Blogger on the Roof

Luke and Melanie with flower-girl Lulu (Photo credit: Mother of the Groom)

Well, the previously undisclosed location was Greenville, South Carolina, and the significant event was the wedding of Melanie Allison Dean to Luke Owles Fleming on July 31, 2010. The pseudo-mystery was an indulgence granted to the groom by his bloguiste father. When I touched upon this blessed event in an earlier blog posting the nervous groom became a little skittish. As an anthropologist he was aware of numerous cultures in which such a blatant advertisement of future happiness might be considered rash; and without quite invoking the concept of taboo, he preferred that I exercise discretion. But now that the happiness is no longer potential and prospective but actual and operative, let me shout, or even fiddle it from the cybernetic rooftop.

The bride and groom are two of the finest and, in every sense of the word, the most beautiful young people I have been honored to know in a long career spent among fine young people; and that’s a judgment that can survive an obligatory parental-pride reduction of fifty percent. I can mention one quite objective criterion, and that is the quality of their close friends in attendance. Many of them were fellow Ph.D’s in anthropology or South Asian Studies. All of them were alert, morally engaged, fascinating conversationalists. If you spend a certain amount of time worrying about the Decline of Practically Everything, as I tend to do, a weekend spent among some of America’s finest youth is a salutary tonic!

I had last been in Greenville in 1952. Needless to say a lot has changed. A slightly seedy mill town in decline has been transformed by civic imagination and a spectacular architectural intervention into a very happening downtown. It centers upon the waterfalls of the Reedy River, anciently used as a source of mill power, around which a nearly perfect mix of green space and tasteful commercial development offers a variety of attractions from the cultural to the gastronomic. And speaking of the gastronomic Rita and Phil Dean, parents of the bride, regaled us with a seemingly endless sequence of Southern feasts. I had a good hint of what was in store when I opened my gift bag at the hotel. Prominent among the goodies were a bottle of RC Cola and a Moon Pie. There were other distinctive touches, such as

THE HAT

The actual ceremony took place on the large stone terrace behind the old Falls Cottage. From that prospect one looks down upon the greensward below. While we were there that view included the temporary stage set for an open-air production of The Merry Wives of Windsor! I recalled, imperfectly, one of the final speeches of the play:
In love, the heavens themselves do guide the state...
And, thank Heaven, the heavens guide also the heavens. The weather was hot and steamy—I mentioned perhaps the venue, South Carolina?—but the faint menace of rain, which gave us a moment or two of anxiety earlier in the day, receded the moment the minister marched in with the groom.

A view of Falls Cottage, site of the wedding, from below

I suppose I owe it to my faithful readers to make a few remarks more general in nature than gloating about my son and wonderful new daughter-in-law. There would be a good deal to say. The Greenville County Museum has several splendid collections, including a large gallery full of Wyeths and several devoted to southern art. Timing problems kept us from seeing the extensive collection of Old Masters at Bob Jones University, though we did manage a visit to a smaller satellite housing an impressive cameo sampling of their holdings. I could touch upon other topics of significance, but allow me to make a beeline for the peripheral, as is my wont. I can report that Upcountry South Carolina is conspicuous for its high rate of tattooed females. This fact, obvious from even a stroll in the public streets, was confirmed by my visit to the Otter Creek Water Park, where the bathing attire allowed for more complete appreciation. The pictorial quality of the body art varies, as does the sophistication of the iconography. Melanie herself sports a beautifully understated dragonfly on her shoulder, much to be preferred to either the Death’s Head or Cross-in-Crown alternatives on view at Otter Creek. I have long been interested in the relationship between text and image in medieval manuscripts. I therefore noted with particular interest that many of the tattooed limbs and torsos were textual as well as pictorial, with the onomatological motiv prominent.

Bloody old Queen Mary, grieving over the loss of the last British possession on the Continent, claimed that when she died an autopsy would reveal the word “Calais” written on her heart. Of the names written upon the Carolinian ladies’ hearts (or nearby) I was able to make a rough-and-ready calculation:

Name of bearer: 21%
Name of boyfriend/husband of bearer: 34%
Name of Son of God and Savior of the World: 41%
Too cryptic to guess: 4%

Name of French town: 0%

Our visit to Greenville also leads me to meditate upon the Bliss Gap in western art. Why is nasty usually more interesting than nice? How can it be that most readers regard Satan as the most appealing character in Paradise Lost? Why does the tragic sense of life so frequently trump the comic? I remember the terror that struck my heart when I first came upon a remarkable image in Beowulf, in which the poet presents as the ne plus ultra of misery the circumstance of an old man forced to view the execution of his son. This cannot have been common even in brutal Old Germanic society, and it struck me as gratuitously grotesque as well as horrible.

Swa bið geomorlic gomelum ceorle
to gebidanne, þæt his byre ride
giong on galgan, þonne he gyd wrece,
sarigne sang, þonne his sunu hangað
hrefne to hroðre, ond he him helpe ne mæg,
eald ond infrod, ænige gefremman.

[In such fashion is it wretched for an old man to see his young son “ride” the gallows. Then he utters a sorrowing song, when his son hangs as a morsel for the ravens while he himself, ancient, stricken in years, can offer no help.]

But I was in my early twenties, unmarried, inexperienced—quite the opposite of eald ond infrod. My reaction was actually rather shallow. Oscar Wilde quipped that youth is too good a thing to waste on the young. I sometimes feel the same way about literature. I have spent my life in the probably vain attempt to teach Hamlet to adolescents. How can one know what is tragedy until one has oneself ingested some small portion of it?

Fortunately, there are also joys that can be savored to the full only by those who have spent many years preparing for them unawares. The parents who stand in attendance at the wedding of their beloved youngest child to a lovely, brilliant young woman, and hear the fervor in their voices as they unite themselves to each other, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health—these parents experience a joy I have found adequately described nowhere even in our greatest literature. The newlyweds are now in some vegetarian paradise for bird-watchers in Costa Rica, but while I was writing I was interrupted by the door-bell. A florist arrived with a bright bouquet. An accompanying note identified it as a token of thanks for our help with the wedding. Never has a gift been more pleasing or more superfluous. May the Lord bless you and keep you, Luke and and Melanie. May he lift up the light of his countenance upon you.

Sophia and her Abba Zvi, with marginalized Uncle Rich, get serious on the dance floor

The bloguiste in Intermission

Today is blog day, but it is also the day we fly to an as yet undisclosable destination for an event of great significance in the Fleming family. My aim now is to achieve a little pseudo-mystery that can be unveiled and reported on in detail next week, but I must do it in a jiffy since we soon leave for the airport. Under these circumstances I fall back upon the genre of the unsolicited book report. Every private library should have three or four books suitable for brief and random multi-tasking during calls of nature, shuttle-bus rides, theater intermissions, grocery checkouts, and the hideous waits in car-inspection queues. I grabbed one last night as we set off for the Richardson Auditorium to hear the Leipzig Quartet play Haydn, Webern, and Beethoven. It was André Blavier’s indispensable Les fous littéraires, or Literary Nut Cases. This is a huge bibliography, compiled with equal measures of affection, erudition, and irony, of all the genuinely certifiable books that have been written by Frenchmen over the years. I need hardly add that the number of such books is very large. We badly need such a monument of English authorial eccentricity. It would probably be even larger.

The Leipzig quartet was superb, and the intermission hardly less so. There is a passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace that I must now ask you to call to mind, check out, or simply take my word for. In Book 9, chapter 19, Pierre Bezhukov—for vulgarians, he’s the one played by Henry Fonda--hatches the plot to assassinate Napoleon, now the master of Moscow. He has determined that Napoleon is the Antichrist because the French phrase l’Empereur Napoléon (subjected to Hebrew gematria learned at his local Masonic lodge) adds up to 666. But it only does this if you include an extra e, the e dropped by elision and represented by the apostrophe. The phrase le Empereur Napoléon might be bad French, but it’s great gematria! Likewise he discovered that the French cardinal number 42 (quarante-deux) renders the same result. And (three exclamation points!!!) Napoleon, born in 1769 is forty-two years old in 1812, if one elides the year in which Napoleon completed his forty-second year of life and the year during which, in popular parlance, he “was” forty-two years old.

It’s pretty obvious that old Pierre must have been consulting one or more of the fascinating French writers detailed in Blavier’s lengthy chapter on “Prophets, Visionaries, and Messiahs”—maybe even my favorite, the abbé J. W. Würtz, author of The Precursors of the Anti-Christ, or, The French Revolution Predicted by St. John the Evangelist and other anti-Napoleonic works.

The fifth edition of Würtz's book is in the open stack of Firestone Library

The abbé Würtz was a native of Germany, then, after the restoration of French Catholicism, the vicar of Saint-Nizier in Lyon. There had been a large population of aristocratic émigrés in Germany, and it is possible that Würtz had returned with some of them after the Revolution. There were quite a few non-native Roman Catholic clergy involved in the process of “rechristianization” in France, so that this possibility, though of course speculation, is quite plausible. It is likewise possible that Würtz had had some connection with Lyon before or even during the Revolution. If so he would have been familiar with the terrible destruction unleashed upon the town as a punishment for its counter-revolutionary activities. He was certainly aware that in their bloody revels some of the Lyon revolutionaries had shouted out “Vive l’enfer”, or “Long live Hell”, an antinomian blasphemy perfectly designed to outrage Würtz, who was clearly a reactionary in civil and an ultramontane in religious politics.

“We know in advance that this explanation will drive many people into a rage,” he writes, setting off to prove that the Corsican upstart was actually the Anti-Christ. “We should prefer to accommodate and spare them the shame of having prostituted the incense of their admiration on one of the most criminal beings who has ever lived. But when the power of the truth commands is not the time to stop.” Far from stopping, he moved on with a detailed analysis. Was it not obvious that the words Appolyon and Napoleon were virtually identical? How much clearer a hint could be demanded of the Holy Ghost? Appolyon means “the Exterminator,” and was not Napoleon the person in all of human history who most appropriately might claim the title? Who had exterminated more people than he? This was the man, the Angel of the Abyss, whom the philosophers had recognized as their king. Furthermore they had done so at a perfectly anti-Christian ceremony held nearly 1000 years to the hour from that in which Charlemagne had been acclaimed Holy Roman Emperor. (This was a typology that had hardly gone unnoticed by Napoleon and his followers who, however, had put upon it an altogether different interpretation).

Würtz had anticipated the fact of a furious reaction, but not the power of its results. For the average Frenchman Napoleon was a great national hero. For the higher Catholic clergy he was the restorer of religion after a godless Revolution and even for a few a potential candidate for sainthood! (One of the reasons that some Englishmen were willing to entertain the notion that the Emperor had been the Antichrist was precisely his re-establishment of Catholicism!) The intemperance of the priest’s attack seemed an insult to the civil state and a threat to a still tentative ecclesiastical hierarchy. Würtz was for a time banned from sacerdotal functions. But the conservative Catholic revival continued. His book went through multiple editions. And when he died in 1826 he had been fully reinstated in his ecclesiastical functions, if not in universal favor. You can learn a lot in a good intermission.

Würtz's ideas were still current in this book by Louis Cavens (1909)

Sensory Cascade: Progress or Change?

...the ever-whirling wheele of Change...

Some common phenomena almost universally experienced yet lack an identifying name. Everybody knows what déjà vu is, but what do you call that experience of searching for a word that is “on the tip of your tongue” but can apparently make it no farther than that? The experience with which I begin is one I know to be widely shared. You encounter a new word, a new idea, a new historical personage, a new medical condition, a new—whatever. You are sure you have never encountered it before. But all of a sudden the floodgates seem to open, and you are encountering it everywhere. This experience needs a name, and I invite my readers to make nominations. For the time being I’ll call it “sensory cascade”.

I awoke this morning with the vague intention of writing a blog about two aspects of progress. The first aspect, an abstract one, relates to the curious misuse of the word “progressive” (noun) in current political discourse. The second aspect, entirely concrete, or at least petrine, relates to the current state of the stone wall last mentioned on July 7th. I don’t ponder the linguistic history of the word “progress” very often. Hence I was somewhat astonished when I opened the editorial page of this morning’s NY Times to find an essay by one John McWhorter entitled “The Dreaded P-Word.” Definitely sensory cascade.

I won’t try to link the op ed piece, since that would force me, and you, to “register” with our national paper of record. Tastes differ, but I work my way through the Times editorial page very much in the spirit that I work through my morning laps, or might work through a session of head-butting a brick wall. The experience stimulates the adrenaline, and you feel much better when you stop doing it.

McWhorter’s essay is excellent, however. He is identified as a “contributing editor at City Journal”. This fact unleashed another sensory cascade, since until recently I had never heard of City Journal. But then out of the blue one of my most brilliant former students, now the journal’s managing editor, invited me to write a little piece for it. I actually got paid coin of the realm for dashing off a mini-blog. Since then references to the journal have been popping up everywhere.

Mr. McWhorter’s subject is the recent attempt of so-called “liberals” to rechristen themselves as so-called “progressives”. He is, I assume, a so-called "conservative." Naturally he has a political point, but he writes as a linguistic historian, and this is what gives charm to the essay. The vulgar understanding of the word “progress” begins with the assumption that change is in and of itself a good thing. This is a proposition dubious in the extreme. President Obama campaigned as “the candidate of change.” Not merely that, he was the candidate of “change you can believe in,” presumably the best kind. Change is dynamic and kinetic; change is hopping all over the place. Yet there is an aspect of all this that seems insufficiently considered. When the new president took the oath of office he promised to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” This is a commitment not to change but to an unwavering stasis. The Bill of Rights: the same old same old, since 1791.

Most of our ancestors regarded change, in the abstract, with something approaching horror. There are some fragmentary stanzas that we believe Spenser intended to incorporate into his Faerie Queene. They are usually called “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” and they begin thus:

What man that sees the ever-whirling wheele,

Of Change, the which all mortall things doth sway,

But that therby doth find, and plainly feele,

How MUTABILITY in them doth play

Her cruell sports to many mens decay?

That was the classical Western attitude to “change”.

One can make progress only with regard to fixed goals. If you are in Allentown PA you can make progress toward your goal of Keokuk IA, for instance. Progress toward fuzzy or ambiguous ends—“the greatest good for the greatest number,” for instance, or “affordable, quality health-care for all Americans”—is likely to be as slippery and uncertain as the ends themselves. That is, it is relatively simple to effect change. Achieving progress is something else altogether. I spent a good deal of the week moving a large number of heavy bricks from one pile to another some twenty-five yards away. I guess that is change I can believe in, and I now have a random brick pile that was once at point A and is now at point B. But you can definitely make progress when your goal is the completion of a stone wall, and this week I have been a progressive.

CHANGE

PROGRESS

Great Men, Great Books

Dante begins one of the cantos of the Inferno by congratulating the Florentines for achievements so remarkable as to gain for their city a great reputation through all of Hell. “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” apparently approaches such celebrity. I have just had my second electronic proposition to “monetize” it. Is monetize a word?

Commercial shilling is beneath the dignity of this blog, but I do allow two easements. I continue to try to drum up business for the non-profit Library of America. They publish beautiful editions of the literary patrimony of our nation, and no literate citizen of the Republic should be without at least a few of their volumes. And if there is anyone in the world still unaware of the American Book Exchange, let me aid in stamping out that fragment of culpable ignorance. Abebooks combines the best of capitalist competition with the comprehensive capacities of the Internet in the service of great reading. It is as it were the biggest, and I do mean awesomely big, second-hand bookshop in the world, and I do mean world.

Despite draconian downsizing, I still have quite a few books and inadequate space to store them. One result of the situation is that I sometimes cannot lay my hands on a book I know I own but lack the leisure to search for. Under these circumstances I have been known on occasion simply to buy another copy from Abebooks. Sometimes two copies, in case the second one should get lost as the first one did. Such was the circumstance last week when I could not find a copy of Leonard Bacon’s wonderful translation of the Lusiads of Luís de Camões (Hispanic Society of America, 1950). I did not realize at the time that my dilemma would lead me to the perfect Christmas gift for my son Rich. The force of this remark will be clearer if I tell you that Rich is (a) a world-class birder, and (b) an enthusiast for Antarctica.

Avoiding the numerous copies priced at fifty or sixty dollars apiece, I was able to pick up two exemplars of the hardcover edition for a total cost of $18.95 including postage. (Did I mention the advantages of capitalist competition?). By the time they arrived, I had found my missing copy, plus another paperback version; but better safe than sorry is what I always say. And excess sometimes pays off; one of my “new” copies is a gem.

Bacon wrote a poem each year as his "Christmas card": Christmas Greetings, 1952

It is a presentation copy from the translator, Leonard Bacon, to his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cushman Murphy. Bacon (1887-1954) was a “minor” American poet of the period between the Wars, a person in whom considerable literary talent joined with cosmopolitan cultivation. He traveled widely in Europe, and lived for several years in Florence. He published many books of original poetry, but this medievalist first “met” him through his erudition. His mastery of the Romance tongues is exhibited in his translations of the Chanson de Roland, the Cantar del mio Cid, and (his masterpiece as translator) the Lusiads of Camões.

Robert Cushman Murphy (1887-1973)

The recipient of the gift, Robert Murphy (1887-1973), was among the greatest ornithologists America has yet produced. He was also a prolific and elegant writer whose learned works make important contributions to ornithological study and whose popular journal articles did much to foster interest in bird-watching, natural history, and conservation generally. His most famous feat came early, in 1912. In that year he sailed on the New Bedford whaler “Daisy” to the subantarctic, where he spent several months studying the unique bird-life. This experience is the subject of an engaging recent book—Eleanor Mathews’ Ambassador to the Penguins: A Naturalist's Year Aboard a Yankee Whaleship. It is also memorialized, in cameo, in the sea lion on Murphy’s bookplate, executed in line etching by John W. Jameson (d. 1939). You can see why my son Rich must have this treasure.

The word that comes to my mind in thinking about the giver, the gift, and the recipient is gentleman—a lexical endangered species in a world becoming ever more coarse and cynical. These two guys were obviously gentlemen. The phrasing of the Christmas inscription—“the Robert Murphys from their Friends the Leonard Bacons”—compounds its fustiness with an offense against peecee. But it bespeaks a real friendship, and Murphy pasted it onto the book’s fly-leaf, just as he pasted onto the back fly-leaf the accompanying letter, written on elegant paper, embossed with a laureated “B” and an address: The Acorns, Peace Dale, R. I.

May 22^nd, 1953

Dear Bob,

Your letters always please. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your observations on “anting” and kind remarks on the verses. This is a rich year for birds. I have seen, apart from Persian Armies of Robins, the Baltimore oriole, rose-breasted grosbeak, scarlet tanager (both sexes, the lady being the more aggressive) flickers, hairy woodpeckers, nuthatch, black and white warbler, chickadee wood thrush, hermit thrush, brown thrasher, goldfinches, and catbirds almost as numerous as the robins. Warblers and sparrows still remain too difficult for me to identify. But I notice that the English sparrow has become rarer than the chipping sparrow. The hordes of starlings have broken up for the mating season and they are only seen in two and threes. We have a grackle or two. All the birds listed were seen within fifty yards of the house. I wish I had your eyes, for I fancy I could then multiply my list by four or five. I don’t think many fly catchers have arrived.

I hope to be in N.Y. on the 27^th and 28^th. It would be fun to see you at the Club.

Meanwhile, our love as always to Grace and you.

Cordially yours,

Leonard Bacon

The final paragraph sent me to my current Century Club yearbook, where I was pretty sure what I would find. Leonard Bacon was a member from 1927 to 1954, Robert Cushman Murphy from 1923 until 1973.

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.

>>>

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.

>>>

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)