Bright Twilight of the Elders

 Rhine Maidens on a slippery slope

Only during the brief period of heedless youth, when most people unconsciously assume an attitude of immortality, do we really think we are likely to achieve all our “goals.”  As serious age advances the realization of life’s impossibilities becomes articulate and acute.  That is one of the several not so nice things about aging.  It is all the more wonderful to discover, therefore, that among all the things you hoped to do but never will there turn out to be a fair number of delightful experiences for which you never before had the time, money, or opportunity to explore.  One such, which I will touch upon next week, will interrupt the thus-far reasonably disciplined schedule of this blog.  A second will provide this week’s subject: Richard Wagner's Ring of the Niebelung.

            As I write we are half way through it.  The Rheingold was on Saturday.  Last night’s performance of The Valkyries (part two of the four of the whole work) has three acts, each a mini-opera of its own.  The Metropolitan’s production began at 6:30.  We were still applauding the singers at twenty minutes before midnight.  If you can imagine an experience that combines the leg pain of a tourist class flight to Heathrow and the tachycardia of a long Alpine ski slope with the ethical exaltation of Paradise Lost—well, if you can do that, you can do more than I can do.  I have a day to recover before Siegfried (tonight) and then, on Saturday, the marathon finale of The Twilight of the Gods.

            You almost certainly know more about Wagner’s Ring cycle than I do, and if you don’t, I could never offer even my infant appreciation in a few hundred words.  It has to be among the most audacious artistic creations the human spirit has yet attempted.  The excess is staggering.  The length is daunting.  It calls for dramaturgical resources unavailable in Wagner’s day.  It requires a vocal range and stamina that surely only a few singers in any generation can command.  Its narrative vehicle is an arcane phantasmagoria of early Germanic mythology and heroic legend.  Most grand opera goes over the top at cardinal moments.  The Ring begins there and hardly descends, except when the Valkyries came galloping, as over the crest of the globe, on their equine planks.

The Valkyries ride the rails

            The old theology, though prehistoric, is almost post-modern.  The gods have created the human race; but the destiny of divinity is to be supplanted by its creature.  The ethic—far from being Hitlerian or Nietzschean as I have been endlessly told by cultural historians—is classical, humanistic, indeed Christian.  It is a plea for the superiority of the spiritual over the material.

            Chaucer’s Pardoner preached always on a single biblical text: Radix malorum est cupiditas.  That’s the one translated in the Authorized Version as “The love of money is the root of all evil.”  An inordinate lust for the golden ring of the Niebelung, and by extension for the power the possession of gold wields, animates the hugeness of the entire tragedy.  Whether beneath the waters of the Rhine, as in Wagner, or beneath the earth’s surface, as in the Boethian tradition, gold is naturally hellish.

            “Let none admire [writes Milton in Paradise Lost]

            That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best

            Deserve the precious bane”

That is a great old English word, bane.  It means a thing or person that kills.  Radix malorum est cupiditas.

            Naturally I was generally familiar with the Ring as an item of cultural literacy, but its concentrated viewing is something else.  The current Met production is directed by Robert Lepage, the founder of Ex Machina, a production company made up chiefly of Quebecois cybergeniuses who specialize in transforming the proscenium arch into a computer game field.  I thought it was fabulous, but it is evident that controversy swirls about Wagnerian opera when presented with the production values of Star Wars.  Traditionalists groan.  Our own tickets became available for purchase only because some friends of friends who had them by subscription were preemptively disgusted by the very idea.  Yet however numerous, the naysayers, having voted with their feet, left the field to the majoritarian enthusiasts.  In the half hour before the curtain rises the large plaza in front of the Met rather resembles the pit of the Stock Exchange, as musical junkies, gesticulating like bond brokers, desperately search for a seller among the surging throng.  I saw no takers and, within the hall, no empty seats.

            But I myself must eschew an excess of Arnoldian high seriousness of my own.  The Ring Cycle may be a masterpiece of musical high thinking, but it would appear no less to be the Rocky Horror Picture Show of the aesthetic classes.  This is an opera with fans.  Our own excellent friend Susan, through whom we got our tickets, was seeing the cycle for the fifth time.  Opera is exhibition, and over-the-top opera enthusiasts at times do not stop short of exhibitionism.There were around us in the dress circle a few hard-core fans who had complemented their glitzy attire of tuxedo or ball gown with those horned helmets that since the nineteenth century have become the headgear de rigueur for most imaginary medieval warriors north of the Olive Oil Line.*  The idea that a man in his mid-seventies can come upon this for the first time with the freshness of a child is rather thrilling.

                                


                                                                   A genius larger than life...

*On this topic I recommend the indispensable article of my learned friend Professor Roberta Frank, “The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet”.

Past and Present

Though in retirement I have left behind many of the professional activities of my old professional life, I have been surprised to find that one feature of that life—invitations to give lectures, informal talks, or after dinner speeches—has not gone away.  And since I enjoy talking to people, I accept whenever possible.  Thus it was that I found myself last Friday evening offering informal remarks to the annual dinner of something called the New Jersey Society of the Cincinnati.  My supposed topic was “The Uses of History” or some such, but it was I who received tuition on that topic.

            Like many Americans, I have become rather casual, if not actually cynical, concerning the greatness of our nation’s founders, beginning with George Washington.  Yet to examine almost any aspect of Washington is to reveal greatness of a kind sadly unimaginable in our current political leaders and aspirants.  His role as first General President of the Societies of the Cincinnati is but one small feather in a lavishly plumed cap.

            The eighteenth-century squirearchy loved reading classical literature, and imitated classical history whenever possible.  Thomas Jefferson for a time tried to use Virgil’s Georgics as a practical handbook of animal husbandry.  The great seal of the State of Virginia bears the motto Sic semper tyrannis—words supposedly uttered by Brutus as he stabbed Julius Cæsar and actually uttered by John Wilkes Booth as he shot Lincoln.  (Instances of the bad uses of history greatly outnumber the good.)

            Among the heroes of legendary Roman history was the farmer Cincinnatus.  He was plowing a field when a delegation of importunate citizens arrived to beg him to assume the dictatorship of the infant city, then threatened by hostile neighbors.  Though he much preferred his agrarian life, he submitted to duty’s demands, left his farm, assumed the leadership of the city, organized its defense, and defeated its enemies.  But the biographical punch line is what he did next—resigned the dictatorship, went back to his farm, and continued plowing.

Coming to terms with term limits

            For the American revolutionaries Cincinnatus was the perfect historical model for so much of the officer corps of the Continental Army, and most obviously for its supreme general officer, Washington.  For modern Washington—the city as metonymy for the congressional body and its whirling satellites—Cincinnatus is an historical indictment of career politicians.  The Society of the Cincinnati, founded in 1783, was a group of former army officers committed to the “immutable principles” of the fellowship that had given the Society birth.   Needless to say these do not include the one immutable principle of our contemporary political class—the acquisition and retention of political office by any means possible.

            There are actually fourteen affiliated societies—one for each of the original states, and one for France.  These were the allies who had prevailed against a great—perhaps the greatest—European military power.   New Jersey was not then a ganglion of superhighways, but the battlefield of such decisive action as that at Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth.  The founding of the Society was contemporaneous with the establishment of a promising settlement on the Ohio River, which was given its name by a proud veteran.  Membership now is by lineal descent, and is parsimoniously granted. 

Washington’s personal decoration of the Cincinnati went after his death to General Lafayette in France.  In 2011 Lafayette’s distant heirs succumbed to Mammon and consigned the relic to a Sotheby’s auction, thus vindicating Burke: “The age of chivalry is gone.  That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe  is extinguished forever.”  It fetched $5,300,000.
 

            I knew none of this when I agreed to give my little talk.  On the same day I gave it, a squabble broke out in our capital city concerning bragging rights for assassinating Osama bin Laden.  This episode began in unseemliness, and has not become more salubrious as days have passed.  I expect soon to hear from one of the candidates not only that he did or certainly would have done it, but that it would have been a good idea to attach Osama’s body to a Chevy Volt and drag it seven times around CIA headquarters.

            They built in marble; we continue in cinder block.  Everybody knows that.  For that first crucial decade of our Republic we survived not only without an FCC or a Securities and Exchange Commission, we survived without an army or a police force!  What protected us in our extraordinary vulnerabilities were certain ideas about citizenship, not yet turned to irony, inhabiting the hearts and minds of certain idealists.

            As we enter a presidential campaign likely to excite discouragement and perhaps even revulsion in the minds of thoughtful citizens, we can perhaps turn again to antique history and classical myth in hopes of finding at least aesthetic comfort.  Various ancient authorities report the existence of a monstrous race called the Pygmaei, a tribe of very little people who lived—and here the authorities vary—either in little subterranean burrows or in houses made of eggshells.  The Pygmies lived in the back of beyond, on the edge of nowhere.  Periodically they did battle with their ancestral enemies, a race of birds of approximately their own stature, usually identified as storks.  The dubious battle betwixt Pygmies and Storks is a not infrequent subject in classical art.  The grotesquerie of it all must have been considered diverting.  Indeed it does seems a more amusing pairing than donkeys and elephants.

George and Me--and Ann Marie

            I spent my entire professional life among Ivy League adolescents in transition to young adulthood, and I know a thing or two about the mores of today’s fast-paced, hard-driving, no nonsense young professional class.  When they communicate, they communicate.  Thus, when the message at the very top of my e-pile yesterday morning addressed me briskly with the solid, no-frills, naked monosyllable of my Christian name, I sat up and took notice.

            I am of an older generation.  I also happen to have a Christian name that denotes (a) a toilet, and (b) a prostitute’s customer.  Under these circumstances I must confess to preferring something a little more formal and traditional:  “Dear Doctor Fleming,” for example, or maybe something along the lines of “Egregio Professore,” “Your Serene Highness,” or “Stupor Mundi”.  But beggars can’t be choosers.  When it’s coming from the White House, you’re lucky to be getting anything at all.  Here was a message with a banner headline: “Obama, Clooney, and You”.

John -- I have some advice for the two people who will be selected to go to a party for the President at George Clooney's house: Choose your guest wisely. Whoever you pick to join you is going to owe you big time. Think about it -- and chip in $75 or whatever you can today to be automatically entered: https://donate.barackobama.com/Obama-Clooney-and-You - Ann Marie Wow!  Only seventy-five bucks?  Why you can spend that on half a shopping cart-load of house brand groceries.  “Ann Marie” puzzled me for a moment.  I do have an eminent colleague and friend named Ann Marie, who is probably an Obama supporter.  But I didn’t know she was a movie fan.  Then there is Ann Marie, sister of one of my kids’ friends in Middle School.  She’s been living in California for the last thirty years, and California is a blue state.  Also, Hollywood is in California.  Still—little Ann Marie from next door?...I read further. It soon turned out that Ann Marie, with whom I was not previously on first-name terms, actually, is a certain Ann Marie Habershaw, the COO of “Obama for America”.  So we now have one presidential candidate who declares corporations to be persons squaring off against an incumbent person who declares himself to be a corporation.  It’s all somewhat confusing. I do readily admit, though, that Ann Marie Habershaw is one classy name, right up there with Julianna Smoot, my other penpal in the Obama campaign—along with Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and occasionally the President himself.  Most days of the week I get an email from one of these people, but this is the first one to invite me to dinner at George Clooney’s house.  Sort of. There was some small print.  The invitation was not actually an invitation to dinner.  It was an invitation to buy a sweepstakes ticket.  In order to be eligible to go to George Clooney’s party I had to be at least eighteen (“or of majority under applicable law”).  I had to be a legal resident of the United States.  I passed that test with flying colors, but there was still a hitch: “Odds of winning depend on number of entries received”.  I hadn’t considered that.  So there was more to Ann Marie’s letter than met the eye!  Not only must I, in selecting an escort to George’s party, choose wisely—I must construct, and on the basis of a crucial unknown, an algorithm to assess the odds of actually being invited in the first place.  My instinct probably would be to invite my wife to go with me.  Same old same old.  But where had I heard that phrase—choose wisely—where had I heard it before?  It came to me in a flash: Indiana Jones, last Crusade, Holy Grail!   Well, we no longer live in an Age of Faith.  Dinner with George Clooney is probably about as close to the Holy Grail as it gets.  I must choose wisely. But first, apparently, I had to help George Clooney figure out where he lives.  Ann Marie was offering a “party for the President at George Clooney’s house.”  But the small print promises only “round-trip tickets for winner and a guest from within the fifty U.S. States, DC, or Puerto Rico to a destination to be determined by the Sponsor (approximate retail value of all prizes $3,200).” Remember, John, choose wisely.  There are imponderables here.  You have no idea of the scope of the competition.  Furthermore, the location of Mr. Clooney’s house may not yet have been determined by the Sponsor—and note the sinister capital letter on that word Sponsor.  Hmmm.  Choose wisely.  The only solid clues are the numbers with the dollar signs.  You cannot determine the odds of winning, but you can calculate, and calculate precisely, the potential return on investment—investment being one of the President’s favorite terms of art.  Now if you divide 3,200  by 75—well, do the math.  What you will get is forty-two followed by a decimal trail of six-six-six!  It’s the Habershaw Code! P.S.  When I went to my Google account to mount this post, I find that I have yet another message, this one from the President himself.  Its subject line reads “Clooney and Me”.  Dare I open it?  I must choose wisely.

Soon, Whenever....

            A theoretical advantage of the electronic revolution, and especially of the Internet,  is that it creates the conditions for instant global debate of a rapid-fire kind, in which the intellectual thrust and parry of the old Dominican theological faculties or the Oxford Union in its heyday is thrown open to the whole wide world—at warp speed.  Thus some obscure person named Hilary Rosen gains fame and infamy in the same instant with a single four-second sentence about Ann Romney uttered on national television; but within an hour Ms. Romney has riposted with the Tweet heard round the Echo Chamber.  So Google is now prepared to lead you to “about” 75,100,000 places you can find some electrons dedicated to the episode.

            The phenomenon, however, seems to be selective.  The intellectual ferment effected by “Gladly Lerne” seems to work at the rate of a fine old brandy, if not that of the construction of Salisbury Cathedral.  A couple of months ago I wrote a little essay about optimism and pessimism viewed from the macro-historical point of perspective.  The general question raised was the following.  Are we better off than we were—not four years ago, but four aeons?  It attracted zero public comments, but slowly a few private emails drifted in, and I sense a need to defend pessimism.

            I believe that it was Chesterton who remarked that the doctrine of Original Sin is unique among the dogmas of Christian theology is that it is empirically demonstrable.   Any medievalist is likely to engage at some point or another with Saint Augustine; but I only appreciated the full extent of the man’s genius when I became a father.   According to the Romantic Wordsworth “… trailing clouds of glory do we come/  From God, who is our home”: but the poet doesn’t mention the booming thunder in the clouds.  Look dispassionately at any newborn infant and you will see the pure distillate of egoism, its very quintessence.  It is three in the morning.  The baby wants to be fed, so the baby yells bloody murder.

            The screaming child gives no thought, none, to its mother’s exhaustion.  The father’s need for restorative sleep sufficient for the successful execution of his arduous work has never entered the child’s mind.  The baby knows only the immediacy of its own desire.   To expect to find in the situation the slightest suggestion of the postponement of gratification would be absurd.  The postponement of gratification is the product of socialization and coercion that free spirits like the Wife of Bath, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the gurus of modern educational theory have ever lamented.  Medieval political theorists, drawing on Aristotle as well as Augustine, saw in the necessary coercions (the criminal law, marriage, and whipping schoolboys for instance) sad memorials to a debased human nature. 

            We recognize the single-mindedness of infantile desire when we accuse others of “acting like a baby”, a form of behavior widely practiced by babes of all ages.  Certainly anyone long associated with a college campus will have seen many “demonstrations” at which a “student leader” in brief political liturgy shouts out two questions to assembled fellow “activists,” to which the crowd bellows in prescribed reply.

            Q: “Whadda we want?”

            A:  “Justice!/Disinvestment!/Free condoms!/Whatever!” [pick one ad libitum]

            Q:  “When do we want it?”

            A: “NOW!”

            But the distance between the vehemence with which the human race demands instant gratification and the lethargy with which it achieves useful aims is evident in a few revelatory facts of linguistic history.  Latin mane meant “the morning”, and especially “first thing in the morning,” but already in classical time it had begun its slide of procrastination seen in its Germanic (morgen, morrow, etc.) and Romance (demain, mañana, etc.) relatives, where it refers to the day after.  Forget Poor Richard’s Almanack; the principle by which people really live is “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow”.   There is by no means anything essentially Hispanic about the “mañana mentality.”  At least in Spanish one meaning of mañana remains “morning”.  In English morrow (without its prefatory to) simply withered on the vine of innate human indolence.

            That isn’t all.  In Old English the adverb sóna meant “immediately,” “right now”.  By Chaucer’s time a few centuries later there was definite slippage.  The word soon had taken on the rather indefinite if still hopeful meaning we tend to look for in it today.  Yet few things are less convincing than the telephone message from the contractor who tells you that his men will be by to complete the job “soon”.  It isn’t exactly a lie.  Describe it as the creative exploitation of rapid semantic development.

from the Christian Science Monitor

            An even more flagrant display of adverbial decay is evidenced by presently.  This word manifestly has to mean in the present, now, as opposed to in the past or in the future.  The chances are eight to three, however, that the next time you are sitting in a waiting room and the receptionist tells you that Whoever It Is will be with you “presently,” you will still have time for a couple of games of chess.  I have a lot more to say on this subject, and I’ll return to it presently.

Hate Crimes

         The System of Dante's Hell

I was for several years the master of an undergraduate residential college, so that I am not unaware that college roommates sometimes treat each other in vile ways demanding redress. Even so, a recent criminal trial just up the road at New Brunswick (NJ), which ended in the conviction of a Rutgers undergraduate (Dharun Ravi) for his serious mistreatment of his roommate, has drawn my attention to the relatively new legal category of “hate crime”.  Ravi grossly abused his roommate’s privacy by spying on him, and by encouraging others to view his secretly recorded sexual activities.  The roommate later committed suicide, and though the prosecution neither claimed nor demonstrated a causal connection, many have drawn the inference; and the gravity of the circumstance probably contributed to Ravi’s conviction of the crime of “bias intimidation”, which is a “hate crime” that might lead to lengthy imprisonment.

            I appear to be in a minority in my disquiet at the very concept of a “hate crime”.  I entertain doubts that a jury could accurately isolate “hate” as the principal motive force behind complex and ambiguous social actions.  (I shall reserve for another day a yet more fundamental objection:  so what if they could?)  But mostly, the confidence with which the press and remote observers diagnose “hate” alarms me. 

             Several weeks ago in Florida a man named George Zimmerman shot and killed a youth named Trayvon Martin.  I cannot imagine that anyone reading this blog is unaware of this appalling affair.  Even on the basis of sketchy and contested details it is very hard, prima facie, to imagine circumstances under which this killing was not stupid and abominable.  It is slightly more conceivable, barely--in light of the possible breadth of a recently instituted “stand-your-ground law” of which I had never before heard--that the act was not illegal.  

            Even as I have been writing this, the latest Newsweek came in the mail.  It documents in statistical detail the dramatically different ways in which black Americans and white Americans are inclined to interpret the episode.  But in fact as yet we simply do not know enough to draw safe conclusions concerning the “objective” facts of the episode, let alone conclusions concerning the mind of George Zimmerman.  Inclination in the absence of factual knowledge is just another, and nicer, term for prejudice.  Nevertheless dozens of pundits, several prominent news personalities, and even some elected members of Congress have felt perfectly confident in identifying this ghastly episode as a “hate crime.”

            That there are gradations of crime seems too obvious to require argument.  Certainly no medievalist is likely to deny the principle.  Most people are familiar with the so-called “six questions of journalism”.  A good reporter ill make clear to the reader the what of a story, its who, when, where, why, and how.  Yet how many people know the origin of these questions?  They derive from what were called the “circumstances” of sin as detailed in the confessional manuals of the later Middle Ages.  Incest was always a no-no, but it was worse to sleep with your aunt than with your cousin, and worse to sleep with your sister than with your aunt.  One of the great lines in world literature comes when the hero of Tom Jones arrives at the (mistaken) conclusion that Mrs. Waters is actually his Mum: “O good Heavens!  Incest—with a mother!”  The stroke of genius there is the indefinite article.  Tom is echoing the casuistry of a printed consanguinity table of an old prayer book!

            Our secular law has long recognized the concept of aggravating and mitigating circumstances in the commission of illegal acts.  The guy who kills somebody to take his sneakers and the guy who kills his aged wife because he cannot stand to see her descend yet further into Alzheimer’s are both killers; but few of us would be content to leave it at that.  Yet it would be a very risky business to start a taxonomy of “sneaker crimes,” “Alzheimer crimes,” etc.  If you feel confident about what a “hate crime” is you ought to feel equally confident about a “love crime”.  I don’t feel so confident.

            The system of Dante’s hell, based in the ancient Aristotelian ethical scheme, presents a tripartite hierarchy of dereliction.  All mortal sin will get you into hell, but the carnal obsessions that nearly monopolize our tabloid newspapers—the general Aristotelian category being incontinence—are of a primitive nature.  Worse in Dante’s eyes are the sins of violence.  The naughty lovers Paolo and Francesca are in a relatively high rent district of hell when compared with the abode of the jealous husband who murdered them.  But the worst category is fraud, which involves not merely the indulgence of appetite or the unleashing of irascible passions, but the actual perversion of the reason.  But applying human reason to evil ends is not thought crime.

            In my view “hate crime” is.  In an effort to purge ourselves of all taint of “prejudice,” we presume it virtuous to punish people for what they think–or what we think they think. So far as I am concerned punishing people for what they think is not a slippery slope, but the ski jump at Chamonix.  When I was researching and writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos I had occasion to meditate on the principles of Marxist jurisprudence (aka “revolutionary justice”) that founded the gulag state under Lenin and by the late Thirties under Stalin populated it by the millions.

            The Soviet authorities did not call these wretches “hate criminals”.  They called them “counter-revolutionaries”.  But the only crimes of the counter-revolutionaries were their thoughts, and usually only their thoughts as fabricated or imagined by their enemies.  The fictive and fantastic deeds to which they were often forced to confess flowed naturally from the fictive thoughts attributed to them.  We are still a long way from the gulag mentality, but I regard our “hate crime” legislation as a false step in the wrong direction.

Lulu's Garden

          

         Few readers of “Gladly Lerne” are likely to be so assiduous as to remember my essay on “The Tornado of Twenty Ten”, but it still exists somewhere out there in the inexhaustible memory bank of the Anima Mundi.  The blog post is, among other things, a photographic memorial to a devastating storm that passed through our neighborhood in August, 2010.  The wind flattened a huge linden tree on the west side of our house, which was spared from major damage by a few capricious inches.

            I was so relieved at having escaped major catastrophe that I at first paid little attention to the mere disaster it did produce.  The linden’s twisting roots undermined a section of one of my stone walls, and it crashed down upon a row of three fine mature holly trees paralleling the house—essentially our privacy screen on its west side.  The southernmost holly it destroyed utterly, leaving the other two as maimed and blasted as the background in a classical Japanese ink drawing.

            Eventually I got around to trying to clean up the mess.  I have left the remains of the blasted hollies for experimental purposes.  I am turning them into a living trellis for two concord grape vines, which I hope will create a leafy screen, and one attractive to birds.  That scheme got off to a pretty good start last year; by June I’ll know if it is going to work in the long run.  The killing ground itself, however, needed more radical intervention, and that’s where Lulu came in handy.

            Lulu is my middle granddaughter, and a precocious landscape architect.  She advised me that what was needed was a new strip of lawn between the house and the bonsai hollies.  A new stone path linking back yard with front should transverse the new greensward.  That is a distance of some twenty yards, and I could tell she was a real architect in the making by the blitheness of her proposal of a herculean labor that was, of course, to be achieved entirely by the sweat of somebody else, namely her aging grandfather.  But I try always to follow expert advice, and it is fun scrounging the necessary stone in old dump sites.

            Lulu took a much more hands-on attitude to creating the mini-garden that should lie between the new stone path and the old stone wall.  According to her architectural theory, it should be less formal than the patch between the walkway and the house.  Indeed, it should exploit something of the ruggedness of the stone wall and the brokenness of the holly trees.  She didn’t actually use the phrase “architectural quotation,” but that was clearly the concept she had in mind.   The plan was to create by artifice a seemingly natural grassy patch randomly scattered with daffodils and featuring a couple of handsome and carefully placed rough squares of stone.

            Since what was actually there at the moment was a patch of scrabbled ground made green only by a few luxurious weeds, it took a real vision to imagine the concept.  It also took a good deal more work—digging deep around stubborn holly roots, and screening the soil to rid it of its gravel.  This time the architect herself pitched in.  She got her hands dirty—and I mean, really dirty.  New grass in these parts always does much better when planted in the fall, so that Lulu was able to enjoy a certain sense of achievement well before Christmas.

            But the floral heart of the project was an investment in faith, and an exercise in postponed gratification—not ordinarily the forte of nine-year olds.  But this week she has viewed the results.  How could burying those funny little daffodil bulbs, with their dead onion skin and their funny dead tops, actually result in such triumphal beauty?  Her Anglican grandfather was able to find a scriptural reference most apt for Holy Week:  “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone.  But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit” (John 12:24).  Lulu, whose theology tends to be more Rousseauian, assigns it to the category of fun.  Yet I can hardly demur.  What could be more fun than resurrection?

            

Three of my gardenian angels

       
 I have not made a practice of “guest blogs”, as attractive as that possibility has seemed on certain Tuesday evenings.  In fact I have not had a single one.  But the old order must change, as Tennyson says, “Lest one good custom should corrupt the world”; so I conclude with some field notes jotted down by the architect herself:

I loved doing the garden with my granddad. My favorite part was when we had to dig up a lot of soil. We saw so many bugs and worms. It was a lot of fun. The daffodils we planted turned out beautiful and I hope we can plant some more next spring. There is so many nice things in nature in this season. I like to have fun making daffodil bouquets with Cora. It is a lovely sight.

Lulu

           

Eccentrics

Last week’s essay concerning the vanishing jalopy didn’t attract any public comment, but I had a small blitz of personal email about it.  Only some of the messages concerned automobilia; the larger theme was cultural erasure or amnesia generally—things that used to be around, but seem to have disappeared, or that we have simply forgotten.  Most of these were material: 78rpm-records, blocks of ice delivered by guys with huge tongs, glass milk bottles, that sort of thing.  But whole tribes of human beings also vanished.  Two Jehova’s Witnesses came to my door last week.  They were the first in at least a decade, probably two or three decades, and the exception that reminded me of all the people who don’t come anymore, especially Fuller Brush salesmen.  If the term “Fuller Brush Man” is meaningless to you, it simply proves my point.

            One terrible impoverishment of American culture is the general disappearance of eccentricity.  Where have all the eccentrics gone?  The demise of my last two beloved aunts, who both died within the last decade, deprived me of my last vital familial connection to genuine eccentricity.  These two marvelous old ladies lived together for much of their long lives in a ramshackle farmhouse built by one of their brothers (and my uncles) following the directions in an old set of Audel building guides.  Although they were voracious readers of public library books, these volumes, along with a large Bible, some nineteenth-century Masonic and Freethinking stuff deriving from my grandfather, and what seemed to be the complete works of O. Henry, made up the core of their highly eclectic permanent home collection.

            Once when I was quite young and all their other, elder siblings were still around I picked up one of the soiled infidel tracts, a laudatory biography of Voltaire.  Among the many reasons the author found to admire the famous philosophe was that he had publicly ridiculed “the cult of the prepuce of Jesus Christ.”  With a large family group gathered around the dinner table, I asked my Aunt Mildred, now long gone, “What’s a prepuce?”  She turned bright red, but said only “Johnny!”  When years later I found out I was more struck by the erudition than the prudery.  I noticed that book still on the shelves in 2006, at the time of my Aunt Louise’s funeral.

Baxter County, Arkansas, 2004; Aunt Louise at the computer; in the background Aunt Edith, aet. 90

          
They generally dressed in what appeared to be the unsold items from a really scruffy yard sale.  Their eyes were so weakened that they seemed never to notice that there was about a quarter of an inch of dust on everything—everything but the Scrabble board, that is, which was in daily use.  Their hearing was also impaired, so that all communication, including that emanating from the television set, was at a level somewhere between a shout and a bellow.  I rather imagine a conversation between Hardy and Lord Nelson on the quarterdeck during a typhoon.  To cross their threshold really was to enter an alternate universe.             

            It was a delightful realm, of course.  For there is all the difference in the world between an authentic eccentric and the very strange people one sees in the subway.  An eccentric is not a weirdo, a wino, a sicko, or a psycho.  Eccentricity is not pathology, but self-confident and unaffected individuality developed to a remarkable degree.  It was from my Aunt Louise that I must have inherited the journalistic impulse.  For many years she published a column in the local newspaper.  It was aptly entitled “A Little Off Center”.

            The chief cause of the decline of wholesome eccentricity is not difficult to identify.  It is the general homogenization of culture.  The more we text and tweet and generally do our thing the more like everybody else’s thing it becomes.  The current paucity of eccentrics is a result of historical changes long underway.  The Golden Age of Eccentricity was probably the period between 1750 and 1900 or so.  Among the old books in my own library into which I dip from time to time is a wonderful volume by John Timbs, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (London, 1875).  Since this is an anthology of English eccentrics, domestic animals naturally make frequent appearance.  We are all familiar with the little old lady who leaves everything to the cat; but all this pales in comparison with the habitual behavior of the Rev. Henry Egerton, the son of the Bishop of Durham, and the eighth Earl of Bridgewater.  

 The Earl of Bridgewater

            This learned and bibliophilic nobleman took up residence in Paris, where he became an expert collector of early French literature.  (The Egerton manuscripts in the British Library are today among its notable medieval collections.)   His lordship preferred canine to human company and was wont to give elaborate dinner parties for his numerous dogs, all of them sumptuously appareled and seated at his dinner table.  “If he be lent a book, he carries his politeness so far as to send it back, or rather have it conveyed home, in a carriage,” writes one contemporary observer.  “He gives orders that two of his most stately steeds be caparisoned under one of his chariots and the volume, reclining at ease in milord’s landau, arrives, attended by four footmen in costly livery at the door of its astonished owner.  His carriage is frequently to be seen filled with his dogs.”

 milord Egerton's dinner party