A Goodbye to Gooch

Once we actually got home we found that the elation born of our Spanish pilgrimage was heightened rather than compromised by the nightmarish return trip, involving the unexplained cancellation of a flight to Madrid, racing about Galicia from one Podunk airport to another by bus, diversions to London, bureaucratic hassles and a shamefully inefficient and unpleasant passage through Immigration Control and Kennedy Airport.  But the fashion in which our nation chooses to receive its visitors and its returning citizens is a subject that would demand its own lament.  Today’s lament is of another and probably more familiar kind.

            Princeton in the springtime is magnificent, and we returned to find our garden in the finest full bloom--forsythia ablaze, large beds of daffodils, the red and purple bursts of such tulips as the deer had somehow missed.  Looking up, one saw everywhere the lighter whites and pinks of flowering trees.  After a cold winter that tarried we seem destined for a hot summer that is arriving early, and it has taken only three successive hot days to start the dissolution of the floral display.  This brings me to my theme:  “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.”

            When I resumed my regular schedule of exercise and showed up at Dillon Gymnasium for an early morning swim I sensed an oddly subdued tone about the place.  Very soon I learned its cause.  “Gooch” had died on April 30^th—probably while I was still sleeping off my bad trip.  Gooch was one of the part-time facilities managers for the Princeton Athletic Department.  For the better part of twenty years it was he who unlocked the gym’s front door at 6:30, then supervised our entry through the turnstile.  He handled the assignment of lockers.  He ran a Lost and Found overflowing with unclaimed eyeglasses and swimming goggles.  Once, with a mighty bolt-cutter, he removed an unauthorized padlock left by a scofflaw on one of the long lockers.

            I cannot account for the name Gooch, which was however affectionately used and cheerfully received.  His real name was Americo A. Arcamone.  He was a Princetonian by birth and a graduate of Princeton High School.  He was born in 1925 and carried away by a stroke a few months short of his ninetieth birthday.  The Italian-American community of this college town is an old and distinguished one.  The early immigrants included a number of skilled stone masons who worked on the fine neo-Gothic buildings of the campus, especially the cathedral sized chapel, which was completed shortly after the First War.  Many of them had originally come from a single village on the island of Ischia, not far from Naples.  As late as the early ‘sixties, when I first saw Princeton, linguists from some Italian university showed up to study the speech of various little old ladies dressed in black—a demographic then numerous but now apparently vanished—who constituted what they called an isola linguistica, a kind of language island or bubble of rapidly disappearing dialect.

            Whether Mr. Arcamone’s forebears were part of this group I cannot say, but it’s wonderful to imagine the pride and optimism of parents who name their child after their new home.   Even fleeting and superficial conversations, when conducted on a nearly daily basis over a period of many years, yield a good deal of information.  Gooch had spent most of his working life—in what capacity I do not know--at McGraw Hill, the publishing company.  His work in the Athletic Department was post-retirement and part time, but it was wholly consistent with his enthusiasm for Princeton University sports teams.  I could count on him for a quick debriefing on any football or basketball game I happened to have missed—meaning, of course, most of them.  He was a keen golfer, and loved especially to pursue that sport in the state of Florida.

            Gooch knew my name even as eventually I had come to know his (by asking).  But he always called me simply “Professor”.  He said it in a way that made it clear that for him it was a term of the highest possible respect.

            Gooch’s wife died a while ago.  I was going to say “recently,” but internet research has proved to me that it a was whole decade past.  These days I am frequently caught up by the shortening of perceived time horizons, a theme not irrelevant to this post.   That news, too, traveled about the gym community on invisible wings, and Gooch accepted my belated condolences with a kind of stoic appreciation. 

            For all of us human community is a kind of globe of concentric spheres: family and intimate friends; work mates--co-religionists, co-enthusiasts, co-whatevers—and so on, spreading out to actual strangers and beyond that to the millions unmet and unseen.  But one group whose importance is often missed is that comfortable world of habitual friendly contacts, of bus drivers and mail carriers and crossing guards.  It is rather wrenching to realize that at any moment, and to your utter oblivion, one of them can be snatched away.   Americo Arcamone: may he rest in peace!

Ultreia

Pilgrims' joy

            The somewhat obscure battle cry of medieval French warriors was Montjoie, a shortened version of the more expansive Montjoie Saint-Denis.  As we know from Shakespeare’s Henry V, Montjoy could also be a personal name.   For pilgrims, the joyful aspects of mountains, if there are any, must be retrospective.  Dante’s vision of Purgatory is that of a steep and steeply ramped mountain.  It feels really good when you quit climbing, and the whole mountain quivers in joy when a soul finally completes the task. 

            Even though our pilgrimage was Camino light and mainly diesel-powered I was accordingly happy, and perhaps even joyous, to arrive at the Monte do Gozo a few kilometers above Santiago.  That means the Mount of Pleasure, roughly speaking, the pleasure being that in earlier, more deforested centuries a pilgrim could from this steep place catch the first sight of the distant towers of the cathedral that had been the object of such long and arduous toil.  The experience was pleasing to me not only in spiritual but also in linguistic terms.   Having recently finished writing a book about an old Portuguese poem, I reacted favorably to the Galician form of the preposition.  It appears that Galician and Portuguese are the closest of cousins.  However I later made the mistake of asking our Galician guide Diego a question about the current state of the Gallegan “dialect”.  Diego is a cheerful and irenic chap, in addition to being witty and knowledgeable, but he rather bristled at the implied slur in the word dialect.  Galician, he assured me, is a language.

            Things are a good deal quieter in Santiago than they were when I was last here.  There is a thinner stream of pilgrims than there will be a few weeks hence, let alone in the height of summer, but the place is still pretty much of a madhouse.  No aspect of the medieval pilgrimage has been more perfectly preserved than its often-impenetrable ambiguity, the rich mélange of naïve spirituality, manifest commercialism, and utterly irreligious high-jinks.  I suppose it is precisely because of the grave difficulty we have in cleanly separating flesh and spirit that the Apostle must remind us that we have our treasures in earthen vessels.

            On our final full day in Compostela we were determined to take in the noontime service arranged especially for pilgrims, a group from many lands, speaking many tongues.  One special part of the Pilgrim’s Mass, a justly famous one, is the censing of the congregants gathered in the Cathedral’s two transepts.  The cathedral chapter has a gigantic thurible—and I mean gigantic--called the botafumeiro.  It works on an elaborate pulley and suspension system requiring several strong and skilled bell-ringers to operate.  The censing of the medieval pilgrims probably had a practical as well as a symbolic motive.  Tramping for weeks on end along dusty roads and through muddy bogs is a considerable challenge to personal hygiene.  I was sitting in the very first row of the south transept, and next to the aisle separating the transept seating into two halves.  It is over that aisle that the heavy thurible swung in its awesome pendulum stroke, swishing and fuming, the bright fire of the coals clearly visible through the ventilations in the silver.  I suppose that one is allowed to ask God for almost anything in a pilgrimage church, but I still felt a little awkward entertaining a mental petition to be kept safe from what seemed to be an all-too-real threat of liturgical decapitation.  My prayer was answered.  Thus passed the only sure chance I shall ever have of exiting this vale of tears in the odor of sanctity, guaranteed.

            It would not be easy to identify a single “high point” of a journey so enjoyable in so many ways.  We saw mile upon mile of varied and beautiful countryside in its spring glory.  Each day we feasted our eyes on architectural and artistic treasures.  We dined liked monarchs.  But near the top, surely, I would have to place the peculiar form of companionship and camaraderie—Chaucer used the word felawschipe—that so swiftly binds together a disparate band of pilgrims briefly and fortuitously thrown together.  I shall not soon forget the fully occupied glazed poultry coop kept in the church of Santo Domingo de la Calzada in testimony to one of James’s more extravagant miracles—the only known example of the sacral de-fricasseeing of a chicken.  But no sooner will I forget the pleasures born of new and unexpected friendship, and of the companionship born of intensely shared experience.

            On Monday night most of us had taken advantage of our coach to drive to Finisterre, the “end of the earth” as it was known in the Middle Ages to such as Chaucer’s Shipman.  That day had begun with bad news.  One of our fellow pilgrims had just learned of a sudden death in his family that would require him to set off for home as soon as possible.  The fleeting nature of human life no less than its preciousness is one of the great themes of pilgrimage.  The art and architecture of the pilgrimage roads to which we had devoted much of the last ten days is largely funereal and memorial.  Our absent friend was very much in our hearts as most of the rest of us gathered on the rude rocks surrounding the Fisterra lighthouse to sip a glass of champagne and congratulate ourselves on journey’s end as we watched a huge sun set beneath the western sea.  How many others, in legend or in history, had seen such a sight?—among them Dante’s Ulysses at the Pillars of Hercules, Henry the Navigator at his wind-swept maritime academy on Cape Saint Vincent, Columbus as he pressed toward the Azores.  But we knew something they could not yet have known, that beyond that setting sun lay our own homeland and our own homes.  There we would now return and, however greatly enriched by our journey, return eagerly.  Perhaps no pilgrimage is really done until all is done.  I thought of the strange old Romance word shouted out by medieval pilgrims to encourage themselves and their fellows not to flag, to keep on moving faster and further: Ultreia!

Buen Camino

         

 Architectural ambition and technical innovation characterize the winery of Bai Gorri, where we had a three-and-a-half hour "tasting lunch."

             Having completed the first three full days of our pilgrimage, I have far more to relate than would fit into a single essay, or indeed several essays, not that I am entertaining any serious ambitions in that direction.  The brief report is most positive.  Our random companionship of thirty pilgrims is cheerful and cohesive, the kind of students any teacher is blessed to have—and certainly the kind who justify both the glad learning and the glad teaching ostensibly characteristic of this blog.  The weather, though for one moment approaching the brink of catastrophe has been tolerable to excellent.  Unlike medieval pilgrims we are enjoying motorized support that allows us to see all manner of wonders and still cover the required distance.  One might describe our rather modest walks along the Camino as “scenes from a pilgrimage.”  Our rather minimal hiking, while enough to task my soles and calves, can hardly make a dent in what appears to be a mandatory daily intake of seven thousand calories, more or less.

            Almost everything has been new to me.  I was last in the Basque country in 1959, and then only briefly.  I was young and Francisco Franco not only alive but considerably younger than I am now.  It was, in short, a different world, and though Navarre’s antiquities and its dramatic landscape are unchanged, the general “vibe” was so radically different as to make it feel a different country as well.  It was a few years before the serious phase of the Iberian revolution in tourism.  There were at that time comparatively few automobiles in Spain--paradoxically that fact made for pretty good hitchhiking—and the whole country seemed coated in dust and impecuniousness.  Now, by contrast, amidst a universally recognized economic crisis and a twenty-four percent unemployment rate, it seems pretty prosperous.  Any American has to be impressed by its bright and shiny infrastructure of roads and bridges.  Of course the only economic “sectors” with which we have had much first hand experience—tourism and the wine trade—are doubtless anomalies in the larger picture.

            We started out in Pamplona.  It is a very interesting place, of course, but I found myself rather annoyed by the young English-speaking guide who seemed to think that all we would want to hear about was the running of the bulls and role played by Ernest Hemingway in transforming an obscure local Spanish tradition into an international phenomenon.  My late senior colleague Carlos Baker, who wrote the “official” biography of Hemingway, was both a mentor and a friend to me; and I know how seriously tedious he found Hemingway’s tauromachic machismo.  John (the aforementioned Anglophone cicerone) was a font of surprising statistics.  Would you believe, for instance, that “only sixteen” runners have been gored or trampled to death in the running of the bulls since the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1923?  Or that the town fathers have erected a bronze monument for them worthy of war heroes?  But one statistic was enough to explain all the enthusiasm.  Last year, during the eight-day festival of San Fermin in July, the merchants, hoteliers, restauranteurs, and (especially) bar-keepers of Pamplona grossed a cool seventy million euros.  No wonder that there are statues to Hemingway all over the town.

 Eunate

            We did zip down to Roncevalles, just to be able to say that we were truly beginning at the beginning of the Camino in Spain.   But our progress is of course westerly, and we have seen many beautiful things, all of them new to me.  They include the hauntingly beautiful and rather mysterious octagonal church of Eunate, the splendid medieval bridge that gives its name to the town of Puente la Reina, the extraordinary cloister of the church of San Pedro in Estella and the yet more remarkable church of San Miguel in that same town.  Its location fully vindicates the well-known opening sentence of Henry Adams’s Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, “The archangel loved heights.”

 Puente la Reina

            Logroño, which had been to me no more than a vague place name, was a particular delight, and I shall leave you with two images that especially arrested my attention.  The first is a superbly politically incorrect Santiago Matamoros, from atop the façade of the church dedicated to that saint, in which the horse of the ferocious apostle is practically knee-deep in Saracens’ heads.  The second is a small crucifixion in the Cathedral of la Rotunda.  It has only fairly recently been recognized (and authenticated) as the work of Michael Angelo.

 

A Sweet Glimpse of the Past

         

   Only five words into the NYT article about it, I decided not to address Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.  The article begins “Ending two years of speculation…”  If the Times editors really think that Hillary’s presidential ambitions were speculative, they probably don’t know what speculation is.  So here’s some real speculation.

An unrelated photograph of Mr. John Corea (Credit: Hoboken411.com)

            I have never actually been in Hoboken (as opposed to around, through or over it) to cruise along the scenic Frank Sinatra Drive.  I do frequently travel by train to and fro the City, however, and I do on occasion pick up and read abandoned north Jersey newspapers left on the seats.  So over the past decade I have acquired a journeyman’s knowledge of Hudson County politics.  I know, for example, that Hoboken has an admirable reforming Mayor, Dawn Zimmer, who almost beat the crook who preceded her and whom she did replace when he was indicted for bribery and thrown in the hoosegow.   I also know that around 2009 there was a major scandal in the Hoboken Parking Authority when $600,000 went missing—that is, 2,400,000 quarters!  The local felon du jour for that caper was somebody named John Corea—some papers preferred the spelling Correa—who had been colluding with some Toms River associates of "mob boss Nicodemo 'Little Nicky' Scarfo."

Little Nicky

            With junk like this monopolizing the few remaining storage cells of my brain, you can see why I struggle with my scholarship.  But struggle I do, and as I was consulting a learned tome from my library shelves the other day out from its pages fell someone’s ancient bookmark in the form of an elegantly printed “at home” card, probably from the turn of the twentieth century: “Mrs. E. H. A. Correa / Second Thursdays / 920 Bloomfield Street / Hoboken NJ.”    You know what that means.  You’ve read some Edith Wharton.  Mrs. Correa was “at home” to visitors on the second Thursday of every month.  Drop in for a cup of tea.  What a wonderful whiff of a vanished civility!  And how very far away from “Little Nicky.”

            Not that I’m leaping to conclusions about the name Cor(r)ea, which is unfamiliar to me.  I don’t even know whether to pronounce it like the Asian country or like that Richard Cory who “was a gentleman from soul to crown.”  But a few moments Binging away yields some interesting facts.  For instance one learns from the indispensable International Insurance Encyclopedia that Emanuel H. A. Correa, born in New York in 1855, was by the dawn of twentieth century a leading executive of the Home Insurance Company.  In an archived copy of The Weekly Underwriter there is the sad news that Mr. Correa died too young on October 24, 1912, with a net worth of $38,606.  That was a while ago.  The Titanic disaster was only six months earlier.  One estimate of the current value of Mr. Correa’s fortune is $17,800,000—quite enough to afford a fine brownstone in such an exclusive suburb as Hoboken!  One deduces that Mr. Correa must have been a man of mild manner and cultivated taste.  We are not surprised to find his unopposed election to the New Jersey Philatelic Association on October 5, 1892.  Is there still a New Jersey Philatelic Association?  Do you still have to be elected to be a member?

            As for the spouse of this admirable man, the lady whose card had been closely preserved for at least the better part of a century between the pages of a Mermaid Series edition of The Two Angry Women of Abington, I have not discovered her given name.  But as Mrs. E. H. A. Correa of 920 Bloomfield Street her good works are lavishly spread upon the social and charitable records of early twentieth-century Hudson County.  I shall conclude this whimsical indulgence with a particularly sweet message she has left us from the grave.

           

a rare first edition

            In 1907 Christ Hospital in Jersey City, a charitable foundation of the Episcopal Church, published as a fund-raiser something called the Kirmess Cook Book: A Collection of Well-Tested Recipes from the Best Housekeepers of Jersey City and Elsewhere.  The cutesy title is an obeisance to the kind of ye-olde ethnic theme characteristic of do-good undertakings to this very day.  “Kirmess” is a version of the old Dutch word for a certain kind of village church festival, and it will be familiar to lovers of classic Dutch painting.  In 1900 the Dutch influence in New York and northeast Jersey, while waning, was still visible.  Here is the contribution of Mrs. E. H. A. Correa. 

David Teniers the younger

WINE JELLY WITH WHIPPED CREAM.

Mrs. E. H. A. Correa, Hoboken, N. J.

Soak one box *Cooper’s gelatine in one quart of California port wine, three cups of sugar, juice of four lemons, one ounce stick cinnamon.  Stand on extreme back of range for one hour, stirring occasionally.  At the end of an hour, add one quart of boiling water, strain and put in a cool place to stiffen.  When cold, serve with whipped cream.

*Peter Cooper (1791-1883) was the inventor of Jello.

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Readers should be advised that I shall be attempting my next essay from somewhere on the road in northern Spain.  If you haven't heard anything for three weeks, say, somebody probably ought to inform the authorities.

In Search of Saint James--and Tomatoes

My Easter boutonnière, still going strong

The last day of March witnessed the last meeting of our Evergreen Forum seminar on the General Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  The initial phrase of the poem’s famous opening (“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote…”) introduces a sentence of which the principal clause, appearing only eleven lines later, is “then longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”  That is, when the April showers arrive, people get itchy to go on pilgrimage.  By strange happenstance, this statement is as applicable this year in twenty-first-century New Jersey as it was in fourteenth-century Kent.  For we are indeed just about to leave, in ten days' time, to lead a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, under the sponsorship of the Princeton University Alumni Council.  I shall attempt to “live blog” this event at it progresses, though with what success I am reluctant to predict.

            What Chaucer more fully says is “When April’s sweet showers pierce to the root the drought of March…”  Observant students, of whom there are many in the Evergreen Forum, with most among them having visited England, wondered what “drought” Chaucer could possibly have had in mind.  At Bodiam weather station, quite near the pilgrims’ route, the annual average rainfall over two recent decades was approximately thirty-four inches, with about two-and-a-half of that falling in March.  The explanation is that Chaucer is of course speaking in a figurative or allegorical fashion.  The drought of March is the lean and penitential season of Lent, which comes to an end with the festival abundance of Easter.  Once again this year’s calendar was cooperative, with Easter falling last Sunday, April 5.  My son Luke and I were together at the stunning Easter Vigil Eucharist in the chancel of the University chapel, as we have been for so many of the last thirty Easters, starting in deep darkness at five o’clock and moving slowly toward the burst of light that comes when full sunlight finally hits the great east “Resurrection” window toward seven.

          

            But New Jersey’s calendar and its meteorology were not so well synchronized this year.  I like to wear a daffodil boutonnière on Easter.  There has been no March drought here, but the moisture came in a form guaranteed initially to retard rather than to hasten the appearance of the tendre croppes.  We had perhaps twenty inches of snow just last month, with protracted low temperatures.  As March surrendered to April there were no daffodils in sight.   By Easter eve the house was surrounded by incipient yellow buds, and among them I was luckily able to find one (though only one) beginning to open.  Now, three days later, many more have appeared.

            Daffodils are gorgeous, but even the nearly omnivorous deer (a large herd of which hangs out in my extended back yard) refuse to eat them.  Everyone knows that the signature garden crop of the Garden State is the Jersey tomato.  My tomato farming has been hampered by our unfortunate tendency to spend a central month of the growing season in Paris or somewhere else nifty, but even so I had good results last summer with a little, partially shaded plot at the front of the house.

 the old garden plot

            My appetite thus whetted, and under the inspiration of Chaucer, I determined to create a somewhat larger bed in full sun just south of the stone wall I put up around my property.   This is at the edge of a large common meadow formerly known as the “Baseball Field”—an appellation dating from the 'Sixties, when there were still many young people in the neighborhood.  This had to be wrested from a bramble patch overrun with various formidable jungle vines, especially coarse wild roses and the voracious species of Virginia Creeper that grows a foot or more per week and feeds from stubborn fat tuberous roots with the tensile strength of Kevlar. This horror must be entirely dug out and destroyed if you hope for anything else to grow in its former domain. 

 the new garden plot

            Even if you lack commercial earth-moving equipment it is possible, barely, to achieve one’s goal.  Some years ago in upstate New York I found in a dump a heavily framed iron grid, roughly three feet by four.  Its original function is uncertain to me, but I was able to adapt it as a heavy-duty sieve in attacking the hideous root structure of this vine.  The price of achieving a plot of Jersey topsoil suitable for producing the Jersey tomato is to dig down at least a foot and sieve every shovelful of the results, removing all brick bats, animal bones, small stones, Mason jar shards, and, especially, the tuber clusters and root fragments.  This activity is not for the faint of heart, the weak of back, or the subtle of brain.

one spadeful at a time

            So far, I am on schedule.  The next task, which I must accomplish pre-pilgrimage, is to get adequate fencing around both the old and the new beds—unless my ambition can be satisfied by offering a dietary supplement to the deer.  Then if I can get plants in the ground soon after returning from Europe, there will be some hope of having a tomato or two in September!

Imaginary Friends

            Two of our granddaughters are just now on a fortnight’s school trip to China.  (The only such trip I can remember from my own early schooling was a two-hour visit to the local water filtration plant.  They called it Science.)  In writing a note of encouragement to twelve-year-old Lulu, Joan inquired whether she and her sister Cora would be accompanied by Turkalee.  Turkalee, a soft toy simulacrum of a turkey, has for many years been Lulu’s most intimate friend—intimate, and of course imaginary.   In the past I have been an inadvertent eavesdropper on animated conversations between Lulu and Turkalee.  I don’t actually know whether Turkalee is in China.  They are by now a somewhat odd couple, and their future is uncertain.   Lulu is in the effervescent flush of girlhood, but Turkalee is decrepit in the extreme, threadbare, limp-necked.  But what a friend Turkalee has been!

            Imaginary friends are rather on my mind at the moment.  They are such helpful extensions of the self.   First, I read of the very useful new app, “Invisible Boyfriend,” which for only $24.99, will fill the aching e-voids in your life.  Then, in reading of the denouement of the University of Virginia rape-hoax episode fostered by Rolling Stone magazine, to which I devoted this page some three months ago, I had the startling apperçu that the whole thing must turn upon a most rare species of the imaginary friend—viz., the imaginary rapist.  Jackie—aka “the victim” and “the survivor”—wanted to attract the sentimental attentions of a fellow student, Mr. X.  She sought to animate Mr. X’s sluggish amatory response by making him think he had an ardent upperclass competitor.  As this person was entirely imaginary, and thus unlikely to sue me, we need not call him “Mr. Y”.  We can call him, as Jackie at first did, “Haven Monahan,” or as she later did, when he supposedly orchestrated her brutal gang rape, “Drew”.   Jackie did her best to overcome the inconvenience of Haven Monahan’s actual non-existence by providing him with some baroque means of electronic communication available for a small fee in the cybernetic wilderness.  Of course she had to write the actual texts herself, but that's no hill for a stepper.

          The role of Haven Monahan was to set the cat among the pigeons, though I learn that in millennial-speak the cat has been replaced by the catfish.   I quote from the indispensable on-line Urban Dictionary.  “A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they're not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances”.  (The Urban Dictionary is better at definitions than at grammar.)  In case you need to use the word in its verbal sense in a sentence, the urban lexicographers usefully provide an example:  Did you hear how Dave got totally catfished last month?! The fox he thought he was talking to turned out to be a pervy guy from San Diego!

            Totally? And from San Diego!  My God!  No wonder so many of us from time to time feel that the world would be a better place if we could control both halves of our daily communications.  I am no longer embarrassed when--as happens with increasing frequency--I am discovered mumbling to myself.  I simply explain that I find it increasingly difficult to get a good conversation going.   A popular song of my youth—and research reveals that it actually antedates my birth—summed up what surely must be a nearly universal temptation.  It was called “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”

            I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter

            And make believe it came fro you.

            I’m gonna write words, oh, so sweet

            They’re gonna knock me off my feet

            Kisses on the bottom

            I’ll be glad I’ve got ‘em.

            No blogger, however, is in a position to be critical of such reflexive modes of communication as may be afforded by the Turkalees or Invisible Boyfriends in our lives.  For all our wishful thinking, we have an actual, documentable audience of precisely one.  It is possibly notable that, according to the statistics kept by Google, statistics that I have no grounds for calling into doubt, this very post is the three hundredth consecutive weekly essay I have published since June 12, 2009, when I first began.  By rough and ready calculus, but one more likely to under- than to over-count, that amounts to 255,000 words I have released into the electronic aether without any identifiable motive other than self-indulgence.  For purposes of comparison I can tell you that there are about 210,000 words in Moby Dick and about 260,000 in Middlemarch.  I am approaching the halfway mark for War and Peace.  While I must grudgingly allow a distinction between quantity and quality that’s still a mighty colloquy with imaginary friends

Golden Oldies

Each week I receive a certain amount of email concerning my blog posts.  The messages are mainly encouraging, but I am sometimes surprised by the source mentioned, as it is not always my blog’s web page.  Several in recent weeks refer to encountering an essay on “Senior Correspondent”, a site that appears to anthologize  on-line journalistic gerontology for the pleasure and instruction of our fellow-seniors.  I know of this site at least by name.  Twice I rashly promised to write something for them and twice I ignominiously forgot to do so—at which point the editors sensibly decided that a purloined essay was probably just as good as a commissioned one, and maybe even better, in that it was actual rather than unconvincingly potential.

            From the pirating of my essays I take absolutely no offense—far from it.  The truth is the Lord’s, as Augustine says, and as for the Internet, it’s as free as the air we breathe or the water from a mountain spring.  That I am a senior is valuably documented by my reduced-fare MetroCard.  That I am a correspondent is perhaps slightly less certain, but still plausible.  That I am communicating with other seniors is the subject of this essay.

            Just yesterday I taught the fifth of six seminars in a Chaucer course I am teaching at the Evergreen Forum, one of several “adult schools” in our town.  The phenomenon of “continuing education,” an important one nationally, is related to a number of demographic trends.  People are living longer and healthier lives.  The number of college-educated retirees is quite large in absolute terms, and steadily increasing.  Many retired people, anticipating perhaps decades of mentally active life, have made such opportunities as tend to be found especially in the environs of college towns an important factor in their choice of retirement location.

            Seniors are delightfully tolerant and forgiving as students—which is perhaps a way of saying they have pretty low expectations.  They also tend to be smart and cultured and to have heard of such historical events as World War II.  And the curriculum on offer from the Evergreen Forum is pretty relaxed too.  Among my competitors are courses with such titles as “Devils, Demons and the Supernatural in Opera,”  “What to Eat?  Do Not Worry,” and “Curiouser and Curiouser: 150 Years of Alice”—all of which I’d like to take myself.  Still, the idea of teaching an introductory Chaucer course on the Middle English text of the “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales seemed a bit eccentric to me even as I was proposing it.  The question is not really whether you can spend six weeks on 850 lines of poetry, but whether such an activity can in any sense constitute an “introduction” to Chaucer.

            The answer, I have been delighted to discover, is in the affirmative.  I have a full load of thirty students, and at least half of them already had read some Chaucer.  As recently as half a century ago Chaucer featured in high school English courses, and several of my students still hold in their memories, after all those years, some or even most of the first immortal sentence, florid and nearly endless (128 words), with which the poem begins: Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote…New students of Chaucer often think, mistakenly, that the hardest part is the language, but it takes no more than half an hour to correct that misapprehension, and to bring them to an understanding that a “modern version” of Chaucer’s text is not merely not the same thing as Chaucer, but something inevitably feebler and less interesting.

            One can have a great experience for the first time only once, and it is really rather thrilling to see a septuagenarian first reading, and then really “getting” some of the great lines in the Prologue for the first time.  Take, for example, Chaucer on gold.   What Milton would later call “the precious bane” appears seven times in the Prologue and crucially controls the descriptions of six of the pilgrims.  The spiritual failures of the Prioress and the Monk, two professional ascetics with high station but without vocation, are signaled by the inappropriate gold ornaments that are a part of their accoutrements.  From the Prioress’s string of beads, rather in the manner of a modern girl’s “charm” bracelet is appended “a brooch of gold full sheene [bright]”, while the Monk fastens the chin-strap of his cowl in a somewhat extra-ecclesial fashion.  “He had of gold ywroght a ful curious pyn.”  To the Clerk of Oxenford (the original glad learner and glad teacher, incidentally) he offers the following couplet:

                        But al be that he was a philosophre,

                        Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre—

an idea dependent upon a “groaner” of a quibble then available on the word philosopher, meaning both an aspirant to wisdom and a money-grubbing alchemist!   The concluding couplet of the description of the medical doctor—the medical profession (Little Pharma, perhaps?) was often taxed with the charge of cupidity in the fourteenth century—is less kindly:

                        For gold in phisik is a cordial,

                        Therefore he loved gold in special.

Here we see both the medicinal and the linguistic roots of my old grandmother’s “elderberry cordial”.  Do you think the Doctor’s love of gold was really based in its value as a heart medicine?  Finally, there is the Good Parson’s characteristically simple statement of an aspiration met by far too few of his colleagues in this poem—that of clerical holiness.  In the middle of the seventeenth century Milton would famously say of the corrupt English clergy that “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.”  Chaucer had anticipated him with his version of a biblical aphorism:…if gold ruste, what shal iren do?  Then he tells it like it is.

                        For if a preest be foul, on whom we truste,

                        No wonder is a lewed man to ruste;

                        And shame it is, if a preest take keep,

                        A shiten shepherde and a clene sheep.

The Clerk of Aberystwyth: the late Roger Roberts took his degree at the age of 82