Lawyered Up, Solecismed Over, and Bummed Out

QUESTION?

What does this guy…

…have in common with this guy?

The answer is obvious: “courtly love”.

Courtly love is an alleged set of extravagant amatory conventions characterizing various heroes of medieval romance, such as Lancelot (pictured above) or Troilus. The courtly lover turns pale in the presence of the beloved, stammers, sighs, falls ill, spends sleepless nights thinking about her; when at last able to speak he declares that he will die on the spot if he doesn’t, right away, get some of what he calls her mercy or grace. (This was called something else in my high-school locker room.) “Courtly love” of course required a lot of bizarre behavior; and it usefully allowed any scholar who had no idea what was going on in a medieval poem to ascribe it all to “courtly love."

Half a century ago my great teacher D. W.Robertson dealt courtly love a severe blow by denying its existence. He prosecuted the attack in numerous scholarly venues, including his classic essay entitled “The Concept of Courtly Love as an Impediment to the Understanding of Medieval Literary Texts.” According to Robertson courtly love was good, old-fashioned lechery nicely dolled up in Gothic weeds, but hardly if at all different from the extravagances satirized by Ovid in his elegies and Art of Love. Horace somewhat indelicately had called the Trojan War “the war of the cunnus,” suggesting perhaps that it was not Helen’s face alone that had launched a thousand ships. There were also biblical examples, such as Amnon’s passion for and rape of his half-sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13). Chaucer thought that story was so good that he modeled a crucial courtly love episode of his Troilus & Criseyde upon it.

Well, if “courtly love” was an unhelpful term, what were we supposed to call all this aristocratic moping about on the part of medieval romance heroes? Fortunately the silver screen came to the rescue. In 1956 there appeared a French film called Helen of Troy. Rossana Podestà (swiche wenche if ever there were one) played Helen. Jacques Sernas was Paris. Catch it if you ever get a chance. Time magazine, which in the 1950s published excellent movie reviews, devoted a dilly to Helen of Troy. “Helen of Troy”, it began, “is about hot pants in high places!”

Hot pants in high places! A great phrase—so much more accurate, and more memorable, than courtly love. It describes the conduct of the princely Troilus perfectly. Unfortunately it also describes the conduct of a guy who ignites his undies at 30,000 feet. That, of course, would be Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, forever to be known as the “Underwear Bomber”. It’s been some time since I wrote a “political” entry. This is not because politicians have ceased their fascinating operations, but because I have in recent months been badly placed for balanced and easily accessible American political news. But Mr. Abdulmutallab has made the front page even in Paris and has made me spend a two-hour reading seminar on RealClearPolitics.com, which does a passable job of anthologizing a wide spectrum of political opinion.

Practically all I read there is discouraging. The most sensible thing I read came from the pen of David Books. The nutshell version: “Grow up!” Bad stuff happens. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward. That’s the Bible, though if you prefer you can arrive at the same conclusion by keeping your eyes open for ten minutes. It is especially unseemly for people who denounce the capacities of the Nanny State to feed, house, or enable medical care for its charges to decry its failure to pry efficiently into every madman’s jockstrap.

Not that the response of the Obama administration is anything less than pathetic. I’ll come clean, though in the manner of ex-President Clinton. When it comes to the confessional mode, he has a lot to teach us all. Sure he smoked dope—but he didn’t inhale. Well, honesty requires me to admit that I did vote for Barack Obama. But I didn’t get the bumper sticker—honest. Since there is not a lot of moral high ground on the market at the moment, I want to snap up that little patch.

Sellers and Yeatman, in their brilliant serio-comic history of England called 1066 and All That, describe the seventeenth-century Civil War between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads as a contest between men who were “wrong but wromantic” and others who were “right but repulsive”. Such is the contest between President Obama and former Vice-President Cheney. The English language is always the first casualty. Mr. Obama is loath to find in Islamic terrorism the slightest thing Islamic or terroristic; so he gives it the old linguistic punt. He does admit, in the fine print, that we are “at war”. We are at war with a “network.” This network is composed of “extremists”. We cannot know what would be the norm or Golden Mean of the thing of which pyrotechnical underpants are an extreme.

Mr. Abdulmutallab had spent months studying network extremism in Yemen. His distressed father had told the American authorities about this—several times. Abdulmutallab travelled light (zero luggage), and he paid for his (one-way) ticket in cash. He breezed through the security inspections of two international airports. Reviewing this sequence of events Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security proclaimed that “the system worked”. When taxed by incredulous critics who made a different interpretation of the narrative outlined, she said that her remarks had been taken “out of context.” So I went back to the context. There would seem to be two related tasks faced by a Secretary of Homeland Security. You have to keep the horse from being stolen, and you have to lock the barn door. It’s one of those things like sex and the internal combustion engine for which proper sequence is a consideration. What Ms. Napolitano meant in context was that once the horse had been stolen the locking of the barn door worked “like clockwork”. Ms. Napolitano, too, is very careful about the words she uses to describe blowing airplanes to smithereens out of religious piety. Such acts are not terrorism. They are man-made disasters—along the lines of the Senate and the House of Representatives, one imagines.

Cheney is very certain that we are at war in a less metaphoric sense. Hence his outrage (shared by many others) that Mr Abdulmutallab is to be tried in civilian criminal court rather than a military tribunal. Mr. Abdulmutallab’s conviction would probably be more certain and more swift in a military tribunal. But the idea that we would be sure to get important “intelligence” by interrogating the bejesus out of him needs reconsideration. The three bits of information Abdulmutallab could be lawfully required to divulge as a prisoner of war are his name, his rank, and his serial number. Two of those he doesn’t have, and we already know his name.

However, Mr. Cheney’s idea has the brilliance of the general law of relativity when compared with that of Mr. Obama’s alleged “expert” on terrorism, Mr. John Brennan. (For Obama Abdulmutallab is merely an “alleged” terrorist, er network-extremist; the least one can do is afford Mr. Brennan the same benefit of doubt.) For him the advantage of a civil as opposed to a military trial is based not in the nation’s legal ideals but in pure Machiavellian practically. Brennan will get Abdulutallab to talk with a—plea bargain! He’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse! They need a few more historians around the White House. In 507 BC a Roman terrorist named Mucius (i.e., “Lefty”) Scævola snuck into the Etruscan camp to murder King Porsenna.

Even a serious strip-search didn't stop this terrorist. Mucius Scævola as rendered by Louis-Pierre Deseine

Paris: the Louvre

He killed the wrong man (honest mistake—bad things happen). At this point “the system worked perfectly.” Captured by the real King Porsenna and threatened with a strenuous military interrogation, Scævola showed his contempt for this pitiful threat by thrusting his right hand into a flaming brazier and keeping it there until al dente. That’s how he became “Lefty” Scævola. Porsenna was so impressed he simply let him go. Now Mr. Abdulmutallab has already demonstrated his readiness to immolate himself, private parts first, for the greater glory of God. Great Balls of Fire, Mr. Brennan, do you really think you are going to bludgeon this man with a plea bargain? I don’t know whether you have to talk like a plain country fool to be a presidential security expert, but it obviously helps.

Among the very worst things that has happened is that Mr. Abdulmutallab has now been “lawyered up”. I speak of course of linguistic crime. I never heard of anybody being “lawyered up” until three days ago, and I have encountered it among the RealClearPolitics articles no less than seven times. The meaning of this grotesque barbarism is apparently “benefitting from legal counsel.” We can look forward perhaps to college students being professored up, religious penitents being priested up, and MacDonald diners fastfooded up. One gets fed up, fast. We face in Islamic terrorism a set of difficult and complex challenges. Our president might even call them “unprecedented”. It is fatuous to suggest that they will be easily met, or that we are not likely to suffer more “episodes” and more loss of life. There are a large number of people out there who want to kill as many of us as possible, quite without respect to race, religion, or political party affiliation. We do not live in the kind of police state that would make it easy to stop them. Many of us are adults and would appreciate being talked to by our elected leaders in an adult fashion about our shared problems. There is unfortunately little precedent in the current administration or the one it replaced to make me expect to be straighttalked up any time soon.

Materia Medica

The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day has proved to be very busy without any of the accomplishment that should be the reward of being busy. From the point of view of developing good “blog experience” it has been a disaster. Perhaps this is the week to deal with the inevitable topic of French medicine.

Following the American news from Paris is no easy task. The filter of the French newspapers casts most things transatlantic in a rather sallow light, and the (mainly American) Internet “news” sites threaten to give triviality a bad name. Yahoo “news” is generally unable to decide whether the more important story should be impending bankruptcy of the nation or the traffic violations of some starlet I have never heard of. Nonetheless I followed the meandering course of the “health care” bill with some attention and probably as much comprehension as anybody else—and in particular the senators—who has little actual idea as to what is in the bill. Its passage is neither the end of the republic as we have known it nor a glorious moment in humanity’s slow ascent from the quagmire of necessity to the fruited plain of grace—the two options apparently offered by senators McConnell and Reid respectively—but we all can surely agree that the process by which it has been achieved is a vivid emblem of our sad and seriously dangerous state of governmental dysfunction.

Inevitably the American “health care debate” has been the occasion of a good deal of journalistic comparison of the medical “models” (the preferred French term) of the United States and France. A similar comparative interest has several times been expressed privately, by French friends or acquaintances. Michael Moore’s Sicko, which offered a view of French medicine nearly as complimentary as its account of the American scene was critical, has not surprisingly enjoyed a certain smug approbation in this country. I have a generally dim view of Mr. Moore, not to mention of French smugness; but the messengers of unwelcome truth are not infrequently obnoxious.

The HEGP, or Hôpital Européen Geogres Pompidou. The most important word is the E-word, which differentiates this institution from...

The political ordeal we are experiencing in America at the moment really doesn’t have much to do with “medical care” per se. It is a question, rather, of the economics of medical care. It does seem likely that the new bill will significantly increase the number of Americans who have some level of medical insurance. That is, the bill will indeed have an effect on the financing of medical care. Its effect on actual medical care itself is a subject of speculation, but there is good reason to worry. Since I am not an expert in the economics of medicine I can but offer comparative comment, anecdotally of course, on medical care itself.

My extensive experience with American medicine has been, in a single word, good. During my entire working life I had access to “employer-provided” medical insurance that was adequate for me and my family, and I was living in places served by numerous general practitioners and specialists. My experience with Medicare I would have to describe as excellent, especially since it has been supplemented by a reasonably priced private policy that has left me with a maximal worst case liability of ten percent. As for my actual family doctor—Dr. Y. H. of the Princeton Medical Group—she is superb. She is superb once you get to her, that is, but getting to her involves infiltrating a wall of “helpers” about as porous as the front line of the Notre Dame football team.

...the HAP, or Hôpital Americain de Paris. Five medicos in search of a patient...

Two years ago, while in Paris, I developed what I experienced as a generalized malaise accompanied by shortness of breath. After a while it dawned on me that it was connected with the sensation of an irregular heartbeat. It was in fact the onset of atrial fibrillation, although I did not know that at the time. My daughter, quite concerned, turned to the Internet to find a cardiologist in our arrondissement—which happens to house the Hôpital Georges Pompidou. (In France, many of the academic specialists split their hours of consultation between private and hospital offices.) This man (Dr. E.) was able to meet me at the hospital on the following day, but that was not the first unusual aspect of the experience. When my daughter phoned him, he himself answered the phone. The only thing disturbing in an otherwise wholly positive experience was that he insisted on speaking English. He had spent some months at the Mass General in Boston, and his English was pretty good—just not quite good enough to keep him from petrifying me. “I zink I know what is wrong with you,” he said, after a brief tour of the stethescope. “Your hert, your hert iz not working any more.” He then pumped a horse-syringe full of some liquid blood-thinner into me, to hold me until I could get to a pharmacy for my own supply—all of which was a temporary precaution until the orally administered Coumadine could begin to take effect in a few days. To be absolutely sure that his diagnosis was sound he sent me immediately (meaning within a few hours) to another hospital where a friend of his (Dr. B.), another alumnus of Mass General and this time the owner of a fine Boston accent, recorded an echo cardiogram. Dr. E. then saw me for two more extensive follow-up visits in which he outlined for me the practical meaning of atrial fibrillation, which would require either the permanent re-establishment of a normal rhythm (not easily done) or a continuing pharmacological course of small doses of rat poison. For four extended consultations, including several electro-cardiograms and an echo cardiagam, the fee was three hundred euros, which I paid in cash, without any formal billing procedure, though I was supplied with the receipts that probably would have worked for at least partial Medicare reimbursement, had I thought it worth the while to face the American bureaucratic hassle of seeking it.

I’ve had two other occasions to visit the office of a general practitioner. Each resolved the problem that had led me to seek a doctor’s help and prescribed effective medicine. Each charged me seventy euros for the visit, again paid in cash, and without the hassle of elaborate forms, bills with malfunctioning return envelopes, and the other stuff I have become inured to at home. I had to see one other specialist, a urologist—my ailments all being, alas, age and gender specific. This man is another academic expert, and he was a bit more expensive—120 euros. This man did have a receptionist, but she played no part beyond the decorative in my medical transaction. An amusing feature of our encounter was that I concluded he must have seen me before. By curious chance his son took a Ph.D. at Princeton a few years ago, and the father attended the Commencement ceremony, at which I must have been the chief marshal! He told me how impressed he was that all the seniors were able to understand the Latin of the salutatory address! So, you can fool some of the people some of the time.

Prescription drugs are delivered free of a purchase charge to French residents who possess the indispensable carte vitale—a sort of combination social security and medical insurance document that is the “Open, Sesame” of the socialized French “model”. I have no such card, of course, nor do I merit it by paying the taxes that actually pay for the medicine. But since the over-the-counter cost of drugs here is seldom so much as a quarter of the American price, this hasn’t been an issue either.

My experience allows two other observations. The first is that French pharmacists are trained to a high level. Many ordinary Frenchmen turn with confidence to the pharmacist for colds and sniffles and routine aches and pains. I suspect that some of the people in the always crowded waiting room at the Princeton Medical Center could usefully do the same thing. The second is the private testing laboratories, which are numerous throughout Paris, offer a cheaper and certainly greatly more convenient way of accomplishing routine blood tests and urine scans than is generally available in America. At least in my experience the contrast with a couple of Quest labs I visited in America, where the sullen staff seemed only marginally competent, could hardly be more dramatic.

And on that note, a happy New Year to all!

Merry Christmas

My blog is intended for a general readership, but I cannot always suppress my parochial particularities. I hope that whatever holiday you celebrate will be a happy one. If you celebrate none at all, let that abstention be no less happy. But Christmas has always been a big thing in my life, and I cannot pass over it without comment. As my friend Geoffrey said in another context, if you don't like this post, turn over the page until you find one you like better.The historical origins of our iconography of Christmas—snowmen, jingle bells, Yule logs, etc.—are capricious. How did Christmas come to fall in December? Easy: traditional chronology plus observed obstetrics. Otherwise the ripening grain would be an apter Christmas symbol than the pinecone. You may be unaware what time of year, exactly, God created the heavens and the earth; but medieval people had no doubts at all. Chaucer writes of “...the monthe in which the world bigan, /that highte March, whan God first maked man...” This business about the year beginning on January first is simply reinstituted paganism, secular humanism run amuck. Think about what the word “September” must mean. I am at the moment reading in the autobiography of George Sand and was delighted to find in one of her legal documents of 1848 the month abbreviated thus: 7bre. September is the seventh month by God’s reckoning.

These people also knew two other things: first, that God would have made the New Adam at the same season he made the Old Adam, and, second, that it takes nine months for a baby to gestate. In the beginning was the Word; and a child conceived at the beginning will come to term in December. The next bit of historical whismy was that by the high Middle Ages, when people began to pay a little attention to Christmas, Christendom was much more west and north than it was south and east. Hence Christmas cold, Christmas snow.

So it seems appropriate that the days leading up to Christmas have been very cold in Paris. Actually that means only a few degrees below freezing, but it was enough to halt the EuroStar. Overwhelming the mainly symbolic heating arrangements in our apartment was child’s play compared with that feat. There was a little snow, and since the Parisians have no idea what to do with it, it was soon trampled into slush which, when frozen overnight, makes the sidewalks treacherous, especially in the dark, which descends about five in the afternoon and is with us until eight in the morning.

Thus just as the frenzy of the pre-Christmas rush threatens to overwhelm, meteorological conditions have encouraged something very different, slowing down a bit. I find that coerced inactivity is seldom very productive. Sitting for three or four hours in a plastic bucket seat in an airport waiting for a long-delayed flight is my idea of penal servitude, and probably the kind the Constitution calls “cruel and unusual”. But this week I have found myself unwontedly reflective. What I have been reflecting about would not be easy to explain. In one of the fine old Prayer Book phrases it is “all the blessings of this life”. One of the most conspicuous of present blessings is our Paris church home, Trinity Cathedral, aka the “American Cathedral in Paris”.

Trinity Cathedral is a George Edmund Street building, and therefore necessarily gorgeous. Street was one of the great neo-Gothic architects, the peer of the American Ralph Adams Cram, architect of the Princeton Chapel. It was built in the late nineteenth century by the kind of expat Episcopalians you read about in Henry James or, even better, in Edith Wharton, who herself represented the strain in its purest form—upper-crust, cultivated, and moneyed. Such characteristics were perhaps prerequisites for people like Christopher Newman in The American, who could hang out endlessly being thwarted by the odious relatives of Claire de Cintré. A few days ago in the Carnavelet Museum I saw a painting by Jean Béraud dating from 1890 and therefore prior to the dictatorship of internal combustion, showing the street in front of the Cathedral filled with the carriages arriving to fetch the parishioners after Christmas morning service. Unfortunately I can find no photograph of it. There is in it, I think, a hint of the satire more blatantly present in the better-known “The Bourgeois’s Outing”?

This church of expatriates really became a French national treasure at the time of the Great War and the temporary euphoria of the post-Armistice period, no doubt the apogee of Franco-American amity in the twentieth century. You may be surprised to learn that Hemingway and Gertrude Stein were not the only Americans in Paris in the Twenties and Thirties; and quite a few of the others went to church. The Cathedral was the center of culturally and socially elite networks not unlike those of the great New York parishes (especially Trinity and St. Thomas) with which it has historic connections.

Today it has perhaps lost the social cachet it enjoyed in the belle époque, but it has gained something far more precious: social purpose. Its ambitious music program makes it an important contributor to the Parisian cultural scene. Its "Service of Lessons and Carols," which I attended last week, was packed with music enthusiasts. Its work among the poor and the needy—Jesus himself said that “you will always have the poor,” and I can assure you that the European social model has abolished neither poverty nor need—is impressive. There is a strong youth program. And the really little kids just put on the most tolerable of all the Christmas pageants I have ever sat through—a number that is large and positive. Not that the belle époque has entirely vanished, mind you. At Christmas Eve Eucharist two years ago one of the lay readers was Olivia de Havilland. Yes, that would be the Olivia de Havilland who with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable was one of the stars in the film of Gone With the Wind (1939). [Christmas Eve update: she's still doing it.]

There are many interesting decorations and memorials in and around the church. Among the most intriguing is this replica of the famous Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the national icon of Poland. It was placed in the church in fulfillment of a vow made by a Polish soldier, and it typifies the international and ecumenical flavor of the congregation.

But my experience of it has been chiefly that of a vibrant spiritual community. It has an excellent educational program, and we became swept up in it immediately. But most impressive is the nature of the congregation. Every shade of Anglican is to be found there—and by “shade” I refer both to skin pigment and theological opinion. There must be some nation of the earth that goes unrepresented, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you which that is. Many members are long-term American expatriates; but there are also many French members. There is a fairly serious attempt at bi-lingualism. Many others are like us, migratory birds, short-termers who are nonetheless encouraged and enabled to make quick and bonding friendships.

Though the role of the clergy is too often exaggerated in assessing the nature of Christian community, it surely does not hurt that the Cathedral has two superb full-time priests and an apparently never-failing succession of interesting visitors. The quality of the preaching—the consistent quality--is really extraordinary. I have spent much of my life studying medieval friars, but the first time I ever heard Meister Eckhart quoted from the pulpit was last Sunday. The Dean had found a passage in Eckhart—actually a medieval commonplace, but beautifully expressed by the Dominican mystic—that sums up the whole truth about Christmas. It is not a truth likely to be popular with the Israeli Tourist Board or the hawkers of souvenirs in the plaza in front of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, but it is finally very comforting. That truth is that it doesn’t really matter very much when and where Jesus was actually born, whether in stable or cave, whether in “the bleak midwinter” of December or the dog days of August. The obviously mythic accounts of the gospels present a cosmic event, not the necessary data for a form required of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. No, what really matters is where Christ will next be born. Meister Eckhart knew that place must be within the hearts of those who would follow him.

Libraries and Heaven

Instead of writing these silly weekly blogs I ought to take up some large and imposing essay of the kind that makes its way into the unread anthologies in the unvisited bibliographies of oversubscribed doctoral seminars in our literature departments. I already have a title, and lack only the essay to go with it. The title would be “Liminality and the (B)other: The Role of the Literature Professor in the Age of Obama”. That’s a nearly perfect title for the kind of academic essay that makes a professor famous, and for two reasons. In the first place it is entirely meaningless, and in the second the one part of it that verges in the direction of comprehensibility, the Age of Obama part, has absolutely nothing to do with the subject.

The problem, though, is not in finding a title. The problem is in the role of the Literature Professor. I ought to know; I’ve been one for upwards of half a century. If an English professor should go to a cocktail party attended mainly by non-professors—something that occasionally does happen—there is one question he fears but can never evade: “And tell me, what is it that you do?” I sometimes try to pass myself off as a mortician or a periodontist, but if I feel brave enough I come right out and say it: “Well, actually, I’m an English professor.” I continue to believe that there is no shame in that admission, but I do dread the inevitable reply: “Oh, I’d better watch my grammar!” Naturally the only rational response to this remark is a cringe.

For the fact of the matter is that most of my fellow citizens seem to believe that the role of my profession is to invigilate the language of the nation. This belief is nearly criminally naïve. Anyone who spends half an hour with a television set listening to our political leaders, or half an hour reading our journalists, should know for a fact that nobody is invigilating the nation’s language. Under these circumstances I thought it of conceivable general interest to explain what it is that a scholar actually does do.

That’s quite simple: a scholar reads, and a scholar writes, and a scholar teaches. In retirement I have somewhat withdrawn from the teaching part, but I continue to read and to write. Given the subject matter that most interests me, the Christian cultures of pre-modern Europe, this means that I am forced to hang out in some of the most gorgeous places on earth—libraries. The project I am engaged in just at the moment—a little book about Luís de Camões, the great Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century—has brought me to a particularly exquisite one.

It is true that the various kinds of “electronic resources,” for which the “Internet” is sometimes the abbreviated code, have greatly aided the work of the scholar. For some, such as the imaginary author of my imaginary essay, they seem to have precluded the need for books altogether. But I’m still addicted not merely to the printed word, but to the sights and smells and sounds of the places where the printed word has been archived by skilled and loving professionals who join technical expertise with greatness of soul. That is why on most mornings I take off as soon as possible for the library of the Fondation Calouste Gulbekian.

The name of Calouste Gulbenkian will be a household word to almost anybody who has done serious work on the culture of Portugal or that of any of the diverse and widely scattered places, from the upper Rio Negro to East Timor, touched by the amazing dynamism of Portuguese expansion in the early modern period. If you suspect that “Gulbenkian” doesn’t sound particularly Portuguese, you’d be right. He was an Armenian by origin, an exile by fate, a diplomat by hobby, an entrepreneur extraordinare by native capacity, and by choice one of the world’s great philanthropists, a Levantine J. D. Rockefeller. He rewarded his adopted homeland of Portugal with the gift of one of world’s truly fabulous art collections; and the foundation bearing his name continues to enrich the world of learning and culture today.

The Paris operation of the Gulbenkian Foundation is housed in a sumptuous hôtel particulier or as we would probably say a mansion on the Avenue de Iéna very near the Étoile. For out-of-towners I will say that that is a good address. The vibe of the place is very much that of, say, the Frick Collection or the Morgan Library in New York, but with the Robber Baron excess constrained by a certain Ottoman mesure. There is a great deal of activity in this building, the meaning of much of which I have yet to divine. There are recital halls. There are lecture rooms. Academic conferences are constantly in progress. There is a lot of gallery space full, at the moment, of seductive botanical paintings by Lourdes Castro. There is a large theater I must pass by, and in it there seems to be flashing upon the screen a never-ending postmodern slide show.

The actual library, at the top of a fabulous marble staircase, is small and jewel-like, a single long room with a fine old table in its center. At either end of the room is a desk where sits one of the highly competent and friendly librarians. Just at the door are the two computer stations, as discreet as such things can be, that give the scholar immediate access not merely to the Gulbenkian catalogue but to the catalogues of the great libraries of the world and even (groan!) to one’s e-mail. The room is girdled in towering glazed cases, at least fifteen feet high, full of beautiful leather editions of every reference book yet devised by the Lusitanian brain. Thick, ancient walnut shelves support rank upon rank of gilded leather: the Lendas of India of Gaspar Correa, Fortunato de Almeida’s Historia de Portugal in six volumes, the fifteen gleaming volumes of the Corpo Diplomatico Portuguez.

Doubtless these volumes are from time to time visited by aging scholars like myself. They sure make impressive stage properties. Most of the small clientele, however, is young; their interests appear to be the current journals, the theater scene in Lisbon, the Brazilian economic miracle, and political developments in lusophone Africa. The large bulk of the holdings are in some repository, invisible but obviously proximate. You fill out a little fiche in the usual European manner; but most unusually you get the book within two minutes.

Luís de Camões occupies the place in Luso-Brazilian culture occupied by Dante in Italy, Shakespeare in England, and Michael Jackson in the United States. When I first wrote a letter of inquiry to the head librarian, Mme Darbord, she responded that the library housed a Camões collection très important. That is putting the matter rather modestly. I have yet to find anything about Camões that the library doesn’t have, or which the charming librarians do not supply with a smile.

Libraries have always had a special allure for me, midway between the spiritual and the erotic. I have not until recently started wondering seriously about my residence in the afterlife, but if there’s no room for me in Dante’s eagle’s eye, something like the Gulbenkian reading room will be just fine, thank you very much. This is one of those libraries in which people still speak in hushed voices. There is always something tonic about the “library whisper”; but whispering in Portuguese, full of sibilants that defy the anatomy of the human tongue, takes it to an altogether new level. There you are, reading this great stuff, bathed in light reflected off polished wood and ancient leather, as a faint, lilting swish-swash burbles in the distance. Ah, stay the passing moment--it is so fair!

Ecce quam bonum

The idea that I could bring all my racing thoughts and impressions into a synthesis within a few days was a fantasy, but here's a first shot. As I said last time, we did a lot for being less than a week in Israel: about as much of Jerusalem as a pedestrian can cram into a full and energetic day; other wonderful biblical spots (En Kareem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum, Bethsaida among them); impressive archaeological sites (Qumran, the Herodion, Beth Shean or Scythopolis, Gamla, crusader castles); much beautiful scenery, sometimes surprising set in counterpoint to the littered streets and drab, even squalid houses and workshops in many of the villages.

THE NORMAN COLUMNS IN THE EMPTY HALF OF THE CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY, BETHLEHEM

But the impressions left by architecture and landscape, vivid as they were, are probably less provocative than those left by a very superficial exposure to the Israeli human community, or rather communities, the plural form being necessary here. My visit to Israel began with a Sabbath meal at the apartment of Zvi’s parents, David and Tikva. My wonderfully hospitable hosts cut through the language barrier with a blizzard of food. Alimentary surfeit, indeed, was the defining characteristic of the three family meals I shared with them. One of these was a big party that included and celebrated the circumcision of a babe I never saw—though I did hear him at one point. Zvi explained the ceremony of this event—and indeed the ceremony of most Jewish festivities—as boiling down to three propositions. (1) They tried to kill us. (2) They failed. (3) So, let’s eat.

Any thoughtful Christian will admire Judaism for its existential claims on the quotidian life of the Jew. Religious practice and ritual, however relaxed or apparently casual in its execution, is the habitual companion of family life. Religious concepts are thus inextricably linked to the wholesome and loving relationships of the family. The shared meal of the Christians, the Eucharist, surrendered to symbolism and allegory many centuries ago. We believe that it “feeds” us spiritually, but nobody walks away from the table licking his chops. There is an old joke about the perfectly round, thinly pressed wafers still used in most churches: it’s easier to believe that they are the body of Christ than that they are bread. Very different indeed is a family Shabbat meal. If you are into the liturgical aspect, it has as much anyone could wish for, but it also has a loaf of real bread. An agnostic can have a fine time at a Shabbat meal; he is unlikely to go to High Mass for either the sociability or the gastronomy.

But what is a source of unity in one sphere may not be a source of unity in all spheres. By pure coincidence just a few days before flying to Tel Aviv I got an email from my old friend Steve White, who from time to time posts comments on this blog. Unbeknownst to me he had just visited Israel himself. He reported complex and tentative reactions, as I myself do, but he did have a large sense of divisions, separations, compartmentalizations. I have to say I shared it. I was prepared for a huge “Arab-Israeli Conflict,” of which there is indeed much evidence subtle and blatant. I was less prepared for the “Israeli-Israeli Conflict”.

The Israeli-Israeli Conflict would seem to be grounded in the unresolved paradox of the “Jewish State”. What, exactly, does that mean?—which is another way of asking, “What does it mean to be a Jew?—a topic endless scrutinized in the religious courts. The political division between left and right seems at least as acute as that in America, and that’s really saying something. Furthermore, and even more markedly than in America, this division usually has religious overtones. There is a marked division, made spectacularly visible on any Saturday, between more and less observant Jews. There is a sense of marked social distinction (essentially racial in character) between Ashkenazi and Sephardic. There is a large and influential section of Israelis that is hardly “religious” at all. The intellectuals of the academy, for instance, seem hardly distinguishable from their counterparts at the Sorbonne or UCLA. There is now a large population of Russian “Jews” in Israel—so large that one is everywhere confronted with Russian-language signs, books and brochures, television programs. I put the word “Jews” in quotation marks only because most of them are not religious at all and never were, their Jewishness having been determined by political aberrations of the old Soviet state, and their emigration determined by the more ordinary economic and social motives that have determined the movement of peoples for centuries. To be sure, there are at any moment large numbers of religious Russians in Israeli. They are Christian pilgrims, and you will find them in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, kissing the stone on which the body of Jesus Christ is alleged to have been placed.

However it may strike an outsider like myself, none of this seems particularly odd to Israelis. One of my favorite psalms, and probably the absolute favorite of the medieval monks whom I have studied for so many years, is the Ecce quam bonum! (Vulgate 132): "Oh what a good and joyful thing it is for brethren to dwell in unity!" Barack Obama’s election campaign was founded in a rhetoric of inclusiveness and a kind of transcendent national unity—entirely abandoned in the actual political practice of his administration, but what else in new?—that could appeal at least to the lip service we pay to the legend stamped on our coins, E pluribus unum. I had the sense that Israelis, perhaps unwisely, had settled into their separations.

The most dramatic of my limited experiences along these lines came with my solo visit to Bethlehem. From the religious point of view this was for me one of the highpoints. I didn’t have the sense of the money-changers actually having taken over the control of the temple as I did with some of the more familiar Christian sites in Jerusalem. My timing was perfect, as I was able to participate in a Greek Eucharist in the old church, with its stone door built intentionally low to discourage the Burgundian knights from entering on horseback, as was their wont. (Re-read the opening scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.) This was swiftly followed by an Arabic Roman Catholic mass, also deeply spiritual, in the slightly newer church built against is north wall. On the same trip I visited the Herodion (a forbidding Roman era fortress atop a bleak mountain, still in the process of excavation), and the supposed site of the Annunciation, where there is now a pleasant modern church. Medieval pilgrimage sites were the original theme parks, and many of those in western Europe were copied from models in Palestine. I already knew about the “Holy House" that had been constructed at Walsingham in East Anglia, and I was glad to see the original.

But Bethlehem is in the West Bank, and to get there involves going through a check-point. David and Zvi drove me out there, but then I was one my own. I had naively assumed that a check-point would look something like the proctors’ kiosk where you must stop for a smiley chat as you enter the Princeton campus by car. The Bethlehem check-point is a huge metal thing, at least a square block in size, all covered and encased in extra-heavy gauge mesh. The vibe as I experienced it was half cattle auction corral, half spooky subway too late at night for comfort. Getting through to the Palestinian side was no problem. Facilis decensus Averni. On the other side, as promised, were many taxi drivers, all functionally Anglophone. I don’t know if there is an actual protocol that the Christians get the Christians, but my guy was Christian, with a brother who ran a nice Christian gift shop, which was a nobler place than many to pay my required tribute.

The famous Wall is absolutely formidable. My guy had a line on it, probably the textbook Palestinian line. “They take down the wall in Berlin. They put it up again here.” I did not think it condign to point out the differing functions of the two walls, as I understood them; nor did I comment upon my impression of a concomitant and dramatically sharp decrease in West Bank suicide bombers. The situation is hideous enough, however it comes about. I also saw several settlements. Once again my expectations were contradicted. What you see looking back toward Jerusalem from the Herodion is not a few campers with pup tents and an Israeli flag. What you see is a huge complex of well built and expensive apartment houses flooding down the hillside with all the elegance and opulence of the real estate on the slopes of the East Bay. To “remove” this settlement would be more or less like “removing” Berkeley Hills, and about as senseless. But here, controverted in the most violent and unaccommodating language, are emblems of an apparently non-negotiable separation.

JERUSALEM AS IT CREEPS INTO THE WEST BANK

Although Sunday observance kept me from getting into a few Christian sites in the afternoon (such as the “John theBaptist” church at En Kareem), the day has no particular significance for Jews or Muslims. It was a workday in Jerusalem, a bustling one, and by the time I got back to the checkpoint late in the morning there were literally hundreds of people milling about, waiting to get through the very slow-moving security process. The concept of the line (as in queue) seems to be unknown in Arab society—as also at Paris bus stops, but that’s another issue. So you had this large mass of people in a kind of football scrum, heading obscurely for some funnel. Most of them were regulars, naturally, but the first problem faced by a novice like myself was to try to figure out where the funnel was. I could see the exit turnstiles (like New York subway turnstiles, only with locks), electrically controlled remotely by the invisible guards in their booths on the other side. The green light would flash on for a few seconds, and a few people would rush through. Then the light would go red, and stay red for five minutes or more.

Eventually my height came to my rescue, so that I could see the direction I needed to head, and what buxom ladies in headscarves I had to trample on to do so. I have to say that I was a little scared, and that I abandoned my gentlemanly instincts. But these were people who needed to get somewhere, probably to work. Many of them were visibly madder than hell. There were shoving matches. There was an incipient fistfight when a guy tried to jump over (as opposed to walk around) the final metal barrier. I have often thought that commuting to work by car or train must be hell. If I had to do this every day to get to work, I’d—well, I’m not sure what I’d do, but I can see that it wouldn’t make me particularly friendly to the people opening and closing the turnstiles.

Back in the early days of the “Arab-Israeli Conflict” the Texan Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House, made a suggestion that revealed a certain cultural naïveté. “Why can’t the two sides just get together,” he asked in apparently sincere puzzlement, “and settle this thing in a good Christian fashion?” Maybe it’s time to revive that program. As soon as the sects that have been warring in in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for the last thousand years can agree on which Christians should get the job.

Guide for the Perplexed

I rather rashly implied in my last posting that I might put something up today about my trip to Israel. However, I must once again temporize. It isn’t simply that the flight from Tel Aviv arrived in Paris only last night, leaving me to attempt, somewhat half-heartedly, to resume something of a writing schedule this morning. The real problem is that the trip was so overwhelming, in so many ways, that it is going to take me a few days to sort out even my initial thoughts. There is no education like travel; and the problem with education, as we all know, is that it so gratuitously disturbs perfectly good and settled opinions. It will be quite annoying to me, at my age and stage of pontification, to have to go back and completely rethink the State of Israel. I’d just as soon go back and try to rethink the Principia Mathematica. I’ll probably have to do that, though let’s postpone it for a week or two. Israel, I mean. Newton may take a whole month.

On one thing, however, my opinion is clear and informed, and that is the quality of the guidance I had during my trip. The great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides wrote a famous book that is usually rendered in English as The Guide to the Perplexed. Well, I was certainly many times perplexed on my journey, so that I was particularly happy to have as my personal guide a modern Jewish philosopher. I refer to my son-in-law, Professor Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, a professor of world history at New York University. Two years ago I found among my Christmas presents a slim envelope that contained a kind of promissory note. It was a coupon, valid for one extended guided tour of the Holy Land, signed by Zvi. This past week I cashed it in.

SATURDAY 27 NOVEMBER 2009: THE GUIDE

ZVI BEN-DOR BENITE from the Mount of Olives

It would not be easy to have found a more determined or knowledgeable guide. In the first place, he is a native Israeli. In the second place he is an historian. In the third place his special fields of interest are in comparative religious history. It doesn’t hurt that he is a native speaker of both Hebrew and Arabic, or that his brother-in-law is among the elite group of highly trained tourist guides officially credentialed by the State. Those two collaborated for hours, putting together a custom-made itinerary that ministered to my own desiderata: pre-historical and ancient archaeology, biblical geography (especially that associated with the life and ministry of Jesus), the archaeology of the Crusades, and, finally, natural history and geology.

Zvi is a trained Sinologist, and his first book (The Dao of Muhammed: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China deals with Islam in China—a topic so hip and current as to threaten to mask the deep learning he poured into the book. But it is his very recent book that is most relevant to our tour. It is called The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009), and it is among the more amazing (and sometime amusing) works of erudition I could possibly recommend—which, obviously, I am now doing. (I do so at greater length in the reviews section of the Amazon.com website.) There was more than one occasion on which I felt thoroughly lost, as for example, when searching for our B&B in a jumbled Druse village where the streets have no names and the houses no numbers. This proved no problem for Zvi. He simply stopped a guy coming out of shop with a large bag of chickpeas. He was, of course, the mayor of the place, and while I don't think he confused me with one of his constituents, the natural politician in him did come out; and he led us by two-car convoy to the place we needed to find. After all the guy who found the lost tribes--all ten of them--is unlikely to be fazed by an undocumented hostelry.

Living High off the Hog

“Gladly Lerne, Glady Teche” is threatening to turn into another travelblogue. In principle I cannot object to this development. Travel is among the most authentic of learning experiences, and it certainly offers any teacher unparalleled opportunities. But this blog has pretensions of redeeming intellectual purpose transcending yet another candid shot of Madge and me at the beach. (And don’t be confused, alarmed, or hopeful. “Madge” comes from a Thurber cartoon, or somewhere.) Yet again I must share a word or two about this week’s travels and warn you that next Wednesday I shall be computerless, happily exploring the Holy Land under the guidance of my son-in-law Zvi. I’ll hope to post something on Friday, December 4.

Joan and I just had a wonderful three days in and around the village of Salernes (Var), in the south, where we visited our old friends Andrew and Edith Seth. There is something uniquely precious about old friends. Andrew reminded me, as he tossed a piece of an ancient tree limb into the hearth, of a wonderful apothegm of old Francis Bacon: “Old wood is best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read. “

The adjective “old” here refers of course to the friendship, not the friends. We have all known each other since our Oxford days half a century ago. We have known each other longer than we have been married, and there are not many who fall into that category. Andrew and I were at Jesus College together and even, as I recall, successive presidents of the Junior Common Room. I’ve been trailing ever since. Andrew went on to become the CEO of Unilever (GB); I went on to become one of the world’s pre-eminent experts on medieval Franciscan literature. Therein in revealed the salient sociological distinction between people who own houses in the south of France and people who have friends who own houses in the south of France.

We didn’t do a whole lot except hang out, walk a little, and sit around the fire reading books. The Seths have a sensible rule about the seashore—don’t go anywhere near it between April and August. Since it was November, however, we took a delightful little spin over to Saint-Tropez. (I’m trying to sound casual.) It was a beautiful day, with a sparkle everywhere. Andrew tells me that there are two kinds of people in Saint-Tropez—the haves, and the have-yachts. The latter are so numerous that from the main jetty one cannot actually see the bay, the view toward which is entirely blocked by skyscraping pleasure-craft with Cayman Island registrations. As to the famous swimming beaches of Saint-Tropez, where rock stars and rusticating politicians party through the night on the Quatorze Juillet—ah, there it was a different story! The Seth Doctrine proved its worth. We had the beaches entirely to ourselves. In fact, here’s a picture of Madge and me on the beach at Saint-Tropez. Actually, come to look a little closer, that would be Andrew, Joan, and Edith on the beach. I must have been holding the camera.

We then puttered over to Sainte-Maxime and a fine latish lunch (healthy salads for the ladies, moules marinières for the old Jesuits). Old friends, old books, old wine—but as fresh as fresh can be on the moules front.

I do have a serious episode to explore—the discovery and exploitation of the beautiful library of the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian in its fabulous palazzo in the rue de Iéna. But you know about me and libraries. It will take a whole blog to do justice to this topic. In the meantime I’ll try to sneak a few shots of the library interior—and even better, of the librarians.

But as we are all facing the Thanksgiving ordeal tomorrow, I had perhaps best close with gastronomy. Last night, when our number-one son Richard arrived from Munich to celebrate Thanksgiving before moving on the next day to give a talk at the British Academy, Joan and I wanted to treat him to dinner. As there are only about two hundred thousand great restaurants in our immediate neighborhood, Rich thought it best for to schlep halfway across town to one of his favorite haunts, the Verre Volé, over on the edge of the Canal Saint-Martin near the Place de la République. There is a kind of Parisian bistro too hip even to be “discovered” by hippest of Anglophone food critics writing for airlines magazines, and this was one of them. It’s run by young people—cheerful, smiling, friendly, easy-going young people. They must have got their restaurant license by mistake. One of the guys wears a sweatshirt that says “Muhammed Ali”. (Another guy simply looks like Muhammed Ali). The place, which has room for maybe fifteen people, is encased in bottles of “organic” wine. They do all the cooking on a glorified hot plate. They offer you a choice of about three things that they decided to cook that night. In short, very cool. So, what to eat?

There is a reason that such useful expressions as “the gravy-train” and “porkbarrel spending” play such an important role in the political lexicon. Pork is by its very nature yummy and transgressive, and of all gravies pork gravy is the yummiest and greasiest. Anybody who grew up in the country knows this; and despite the fact that there is precious little country left, the memory of a vanished agrarian simplicity continues to command the depleted metaphoric vocabulary and the annoying moral theology of our politicians. Pork is precisely what the American people want from their elected representatives. Try for a moment to imagine a reforming president threatening to veto a bill “until every last bit of falafel has been cut out of it.” Perhaps you remember, as I do, Barak Obama, Man of the People, sympathizing with the electors of Iowa over the cresting price of—arugula! Let me ask you this: how much arugula would it take to secure Senator Landrieu’s vote on an important piece of legislation? You know there is not enough arugula in the world to do that. Some measley millions in pork, on the other hand—a done deal!

When you have really made a meal for yourself, what is the phrase you use to describe the experience? Well, I’ll tell you the phrase you don’t use. You don’t say, “Boy did I ever yoghurt out!” No, the correct term is pig out. Such porcine thoughts arise not merely because I am a Razorback but because half of my family keeps kosher, often making me the beneficiary of a diet delicious and salubrious, but definitely porkless. Hence I tend to make the most of such opportunities as may arise to eat as the other half eats. Well, among the four entrées (actually reduced to three by the time we came to order) was something called “carne de cochon”. Carne de cochon? How gastronomically incorrect can you be? Well, the name tells it all. Gross and glorious. I do have one suggestion for the restauranteurs. I think that every gourmand ordering this dish might conveniently be supplied with a three by five card. On the one side might be printed a brief reminder about the basic chops for the Heimmlich Manoeuver. On the other side would be a blank prescription, awaiting only a qualified medical signature, for Lipitor.