Perils of Relaxation

Forget Colonel Mustard: Joan did it in the back yard with the hammock

I was a pretty laid-back, easy-going kind of a lad. My mother claimed I was “too serious,” but that was as they say “code,” meaning that I read a lot of books. Reading was a great form of relaxation, so much so indeed as to be preferable to most officially sanctioned “amusements”. For that reason, perhaps, a similar hypo-tension characterized my years of higher education, despite their ostensible rigors. But then finally, aged twenty-seven, I found myself in Madison WI with a wife, a job, a prospect of paternity, an unfinished book manuscript, a clicking tenure clock, rent payments, and a car that kept breaking down.

I felt stressed. I suffered praeternatural fatigue and insomnia. I experienced, or imagined, an irregular heart beat. This sent me to a doctor, who administered my first-ever EKG, a procedure I supposed as probably of similar magnitude to a liver transplant. His diagnosis was that there was nothing wrong with me, except that I need to exercise and to relax. It was winter. This was the great Midwestern Tundra. Opportunities for health-giving winter sports were abundant, and he named a few.

I invested in a pair of ice skates. They cost $29—no mean figure, given that my annual salary was $7500. I bundled up, went to frozen Lake Mendota, put on the skates, and started gliding. Forty-seven seconds later I fell, hard, breaking my left wrist. That was the first of many experiences with health-giving exercise—tennis, squash, running, working out on machines--that landed me in or near a hospital. It took me a few years to discover swimming laps. As far as I can determine swimming laps is as close to risk-free exercise and relaxation as it comes. Of course I could drown, or I could die of boredom; but I’ll just have to risk it.

Actually, I usually get quite a bit of relaxing exercise around the house and garden. One of my things is building stone walls, an occupation requiring a certain amount of brain as well as a certain amount of brawn. First you have to drive around various slag-heaps in central Jersey scoping out appropriate detritus schist. You wouldn’t believe the stuff you come upon in the wilds of New Jersey. Many of the individual stones weigh a hundred pounds or more, and you have to dig them out and schlep them to the pickup. In the course of building you probably move each one another four or five times. And you don’t even have to have a gym subscription.

section of wall "in progress"

The walls I build are at best pseudo-functional, but in my opinion they really look terrific. Something there is that really loves a wall. And if you are going to put women on a pedestal, as I tend to do, the pedestal is just as important as the women.

Lulu and Cora Fleming-Benite rampant

Well, last week saw some pretty heavy-duty wall-building. My number-two son Luke (I refer to C.L.O. Fleming, Ph.D., the linguistic anthropologist) is with us at the moment. He is generally up for some good, health-giving, relaxing fun, and he helped to put on the capstone (approximate weight: 470 pounds) of a section of our latest effort, a new perimeter for an out-of-control compost heap at present contained only by an ad hoc brick pile.

The relaxing fun also includes removing the bricks and the concrete blocks by wheel barrow to a new, tidy, remote location. As some of you will be aware, the weather has been hot in the northeast, and after two or three hours I was apparently showing signs of fatigue. My affect alarmed my spouse. “You know,” she said, “you never relax. You’re supposed to be retired. Why don’t you lie down in the hammock? You never lie down in the hammock.”

section of "finished" wall

It is not quite true that I never lie down in the hammock. I distinctly remember doing so on at least two occasions. But I do what I am told. I went over to the hammock and tried to lie in it. Unfortunately, I mismanaged the physics, maldistributing my not inconsiderable avoir-du-poids. The hammock went into a rapid spin and spilled me hard on my left side. Sharp, agonizing pain shot through the left side of my torso. I think I probably cracked a rib. Many bodily movements are now painful, conspicuously including those needed for the Australian crawl. So, forget swimming. Lifting even light stones is out of the question. Relaxation has struck again.

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Changing the subject entirely, I need to do a little literary pimping for my number-one son Rich (I refer to Richard A. Fleming, the travel writer and journalist). Readers of his remarkable Walking to Guantanimo will want to know about his latest excursion in the Antilles basin. It is an essay accompanying Leah Gordon’s amazing photographs of Kanaval—a kind of Haitian Mardi Gras on steroids. One of the other contributors is the famous novelist Madison Smartt Bell, author (among much else) of Freedom's Gate: A Brief Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, not to mention a 1979 senior thesis “directed” by Prof. John V. Fleming.

What I Did Last Summer: an abecedarian post

The Castellans of 2010

So rapidly and so vastly has the empire of WiFi expanded throughout southern Europe since my last trip through those parts that, had I taken my computer with me, I probably could after all have scraped together blogs for the two Wednesdays past. But then I would have been worrying about the strength of the signal when I should have been savoring my cogote or lazily luxuriating in the birdsong of a soft Tuscan dawn, while you would have gained nothing more than a spiritless travelogue. Albertanus of Brescia in the thirteenth century came up with one of the all-time great book titles: De arte loquendi et tacendi. I translate that roughly as “When to Write Blogs and When to Shut Up.”

We now re-enter the realm of loquendi; and indeed this will be an unusually long post, though divided like the old menus in Chinese restaurants into the options of a Column A , a Column B, and a Column C. Column A is the travelogue; Column B is a brief account of the Princeton Dante Reunion at the Castello; Column C is a yet briefer essay on medieval Christian humanism. You may take your pick, mix and match, or choose to fast. Only the indefatigable can aspire to discover the alleged connection between them. And of course even A, B, and C cannot cover all that cries out to be included, such as, for example, (D), the doctorating of my son Luke, which took place in Philadelphia while his parents were lushing it up in a tapas bar in Zaragossa. (So for "My Son The Doctor", see "My Brother the Doctor"). Our older works of literature did not, of course, deploy themselves in “columns”. They were divided into stanzas, strophes, chapters, tituli, cantos, books, partes, among numerous other subdivisions, the most appropriate of which in the present circumstances is the fitt. So…

A, or FITT primo. Meanwhile, in old Castile, after brief anxieties that left me with the resolve to buy an i-Phone, I met up with my friend and companion (the “other John” [Meyer]) near Madrid, and we set off on a fine-tuned schedule to meet our peregrine spouses, who, after two weeks and roughly two hundred and fifty miles of marching, were to be found sipping white wine on the town square of Sahagún, a little east of Leon. Sahagún has many claims to interest and at least one to fame. It is the birthplace of Bernardino de Sahagún, O.F.M., the great missionary-anthropologist to whom we owe such knowledge as we have of the old Indian cultures of the Valley of Mexico.

But we had to get on to Italy and had no time to tarry, nor do I now. It was on to Zaragossa, with its cathedral so big and so baroque that it makes me gulp even thinking about it. Most of the next day was spent in fabulous Barcelona. Susan Saltrick (the other spouse, camarade de route extraordinaire) led us on a tour of the amazing Romanesque chapels reborn in the Catalan Museum atop Montjuic. We would have done many more fun things in Barcelona had it not been for the very tedious business of finding the wharf from which the Livorno ferry departs, guarding our possessions in its lockerless departure lounge, and then waiting endlessly for the retarded departure of the vessel.

A square of his own: bloguiste, apparently about to be shot by Falangists in Barcelona

I say no more. Simply strike from your traveler’s Book of Life the outfit called the Grimaldi Line, though it did eventually bring us alive to Livorno, the port of Tuscany, and the old Leghorn of the Romantic poets and Lord Nelson.

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B, or FITT secundo.

The seminar in session, bloguiste's toe on left

The maestro in preparation, or a place in the sun

The biennial Italian reunion of the Princeton Dante course, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary, is a tribute to the alto ingenio of Robert Hollander, the great scholar and famous teacher who taught Dante at Princeton for many years. Hollander’s published contributions to Dante studies are striking both in their quantity and in their quality. In recent years he and his wife Jean (herself a poet and teacher of poetry) completed their three-volume, copiously annotated edition and translation of the Divine Comedy to popular and scholarly applause. Among other things, Hollander pioneered the concept of the intellectually respectable reunion event at Princeton. He has happily inspired imitators, so that silly costumes, beer-swilling and really bad, loud rock bands are no longer the sole attractions of the annual pre-Commencement revelries. Some of the alumni dantisti, stimulated but unsatisfied by a single afternoon of flexing their maturing literary brain cells, came up with the idea of a week-long Dante event. Once they started thinking big, there was no stopping them. Princeton alumni tend to age as the years go by. The better news is that some of them tend to achieve financial stability as they do so. The biennial event would take place not in central Jersey but in central Tuscany. I believe that in commercial lingo that is called “trading up”.

Graduate students (even on occasion current undergraduates) and younger alumni have been able to participate in this deluxe event thanks to a generous scholarship program supervised by a certain alumnus eminence grise. Eminences grises by nature shun the limelight, and this one will go unnamed; but I will give one hint. He is a powerful Chicago lawyer and a community organizer. The community he organizes as the Castello is roughly thirty-strong, composed of alumni ranging in age from the class of 1955 to the class of 2010.

A Tuscan castle and its view

Even so only the intervention of the Spirito Santo herself can explain how they came up with the venue of the thirteenth-century castle of Santa Maria Novella in Marcialla, near Certaldo. Draw a straight line on your Rand McNally between Florence and Siena, and then bisect it at its dead center, and you’ll be very near the place. Medieval castles are hard to tear down but harder yet to keep up. This one has been being lightly restored for the last five or six hundred years, and it now has the mod cons of a cameo conference center but is still very, well, castellan. The food from the castle kitchen, generally served al fresco, tastes so good that it would be illegal in most Midwestern states.

The Castello reunion, however, is a hard-core intellectual event, especially for Professor Hollander, who lectured in seminar format for two and a half hours each day. In the afternoons preceptors (discussion leaders), of whom I was one, led hour-and-a-half discussion groups of roughly ten people each. Around the edges there were many animated individual conversations about such current topics as the Brunetto Latini, Count Ugolino, and the style of Lucan’s Pharsalia.

For the topic of Professor Hollander’s seminar this year was Dante’s Inferno with particular reference to the poet’s classical sources of inspiration. Anyone who has read even a little Dante knows that the Italian poet was greatly influenced by Virgil. Indeed the hyper-Christian Dante must have startled his contemporary readers by introducing Virgil as a principal character in his poem. “Virgil” is Dante’s guide through Hell—a remarkable but logical enough fact, since the most famous rendition of the underworld in Latin literature (in the sixth book of the Æneid) was Virgil’s invention. But how did Dante perceive the ancient pagan past, and how did his view of it inform his own poem?

The quality of the students at the Castello does credit to their master. The “student body” includes a college president, business tycoons, professional scholars at differing stages of career, passionate amateurs. We are constantly prattling about “diversity” in the academy, referring to a check-list of sociological categories. At the Castello I would extol a Pauline “diversity of gifts” that gives literary study a special zest. The fellowship is mellow and generous, the wit lively, the talent highly varied. On four of the six nights of our stay there were cultural events ranging from the sublime to the more sublime. In the latter category was an evening concert of bel canto arias by alumna Jennifer Borghi. Her old professors remember Ms. Borghi as a brilliant undergraduate and, yet more importantly, an ethically luminous young woman destined to leave our world a better place than she found it. Today she is known to her widening audiences as a professional mezzo-soprano of unusual strength, clarity, and precision. It would be a contravention of the articles of incorporation of this blog to offer a stock market tip, but I am willing to bet my penultimate pecunia that some of you will one day hear Ms. Borghi at the Metropolitan Opera. Perhaps she will even put the Dante seminar to good use. There are appropriate roles in Purcell’s Dido and Æneas and Riccardo Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini.

Ms. Jennifer Borghi, the diva of the dantisti

We left the Castello as one might leave Brigadoon, or better yet the Earthly Paradise, “with wandering steps and slow.”

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C, or FITT tertio et ultimo. Virgil is not the only pagan poet Dante uses, or even the only one he meets in Hell. Ovid, Horace, Lucan—they are all there. Furthermore Dante displays a surprising familiarity with wide swatches of classical mythology and history. Though almost everything touched by Dante’s genius is striking and original, the approbative exploitation of the pre-Christian past is actually commonplace among our older Christian writers and painters. Scholars have often been unnecessarily puzzled by their habit of mind, and a whole theory of the “pagan” Renaissance, now happily exploded, was once built upon their misapprehensions.

Dante was undoubtedly a Christian; he was no less undoubtedly a humanist. A Christian is a person who believes in the historical and supernatural theological propositions of the ancient creeds, especially as they refer to Jesus Christ; a humanist is a believer in the powers of human rationality and an admirer of the rational achievements of great human minds of the past. It is only in quite recent centuries that Christianity and humanism have come to be regarded as generally incompatible. That would have seemed a very odd notion indeed to Bede or Robert de Sorbon or Erasmus or Duke Humphrey or John Milton or the founders of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and several dozen other of the most important colleges and universities of our own land.

I am tempted to this fitful excursus partly in response to the stimulation of the Dante seminar just described, but also for two other reasons. The first is that the little book I myself am now completing deals with an author, Luis de Camões, who exemplifies the characteristics of the old Christian humanism in such a flamboyant fashion. He was a Renaissance man in every sense—scholar, soldier, lover, luckless entrepreneur, shipwrecked exile, prisoner, explorer, world traveler, imperialist, crusader. He wrote what is in my mind the greatest of the Renaissance epics, the Lusiads, and a body of lyric poetry second to none among his contemporaries. His command of the text of Virgil is stupendous. It is obviously the result of deep study from printed texts, and makes Dante’s Virgilianism seem like what it probably was, the amateur enthusiasm of a lover of poetry. Though there is not much evidence that Camões was a good man, the evidence that he was a great one is overwhelming. His achievement was an achievement of “Christian humanism.”

The second circumstance is the recent receipt of a gift. My friend Marsha Dutton of the University of Ohio, a past president of the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church, just sent me a copy of her new edition of Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx (in the translation of Lawrence Braceland, SJ). Aelred and his old monastery at Rievaulx in the West Riding of Yorkshire played a major role in my becoming a medievalist. The story is perhaps worth a little essay of its own one day. For the moment I want to say only a word about Spiritual Friendship, his loveliest book. It is a Latin dialogue closely modeled upon the De amicitia of Cicero—a book once routinely taught in American high schools. (Ah, the pity…) Aelred greatly admires the old pagan philosopher. I will go farther and say that Aelred loves Cicero. But he knows something that Cicero did not know, and he knows he knows. The actual dialogue begins thus. “You and I are here,” says Aelred to his imagined interlocutor Ivo, “and I hope that Christ is between us as a third.”

In his very moving and effective campaign President Obama appropriated a famous phrase of Martin Luther King: “the fierce urgency of now.” Though some nows are more urgent that others, they are all urgent enough. There may be here or there a Miniver Cheevy who might seek to escape altogether; but in general the urgency of now is enough to monopolize our attention. There is actually very little danger that we will be oblivious to the now. What worries me, as I think also it worried Dante, is the oblivion of the then. We are not the first human beings to live upon the earth, and to imagine that we are the most perfect to have done so is a folly beyond the hope for a cure. If that is what you believe, you will be lucky to go through life reinventing the wheel, though that would be a great improvement on our present cultural mission: the reinvention of the flat tire.

Hands across the Water

I am past the midpoint of my brief sojourn in Paris. The last week went by in a blur. Of such blurs there are several genres: the travel blur, the fun blur, and the work blur among them. I have to confess that this time it has been the work blur. I did have one gloriously fun day. A very old family friend, Christine Stansell—once a student, for many years a Princeton colleague, and now a hyper-eminence in the Department of History at the University of Chicago—made a brief stop. (Professor Stansell is, among other things, the mother of James Wilentz, a young art historian/aficionado/entrepreneur, whose website Old Masters/New Perspectives I have commended to you in the past.)

On one of the few really beautiful days of my stay here Chris and I took in the special Chopin exhibition at the Musée de la Vie Romantique. This delightfully demoninated institution was once home to George Sand—than whose vie it doesn’t get much more romantique. The special exhibition was actually rather thin, though it had gathered together a wide range of portraits of Chopin and other musical luminaries of the first half of the nineteenth century. But the permanent collection is fascinating, and it preserves wonderful artefacts from the decades of the 1830s and 1840s, surely two of the richest in French cultural history.

But mainly I have been single minded in working away at a book on Luis de Camões. I am at the tedious stage of revision and foot-note sleuthing. It’s rather a slog; I am pretty tired of my own ideas at this stage. There is a point in the writing of every book when its faults seem scarlet and its virtues, if they can be found at all, pale-wash pastels. But I have stuck to it, spending long days at the library of the Fondation Gulbenkian, the subject of one of last year’s posts. However, I have had my last day there, and for a somewhat ironical reason: the library will be closed for the rest of the week in celebration of the Portuguese national holiday: the dia de Camões!

The only exercise I have been getting is through walking home from the library—and to it, if I get off early enough to forego the number 82 bus. Two days ago I had a Matrix-like moment in which I realized I have been living, all unawares, within some weird kind of maritime allegory. You probably know that the object of my researches, Luis de Camões, is chiefly celebrated for his great epic poem about Portuguese maritime expansion: the Lusiads, a heroic presentation of Vasco de Gama’s passage to India at the end of the fifteenth century. I am not working on the Lusiads. I’m writing about his religious poetry. But you cannot read a page of Portuguese history without hearing the flapping of sails, the creak of deck planking, and the moaning of hawser rope.

Then the street signs started talking to me. I stepped out from the library in a new direction the other day in search of a bottle of fizzy water. I found myself here:

I have been living all this time on the avenue de Suffren, a fairly major artery and the division point between the seventh and fifteenth arrondissements. Only now did I stop to inquire as to just who Suffren was. Of course you know already: Pierre André de Suffren (1729-1788), the famous Povençal admiral after whom a French nuclear submarine is named.

a somewhat petrified Admiral Suffren

When I do take the bus, I get off at the rue de Lubeck, and then walk up it toward the library. The first street coming in from the left is the rue de l’amiral d’Estaing. That would be Admiral Charles Henri d’Estaing (1729-1794), the discoverer of Suffren and (always according to French sources) the terror of the British fleet.

"Showing how to Cut the Englishmens heads off"

Between them they considerably advanced the cause of the American revolution—a fact sweetened by topographic poetry, for if you deviate up Admiral d’Estaing’s street you run headlong into the Place des Etats-Unis with its corpulent memorial to Hands-Across-the-Water. Unfortunately, the intense demonstration of Franco-American friendship is now largely archaeological. More recent topographic tributes are likely to be rather different.

"Put 'er there, George," said the Marquis de Lafayette

"Take that, George," said the municipality of Saint-Denis

The next day, for variety, I took a different route, over the Bir-Hakim bridge and up through Trocadero. This was cheating a little bit, because I knew I would have to pass the Musée de la Marine, where my granddaughter Lulu and I spent some happy hours a few months ago. What I wasn’t expecting was the little side street off the right: the avenue de Camoens.

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Perhaps there is a sea voyage in my future? Let me take advantage of the economies of scale offered by electronic communication to remind my readers, both of them at once, that “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” is about to go into two-week estivation. On June 16 I hope to be rambling about Romanesque sites in Navarre and Catalonia, while on June 23 the plan is to be participating in a seminar on “Dante and His Classical Models,” taught by my own friend and classical model, Robert Hollander, in a Tuscan castle. The way I intend to get from Barcelona to Livorno is by a lengthy ferry crossing. I speak of hopes, plans, and intentions. Man proposes; God disposes. Two days ago I received the crushing news that Charles Crupi, one of my oldest and dearest friends from the Golden Age of our early professional life, has died in Albion, Michigan. Charles had very recently retired from a long teaching career at Albion College. He was in effect “Mr. Albion”—teacher, scholar, Shakespearean producer, Christian humanist, husband and family man, good citizen extraordinaire and, in brief, one of the finest people I have ever known. Requiescat in pace. I found this photograph on a Facebook page put together by students to honor their "legendary" (their word) professor at the time of his recent retirement.

CHARLES CRUPI (+ 6 June 2010, æt. 71)

Scholar Gypsy

Nil admirari prope res est una, Numici,
solaque quae possit facere et seruare beatum.
Horace, Epist. I, vi.

You and you alone bring out the gypsy in me.
The Gershwins, “Embraceable You”

Horace’s famous advice to his friend Numicius—Nil admirare, “Be astonished at nothing”—became as sacred scripture to generations of European sophisticates. The advice was of course merely an elegant and classical version of the usually whispered injunction of embarrassed mothers to their gawking offspring: don’t stare. Horace’s phrase was the actual motto of one of the most admirable scoundrels of world literature, Byron’s Don Juan. It was the proper attitude of the ultimate sophisticate, the terminal cosmopolitan, the man who had been everywhere, done everything, seen it all. A group of my undergraduate college friends in a Romantic poetry course—none of us had been very far, done very much, or seen even life’s previews, let alone the first reel—invented an imaginary companion, Neal Admirary, who epitomized the sophistication for which we aspired. I suppose it is not surprising that hicks feel the fear of being thought a hick with a particular acuteness.

Well, half a century later, after many decades of life as a wandering scholar, I’m still at the aspirational stage; for on my second day back in Paris I found myself gawking in the street right in front of our apartment. I would have thought that simply having an apartment in Paris ought to be enough to assuage Neal’s savage breast for at least a day or two—but, no. Having an apartment in Paris is by no means a sufficient guarantor of the Nil admirari spirit.

The neighborhood of the apartment, very near the Eiffel Tower, is I suppose more like the upper West than the upper East side, but it is still plenty “fashionable”. In the short half-block to the east there are two grocery stores, one a cadet outpost of a large chain, the other the more typical and ludicrously named local “SuperMarché” presided over by north Africans. Both of them have beautiful fruit and vegetable stalls on the sidewalks in front.

a local Paris fruit-stall

There are two reasons that the fruit displays in French shops look so scrumptious. The first is that the fruit is scrumptious. Retarded French agriculture is years behind America in the race for the tasteless apple and the sawdust orange. The second is that the shopkeepers invigilate their wares ferociously, immediately discarding any plum, pear, apricot, or kumquat may that betrays the slightest blot, crease, wrinkle, or inappropriate softness. The rejects go into a kind of poubelle shopping cart, and thence into the large green and yellow garbage bins at street-side.

garbage can belonging to local Paris fruit stall

Early yesterday evening as I returned from a long day at the library, there were six gypsies, five women and a male teen, ransacking these garbage cans. All the women had the little, wheeled, grocery-carriers popular with French housewives. They had, in addition, several suitcases of various sizes. The young man had some kind of homemade pushcart. These they were cramming with discarded fruit and vegetables. Their attitude was utterly lacking in anything hurried, furtive, or embarrassed. They treated the well-dressed pedestrians on the sidewalk as minor nuinces to be tolerated in a spirt of noblesse oblige. This was not the pitiable dumpster-diving of a New York down-and-out. Though they seemed in fact to take everything, they still examined each piece with the leisurely expertise of Parisian shoppers. Neither the store clerks nor the numerous passersby took the slightest notice. Nil admirari. I was the only one gawking. Still, this was surely an “admirable” sight to come upon in a middle-class neighborhood of a European capital?

It is now politically incorrect to speak of “gypsies,” the authorized term being some form of “Roma people.” Certainly gypsies have been among the groups facing discrimination, and with Hitler attempted annihilation. But the weak foundation of political correctness is often easily undermined by having read a book or two. One of the favorites of my childhood was George Borrow’s Romany Rye, somewhat dated in style, but eternal in its interest. (A “romany rye” was a kind of fellow traveler of gypsidom, a non-gypsy who knew gypsy lingo and ways, as Borrow certainly did.)

Jan Yoors, scholar gypsy and gypsy scholar

Its modern equivalent is an extraordinary book by Jan Yoors, The Gypsies. Yoors (1922-1977) was a Flemish-American artist and photographer. As a young lad in the Low Countries, animated by a spirit of reckless adventure, he once ran off with a gypsy caravan. He soon enough returned home, and his avant-guard parents, instead of punishing him, agreed that on a regular basis he might spend a part of each year on the road with his gypsy friends. This he did throughout the decade of the 1930s. His account of his experiences is gripping. Several years ago I was lucky enough to find on Ebay a signed copy of his book, together with four or five of his own stunning, unpublished photographs. If Borrow and Jan Yoors can talk about gypsies, and they do, so can you or I.

Such anti-gypsy feeling as I have encountered in this neighborhood, and there is some, grows out of repeated episodes of annoyance experienced in the Champ de Mars. This is the pleasant and well populated rectangular park running between the Eiffel Tower and the École Militaire, a space sacred to joggers, nannies with children in strollers, pan-Mediterranean boules-players, hyper-hormonal adolescent lovers, Asian photographers of themselves with tower, African hawkers of tower gewgags, and gypsy beggars and ring-scammers. If you live around here you cross the park frequently, just in the course of your daily business. On approximately forty-three per cent of crossings you will be accosted by a gypsy ring-scammer.

In search of a useful photograph, never found, I happened upon another American who has written about the ring-scam at length; so if you want a whole bague-blague-blog, go here. Bref, the deal is this. As you are walking along you become vaguely aware of a person (usually male, but not always) walking toward you. Just as you cross, or are about to cross, this person suddenly reaches down to the ground and appears to pick up a gaudy gold ring. This is then shoved in your face. “Here’s your ring,” (s)he says, always, as in the miracle of Pentecost, in your own language. “You dropped it.” Since it is not your ring, and since you did not drop it, since it is indeed nearly impossible to imagine how one drops a ring while walking in a park, you are likely astonished by this person’s reluctance to take no for an answer. But if you are insistent enough your interlocutor will give up, transforming instantly from exotic gypsy ring-finder to common-or-garden variety gypsy beggar. Like most scams, this one depends upon the cooperation of the victim’s own dishonesty and cupidity. You are supposed to claim the “lost” ring with feigned expressions of gratitude. The “finder” will then suggest that an appropriate reward would speak even louder than your words. The ring being worth thirty-five centimes, anything above five euros will do. I have never seen this scam work, or heard of its working. It is impossible for me to believe that it has ever worked. But of course I have never heard of the “Nigerian banker” scam working either, though you know it must sometime, somewhere. People do not send out millions of emails or “find” three thousand rings a week just for their health.

Bloguiste en vacances

Emergent circumstances now emerge, leaving me in search of the right analogy. I find it, naturally, in academic life. Oxford University, where I took an undergraduate degree (1958-61) as a Rhodes Scholar, prides itself on its ancient mode of instruction. It is called the “tutorial method”. Each week—during the twenty-four weeks a year a slothful Oxford undergraduate is actually in residence, that is—the student has a meeting, of about an hour’s duration, with his tutor. The first fifteen minutes are taken up with social trivialities, usually including (anytime after about 9:30 a.m.) a glass of sherry. Then, for the next twenty minutes, the student reads viva voce the essay prepared on that week’s topic. This is followed by the tutor’s oral critique of what has just been read and, perhaps, some discussion between tutor and student.

Oxford seems very proud of this system. At the recent Oxford reunion, which I wrote about in a posting not long ago, the Vice-Chancellor made it clear that the institution is prepared, like JFK, to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, to continue to support the “tutorial method”. Perhaps there is some less efficient way of teaching than the tutorial method, but if so I haven’t yet discovered it. Like so many other aspects of modern academic life the “ tutorial method” is among the fossil remains of an ancient time before the invention of typewriters, word processors and photocopy machines. The word “lecture” reveals the kinship of that fossil to the tutorial method. Anyone who knows a little French knows that the word “lecture” has to do with reading. In an age before easily reproducible textbooks the professor read (lectured) his opinions from a podium. Students wrote down what he said on wax tablets. If you think that Aristotle at times sounds elliptical, it’s because what you are reading is not Aristotle but student notes on some Aristotelian “lecture”.

It should be fairly obvious that the discussion of a student’s essay would be more fruitful and more profitable if the tutor had actually had time to read and think about the essay in advance. But since Jowett didn’t know anything about email attachments we continue to glory in the “tutorial method”. All this is neither here nor there, except by way of providing me with an anecdote needed to minister to my own sloth. I had an undergraduate acquaintance at Jesus College, a history student, who was more conspicuous as a bridge player and ballroom dancer than as an historian. The awful responsibility of producing an essay every week at last overwhelmed him, and the dread day arrived when he had to appear before his tutor armed only with a few random sentence fragments in a notebook. According to his own proud testimony, he handled this sticky situation in the following way. He addressed his tutor confidently: “Last week an essay,” he said; “next week an essay. This week—copious notes!”

Your bloguiste finds himself in a somewhat similar pickle. He has twenty-four hours to prepare to take off for Europe. Tomorrow night, volcano volente, he’ll be half way to Paris. On Wednesdays the second and the ninth of June he ought to be able to come up with something that might, by the exercise of heroic charity, be called an essay. But on June sixteenth he and his friend John Meyer will be in a car at an undisclosed location in northern Spain searching for their pilgrimaging wives somewhere along the route to Santiago. They must sweep them up in the aforementioned vehicle before driving like demons to Barcelona to catch a ferry for Livorno. Because on the following Wednesday, June 23, bloguiste will be installed in the Castello Santa Maria Novella in Marcialla, near Certaldo in Tuscany, sitting at the feet of the world’s greatest living dantista, maestro Roberto Hollander, who will be conducting a week-long seminar of the Princeton Dante Reunion. This year’s theme: Dante’s use of his classical predecessors.

Jean and Robert Hollander, the famous translators of the Divine Comedy

As thirteenth-century Tuscan castles go, Santa Maria Novella is pretty deluxe. There are even those who, seduced by the amenities, the superb gastronomy, and the celestial calm and beauty of the surroundings, are willing to forgive the want of wi-fi. Truth to tell, your bloguiste is of their number.

The Castello Santa Maria Novella, near Certaldo

Readers can therefore look forward to a two-week vacation hiatus in Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche. These circumstances may also serve to offer a plea of extenuating circumstances to private correspondents who may have concluded that I have dropped off the edge.

History Is For the Birds

"My heart in hiding stirred for a bird"....But what bird?

I spent a rather wakeful night in New York, made somewhat more tolerable by the news that came with the dawn. The Specter is no longer haunting America. This development, according to the newscaster, was “historic”. Though I could savor it as news, it seemed rather tasteless as history. I’ve always liked my history to be aged for a couple of weeks before decanting. Still, the tension between the here and now and the then and there is enervating. George Gissing took as an epigraph of one of his books a quotation said to be from Jules Michelet—I have never found the original source—in which the great French historian supposedly reflected on his life in these sad terms: J'ai passé à côté du monde, et j'ai pris l'histoire pour la vie. I would translate, loosely, “I passed by the world on the other side, and I mistook history for life.” This must seem a rather terrifying possibility to any scholar like myself who has spent so many years immersed in books and in the exhausting and uncertain attempt to imagine the human life of the past. When in doubt, put your nose into a book; and that’s what I did on the ride home. I happened to have with me the first volume of William Boulton’s The Amusement of Old London (1901). That’s real history and, as usual, it did connect with real life.

A nice feature of our house—for which we prepay with winter fuel bills—is a long wall of glass along the south side, looking down through our garden to the field and woods beyond. On rare occasion now and again, in bright sunlight, a baffled bird will try to fly through the glass. The shock must always be rude and painful; two days ago it proved fatal for the beautiful specimen above, whose little corpse I found as I stepped out into the yard. I was headed for some chore, and I set the bird aside for a decent Christian burial at a later date. We couldn’t identify it, and a friend suggested that I make a photographic record. So I call upon my ornithological readership for help. It will no doubt be child's play for any bird-spotter. My son Rich could do it in a second, but I doubt that he is reading this blog, busy as he is with scouring the second-hand bookshops for a replacement copy of Julia Ward Howe’s Trip to Cuba (1860), for which the Firestone Library is once again billing me.

The death of this bird bothered me a lot, and this is in some ways surprising. I grew up in the country. Everybody hunted, including me. I never was a “sport” hunter, but in my time I killed and consumed, without a second thought, a large number of squirrels, rabbits, and quail. After half a century of watching a thousand tame squirrels prance about the Princeton campus, that all seems like a dream; but to this day I am nonplussed by what I will call the eastern, liberal inability to “get” what the agrarian Battle of the Second Amendment is really about, which is the default conservatism of human community. One of my culture heroes, the early anthropologist E. B. Tylor, summed it all up in a single magisterial sentence: “Most things that exist in the world exist for the reason that they once existed.” The hunters and the gatherers have been around for a very long time. Once on a family holiday in Spain, while staying in a village, we experienced a freak hailstorm of brief duration but considerable ferocity. In the minute after its abrupt end all the villagers rushed into the fields in search of zonked birds, which they brought back, many of them still weakly flapping, in their disgusting variety (sparrows, crows, magpies, etc.) as table delicacies. These people would have eaten my dead bird with gusto, and probably shot it with even more.

Bull-baiting

All this came to mind as I perused the first two chapters of Boulton. From the first I learned that the most popular and profitable public London entertainments from the Restoration through the Georgian period were various exhibitions of orchestrated cruelty to animals: dog fights, cock fights, bear- and bull-baiting. These spectacles, most of which took place in the unelevating venue of Hockley in the Hole, slightly eclipsed in their popularity even human gladiatorial combat, non-lethal but sanguinary. The baiting generally involved setting ferocious dogs upon chained or tethered bulls or bears. Another favorite sport involved igniting powerful firecrackers that had been affixed to large animals. Some “events” consisted of nothing more inventive than a group of men beating or hacking a brute to death in the middle of an arena. Two days a week—Mondays and Thursdays—had regularly schedule baitings.

Bear-baiting: the stalls for gentry

And who, exactly, enjoyed such “sport,” already more than a century old as the Age of Reason came into full bloom? The answer would seem to be—everybody! I have always been a great admirer of Queen Elizabeth I. She had a lot going for her. She could speak Latin. She translated Boethius. She was a patron of the arts. And of course she was the “head” of my church—“insofar as the law of Christ allows”—and a considerable theologian. (She came up with the best definition of transubstantiation on record). She was also big on the bulls and the bears—and I am not referring to the stock market. “The Queen herself was a great connoisseur in the sport,” writes Boulton; “so much so, that she deprecated the competition of the playhouses, and issued orders from the Privy Council forbidding the acting of plays on Thursdays, the chosen day for the bear-baitings at Bankside.” Eat your heart out, Will Shakespeare!

Jean-Baptiste Greuze: sentiment

In 1763, in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the great master of “sentiment” exhibited among other celebrated paintings his “Girl Mourning Her Dead Bird”. In that same year there flourished in Paris at least a dozen well patronized cockpits. Many of the capital’s leading citizens undoubtedly enjoyed both exhibitions. Now that is historic.

Mr. Micawber, meet the enemy...

This will be a grumpy, cheerless, puritanical, and visually bleak post. I made the mistake of looking at the morning paper in close proximity with my morning shave.

There is an odd phenomenon that most people my age have experienced. There is undoubtedly a female version, but for men at any rate, it seems to be associated with shaving. I had come upon it two or three times in literature without paying it much mind. Then one day about twenty-five years ago I encountered it in my own mirror. Shaving is an exacting exercise, and the shaver tends to concentrate on small details rather than the large gestalt. But all of a sudden I did see the larger picture in its wholeness, and the larger picture was my father staring back at me. This was not vague resemblance, but a sudden shock of identity. For the briefest of moments I actually thought I was having a supernatural experience.

My father was a great man, and a hero to me to this day. He was also, I thought, quite good looking; to become his tonsorial doppelganger, once I had a moment to think about it, seemed not such a bad thing and maybe even a good one. So I jogged along in that mode for another couple of decades until once again my morning shave was rudely invaded. The intruder this time was less welcome—my grandfather. My grandfather lacked my fathers (his son’s) principal virtues, and certainly his joie de vivre. He was in my experience crabby, bigoted, and embittered. I realize in retrospection that he must actually have been haunted by a sense of failure. The high point of his life had been service as a recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War of 1898. He spent long hours sitting around his front yard in a straw hat with a .22 rifle, shooting at squirrels marauding in a distant walnut tree. One memorable day he amazed us all, no doubt especially the squirrels, by actually hitting one. But mainly—and this was the thing—he was a really old guy. His abundant hair was wild and white in that distinctively Irish mode. He had shiny, crackled, old man’s skin that bruised and cut easily. This is the man who now stares back at me from the shaving mirror.

This week’s news from Greece and lower Manhattan has put all this into perspective for me—the perspective famously articulated by Pogo. When I look into the mirror, I see the Enemy, and the Enemy is us, specifically us geezers. Practically the entire Western world is on its way to hell in a hand basket on account of geezers chowing down their free lunch. Only it isn’t lunch—in lots of places it’s a five-course banquet washed down with a vintage of pleasant local varietals. Furthermore—and here’s the really important part—it isn’t free. It only seems that way on account of the magical illusion of plastic cards.

The “economic crisis” clearly involves arcane and esoteric dimensions well beyond my capacities. But there is something wrong with our whole national approach when a Ph.D. in English can make neither head nor tail of a 1040 income tax form. It was an evil day when John Maynard Keynes replaced Wilkins Micawber as the official Guru to the Geezers. Remember the Micawber Principle? Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery. Maybe the return of the debtors’ prison wouldn’t be such a bad idea, or at least debtors’ house arrest, such as that imposed by the EU on Greece. But, physician, heal thyself! In many of those EU countries official Geezerdom begins at age 55.

One of the last things my mirror-dad said to me before morphing into my mirror-grandad was roughly this. “Son, our country is in a real mess. It’s mainly self-indulgence, which since the war has been transformed from a shaming vice into a civil right. If we are going to get out of this mess we are going to have to do three things. People are going to have to work harder and be more productive, and they are going to have to make conscious sacrifices. Washington has to make fewer and smarter expenditures, or to raise more money through significantly raised taxes—probably both. For a start the government is going to have to quit spending money that it doesn’t have. But in order to have even the money it ought to have to do the things it ought to be doing, it’s got to have more income. If people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in a nice house, they ought to be willing to pay what’s needed to live in a nice country.”

Why is there not a single politician of repute, in either party or in no party, who is willing to articulate these elementary principles? One answer is that no such person could possibly be put into office by an electorate so addicted to the free lunch. But the waiter is even now at long last calculating the bill, and no matter how many tantrums we throw in the street, with or without a few homicidal fire bombs, somebody will have to pay it. My dad was not an economist. He didn’t even have a college degree. But he did work for a living. I know I have an erudite readership. Surely out there in the electronic academy, there must be somebody who can explain why my dad and Mr. Micawber are wrong.