilgrim himself I am dependent upon good guides.  How lucky I have been to find one not merely in the pages of books but in the incarnation of a sustaining friendship of many decades.  Robert Hollander (1933-2021): Requiescat in pace.

 

 

Tree Planting

                                          one newly manufactured tree fence
                                            you can at least see its shadow

            I have the feeling that we really are finally arriving at a hopeful moment.  In part it is the weather, in part the impressive evidence of the national vaccination campaign.  This past weekend Joan and I broke free from what has seemed an interminable house arrest and drove thirty miles north and west through the greening countryside under bright sunshine to the beautiful country property of our elder son Richard and his wife Katie Dixon.  This modest excursion induced the amount of excitement one might expect from a week in Paris.

 

            Rich and Katie had planned a kind of working house party, at which numerous invited friends would enjoy a day in the vernal countryside and some top-quality gourmet food in exchange for a few hours’ help in planting out some seventy-five seedlings fresh from the greenhouses of the New Jersey Forest Service.  We arrived mid-morning on Saturday, spent the night, and returned home not too long after the lunch hour on Sunday.  In my geriatric condition I move pretty slowly (and uncertainly) and huff and puff a good deal.  It’s discouraging, but my doctor advises me to take as my reference point not my youthful self but other octogenarians.  By that standard things are a little brighter.  Even my small contribution was helpful, since for a variety of reasons not too many other indentured servants showed up.

 

                                                                           repairing devastation
 

            Among the serious damage inflicted by a series of major storms, beginning with superstorm Sandy nearly a decade ago, has been that inflicted on local woodlands.  The high winds damaged or flattened many large trees, including two in our own yard, and many untended woods are difficult of access on account of the tangle of fallen branches and trunks, and the thickets of opportunistic brush growing up amidst them.  There are many unpleasant aggressors just waiting for a chance, including a horrible strangler vine called China Berry or Porcelain Berry.   At Richard and Katie’s place, certain windswept patches of once heavy woodland look nearly clear-cut.   In ages primeval the fallen wood slowly pulverized, enriching the soil for new growth  This process must have often been accelerated by terrible fires ignited by lightning.  The recent forest fires in California have dramatized the dangers of building human habitations in forests that are in a “natural” or “unmanaged” state—the adjective having come to bear as much political as descriptive weight.  Forest fires are less common in our forests of the Northeast, but there are many other reasons to clean up and reforest devastated patches.

 

Infant white pine

            The New Jersey Forest Service has an annual sale of seedling trees--conifers and hardwoods—at low prices.   You order them in the winter, and since the competition is hot you order them early.  Richard ordered seventy-five divided among three species: Eastern white pine, white oak, and Cornelian cherry.  The white oak is one of my favorite of all trees, despite the fact that one came within about six inches of killing me sixty years ago.  And the prospect of a pine grove, with a breeze gently moving through the needled limbs and the sweet smell of fallen needles underfoot, is a happy one.  Not that I will be around to enjoy it.  I am just a one-time country boy.  My son is a real naturalist and environmentalist.  He has a rather purist attitude toward the Cornelian cherries, which were perhaps part of the package deal from the Forest Service.  They are not a native Eastern Seabord species, but some kind of exotic import.  My own view, strangely more liberal than his in this instance, is that we should to the degree possible view “invasive” botany rather as we are told to regard human migration, from a practical and welcoming point of view.  The dogwoods that have been naturalized in southern woodlands are a wonderful aspect of the countryside, and I do hope to survive long enough to see some yellow blossoms on the fast-growing Cornelians at Richard’s place.

 

                                            preparing the ground
 

            Richard had identified well in advance two or three plots, each fairly distant from the others, and marked each proposed tree site with a little flag on a wire mast, each coded by tree species.  What needed to be done now was to clear debris and rocks, dig the holes and fill them with turned soil, plant the seedlings, and get them off to a running start with a generous watering.  The final step was to protect them with a stout wire enclosure.

 

            My own entire effort was directed to the inglorious final step, time-consuming but indispensable.  I spent a few hours  constructing the tubular cages needed to protect the seedlings from the deer, at least for a few years that could give them a good start.  If unimpeded Bambi’s mother will happily chow her way through your entire vegetable garden in half an hour.   When browsing over the open forest floor she will snap up almost any inviting green sprout or interesting tender bark she sees poking up through the earth.   The staggering profligacy of arboreal reproductive effort—think of the number of acorns produced by a single mature oak--attests to the daunting prospects awaiting any particular seed.  Foraging animals are not the least of the challenges.

 

            The raw materials for my personal task were some heavy rolls of soldered wire fencing five feet high with a grid of two inches by four inches; my only tool was a fine old pair of industrial pliers with a keen wire-cutting edge.   My workshop was the driveway in front of the house.  I first cut length of a hundred inches, a bit over eight feet, with one edge trimmed even with the vertical and the other left with the two-inch prongs of wire left free.  I then joined the two long sides to make a circle, bending the two-inch prongs back upon themselves to suture the wire into a latticed tube.  This takes a little skill and considerable hard work.  It is fairly heavy gauge wire, and bending short pieces of it accurately is hard work.  But you end up with a mesh tube five feet high and more than thirty inches in diameter which, when properly installed atop the planted seedling, offers reliable protection for an indefinite period.  I did the better part of a roll on Saturday, and a full one on Sunday, or about twenty individual tubular fences.  Richard had done a large number before I arrived.  Altogether I think that fifty of the trees are now in the ground, most if not all with their mesh protection.

 

            Being on the fence is seldom an admirable position.  But in this ambiguous world in which imperfection characterizes so many of our actions, it is a pleasure to participate in something so unambiguously wholesome as planting trees.  Not that I in fact actually planted any over the weekend.  But they also serve who only stand and wait, as Milton says.  Waiting with me I had from time to time a delightful young granddaughter who will, I hope, soon enough see the seedlings outstripping her in height.  And as a first premonition of post-pandemic possibility, our arboreal weekend is likely to remain long and happily in the family memory.

 

 

most photos by Richard A. Fleming

 

The Forsythia Saga

 

 

Around these parts spring made a dramatic start, but quickly retreated into a protracted period of cool and damp, by no means a serious threat of a return to winter, but far from an invitation to cheerful outdoor activity.  So far as the enjoyment of spring’s arrival is concerned,  meteorological circumstances have thus cooperated with the severe constraints imposed by the coronavirus pandemic to mute, to some degree, the impact of what is ordinarily a boisterous annual experience.  Many flowering trees are in bloom.  Some, indeed, are already beginning to go over.  But as I barely go out in the town, what I have actually seen has been limited to my local walks.  Most of these do include lovely greening woods and waterside paths along the lake front or the canal tow-paths.  Here one does see a few flowering trees, including some tall and spreading ornamental cherries, but there are no architect-designed pleached floral alleys as there are in places on the campus and the center of the town.  Under these circumstances, I have gained a renewed admiration for simple old standbys—I’ll call them simply the yellows—that never let you down.

 

            The first of these are the daffodils.  Every year they are magnificent, but this year more than ever.  The daffodil is dear to my heart for many reasons.  Nature is full of ugly ducklings, but the transformation of  a wrinkled oniony thing that looks like a cold scrotum into a delicate and magnificent yellow bloom is, so far as I am concerned, better than the ontological argument for the existence of God.  Furthermore, with even a minimal attention to care in planting, the daffodil will multiply, it will naturalize, just become a faithful and comfortable part of the scene, asking little of you while offering so very much.  Best of all, if you should happen to be outnumbered by deer in your neighborhood by a ratio of ten to one, it may well be the only thing you plant that you can be pretty sure will not become a few molecules of a venison haunch before it can get three inches high.  Finally, even more than the red, red rose, it must be any English professor’s favorite flower.  Poetry is so endangered in this country that I sometimes think there are more people who write it than who read it.  But you generally count on people—at least most pre-millennials—vaguely remembering their Wordsworth as he himself so vividly remembered the waving oceans of yellow flowers.  “They flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude, / and then my heart with pleasure fills / and dances with the daffodils.”

 

 

            But the yellow spring flower that I would perhaps praise even more highly is yet more humble and more commonplace: forsythia.  The tiny flashes of yellow along the luxuriant green bushy stems are often the very first indications of spring’s arrival.  This year the yellow glints were showing out under the snow.  I think that only the snow drops were earlier, and white against white does not make what you would call a vivid display.  Daffodils are fairly easy to deal with.  Forsythia is almost impossible to kill—and I speak as a gardener who has proved his ability to kill anything.  If you cut off a length of forsythia branch and push the cut end into the earth and abandon it, there is a fifty percent chance that it will root and thrive.  If you put a few grains of grafting hormone on to it, the chances approach ninety-five percent.  Along the main road leading from Route 1 into the town of Princeton there is a stretch of still mainly open land belonging to the university, perhaps half a mile long,  For nearly half of that distance there is on one side of the road a gorgeous forsythia hedge from which I have, over the years, taken probably as many as a hundred cuttings.  Since the mass of brilliant yellow on the forsythia bushes comes and goes within a month, it is most fortunate that the lush green of the abundant leaves makes the forsythia an attractive edging plant at all seasons of the year.

 

 

            Quite a few words in the English language derive from the names of actual people, and many of them are somewhat disquieting.  One does not want to fall victim to Lynch law, contract Parkinson’s disease, or fail a  Wassermann test.  What we might call the linguistic Overton window continues to open ever wider so as to allow of Reaganomics and such.  Some very great ones lend their names to new-found stars.  But the highest achievement of all, to my mind would be to have a flower bearing your name.  Look at the bright blossoms (bracts, actually) of the bougainvillea vine, named of course after Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the Gallic Captain Cook.  You practically hear the lapping of the waves below the gunnels, or catch a mental glimpse of Gaugin’s Tahitian woman in the red skirt.

 

            The name forsythia honors the memory of William Forsyth (1737-1804), one of several great British gardeners of the classic period.  Forsyth is not perhaps as famous as the two Tradescants (>tradescantia) of two centuries earlier; but he was a man of parts who played an important role in the histories both of botanic medicines and of garden architecture.  He was born into proletarian obscurity in Oldmeldrum in Aberdeenshire, an out-of-the-way place that, oddly enough, I actually visited in the late 1950s.  The countryside in that northern blade of Scotland is magnificent in a rugged sort of a way, and I remember it as feeling very remote.  It probably would have seemed a good deal more so in 1737, when Forsyth appeared on the scene.  He made his way to London in the 1760s, where he eventually took charge of the Apothecaries’ Garden in Chelsea and later of the royal gardens of Saint James and Kensington.  He is credited with constructing the first English rock garden, using (among other randomly gathered stones) plaques of lava fetched from Iceland.  He deserves his halo of brilliant yellow blossom.

 

American Poet

Amanda Gorman

 

            One of the high points of the inauguration of President Biden was the poem written and read from the Capitol steps by Amanda Gorman, our “youth poet laureate” and a recent Harvard graduate.  Her poem, entitled “The Hill We Climb,” hardly  glossed over the specific circumstances of its  difficult and dramatic historical moment.  The bitterly divisive recent election is there, including the aftermath of the shocking riot  that had transpired on virtually the same spot two weeks earlier.  So is the national racial turmoil, and so is the coronavirus pandemic.  Thus the composition combines some somber truth-telling that seasons its emphatic aspirational encouragement, all of it animated by a glowing American patriotism, and all of it arranged with a technically assertive verbal boldness of musicality, assonance, and hinted half rhymes, emblems perhaps of a national work in progress.  The “occasional poem” is a difficult genre with few long-remembered examples, but “The Hill We Climb” may turn out to be one of the few.  The attractiveness of the young poet, the playful seriousness of her poem’s content, and the tidal wave of good will with which it was received, all suggest as much.

 

            I suppose it is my inner English professor who led me to think of an even younger poet writing two hundred years earlier.   “Much have I travell’ed in the realms of gold,” wrote Keats in 1816, “And many goodly states and kingdoms seen”.  He was twenty years old , and had but five more years to live.  In fact, young Keats had never been outside of England, and had seen little enough even of it.  The “goodly states and kingdoms” he had seen were imaginary.  He had visited them in his reading, and especially in his reading of poetry.  Such is poetry’s evocative power.  And now he has had an imaginative experience unlike any he has known before, one he compares to an astronomer’s  discovery of a new planet or the adventurer Cortez’s first sight of the Pacific ocean.  He has encountered Homer, the wellspring of our poetry, in the English translation of the Elizabethan scholar and poet, George Chapman.

 

            It is rather thrilling to find a poet paying homage to another in such a fashion.  And of course Keats honors two poets, the great Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the rather obscure George Chapman whose translation of Homer’s Greek was for Keats the necessary intermediary of transformative experience.  We can all appreciate Keats’s gratitude, since the number of native English-speakers who can read Homer in the original ancient Greek has always been small and today is miniscule.  How lucky we are to have our Richmond Lattimore, our Robert Graves or our Robert Fagles.  For this reason I have been saddened to read in the press of the controversy that has overtaken proposals to translate “The Hill We Climb” into several other languages.  The controversy, in my opinion, is really dumb, but emblematic of a larger cultural confusion that is actually quite dangerous.

 

            The controversy, as you probably know, or at least could easily guess, is about race.  Amanda Gorman is a dark-skinned American woman of African ancestry.  This fact, obvious to the thousands actually present at her poem’s reading and probably millions who have seen videos of the event, would be likewise obvious to a blind person as well, as it appears prominently within the first ten lines of her poem’s text.  Around this fact a strange doctrine emerged.  In several countries with readers eager to have the poem available in the local vernacular—two I have read about are the Netherlands and Catalonia—distinguished literary people have been discouraged in their proposals to translate the work because of, yes, the color of their skin.  It is not black.  What may seem incomprehensible to readers of ordinary common sense will be less surprising to those apprized of recent developments within our elite cultural institutions, where the Kool-Aid of “identity politics” has swamped the water mains.  It appears even to be bubbling up through the water coolers of our still partially empty business offices.

 

            All literary translation is difficult and necessarily somewhat approximate.  Poetry presents special problems.  The great classical scholar Bentley is supposed to have said of Alexander Pope’s efforts on the ancient Greek bard “It is a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”  Even if but partial success is the best to be hoped for, the first and indispensable requirement of anyone who would try to be a good translator is a thorough knowledge of the language being translated—in this instance standard American English as used by a highly educated American woman.  It is true that a broad familiarity with whole body of work of the author to be translated is relevant, and that in it there could conceivably be cultural markers related to race put to artistic purpose.  But this poem is in effect Ms. Gorman’s public debut, and its ceremonial role in a national occasion meant to unify and express a shared spiritual aspiration was anticipated and applauded.  The idea that it requires the pigmented sensibility of an Afro-Catalan to introduce her to an eager audience in Barcelona, or that the insufficiently pigmented are thought-criminals for even trying, is beyond preposterous.  Such views mistake the nature of poetry and insult the powers of poets to allow us to see through their art “goodly states and kingdoms” previously unknown, rather than confirm a party line.  Most of all they are deaf to the actual content of “The Hill We  Climb,” a poem animated by the universalizing national aspirations appropriate to its occasion.  The skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother is in the poem, but so are the embattled farmers of Concord Bridge, claimed and exalted by Gorman as “our forefathers who first realized revolution”.  Yes, our forefathers, an homage to the most famous speech of Abraham Lincoln, a man recently deemed by the members of the San Francisco School Board as morally unworthy of having one of their buildings named for him.  Ms. Gorman, thank God, is a Californian of a different stripe.  Our country desperately needs her youthful optimism and unifying encouragement, indeed that of her whole generation,

 

            Buoyed by spring’s arrival and promising news on the vaccination front I have felt that we were entering a more hopeful political climate as well.  Perhaps the mental aberrations that exacerbate our current sorrows are only temporary, though such an episode as this has to be discouraging.  But so was the first dawn of Easter here.  The morning was glowering, and though not exactly cold it was not warm enough for our proposed outdoor family feast in the early afternoon.  Various electronic devices were even threatening drizzle.  But by mid-morning the sun was shining brightly, and the air, still brisk, began to warm.  The Day of Resurrection turned out to be a resurrected day.  Our family get-together was a triumph.  Renewal, fresh possibility, exhortation to persevere in efforts of national perfection are major themes in “The Hill We Climb”.  Though it is not a religious poem, the author does invoke from the Bible a famous image of peace and plenty—the people gathered each beneath their own vine and fig tree—a favorite of our nation’s first president and, I hope a continuing inspiration to our forty-sixth.

Distanced Learning and Yearning

 

           Educational opportunities lurk in unlikely places.  A few days ago, while seated on the throne at  the end of the house where my wife’s study is located, I heard a southern voice speaking in an encouraging voice about—well, what was it about?  It was coming through or around a wall, with intermittent intelligibility, but I thought I caught a certain drift.  Some lady was giving instructions on what I supposed was a horticultural topic.  “Take you measured long leaf, tidily trimmed at either end, and find what you take to be as close as possible to its exact middle garble, garble… grasp the bottom, and fold garble this midpoint…”  My business done, I gave this little thought, though I later learned with surprise that Joan had been watching an instructional online video about making a palm cross out of a single narrow palm frond.  This is an operation that I myself last formed successfully when I was about twelve years old.  It takes some skill, and for me a forgotten one.  But the episode brought vividly to my mind the immanence of Palm Sunday, just around the corner.

 

             Somehow there was way more drama attendant  upon this memory jog than I would have expected.   Even the most variable of variable feasts are in fact not all that variable.  As a simple annually recurrent calendrical fact, Palm Sunday’s reappearance in March or April is obligatory.   Its religious significance is noted by but a dwindling part of the national population, many of whom are as oblivious of it as I am of National Doughnut Week—on my fairly safe assumption that there must actually be a National Doughnut Week.  What made the reminder of Palm Sunday of unusual significance to me was the association it now has for me with the Coronavirus Pandemic.  At a funeral in March of last year a man declined to shake hands with me.  While the effect of his refusal was rather startling, its manner was diffident and apologetic.  “I don’t think we are supposed to do that,” he said.  That was my first conscious awareness of the regime of medical “social distancing”.  By April 5—the date of Palm Sunday last year—we were not having funerals or any other church services.  That April there were 65,000 Coronavirus deaths in our country.

 

            A year of pandemic, especially one further distorted by political passion and dramatic social tensions, has doubtless taught us all many lessons.  The two somewhat eccentric ones I shall take up in this essay are things I have discovered about the Internet, what it is very good for and what it is not so good for.  One thing it is very good for—providing you have patience and lots of spare time—is the instructional video.  The construction of a palm cross is, when compared with, say, the construction of a catalytic cracking plant, a fairly simple undertaking,  But if all you are working from are unillustrated verbal instructions, it may not work that way.  My old friend Richard de Fourneval (fl. 1250) says that there are two modes of teaching: par parole, that is, verbal instruction, and par peinture, that is, by pictorial illustration.  When the two are intelligently and harmoniously joined, the educational effect can be impressive.  Richard had in mind the union of word and image in the hand-made book, or manuscript, as we usually call it.  Video photography has the potential to maximize the synergy of the verbal and the pictorial in our own age.

 

            I have discovered that there is an instructional video dealing with any activity on which I have sought tutelage.  For me,  this has primarily meant house and garden stuff.  There cannot be a carpentry, plumbing, or wiring  task for which you cannot find several Youtube tutors.  The abundance, indeed, is one of the problems.  There are many videos, but not many really good ones.  Indeed, most of them, in my experience, are pretty bad.  That is because the ability to make a perfect dovetail joint is very different from the ability to explain how it is done, or to use videography effectively.  This is where the time and patience come in.  You may have to look at six or seven of them before you find the right one, provided that there is indeed a right one.  But ordinarily it takes no more than three or four minutes to tell whether what you are watching is going to be of use.  On rare occasions your craftsman will be so good at pedagogic performance that there is no need for verbal explanations.  Somebody drew my attention to three substantial videos made by British master craftsmen—one a carpenter, one a glassblower, and one a blacksmith—in which there is no verbal commentary at all.  These are truly works of art about artists at work.

 

            The wild success of Zoom has proved the usefulness of computer technology in creating virtual conversations of various kinds.  The most numerous of these are probably also the least successful—the Zoom teaching attempted by our public schools.  While a half a loaf may be better than none, it may not be all that much better.  I suspect the pandemic will have significantly retarded the progress of a generation of our school children, and with serious results that are likely to appear only in future years.  On the other hand it may have remade the office workplace, and seriously affected the economics both of the urban commercial and suburban residential real estate markets—deflating the demand for New York office space while driving the prices of macmansions in Morris County to even more astonishing heights.  Zoom meetings are terrible for religious services.  The essence of the religious impulse is not belief but community.  The purpose of a congregation is to congregate.  The very etymology of the word points to the important, indeed indispensable feature of a physical gathering together.  Congregation is just about the opposite of “social distancing”, and it certainly is not the same thing as watching something.  So I very much hope the year ahead will be very different from the one we have just passed through.

 

           

 

           

Picking Up the Lingo

"Piramus and Thisbe" by Lucas van Leiden (1514)

            We need a word for a moderate or even hesitant form of video bingeing, snacking perhaps, or grazing.  Anyway, I was doing it over the past couple of weeks, the object of my leisurely consumption being a series called “Troy: The Fall of a City,” a sort of spaghetti epic treatment of the Iliad.  It actually has some fine moments.  There is a black Achilles, and the female lead, the German Bela Dayne, is gorgeous, weighing in at nine hundred and seventy millihelens, at the least,  the millihelen being of course the scientific term for the amount of beauty needed to launch one ship.  There was some highbrow fallout from this experience, as it reminded me of the magnificence not merely of Helen of Troy, but of the body of Greco-Roman mythology thought of as a vast literary epic of its own, and the inspiration of so many of our own great English language writers and those of the European continent.  Early in my graze I ordered a new second-hand copy of Bullfinch’s mythology—my old second hand copy, like far too many of my books, being unfindable—and have begun reading sequentially the long section on the Greco-Roman myths.  I have been doing some more formal studying too, and will soon come to it.  But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, especially now that spring is arriving.

 

            I have just returned from a glorious spring walk.  Along the lake bank, which is only about a quarter of a mile due south from our house, and all the way through beautiful, incipiently greening woods, there is a well-established path flanked by budding daffodils, the ancestors of which I myself planted over the years in my former role as chair of the Grounds Committee of our neighborhood .  Not quite ten thousand at a glance, but still enough to call Wordsworth to mind.  I then walked west along the ridge path overlooking the lake.  There is one discordant moment in this itinerary, when you have to cross a major county road that handles a fair amount of traffic, but it is only a moment or two until you have crossed it and left if out of sight.   Then all you see is the lake, the greensward of nice houses up the rise, and the wonderful woods practically groaning to break free of winter.

 

            Feasting on the spring beauty and drinking in the fresh spring air were not, however, all consuming.  I was thinking great thoughts.  For example, I was thinking that our armadillo likes to eat pineapples.  Furthermore I marveled that the girls’ monkey wears gray gloves.  These are not perhaps empirical facts, but as verbal icons they loom large in the on-line Portuguese language course I have started to follow.  I read in a newspaper column that the Duolingo ap is the most widely used freebee in the world.  I had never heard of Duolingo, but then I am used to learning, belatedly, about the world’s best, most important, most numerous, most rewarding and indeed most indispensable things; so I took it in stride.  I am also my father’s son.  Someday, perhaps, I shall be able to capture the essence of this great man in an extended essay.  Until then, anecdotes must serve, and this anecdote is about fireplaces, but also about learning Portuguese.  My father once built a beautiful fireplace for our house in Arkansas.  I thought it was a terrific fireplace.  When it was finished, he then got a book about how to build fireplaces and read it with great interest.  I actually published a book a few years ago about a great poem by Portugal’s greatest poet, Luis de Camões.  But his language is to contemporary Portuguese as Spenser’s is to contemporary English.  It is not all that helpful at a Starbucks, or in other contemporary colloquial situations.  From the orthographic point of view (that is, the way the language is written) a good knowledge of Spanish gets you at least halfway there.  And some ability in Latin—Camões was a great Latinist, and especially a student of Virgil, rather like Milton—gets you most of the rest of the way.  But from the oral point of view (that is, the way the language is pronounced in colloquial exchange) things are very different.  I discovered that some years ago when I visited Lisbon with my son Luke, who was fortunately fluent in (Brazilian) Portuguese after years of field work in the Amazon.

D. L., the avian Lusophone

 

            If you are still looking for pandemic pastimes, halting conversation with your computer in strange tongues is not a bad one.  This Portuguese course doesn’t move very fast.  In fact it is maddeningly slow.  The Duolingo ap is free in many senses, including its license to spend a quarter of the time encouraging you to move faster, learn more, and be cooler—all of which apparently can be achieved by moving up from the free lessons to the ridiculously inexpensive paid ones.  I know I ought to do that, but it is not only my miserliness that is stopping me.  The slow pace, with its leisurely reinforcements and its ruthless attitude to mistakes, really drums the stuff into you.  My certainty that the Portuguese word for armadillo is tatu (masculine) is now absolute.  My grandchildren’s names will surrender to Alzheimer’s before the Portuguese appellation of the armor-plated pride of the family Dasypodidae does.  Will we ever be able to travel again?  How I long to find myself in some Lusitanian hotspot where, in the normal flow of conversation,  I shall be able to inquire of my hosts, quite casually of course, Teu tatu é tatuado?  (Is your armadillo tatooed?).

 

            Joking aside, even the most elementary language study can encourage advanced aspirations.  I don’t think I had even heard of Portugal’s greatest novelist—José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900)--until a few years ago.  Now I find myself caught up in his novel called The Relic, at once a comedy of manners, rich in familiar picaresque devices and situations, but also very urgent in its free thinking anticlericalism that must have seemed quite shocking to Lisbon’s conservative bourgeois citizenry of its day.  No armadillos so far, but of course he was not writing from Brazil. 

 

            The great preservers of  Greco-Roman mythology were the poets, beginning with Homer and Virgil themselves.  European epic poetry of the Renaissance naturally regarded mythological elements as an essential part of the form.  The prominent presence of pagan religious myths frequently surprises readers of such overtly Christian works as Paradise Lost, but it is in fact very common feature of humanistic poetry.  Think of the extraordinary classical apparatus in the Divine Comedy of Dante, most religious of poets.  The great Portuguese poet of the Renaissance, Luis de Camões, wrote a historical epic (The Lusiads) about the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India in 1498; but the history is almost overwhelmed by supernatural elements taken from pagan poetry.  We would expect that Neptune (Poseidon) would have an important role in a seafaring epic, as he does, but the real arch-enemy of the Portuguese mariners is Bacchus—an extraordinary invention of the poet’s fertile brain.

 

            Meanwhile, throughout The Lusiads, there are literally hundreds of allusions to classical myth, doubtless many more than I have noted.  One just popped off the page at me while I was studying a Duolingo lesson on fruits and vegetables, where I learned that my armadillo had eaten thirteen abacaxis (pineapples).  Few myths are more tragically poignant than the story of two young Babylonians, Piramus and Thisbe, most ancient of star-crossed lovers.  Forbidden by their parents to be together, they carried on a secret conversation through a chink in the wall that separated them, and thus planned to run away for a nocturnal tryst beneath a mulberry tree at a secluded local historical site, the Mausoleum of Ninus.  Thisbe arrived first, but she fled when a marauding lion appeared.  The lion was gone by the time Piramus got there, but it had left signs that misled the young man to believe that Thisbe was dead.  So he killed himself.  By then Thisbe was cautiously returning to the designated mulberry tree, where her discovery of the gory corpse of Piramus led her to—kill herself.  The most beautiful rendition of this story is in Ovid, who explains that it was in response to this tragic event that mulberries, which had until then been a white fruit, turned red from the spurting blood of Piramus.  The most popular version of this sad tale perhaps is the burlesque presented by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

The mulberry, fruit of love and death

     Late in the Lusiads, in the ninth of its ten books, Venus decides that the triumphant Portuguese, now on their homeward journey, deserve a little reward: some rest and relaxation on the Isle of Love.  This is, of course, an Earthly Paradise and Garden of Delights of which the Club Med is the palest of modern imitations.  Everything is perfect in this place.  Without going into the sex part, the goddess Pomona, in charge of fruit orchards of every kind, has been particularly lavish.  All sorts of fruits flourish here, and without the need of laborious cultivation.  The two specific fruits the poet names are the cherry and the mulberry, which share a vermilion coloration.  In a line I had not noticed before, Camões speaks of mulberries as the fruit “that takes its name from love”.  It happens that the Portuguese word for mulberry, as I now know well,  is amora.  The Portuguese word for love is amor, unchanged from the Latin word from which it derived.  But Portuguese amor and amora have no real kinship.  One Latin word for mulberry was a Greek borrowing, morum, and this is the word from which the Portuguese derives.  Camões was a wizard classicist, and he would have known this.  But just as he could make the actual history of Portuguese navigation bend to his poetic fancy, so also could he use imaginary etymology for the same purpose.  For a Renaissance humanist love and mulberries go together just as Piramus and Thisbe did: tragically, and in dark red.  But no wonder I didn’t get it the first time!

 

Portuguese merchants: pineapples in search of armadillos

Kathy Covid

 

            The past week brought us to a new plateau of optimism.  In large measure the explanation is rather obviously calendrical and meteorological.  We are very near the equinox.  The increment in the hours of daylight, the quality of the light itself, a dramatic if brief rise in temperature that has left in our field of vision only scattered patches of snow rather than deep snowfields.  We are threatened with some more cold days and even snow flurries, but we are surely past some tipping point.

 

            For us the specific day may have been February 19.  On that day we got our first injections of the Moderna vaccine.  I am fairly patient and stoical, but the moment I got the shot I realized that I had been much more concerned about the matter than I was willing to let on even to myself—or, perhaps, especially to myself.  The somewhat unlikely venue was the gardening section of a huge Walmart store in a shopping mall in North Brunswick, NJ, about fifteen miles north of us.  This may sound a bit dubious, but the whole set-up was brilliant—quick, efficient, and uncrowded.  The registrars were all friendly, courteous, upbeat young people, solicitous of  their elderly charges.  The hardest thing about it was walking from the registry desk at the pharmacy to the place where the shots were actually administered, a distance of about a city block, all of it of course through aisle after aisle of Walmart merchandise.  I deduce that the garden department had been chosen both for its peripheral location within the big box and because in mid-February there are few customers milling about among the large sacks of grass seed and turf-builder.  I suppose a sense of relief is what most people experience as they leave a Walmart,  but on this occasion the experience approached delight.

 

            But what I set out to write about was not that we got our jabs but how we came by them.  Many weeks ago I registered my sense of dissatisfaction at how vaccination was proceeding in the state of New Jersey.  The system was poorly organized and poorly explained, leaving one with the impression of a poverty of opportunities and an arbitrariness in their allocation.  I now realize this was, and to some extent still is, pretty much a national problem.  Elaborate websites featured impressive full pages of telephone numbers to call and forms to fill out, but none of this seemed ever to lead to actual vaccination appointments as opposed to endless referrals to other telephone numbers.  Once crucial medical workers and other “front-liners” had been addressed, the largest number of high priority candidates for vaccination were the elderly—and especially the already infirm elderly.  The press began to raise an unsettling theme.  Getting an appointment might depend less upon a theoretical eligibility than upon  digital sophistication and a persistent Darwinian competitiveness, characteristics for which the targeted population was perhaps not conspicuous.  Though there are more geezer computer whizzes and Tiger Greatgrandmoms than you might think, there was more than enough truth in this analysis to cause a bit of generalized elder distress.

 

            Then, out of the blue, I got a telephone call from a woman named Kathy.  She has a last name of course, but of course I didn’t take it in, neatly demonstrating that I was exactly the kind of person she had it in mind to call.  She is now preserved in my phone “contacts” as Kathy Covid—perhaps a poor repayment for her kindness, but an efficient way of differentiating her from  a surprisingly large number of other Kathies recorded in that registry.  Kathy was calling from somewhere up in the northern part of Somerset County.  She told me that she and a few friends had formed a group to help elderly people (the diplomatic phrase she used was eligible people) set up vaccination appointments.  Would we be interested?  You bet.  Within two hours we were able to schedule appointments.  I passed on her number to friends, and they had similar results.  When I called Kathy myself a couple of days later to thank her for her help, she was very gracious, though it seemed to me obvious that she hadn’t remembered my name.  By that time she had probably talked with, and aided, dozens of other elders.

 

            Most people who love poetry even a little are likely to have read Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a poem which is about, among other things, recollected memories and their relation to the moral life.  In it the poet recounts revisiting, after an absence of five years, the beautiful countryside above the ruins of a twelfth-century monastery on the Welsh borders.  His earlier memories of the natural beauty are revivified, though they have never left him.  “These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love…”   Little, unremembered acts of kindness and of love…perhaps the most famous lines in a famous poem.  They hardly need glossing, though these days one should perhaps make an observation relating to linguistic history.  Wordsworth here uses man in its common eighteenth-century generalizing sense of human kind.  It is not, as we say now, “gender specific”.  What Kathy Covid did for us was indeed an act of kindness and of love, and indeed was also apparently unremembered after only a few days, or at least detached from memorial specificity amid a plethora of other such kind acts.

 

            It is now just over a year a since the plague fell upon the world, negatively affecting all of human social life, but especially the daily life of complex industrial and commercial societies like our own.  And in our country the effects seemed exacerbated by a threatening synergy of medical and political malaise culminating, in these parts at least, in the midst of the darkening cold of winter.  The lack of social cohesion made vivid at the personal level in the enforced isolation of so many of us, and more broadly in the inability of our government to get anything very serious done, has seemed painfully apparent.  Under these circumstances little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love can suddenly claim a great name and memorability, certainly, among those who have experienced them.