Whose Number Is Not Legion

 

This essay is a new venture for me, requiring a kind of provisional 

abrupt introductory paragraph that must serve as a foundation

for a structure to be erected upon it some hours hence--I hope by

about 3pm EST. That is to say, this post is to be continued. For

it involves matters that will not have happened until about then, 

or at least for which I have no hope of providing some 

photographic evidence of their having happened by then.  This

is as close to "live blogging" as Gladly Lerne is ever likely to 

come.  So with what I must hope is a sufficiently annoying air of

mystery, I leave you until later, or in this instance jusque' à 

plus tard....

        and it is now plus tard.  This is a story about two

 commanding figures, Napoleon Bonaparte and our daughter

 Katherine.  I realize that this may seem a conspicuous yoking

 of unequals of differing character, perhaps even a concordia

 discors like last week’s soiled fish.  But there are major

differences between them.  Our daughter , after all,  is a very 

nice person.  But it was the not-so-nice First Consul Napoleon 

who, two hundred and twenty years ago, established the

 Legion d’Honneur.  The French Revolution went a long way

 towards destroying hereditary aristocracy.  Along with

 titles of aristocratic rank were junked hundreds of

 religious and secular sodalities, fraternal organizations

 and orders of chivalry.  Many of these groups had been

 divided into hierarchical degrees of subgroups with more

 or less fancy titles.  Many had distinctive emblems,

ornaments, or features of dress that announced their wearers

 with varying degrees of iconographical exactitude.  In 

theory all this was swept away by the Revolution, one of 

the three bywords of which was Égalité--equality of social

station.  One title alone was thought sufficient for all:

Citoyen—citizen.  (For the Russians a century later it 

would be tovarishch—Comrade.)                 

Never mind that the egalitarianism might in reality be 

more linguistic than social.  The world of titular elitism

had been dealt a punishing blow.  And it might seem to

have created a “merit gap”.  Napoleon was at heart a 

soldier, and he believed that soldiers, though they fought 

nobly for their homelands, for their leaders, for their

religions, and for glory, by no means despised the 

“baubles” of military decorations.  Their miserly pay, 

when they got it, hardly made them what we would think 

of as mercenaries.  It was with this in mind that in1802,

 he devised the Legion of Honor to recognize conspicuous 

service to the French patria.  The recognition was not

 material, but of the highest prestige.  The Legion’s motto

 is “Honneur et Patrie"-“Honor and Homeland.”  At its 

origin Napoleon thought of such service as principally,

though not exclusively, military in nature.  The very

word Legion of course was a term borrowed from ancient 

Roman military history—a large fighting force (a minimum

of four thousand men) organized into a precise hierarchy 

of well-oiled functional parts.  The excellence recognized

among the new French Legioneers came in gradations or

degrees, as it had in the old church hierarchy and in the

burgeoning secular religion of the Free Masons.  Over 

time the concept of service to the French Republic was

largely directed to notable achievement or leadership in

many fields, culture, scholarship, industrial enterprise, etc.

It was also realized that there were throughout the world

men and women who, though not in fact French citizens

or perhaps even residents of France, were notable

contributors. People could and did honor the French

patrie from many foreign climes.  This was particularly

true, perhaps, of academic experts dealing with French

materials: French history, French culture, Francophone 

countries, and so forth.    

Two new electrifying knights
 

            By now you see where this is going.  A short while ago Christophe Kerrero, the Recteur de l’academie de Paris, inducted Dr. Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, historian and CEO of the Getty Foundation,  as a chavaliere.  Chevalier/e continues the title of distinguished military distinction in ancient Rome and the Christian Middle Ages.  The English word knight (from Old English cniht, “young man”) was a bit of an outlier.  The Latin word eques, like the French chevalier, the Spanish caballero, the German Ritter, etc., made clear this person’s essential source of fearful power.  As the French joke has it, the most important thing about a chevalier is the cheval (horse).  And indeed I would hate to be standing in an infantry line, sword in hand, facing ten or twelve 1400-pound war horses, each mounted by a steel-clad warrior with extended battle lance in “charge” position, headed my way at a canter that soon advanced to a gallop.

                                                       Claudine and Joan in the Grande Salle of the Sorbonne
 

            External evidences of the award—what Napoleon called the “baubles”--are a fancy medal for ceremonial occasions and a very discreet small red lapel bar for trips to the grocery store and things like that.  I now remember quoting Nina Berberova on the Kravchenko trial.  “To see with my own eyes how a former minister, or a world-known scientist, a Nobel Prize laureate or a Sorbonne Professor with the Legion of Honor in his lapel button hole, or a famous author would take the oath and under oath affirm that there never had been and were not any concentration camps in the USSR was one of the strongest impressions of my entire life.” Reports of Katy’s testimony are much more uplifting.

                                                        Pierre and Claudine Bloch: friends of seventy years
 

I have already reported on one of these filial laureations in January of 2001, also in Paris and also at the Sorbonne.  (I am now sort of embarrassed by the bragging in which I indulged, but should you have nothing better to do you can run a search under “What a Prize!”—an allusion to the prize-winner, actually--or follow the list back to January 27, 2010).  A large issue of my own this time is simply the unfortunate fact that I am in New Jersey, not Paris.  I didn’t think it was wise from the medical point of view to undertake another international trip so soon after the last one.  In case of my own possible temptation to revise this decision, the prize-winner herself stood ready to reaffirm it in emphatic form.  But all is very well.  Joan, accompanied by our eldest and very globe-trotting son Richard, are already ensconced in the elegant guest quarters of our very old friends Pierre and Claudine Bloch--next to the Luxembourg Gardens, a short walk from the site of the ceremony.  My erudite son-in-law Zvi, prohibited by his own professional obligations from attending the ceremony, has been keeping me company here.  So it's Hands Across the Water, and if all goes well with Richard’s plans to send me a couple of photos pronto, I shall achieve my first and probably only semi-live blog.  And I will say it again: What a prize!

                                                   

photo credits: Richard A. Fleming

 

Felix Culpa

 

On this slow news day, the closest I want to come to politics is a possibly eccentric meditation on the idea of the margin of error.  John Milton, in his epic treatment of the Genesis story, Paradise Lost, advances a theory of what is called in Latin a felix culpa and in English the “Fortunate Fall”.  This is the somewhat convoluted Christian theological idea that the primal sin of Adam and Eve, though utterly disastrous in its immediate effects, turned out in the end to be the cause of humanity’s greatest happiness, namely redemption through Jesus Christ.  Hence it was a “happy” sin or fault.  The paradox of the felix culpa is actually rather fascinating in its many ramifications.

 

My attention was recently drawn to the idea of fortunate mistakes in art and literature.  The line of thought was introduced by a news squib concerning a painting by the modernist Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).  Apparently one of his most famous works has been hanging upside down in various museums for the last seventy-five years.  I say “apparently,” because I don’t see how anybody can actually know.  The painting is a group of strips of color crossing at right angles parallel to the four sides of its canvas, a geometrical square.  The expert who declared the painting to have been hanging upside down claims there is independent evidence of this fact, but it doesn’t convince me.  The real reason behind the claim is that this guy thinks it looks better the other way.  I can get behind this argument.  Life would certainly be much improved if it conformed to the way I see things.  And as I look at the painting, it would look about the same whichever of its four edges was “up”.  If the way it has been hanging for seventy-five years is culpable, it is happily culpable.  It's all in the way you look at things.

 

 

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the philosopher-bishop George Berkeley published his novel ideas about ontology—ontology meaning, roughly, how things exist.  What brought things into existence was the fact that they were perceived to exist.  This theory was very elegantly expressed in a short Latin sentence.  Esse est percipi.  “To be is to be perceived.”  You have probably heard about “Berkleyanism” in terms of an example commonly used to illustrate it.  If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to see or hear the crash, did it really fall?  Indeed, did it really exist in the first place?  According to Berkeley it is only the perception of phenomena that makes them exist.  So at first blush it would seem that the answer is negative.

 

            Well, we do say that seeing is believing.  I recall from many years ago a hilarious segment on, I believe, “Candid Camera”.  A refrigerator salesman was trying to close a deal with a supposed prospective buyer (actually a conspirator in on the joke).  How, this man wanted to know, could he be absolutely sure that the interior light in the refrigerator actually went out when the door was shut?  He didn’t want to be paying for wasted electricity!  No amount of explanation and assurance from the salesman, no amount of fiddling with the little switch in the side of the door, could persuade him.  He insisted on actually climbing into the refrigerator and having the door shut on him if he was to be persuaded.  The salesman, apparently willing to do anything to close a sale, cooperated; so he scrunched the supposed “buyer” into the shelf above the vegetable drawers and actually closed the door!  In fact, Berkeley didn’t think metaphysics demanded such strenuous human measures.  Fortunately, all-seeing God, whose divine perception was continuous and ubiquitous, was in charge of ontology.

 

The witty English priest Ronald Knox wrote a limerick on this theme

There once was a man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad”

 

which elicited an equally witty if anonymous response:

Dear Sir,
              Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
                          Yours faithfully,
                                                  God

            Of course, if there is perception, there must be the possibility of misperception, and thus another chance of felix culpa.  For example I am slightly color blind.  How can I know that what I do not see is better than what I do see?  There are some great examples of masterful mistakes from literary study.  One concerns a very dramatic incident at the end of Melville’s novel White-Jacket: or the World in a Man-of-War.  The narrator, a Yankee seaman who takes his strange nickname from his home-made upper garment, narrowly escapes death in an accidental plunge from a spar high on a mast into the sea.  He plunged deep into the water before resurfacing miraculously uninjured.  In the submerged moment of his terrifying near-death experience, his whole life races through his mind.  “I wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying.  But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through”  (p.763, LibAm edition).

 

            An eminent Harvard professor, one of the country’s leading authorities on American literature, and a man who had either bad eyeglasses or a bad edition of the novel, waxed lyrical about this passage.  He was particularly excited by the idea of a soiled fish.  He wrote thus: “[Melville’s] “discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical.”  Now who could possibly doubt the poetic superiority of a soiled to a coiled fish?  And who would settle for rubbing up against a slippery eel if you could have a discordia concors instead?  The mistake is a great improvement on the take.  God bless the typographical error.  O felix culpa!

 

 

 

 

 

Elective

 

            It is possible that you are already aware that there is an election taking place in our country six days hence.  I am reluctant to write about politics in this blog.  I am not a political scientist or even a political groupie.  The category in which I would place myself is “concerned citizen”.  I hope and trust that same category embraces the large majority of my readership.  Because there seems to me to be a lot to be concerned about.  A brief venting on this subject will at least win my promise not to write about the actual election results.

 

            In the state in which I reside and therefore vote there is not a lot of action this year.  The names of neither of our two senators nor of our governor will be on the ballot.  They are all serving in unexpired terms.  Few of the Congressional contests are in serious doubt.  Our own representative, a competent, experienced, popular and well-spoken Democrat, will certainly be re-elected.  Such drama as I can find, and it isn’t much, is in the list of candidates for the Princeton School Board.  But New Jersey is somewhat anomalous in this regard.  Our two largest neighbors are New York and Pennsylvania.  There is enough competition in New York to qualify it as at least a “skirmish state” among the House candidates as a group.  And Pennsylvania is a full-blown “battleground state.”

 

            According to the endlessly repeated bromide attributed to Tip O’Neill (D-MA, d. 1994), “All politics is local.”  If so, I wish that somebody would get that word to the national headquarters of our two major political parties.  Because I am being inundated with importunate begging letters from my friends Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell imploring me to help elect their senatorial candidates in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada, among other places.  According to news reports “money is pouring in” in response to such appeals.  Maybe so, but not mine.  There is not even the pretense that candidates being pushed are meant to represent the electors in the states in which they reside.  They are meant to represent one of two major political parties, alias Good and Bad.

 

            Old age is full of insults and inconveniences, but there are a few advantages to it.  One of them is remembered experience.  When I was a kid the donkey and the elephant could be rather cheerful, even sprightly mascots of a competition that seemed more athletic than belligerent.  One knew lots of people who sometimes voted Democratic and sometimes Republican, depending upon the political circumstances of the moment and the personalities of the candidates.  It seems to me we now have an electorate that is very closely divided in numbers across the country, and very nearly immobile in the fixation of party allegiance.  This is a very bad situation for many mostly obvious reasons.  Our system of primary elections, ostensibly designed to facilitate efficiency, has the practical effect of nominating candidates who are extreme and not infrequently lack the competence needed to serve as democratic political representatives.  Thus among the candidates for whom this New Jersey resident is being importuned to contribute his Social Security shekels are a once-great football player of stunning ignorance and moral hypocrisy in Georgia and a cognitively impaired stroke victim in Pennsylvania.  In somewhat differing ways they exemplify the large problem identified above: a closely divided electorate increasingly fixated upon partisan preference.

 

            The two men to whom I refer represent different political parties.  The partisan problem is wonderfully bipartisan.  In my view it is political malfeasance for either of them to present themselves as senatorial candidates, though for different reasons.  Democracy depends upon the rule of law to be sure, but law alone is not sufficient to sustain it in any vibrant fashion.  It also depends upon a web of common-sense conventions.  One of these is that the electors be presented not merely with a choice of candidates, but with a choice of qualified candidates. 

 

Is someone in an unresolved state of seriously compromised health “qualified”?   I am particularly interested in cerebral vascular accidents (“strokes”) because of personal experience.  There is enough evidence of the occurrence of cerebral blood clots among the males on the paternal side of my family to give me some sleepless moments.  My beloved father died after a series of four strokes over the period of nearly a decade.  If you have ever personally witnessed the effects of a serious stroke on an active, articulate person of energy and intelligence, you have experienced one of life’s true sadnesses.  And if you have watched a video of the debate between John Fetterman and his opponent in the Pennsylvania senatorial race, you have had a glimpse of it.  But neither one’s sympathy for a man’s situation nor admiration for a his pluck can turn an issue of the public good into one of the private rights of disabled people.

 

About halfway through the disastrous sequence of my Dad’s decline in New Mexico, I went with him once to a meeting of his Stroke Club, a support group for sufferers and survivors, whose degree of impairment varied considerably.  I met several brave, indeed inspirational people at this meeting.  One guy, a former long-distance truck driver, pricked up his ears when he heard I was from Princeton.  “Have you ever heard of the Princeton University Press?” he asked.  What a naïve question, thought I, author of several books published by that press, when I finally figured out what he was trying to say and discovered what lay behind it.  This man could barely speak, but he was buying all the volumes of the English translation of Kierkegaard’s works as they were issued by the Bollingen Foundation through the Princeton Press.  A silent, useful rebuke for me and my assumptions: but I still wouldn’t want him as my senator.  Stroke victims sometimes can and do recover.  But they also can and do suffer successive seizures.  The insouciance and prevarication with which candidates, their assembled medical experts, and segments of the press want to avoid an honest discussion of medical realities is in one way astonishing.  In another, it is not.  One of our legendary football coaches is supposed to have said in a pep talk to his team: “Men, winning isn’t everything.  It’s the only thing.”  This guiding principle was passed on by my own coach—approvingly but quite ludicrously, given the material he was dealing with—to a team on which I once played.  This Darwinian exhortation seems now to be political science.  A columnist in the Times just said in so many words that the terminal goal of the senatorial election is selecting a person of the right party.  If that is your view of the ends of American democracy, you can probably relax a little about the problem of misinformation on Twitter.

No. 687 of the continuing series

 

The Golden Age

                                            Peaceable Kingdom of Edward Hicks
 

If you’ve read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, you will know—or at least be forced to deny in the face of overwhelming if dull statistical data—that the larger trends in global human felicity are on the upswing.  I refer to such major factors as the ravages of war, famine, and disease.  The number of our fellow humans who have fairly recently “been brought out of abject poverty” is astonishing.  Pinker’s book is in line with a major though historically fairly new trend of optimistic thought—mainly since the Enlightenment—progressivism—documented in another once-famous book by the Cambridge historian J. B. Bury*.  Yet one would hardly guess the world’s good news  from reading the daily papers or watching the PBS News Hour.  There one gets the impression that major world trends have probably never been worse since the time of the Golden Horde, and that in our own country “democracy is imperiled” about the same way it was in Bloody Kansas in 1858.  Do not misunderstand me.  It’s not that I think everything is just tikkity-boo.  I think a lot of things are pretty bad—just not 1348 or 1793 bad.  But as a student of earlier periods of history I am aware that the human struggle has in fact been unending.   Twice in my own lifetime the pessimism has been tinged with apocalypticism.  When I was a child in school the terror was Nuclear Winter.  For my young grandchildren it has been Global Warming.  We are born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, as the Good Book says.  What interests me in this essay is the alacrity with which spokesmen of the human race have embraced historical pessimism and continue to do so.

 

Having too little to do as he lolled around the Tower of London while awaiting eventual execution, the Elizabethan courtier and swashbuckler Sir Walter Raleigh dashed off an 800-page History of the World animated by his imaginative etymology of the word world: “that which groweth worse as it groweth older”.  Retrogressivism.  It is Raleigh rather than Pinker that my week’s reading in old poems has brought to my mind.

 

Among the great world myths, to be found in the lore of the most “advanced” of ancient peoples and in the least technologically developed of contemporary indigenous groups, is that of a Golden Age from which the human race has gradually declined or precipitously fallen in its ethical stature, moral grandeur, and state of felicity.  Usually, perhaps always, the transformation is the result of moral lapse.  Most famous of such myths is that in the Hebrew Scriptures—the story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent and the forbidden fruit tree.  In the early centuries of the formation of Christianity brilliant exegetes derived from this story in the early chapters of Genesis complex doctrines of human nature, the construction of the human psychological apparatus, refined philosophical concepts of the nature of human offense against God (sin), and the consequences of its supposed inheritability, often called Original Sin.  In the seventeenth-century the English poet John Milton, probably the best-known epic poet in our tongue, published Paradise Lost, announcing as his theme “Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World, and all our woe, with loss of Eden…”  For just as the human race was corrupted, so also did living conditions in our world become harsh and adversarial, and life itself a brutal struggle: vineyards into briar patches, so to speak.  The “peaceable kingdom” became the arena of human life “nasty, brutish, and short” in Hobbes’s famous phrase.

 

The pre-Christian myth of the Golden Age is alluded to by many of the classical Latin writers and treated at some length by the two most important poets among them, Virgil and Ovid. So consonant was it with the account of human origins in the Bible, the Roman myth needed only the slightest humanistic tweaking to enter the mainstream of Christian Latin literature, which it joined via various channels, but especially by way of a magnificent poem (early sixth century) by the brilliant poet-philosopher Boethius.  His greatest book, The Consolation of Philosophy is a prosimetrum, a work in which poems and prose passages often work in intellectual symphony.  One of the most famous “meters” (poems) in the Consolation begins “How much happier was that earlier age when contented men depended on the faithful fields and, not yet sunk into luxury, satisfied their hunger with easily gathered acorns.”  Felicitous, peaceful simplicity of life became deformed by the invention of navigation, leading to trade, and universal avarice.  The next steps toward depravity were bloodshed, wars of conquests, and the frantic digging for gold and precious gems.

 

  This short poem (thirty lines) of Boethius had a long afterlife.  It was translated or adapted by early poets in most of the European vernaculars—Chaucer included.  Chaucer’s “translation” is double the length of that of Boethius, and doubly pessimistic: by its final three lines the moral decline is so bad that nothing is left in the world but “covetousness, duplicity, treason, and envy, poison, manslaughter, and murder in several varieties.”

 

Boethius’s Golden Age meter of course derived from earlier Latin literary tradition.  The most influential of the classical versions are those of Virgil and, especially, Ovid.  Very early in the Metamorphoses Ovid traces universal world history from a Golden Age, ruled by Saturn under Astreia, goddess of justice, through its gradual decline into ages of less precious metals.  Things really got tough in the Age of Iron.  “Immediately every species of crime burst forth…modesty, truth, and honor took flight; in their place succeeded fraud, deceit, treachery, violence, and the cursed hankering for acquisition".

 

painful end of an era

 

The correspondences Christian theologians found between Moses and Ovid were not simply factitious.  Legends of the ruination of our once paradisal planet through human moral depravity are part of the shared stock of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern lore.  Virgil, widely believed to have foretold the birth of Christ in his Eclogues, could almost naturally become Dante’s guide to his imagined Christian underworld.  The end of the Golden Age and the loss of Eden are fundamentally the same old story of desire and rebellion-- drugs and rock-and-roll being long delayed afterthoughts.  The violent end to the Age of Gold came about in this wise.   Saturn’s revolting son--“Lecherous” Jupiter as Chaucer calls him—revolted against his father in a most revolting way.  He cut off his dad’s private parts and dropped them into the Mediterranean drink.  The result this aberrant act of coitus, after a certain period of foaming and bubbling, was the birth of the goddess Venus at Paphos on Cyprus.

 

Venus on the half-shell

Most readers probably consider it inappropriate if not blasphemous to find anything humorous in the scriptural version of the Fall of Man.   I do have to say that I find it hard not to smile when I read of  the first thing Adam and Eve did following the disaster.  They tried to get some underwear on, and quick: “and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”  Maybe it’s just the Elizabethan use of the word aprons.  Once the goddess of love got loose in the world, all hell broke loose, especially when her very naughty kid Cupid was around.  It’s more like a belly laugh in Ovid, where one of the first events in the fallen world is Apollo’s mad pursuit of Daphne, the beautiful daughter of a river god.  You know about Cupid’s arrows, of which there were two kinds: aphrodisiac and anaphrodisiac.  The first inspires a burning sexual passion in its victim, the latter a terrible headache and revulsion at the very idea of sex.  Just for the fun of it, Cupid shot Apollo with one of the former and Daphne with one of the latter and sat back to enjoy the fun.  This led to a frantic pursuit and many great works of Renaissance art.  Just as she was about to be captured and ravished by Apollo, Daphne uttered a desperate prayer to be saved.  Salvation came in the form of her miraculous transformation into a tree—the laurel tree, thereafter the Apollonian symbol of poets and poetry.  As her tender flesh turned to bark in his hands, and her lovely hair a tangle of leafy twigs, Apollo was forced to reconsider his options.  “Well,” he said in effect, “if you won’t be my girlfriend, will you at least be my tree?"

 

Arboreal Daphne 

*J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1920).  A timely study: 20 millions, half of them civilians, had just been killed in the Great War.

Camões--and a Little Chaucer--at Harvard

   

 

 

    

 Watch out, Geoff.  I've got my eye on you.

 

 If I declare our visit to the Camões Conference at Harvard a great success—and I do—the credit for our personal comfort goes primarily to Leah and Brian, our generous hosts, who with what appeared to be ease balanced busy professional careers and the demands of two adorable children with the care and feeding of a couple of octogenarians.  On the academic side, on the Harvard campus, the treatment was likewise most welcoming, and the intellectual feast quite rich.  Many of the principal scholars in this field, including the Portuguese ones, were there; others made presentations via Zoom.  Rita Marnoto came from the University of Coimbra, the ancient academy at which Camões himself must have acquired some large part of his enormous erudition.  It is rather as though Davy Crocket had picked up a Yale doctorate on his way to the Alamo.  She gave the introductory talk, a bibliographical tour de force concerning the poem’s first edition(s) of 1572.  Around the edges there were pleasant group meals full of friendly and informative talk; Joan sneaked off for half a day at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and offered a report on some of the marvels viewed.

My belief concerning the European Renaissance, a belief by no means widely accepted by my colleagues, is that in most essentials it continued in the philosophical and theological traces of high medieval culture.  Historians are more interested in change than in stasis, and there of course appeared in the sixteenth century major stylistic changes and intellectual innovations for us to talk about.  My talk, indeed, in part concerned possible “medieval” relationships between Camões and Dante.  Such relevance as the digressive comments about the Middle Ages in this paragraph might possibly have  concern my welcome of two unexpected fourteenth-century Chaucerian interventions into our sixteenth-century Camonian event.

At the Houghton Library, where some of Harvard’s fabulous bibliographic treasures are stored, experts had mounted a small collection of first and other editions of the Lusiads.  The Harvard library is among the richest in the world in this as in so many other subjects.  But there is hanging in an elegant room not far from the exhibition space what is probably the most famous, and possibly authentic , portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer.  I had seen a hundred reproductions of it, but never it.  The Librarian of the Houghton, knowing that I had taught Chaucer for many years, took me aside for an unscheduled private viewing.  It was a very memorable kindness.

                         The Houghton Rare Book Library, Harvard University

A second way the Middle Ages intruded into our very Renaissance conference was via the front page of the New York Times, which reported that two major Chaucer experts had discovered new evidence concerning a mysterious episode in the poet’s life.  Though Chaucer’s life records, when sufficiently spread out and annotated, occupy a pretty thick book, there is a great deal we do not know about him, including practically anything that might shed light upon his “personality”.  One intriguing document, however, has garnered a great deal of attention and much speculation.  It is a legal affidavit attesting that a woman named Cecily Champagne absolves Chaucer of any charge of raptus against him.  This document has sometimes been used by feminist scholars and others to impute patriarchalism, misogyny, and other unpleasant medieval attitudes to the father of English poetry.  What is new in the Chaucer scholars’ discovery is that Cecily and Geoffrey were allied in a legal action denying the charge.  Any scrap of evidence about Chaucer is a major discovery, and the discoverers of this one merit high praise.  But there is no particular illumination of Chaucer’s character in it.  Anybody with access to the Du Cange dictionary of medieval Latin would know that it is quite unlikely that raptus in the context of the original document means forcible sexual possession.  Hardly more likely does it mean that he secretly married her.  No form of “kidnapping” or “false imprisonment” or other coercion is likely.  Secondly, and without the slightest ambiguity, what the document says is that Chaucer did not commit raptus, whatever raptus means.  Only in places like Park Slope has inveigling away somebody’s cleaning lady with an offer she cannot refuse risen to the level of a crime.  Somewhat strangely, one of the discoverers of the supplementary document was quick to add that nothing in this episode undermines certain previous scholarship concerning it.  This is a little like saying that nothing in Copernicus undermines anything in Ptolemy.  That is one of the current stylistic differences between scholarship in the humanities and scholarship in the natural sciences in America.  The study of past ages can be very rewarding and indeed instructive.  But the past is a series of unique ages, each with its own inherited cultural patterns each with at least some cultural innovations.  It cannot be true that “to understand everything is to pardon everything.”  Still it does little to divvy up the past into convenient but inadequate categories for flagellation among our own current moral and political certainties, many of which would seem novel if even comprehensible to our not too distant ancestors.

Traveling by train worked out very well.  It took about five hours.  Flying would not have required less, though it would have involved a great deal more difficult walking and the general hassle of security lines.  There are far worse fates than to sit in a comfortable, roomy seat with a good book for a few hours. 

Still I was once again struck, as I so often am, by the disparities between the private and the public in our country.  Everything I saw on the Harvard campus was elegant, functional, imposing, inviting.  It was clean.  It was tidy.  You might never guess that the institution’s endowment is less than sixty billion dollars.  Boston South rail station, where we arrived and whence we departed, is a civic disgrace.  The area from which the trains arrive and from which they depart has the air of a long-abandoned steel mill.  The vibe of the interior waiting room, where I was able to buy a pint bottle of soda water for $3.84, is decayed inelegance.  And though the Amtrak train did get us to Trenton, and on time… How are you going to keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?  The distance between Marseilles and Paris is greater than that from Trenton to Boston.  The TGV (very fast train) covers the distance in three hours and twenty-seven minutes, and you can safely place your bottle of soda water on the little-fold down table without fear that it will be bounced into your lap within the first quarter mile.  Of course my weekend thoughts were full of other cities: Lisbon on the Tagus River, and others I shall never see, Mombasa, Malinde, Goa.  Forget the train stations for the moment.   In this country I have actually been paid good money to read, teach, love, talk, and argue about old books that I love with a never-failing succession of inspiring young people.  And hang out at Camões conferences for down time.  What a privilege.  What an honor!

A Daring Journey

Vasco da Gama (maybe)
 

        In 1497 Vasco da Gama set out from Lisbon with the mission of finding a maritime route to what I shall call actual India—Columbus having just a few years earlier convinced himself and a good deal of the European learned world that he had reached India in the Caribbean.  He spent a long time on the trip, which included numerous European “firsts”, or at least “first recordeds”.   He navigated the treacherous waters off the Horn of Africa, the continent’s southern tip.  He spent a certain amount of time investigating some of the lands on both the western and eastern flanks of the continent.  These landings were the origins of Portugal’s African empire in Angola and Mozambique, among other places.  Most important of all he did make it to “real” India, where he raised a good deal of hell and scouted out the the possibilities of a  Portuguese colonial presence destined, in Goa, to create one of the teeming multicultural cities of the Renaissance.  In economic and cultural terms he challenged the Muslim maritime monopoly in the Indian Ocean and “opened up” the East for the lucrative commerce of Europeans.  Vasco’s voyage was epoch-making and epic in its statistics,  taking roughly three hundred days at sea, travelling roughly twenty-four thousand miles, and losing most of his crew (including his brother) before landing once again on Portuguese land in 1499.  Fifty years or more later—we really are not sure when--a somewhat mysterious countryman of Vasco’s, an erudite Latinist, a soldier, an adventurer, a disappointed lover, but above all a magnificent poet wrote (in an elevated form of the Portuguese vernacular) an epic poem about the voyage.

The poet’s name was Luis de Camões.  His poem is called the Lusiadas (Lusiads in English), which means roughly “the adventures of the sons of Lusus”) as Æneid means roughly “the adventures of Æneas.”  The connection with Virgil’s Æneid is crucial.  Camões lived, breathed, and presumably bathed in the poems of Virgil, which he appears to have more or less memorized.  Lusus is a highly iffy mythological character, probably the son of the god Bacchus, and the legendary founder of the nation of Portugal, the Latin name of which is Lusitania.  Most people have heard of Lusitania, or at least the Lusitania,  for a somber reason.  It was the sinking of a British passenger liner of that name by the Germans in 1915 that was the immediate “cause” of America’s entry into the First World War.  But if you think any poem that requires this much explanation just to understand its name is a pretty fancy poem, you are right.  It is.  It is also very long.  Nonetheless it did find a publisher, who brought it out in Lisbon in 1572.  The rest is history, and as historians love anniversaries, it has not gone unnoticed that 2022 is the 450^th anniversary of publication.  Under these circumstances, a group of enterprising young scholars at Harvard decided to put together an academic conference to celebrate the occasion.

                                                        Camões (maybe)

 

As Chaucer’s Friar said after listening to the Wife of Bath’s extensive remarks introducing the actual story she is preparing to tell, “This is a long preamble to a tale!”  That is not the sole resemblance between the Wife’s introductory remarks and my own.  In both instances the prologues are more interesting than the tales themselves.  Nonetheless, I must continue with my own tale.  I am quite interested in Camões, and I published a short book about one of his poems a few years ago.  The proposed “Camões at Harvard” conference was a chance to take a shot at his greatest work, the epic Lusiads.  So I sent in a proposal to the organizers, and more or less forgot about it.

 

During the time the idea for the conference was being hatched, the pandemic was raging.  Covid has had a major dispiriting effect on all of education, including higher education.  Many institutions felt they had to abandon “in person” teaching in favor of various more or less unsatisfactory on-line techniques.  The Age of Zoom had arrived.  Even in normal times conventions, conferences, and group meetings were known as possible spreaders of infectious diseases.  You will recall the infamous Legionnaires Disease, so named because of its first identification in relation to a meeting of the American Legion.  I once left a scholarly conference sick as a dog.  During the height of Covid many long-scheduled meetings were cancelled or indefinitely postponed.  But with the reasonable hope that things were improving, the planners of the Camões conference came up with an innovative plan.  The conference would be “hybrid”, part on-line, part in person, depending on circumstances and the preferences of individual participants at the time, which is—now.

 

The best part of academic meetings, from my personal perspective, has always been the informal conversations among participants.  Having signed up, I was willing to give my talk by Zoom from my home library but without much enthusiasm.  I was greatly relieved when Covid conditions improved sufficiently to move forward.  What sealed the deal for us was an invitation from a delightful friend on the Harvard faculty, once a graduate student at Princeton and now a rising scholarly star, to stay for a couple of nights with her and her husband in their house in Cambridge.  So later today Joan and I will be at the Trenton station to catch an Amtrak train scheduled to be in Boston South Station in the late afternoon.  This is a big deal for us.  We have become timid fuddy-duddies when it comes to serious travel.  I doubt that any of Vasco da Gama’s crew could have felt more edgy.  I am hoping to travel little more than five hundred miles in the semi-luxury of “distanced” business class, spend no more than three days doing so, and lose none of my crew.  But you never know.  It is embarrassing to be timorous in anticipation of a short and comfortable trip to hear about the memorials of one of the longer and most dangerous trips documented in world history; but travel mishaps do occur.  The extraordinary maritime empire of tiny Portugal spread across the world.  One of the established genres of the nation’s rich Renaissance literature is the history of maritime disasters.  To be fair, the Portuguese had so many disasters only because they always had so many ships at sea undertaking so many ambitious and dangerous voyages.  Wooden ships but iron men.  So I’m looking forward especially to hearing a scholar give a talk entitled: “The Lusiads: Flipside of 15^th Century Maritime Disaster Literature.”  I find the word flipside in the title particularly intriguing, and possibly disconcerting.