White Pebbles

 

             If you are in search of good news these you’d best grab what you can when you can.  That is what I did when I accidentally stumbled upon an online paper published by three scientists under the title “Human Mortality Improvement in Evolutionary Context.”  Here’s the take-away.  (Spoiler alert: it’s heavy going.)  We quantify the rate and amount of mortality reduction by comparing a variety of human populations to the evolved human mortality profile, here estimated as the average mortality pattern for ethnographically observed hunter-gatherers. We show that human mortality has decreased so substantially that the difference between hunter-gatherers and today’s lowest mortality populations is greater than the difference between hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees.

 

            Wow!  Wild chimpanzees.

           

I happen to be interested in hunter-gatherers because I am one--in both a metaphorical and a literal sense.  My metaphorical gatherings come mainly from eclectic not to say odd-ball reading (sample above), while my material gatherings are mainly the by-products of my therapeutic ambulation.  This week the two have merged in curious fashion.  My medical advisors are trying to keep my molecules moving by beginning with my legs.  So I am supposed to take what is for me a substantial and challenging walk every day, and I have frequently alluded to these walks, occasionally even described them in blog posts.  The possible satisfactory walking routes are of course limited, but also varied, and most of them avoid pavement in favor of sylvan paths.  On the whole the routes are very pleasant.  But I always enjoy walking more if I can hunt and gather as I go.  According to season I can sometimes gather fungi or nuts.  Within the next ten days the raspberry harvest, which promises to be huge, will be hanging over, or beside, many footpaths.  But my staple quarry are little white pebbles roughly between the size of peppercorns and ping pong balls.  As these little white pebbles are a geological feature of much of the local topsoil rather than seasonal vegetation, they are my gathering mainstays, so to speak; but they probably do require some explanation.

 

A nice feature of our house is a little atrium, or enclosed garden, open to the sky, probably fifteen feet square.  It has some floral plantings and shrubbery, a tiny pool with a spouting dolphin-mouth faucet electrically controlled by a switch in our kitchen, and a short gravel path along which our pet turtles, Chloë and Hector, sedately parade.  A heavily used bird feeder hovers above.  One day it occurred to me that this quirky little secret garden, which gets only a few daily hours of direct sunlight,  could use a little more light.  It might be further improved if the pathway gravel, instead of being a dull gray, were a light-attracting shiny white.  And since wherever I walked I was noticing a scattering of little while pebbles, often half-buried in hard earth, I thought I might start gathering a few on the daily round.  All I needed to carry was a small pointed metal tool to loosen some of the pebbles, and as a receptacle a quart-sized plastic milk container, the mouth of which was, I discovered by happy chance, a serviceable size-gauge. Early experience suggested that if I gather a hundred or so a day for, say, three years, one might begin to see results.  And it’s usually more fun than not to be “doing something”—even if what you are doing is pretty footling.

 

 

Of course, I encounter many other walkers, runners, and bicyclists along the route—either coming toward me or overtaking my leisurely pace from behind.  These people are likely to see me scour the ground, lean over, poke at things with a strange weapon, and put something into a milk bottle.  About a third pretend they don’t see me. Another third are curious as hell but too polite to say anything but “Nice day for it,” or some such, let alone ask what “it” is.  But some small number do ask.  I always tell them: “I am gathering white pebbles.”  Maybe half of this group persists: “What for?” Again, I always answer truthfully: “To brighten up my atrium path.”  We are now talking about small numbers.  I can tell that the fraction of the fraction believing me is maybe fifty percent.  It is not easy to mask incredulity and dark suspicion.  What the skeptical think I was doing is unclear to me, but it obviously isn’t anything good, and I shall not be surprised if I find a detective at my door one day.

 

In my secondary hunter-gatherer role, also known as library mode, or the bibliographical, I was this week reading a few short stories.  I picked up my de Maupaussant, and almost immediately stumbled upon the classic “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”).  How could I have failed to think of it in this connection before?!  You may well know the plot, but here it is in brief.  In some benighted corner of nineteenth-century rural Normandy, two prosperous peasants, Maitre Hauchecorne and Maitre Malandain, are, for reasons unstated, ancestral enemies.  Hauchecorne is a compulsive hunter-gatherer skinflint who picks up anything he finds along the way that might conceivably prove useful in some conceivable circumstance.  Walking into the village of Goderville on a market day, he spots a small piece of discarded string on the path before him, leans over, and picks it up.  One never can tell when a piece of string might come in handy!  Only then does he realize that his nemesis, Malandain, is watching him from a distance.  Embarrassed to be so discovered, Hauchecorne then makes a show of looking around a wider area as though for something valuable he has dropped.  This is a technique well known to anyone who has ever been threatened with discovery while intending to take a pee behind a tree, should such people exist.  The market activities continue into a kind of communal lunch, which is interrupted by the announcement of a horn-blowing town crier.  I love this detail, because as recently as the early 1960s Joan and I lived in a delightful Provençal village where there still was such an official!  The town-crier’s electrifying announcement is this.  A certain local citizen has lost a wallet containing 500 francs and business papers, having apparently dropped it on the road to Goderville.  Has anyone any relevant knowledge?  Handsome reward offered, etc.  “Aha,” thinks Malandain, “So that was what Hauchecorne was up to!”  He informs the police of what he thinks he saw, and soon the whole village buzzes with gossip.  To no effect does Hauchecorne keep repeating “It was only a bit of string!”  Nobody believes him.  I mean—who would pick up a dirty piece of string?  Eventually the lost wallet is found intact and restored to its owner, but by then, it’s way too late.  Hauchecorne’s reputation as thief, liar, or fool—take your pick--has set in the concrete of village malevolence.  Poor Hauchecorne spends the last of his few tormented days telling and retelling his story to unbelieving neighbors.  “It was only a piece of string!”

 

There seem to be at least two things worth pondering in all this.  One of the sadder maxims of La Rochefoucauld is that even “in the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not exactly displeasing.” The alacrity with which so many of us are quick to think the worst of strangers is perhaps even more frightening.  

 

old sidewalk slab and pebble scattering

 

        The geology of the pebbles is also worth a thought.  To my untrained eye they are a mixture of rock types, some ignious quartz, but more metamorphic limestone.  Where do these light-colored stones come from?  Not far from my house are some old, crude poured concrete sidewalks, much decayed by invasive vegetation.  The normal size of the sidewalk section is a four-by-four foot square.  The concrete was but roughly finished by trowel, and I note that in general there are on the average surface visible between ten and twenty white pebbles of the sort that, if they were poking through the bare earth of a field, I might go after.  I presume that roughly reflects the “white pebble” component, maybe five percent, of the commercial gravel piles used by the masons.  Many of the light-colored stones seem to have spent half an eon or so engaging with the abrasive sand of a sea bottom.  That puzzles me because in my very limited personal experience  white pebbles are actually quite rare among the shingle of the swimming beaches of the Jersey Shore.

Goin' Home

            The first week of calendrical summer has been a mellow and joyous one here as we had been anticipating a lengthy visit from our son Luke, our daughter-in-law Melanie, and their two delightful offspring, John Henry (9) and Hazel (8).  And now they are here.  Their home is in Montreal, where Luke is a university professor.   This family has been much impacted by Covid, and their travel plans have definitely been in the category of touch-and-go.  In our observation the myth that things bureaucratic have been better in Canada than in our own land has the status of other masochistic American myths.  An earlier trip south, planned for Easter, had to be cancelled at the last moment; and there had been serious doubt hovering over this one as well.  But they did with sheer heroism make a flying trip to Sophia’s wedding, and they arrived here for a real summer visit late on Saturday.  They are not actually staying under our roof.  At the tolerable cost of some cat-sitting they were able to wangle a large and commodious house for themselves nearby.  But on Sunday we did immerse ourselves in a full day of varied activities from attending church in the morning to hanging out at the pool in the afternoon, and eating take-out from Tiger Noodles in the evening. A good swath of summer lies before us, and quite possibly even some more miso soup.

 

I found myself anticipating their arrival with what Henry James might call animation.  I did not try to resist or disguise my eagerness.  Every stage of life has its surprises; but old age is almost nothing but surprises.  The physical changes, however well anticipated in theory, are in practice something quite other.  I was an English professor.  How many times have I read in Hamlet of “ the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that Flesh is heir to?”  The “natural shocks” of physical decay, whether or not they are exacerbated by dramatic pathology, catch you off guard; but they are in a certain sense expected.  What I found much more unexpected are the new developments in sentimental and psychic life, unfamiliar and unanticipated, yet upon reflection perhaps finally not surprising.  The realization that one is essentially through with many of the activities which have proved so urgent and life-sustaining in earlier years is necessarily a somber one.  Yet it does come with a sense of liberation as well.  It seems to permit a certain surrender to sentiment. Our joy at seeing the family of our youngest child has been unrestrained—and with regard to my own reactions maybe schmalzy. 

 

It has had the strange effect, also, of bringing to my mind a kaleidoscope of decades-old experience.  Throughout my adult life I lived at a distance, often a very great distance from my parents.  Visits to them were difficult and rare.  The arrivals and departures were always emotionally charged, and with one exception never accomplished on my part with dry eyes.  Somehow I managed it on my last farewell to my father, which I knew was a last farewell, and executed as he stood shakily upon a stick, confused, uncomprehending, and aphasic in the cubicle bedroom of a rehabilitation hospital in New Mexico.  Trips “home” always involved difficult travel arrangements: a flight to Springfield, Mo., or later El Paso, Texas, and then a fairly substantial drive, usually in a rented car, to Baxter County, Arkansas or Las Cruces, N.M.  Such musical tastes as I have are mainly classical; but homecomings and departures are always associated in my mind with sentimental popular ballads or Country and Western tunes, mainly having to do with absence and loss: “You Are My Sunshine,” “Red River Valley,” Peter, Paul, and Mary—well, mainly Mary: “If you miss the train I’m on / You will know that I am gone.”  It’s not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me, but, my darling, when I think of thee.  If you seek evidence of the inventiveness of the English language as spoken in America you might begin with the wonderful word tear-jerker.  My own singing repertory, if it could be called that, consists of almost nothing but tear-jerkers, most of them pseudo-folk songs from the Nostalgia Canning Factory.

           

But there is one piece that has a pretty good claim to being “classical”, and I associate it always with driving through south-central Missouri and into northern Arkansas.  I have mentioned this route once before, because it takes you through the village of Mansfield, Missouri, the resting place of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  My parents’ little “farm” in Baxter County, Arkansas, and the rather larger one belonging to several of my uncles and aunts, was about six or seven miles south of the county seat town down a dirt road terminating at an old-fashioned reaction ferry that crossed the White River. (The quotation marks around the word farm acknowledge the fact that the land was mainly woods with some animal pastures rather than fields plowed and cultivated for food crops.)  This road, the Shipps Ferry Road, was pleasant and meandering, and a bit up and down, with one fairly serious WPA culvert bridge across a creek.  About a third of the way along this southbound route the road went up the long side of a sizeable hill, opening at the top to a long classic panoramic Ozark Mountain view.  You couldn’t see the river, but you clearly saw the hills on the other side of it.  I always reckoned when I topped that rise that I was home.  Three or four years ago my granddaughter Sophia and I made a trip “home” together.  She was driving cross-country from Los Angeles to a new stage of life in New York, and we met up in the Little Rock airport.  It was an experience I shall never forget, and which I cannot remember without bringing to the surface the plangent realization that it is most unlikely that there will ever be another such homecoming for me.  Alone in a vehicle I would sing out loud as much as I could remember of “Goin’ home, goin’ home…,” a song written by one of Dvorak’s friends to a plangent melody from the New World Symphony.  We have every reason to hope that there should still be a few more such homecomings in store for Luke, Melanie, John Henry, and Hazel.  And whether or not tears well in the eye, we are all hoping to enjoy this one to the hilt.

 

Sixty-five years ago on hot days in a public school of no particular distinction in east Texas a fine teacher, Mrs. White, spent two class hours discussing with us a poem of Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man.”  It’s a poem set in a New England agricultural world that was probably already disappearing when the poem was published in 1914, and has now vanished everywhere. It is a beautiful poem with a profound and eternal moral theme, the interplay of justice and mercy.  It is a dialogue between a farmer and his wife concerning a kind of bad penny of an old farm laborer who has unexpectedly shown up at their place once again.  Its most famous line, spoken by the farmer, Warren, is ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’ Most of us kids thought that was really profound.  The poem is a kind of flint-nosed Yankee version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  Mrs. White would tell you what a word meant, but you had to tell her what the poem meant.  I didn’t say it out loud, but I was worried about those coercive have to’s in both of Warren’s clauses.  It was as though she had read my mind.  Mrs. White said: “But Mary doesn’t necessarily entirely agree with her husband, does she?  ‘I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’”

John Henry & Hazel

 

Foxholes, Bird Nests

 

to the edge of the known world

The long-serving rector of our parish church has just retired, and as the search for a permanent successor is by design a careful and time-consuming one, the wardens have been charged with putting together a roster of visitors and local retired clergy to conduct the weekly services—the clerical equivalents of substitute teachers.  The lot fell to Joan for last week and next.  It has been quite a while since I saw her working on a sermon.   “What are the texts?” I asked—meaning, of course, the appointed Bible readings around which the sermon might be constructed.  “Foxes and holes, birds and nests,” she replied.  There are several choices, and her tone of voice suggested that was one she would probably not choose.  I knew what she was referencing, of course, a passage in which Jesus says, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath nowhere to lay his head.  Funnily enough, I myself have spent a certain amount of my recent time thinking about foxholes and bird nests, and in very different contexts.

The past week or ten days have seen our first really warm summer days as well as a significant amount of rain, some of it heavy.  The result in open woodlands has been what I call the Great Greening, in which the more gentle and subtle verdant shades of spring are overwhelmed by darker greens of a rampant, undisciplined character, leaving the impression of forest half yielding to jungle.  The fast-growing-vines—especially the porcelain berry that I wrote about some weeks ago—are particularly prominent.  Serious Summer is on the way, Serious Summer with its many pleasures but also its challenges and discomforts.

I usually think of the fieldstone wall at the bottom of our yard as an architectural decoration; but in Serious Summer it takes on the nature of a protective barrier, like Hadrian’s Wall or the fortified bridge of Conway Castle, dividing the world of safety and civility from a terrible landscape where dragons roam.  And while we don’t have any actual dragons, we do have in abundance most of the other critters of the Jersey fields and woods: deer, squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons,  ’possums, and an increasing number of foxes.  Bears and coyotes have been reported in or at least around Princeton, but I have yet to see them.  The foxes, on the other hand, are now commonplace.  Several times I have seen a fox lithely walking along the top of the whole length of the stone wall as though it were a private vulpine highway.  There was a special reason for the path of this particular fox trot, and I shall come to it eventuallly.

One of the principal objects of my scholarly research in Medieval Studies was the cultural history of the medieval Franciscan Order.  Francis is called the poverello (poor man) because of his commitment to evangelical poverty, the belief, based in a certain reading of the gospels that neither Jesus Christ nor his disciples owned any property.  This was regarded as the perfect (meaning “complete,” “having reached the highest possible level”) stage of spiritual life.  The doctrine of voluntary self-pauperization was usually called evangelical poverty—and it was regarded as morally superior to (and not really having much to do with)  what we usually think of as poverty.  There are many gospel passages in which the friars found this doctrine, but especially in Jesus’s reply to a man who asked him what he must do to be perfect.  The answer: “Sell everything you have; give the proceeds to poor people; and follow me.”  This the questioner could not do, because he had a lot of things.  Ah, yes, rich men, the eyes of needles.  And if this was a problem for a single rich man, what of a burgeoning new religious order with dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of partisans of “evangelical poverty” who did, however, need to be clothed, housed, and fed?  The conflict between literary reality and somber material necessity instigated a major rift within the Franciscan Order and a sustained polemic from conservative monastics of the Benedictine tradition, most of who lived simply but in comfortably endowed digs often supported by revenue-producing farmland.  The friars were also often in conflict with the so-called “secular clergy”—that is, the ordinary parish priests, who might find themselves in unwelcome competition with the new-fangled itinerant monastics, who were becoming as numerous and noxious as “flies and fleas.”  The debate was to a degree a battle of Bible verses, the passage about the Son of Man lacking even the domestic amenities of foxes and birds being a favorite of the more radical friars.  But their opponents could also turn it against them.  The birds came out unscathed.  Who doesn’t like birds?  Francis himself preached to them.  But not the foxes.  Foxes already had a folkloristic reputation for cunning and trickery.  Furthermore, with their reddish-brown coats they looked rather like a certain brand of friars—Franciscans.  So foxes and friars were an almost inevitable literary coupling, the most prominent survival being perhaps the folklore of Reynard the Fox.  I think it is likely that at one level Chaucer’s hilarious tale of the rooster Chaunticleer is an ecclesiastical allegory about the competition between friars and secular priests

 cock and fox

 

vulpes et gallus
 

It is fascinating to note how deeply our earlier artistic traditions in painting and literature, both popular and learned, reflect images derived from scriptural exegesis.  Because of a detail in Jesus’s commission to his disciples (Mark 6.9), the friars called themselves “them that carry no purse.”  But one disciple did carry a purse: Judas, as Chaucer’s imaginary Friar points out in attacking the equally imaginary Summoner, who also “had little purses and was a thief.”  You may also have noted the many ambiguous purses and codpieces in Renaissance portraits of the high and mighty.

approach of the jungle, site of foxhole

But back to my wild garden.  There is hanging from the tool shed near the liminal wall a rather fancy ceramic birdhouse, the gift of a long-departed friend.  Its location is wholly inappropriate to its function.  In fact its particular elegance is not really our style.  I put it there “temporarily” several years ago to keep it safe from lawn mowers.  I was amazed when Joan reported to me a few days ago that there was a nest and a bird in it, possibly a wren.  There had not been bird in it for a few years.  I wonder if that had anything to do with the family of foxes formerly living in their foxhole less than twenty yards away?   

 

But I only came to this realization recently.  For the reason I used to see foxes walking along the top of the stone wall was that the wall was for them the fastest route home.  They had dug out their home in a particularly jungly spot just beyond my property line.  When I stumbled upon it, I found that it was actually less a hole and more  a wide, shallow crater, of soup dish shape, spacious but virtually invisible in its surrounding high grass.  Even so, it was not a particularly good place for their abode, as they apparently decided fairly soon.  But they were there long enough to make the birds decamp, and it has taken some time for them to return.

Historical Jesus

 

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)

            My blog essays neither seek nor merit a large readership, but I think I have discovered how I might get one should I be so inclined.  All I would have to do is write exclusively about Princeton athletic events or the weddings of attractive  and popular young people with many friends.  So profuse has been the clientele for the account of Sophia’s wedding last week that I think I must retreat to the obscurity of some arcane topic and treat it arcanely.  I seek, in Stendahl’s somewhat cryptic note at the end of the Charterthouse of Parma, “the happy few”.  But even the fewest may not be so happy after learning that my topic will be a novel of Mikhail Bulgakov’s set in 1930s Moscow, The Master and Margarita.  Only sort of about that, of course.

 

            This very strange and funny novel was written in the earlier period of Stalin’s tyranny, mainly in the Thirties.  It includes at least two plots, though their summary description will tell you very little about the book’s genius.  One strand (set in contemporary Moscow) is a satirical treatment of an official Communist  Party writers’ guild, Massolit, and its strange visitation by the Devil in the persona of a mysterious foreign professor, Voland.  Voland brings with him an entourage and an ambiance of the weird and the supernatural.   A second plot (set in ancient Jerusalem) is an historical novel written by a disillusioned writer called “the Master,” about Pontius Pilate, Jesus, and Judas Iscariot.  In both there is a lot of interplay with biblical and secular literature.  Margarita, the Master’s girl-friend, appears to be a Marxist reflection of Goethe’s “eternal feminine” in Faust.  Around the early Thirties militant atheism went into overdrive as Party doctrine and practice.  While wrecking crews demolished old churches, stern-eyed poets wrote odes celebrating the death of God. Berlioz, the Massolit commissar, denies that Jesus ever even existed.  But Professor Voland’s amazing powers seem to prove that supernatural evil, at least, is real enough; and the Master’s novel treats Jesus as an unquestionably historical personage, if only a deluded madman.

 

            I read The Master and Margarita in 1976 in London at the urging of a friend and colleague at the William Morris Centre, Tom Drescher.  I thought it was absolutely engaging and rather amazing, but I certainly didn’t “understand” it.   Nor did I then know enough to appreciate its relationship to a long and paradoxical tradition in modern European thought that has at long last captured my curious attention: the cultural significance of “the historical Jesus.”  Judaism, and its late Antique sect that eventually became Christianity as a distinct faith, are described as revealed religions.  The revelation is contained in a book, or rather in an anthology of books, the Bible.  For Christians the revelation is found both in the ancient books first written in Hebrew and in the later ones, first written by early followers of Jesus and recorded in the common Greek language of international exchange of their day.  Of the latter, four (the gospels) are biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, presenting a common narrative with much overlapping and some contradictory detail.  All four gospels present Jesus as a miracle-worker during his life, and report his rising from death after his execution.  The books of the Bible are surely the most studied books in the history of world literature and the objects of a vast secondary literature.

 

            A miracle is an unusual event for which there is no rational or scientific explanation, and in the Age of Reason, or Enlightenment, thoughtful people were less and less willing to credit them—including those in the Bible, indeed including those attributed to Jesus.  Contrary to popular belief, it was not an irreligious age.  But the philosophical minds that were awestruck by the brilliance, order, and rationality of God’s Creation could scarcely credit that the Creator would on odd occasions break his own rules to stop the sun in its invariable course so that Gideon could slay more Amorites, or that his Son could induce the mass suicide of a herd of Gadarene swine.  The Scottish philosopher Hume included a devastating critique of miracles in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).  But growing doubts about New Testament miracles only stimulated greater interest in Jesus as an historical moral philosopher and religious teacher.  There emerged a new kind of biography of the “historical Jesus.”

Ernest Renan (1823-1892)

 

            Its literary history is too rich to deal with comprehensively here.  Our own great Enlightenment President, Thomas Jefferson, created his own version of the New Testament by excising from the Authorized Version those parts he considered accretions, leaving, he hoped, a clearer and more coherent body of Jesus’s ethical teachings.  The rapid growth of scientific investigations in the nineteenth century had its parallels in professional biblical and theological studies.  Two of these were particularly important.  In 1835 David Strauss, a liberal German Lutheran theologian, published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, in which he denied Jesus’s divinity and chucked out his supernatural deeds.  Mary Ann Evans (“George Eliot”) translated this scandalous book into English.  Far more important in its popular impact was the French Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan (1863).  I have written about this gentle, beautiful, and reverent book before.  Renan was a one-time Roman Catholic seminarian, who early abandoned his peasant faith.  He became a deeply learned historian, medievalist, and patrologist concentrating on the origins of Christianity.  His biography of Jesus is wholly demythologizing, but not adversarial or polemical. It was intended for, and connected with, a very large audience of intelligent readers.

 

            It caused outrage among church leaders.  The Pope declared Renan “the arch-blasphemer of Europe”. But many educated Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, actually found spiritual nourishment in the work, which freed them to strengthen their core beliefs by jettisoning dogmatic stumbling blocks.  This is in some ways an astonishing conclusion to come to with regard to one of the most heretical books ever published, but it is clearly demonstrated in the work of an English historian, Robert Priest.*  Priest has made a thorough study of the original Renan archives, which contain many letters written to him (some anonymously) from grateful Christian readers who found in his book a strengthening of their own religious ideas.

 

            I was led to Priest’s work while trying to figure out how a great Portuguese novelist of the 1890s would write two fictional versions of the death of Christ, and place one of them unexpectedly into the middle of a slightly ribald social satire.  Or why a great spate of historical fiction about Jesus, Judas, Pontius Pilate, and other related characters suddenly appears on the scene in the later 1800s.  I have by no means figured it all out, but Bulgakov’s very bizarre Master and Margarita has certainly set me to thinking.  The Bolshevik intellectuals, and their satirical reflections in the Moscow writers and theater people of Massolit, were all of course vocal atheists.  They did not believe in a God of Providence, but in the scientific determinism (dialectic) of history.  In the first, weird chapter of the novel, Mikhail Berlioz, head of Massolit, and Ivan Bezrodny, a poet and the author of a travesty on the birth of Christ, are discussing the non-existence of Jesus.  The Devil, who appears to them in the persona of Professor Woland, a foreign, apparently German historian, overhears and joins their conversation. Their first fear is that this unknown personage is a police spy—generally a sound default assumption in Stalin’s capital—but what Woland has to say is so bizarre as to reassure them that he is only a madman.  His prediction is that Berlioz will very soon meet his death by decapitation by a female member of the Komsomol (a Communist Girl Scout).  Their conversation wanders into various byways, but at its end Woland directly contradicts the views of the literary men concerning Jesus.  

 

“Jesus did exist, you know.”   

“Look, Professor,” said Berlioz with a forced smile.          

“With all respect to you as a scholar we take a different attitude on that point.”

“It’s not a question of having an attitude,” replied the strange professor.  “He existed, that’s all there is to it.”

 

Thus did the diabolical historian insist upon the historicity of the historical Jesus by way of introducing into the mystifying early pages of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita the opening chapter of a second book, a modern apocryphal gospel, the Master’s condemned historical novel, a chapter set at the palace of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem in the time of--Jesus.  In a brilliant introductory essay in the Everyman’s Library edition, Cambridge professor Simon Franklin writes of Bulgakov’s own temporarily doomed text: “Not a page was publishable…[with its] multiplicity of styles, with the logic of fantasy installed as fact; a ‘true’ figure of Christ who stands outside the doctrines both of orthodox Soviet atheism and of Orthodox Russian Christianity.”

 

            But history does have its dialectics, often strange ones.  You can now find photographs in the newspapers of Vladimir Putin (ex-KGB officer) snuggling with Patriarch Kyril of the Russian state church, or of Kyril’s priests asperging Putin’s bombs and bombers on their way to Ukraine.

 

 

*Robert D. Priest, “Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France: The Popular Reception of Renan’s Life of Jesus,” The Journal of Modern History, 86 (2014): 258-284.

 

 Warning: this is post number 666 in the continuing series.

 

 

June Wedding

                                                    the principals and the place

 

           On Saturday, June 4^th, our eldest granddaughter, Sophia Fleming-Benite, married Raymond Wang on the grounds of the fabulous, funky colonial farmstead belonging to her uncle and aunt, Richard Fleming and Katie Dixon, in Kingwood Township near Frenchtown, N. J.   The mother of the bride—also a Katy but with a usefully variant spelling—is our daughter.  The father of the bride, our son-in-law, the eminent Sinologist Zvi Ben-Dor, was one of the two officiants, the other being the father of the groom, Bob Wang, also a professor.  So the erudition was conspicuous, the culture multi, the joy unbounded, and the weather absolutely perfect.  This last point was hardly banal given the event’s open-air setting on a greensward to be reached only after a quarter of a mile of gravel lane marinated by several previous nights of thunder showers.  Though the impressive ecumenicism of the ceremony—roughly Sino-Judaic-Franciscan, I would say—avoided all parochial spiritual sectarianism, I might give some small credit to my own silent orisons to Aeolus, the god of winds, and the stormy goddess Tempestas.

John Henry warms up the crowd
 

But only very small.  The wedding couple are in themselves such magnificent specimens of benign energy, moral majesty, and boundless promise as to restore some sense of that social confidence so severely undermined by two years of dystopian plague  and the seemingly remorseless bombardment of the daily news.  None of us can ever be wholly prepared for the storms of life, literal or metaphorical, but Raymond and Sophia strike me as about as fit for life’s struggle as they are destined for its happiness and satisfactions.  That seemed to me as well to be the general sense of the gathering—upwards of a hundred friends and family, I would have thought, vibrant with admiration, congratulations, vibes of universal amity, and the determination to enjoy to the fullest one great party.   This was in the form of a dinner-dance beneath a spacious tent, itself enclosed within a yet more encompassing canopy of towering old forest, through the foliage of which, when one stepped out, shone occasional glimpses of those stars which are the pilgrim Dante’s culminating vision of Love in his imagined Paradise—"the Love that moves the sun and the other stars”.

 

I find myself challenged by certain expectations of the write-ups of weddings as I find them in the social pages.  What of the bride’s dress, for example?  Well, Sophia would look gorgeous in a potato sack, so naturally she looked even better in something very different—not a traditional bridal gown, but a stunning long white dress in a fine fabric that gave off the tactile effect of tiers of finely beaten copper.  Both of the principals’ mothers were dressed in arresting red, explained by Mrs. Wang as by Chinese cultural custom the requisite wedding hue.  The grandmother of the bride, whose beauty has but mellowed since her own somewhat more modest marital event precisely six decades earlier, was a symphony in blue.  Put this all together and you get—yes, red, white and blue!  The bunting of our national allegory.  Sort of looks like America.

 

sixty years on
 

Lulu and Cora Louise, Sophia’s younger sisters, were of course the bridesmaids and ring-bearers.  Of our six grandchildren, five are girls, including all three in the bride’s family.  The three Fleming-Benite sisters invite an analogy that must commonly spring to the grandparental mind in such circumstances.  What naturally presents itself to the classicizing temperament is, of course, the vision of the Three Graces.  Though these young ladies have names--Aglaia, Thalia, and Euphrosyne—I seldom can remember them.  What is important is that as a group they are the classical mythological embodiments of feminine elegance, beauty, and joyousness, qualities that on Saturday last were on conspicuous display in the backwoods of Kingwood, New Jersey.

 

 

Cora Louise, Lulu, Aglaia, Thalia and Euphrosyne

 

The ceremony, beautifully crafted yet pleasingly relaxed, almost took place at its appointed hour, and almost all the guests had arrived in time.  There are certain situations for which almost is in fact the most desirable possible state of affairs.  A definite and significant formality of concept joined with a flexible and relaxed mode of execution to form a union of what Chaucer called sentence and solace—deep meaning and lots of fun.  And, boy, was there ever fun!  The music began even before the ceremony, and not just any music, but music of exactly the right kind—a line of cool New Orleans brass lined up in front of the old house’s façade looking onto a long meadow, gently sloping down toward a distant pond.  It was in this field that the chairs for the guests had been arranged, the slight declination of the ground creating the effect of a natural and spacious amphitheatre.

 

Without claiming objectivity as an observer, I have to say that this wedding was the most joyously received large event in which I can remember having participated.  From time to time I read in the papers of certain initiatives—the building of a concert hall, perhaps—as being “public-private” undertakings, meaning that they come from the cooperation of individual and communal efforts.  So I would describe the wedding at Kingwood.  It made good use of expert professionals: caterers, a “wedding planner,” musicians, sanitary engineers who introduced us to completely new horizons in portapotties.  But all these amiable and competent experts were at the service of, rather than in exerting control over the wedding couple and the site hosts.  Richard and Katie Dixon, lord and lady of the manor, laboring for months in further beautifying their beautiful domain, had produced an horticultural masterpiece.  I doubt that the grounds ever looked better in all their two-hundred and thirty-two years.

 

The dining and the dancing were superb, granting the necessity for the latter to be “age appropriate”.  In fact the vigorous participation of several small children added a delightful dimension to the activity on the dance floor.  Of this we were observers rather than participants.  In my condition anything more lively than a sarabande is unthinkable.  An edible joint of chicken produced by a caterer is a rare achievement.  The delicious one these people produced was virtually unprecedented.  And of course there were other hilarities and highjinks—including a moving and heartfelt speech shared by a married couple among the newlyweds’ closest friends, random bursts of uproar among the dining tables, the modulated hum of happy fressers.  I myself was honored by Sophia and Raymond to propose a toast, which concluded thus: “As they set out on their committed life together and their destined mission to leave our needy world a better place than they found it, we, their families and their friends, wish them all happiness, good health, material sufficiency, and the never-failing comfort and support of mutual love and companionship.”  From my lips, I hope, to the ear of God.  The party continued after the geriatrics’ witching hour, though how long I cannot say.  I awoke to a silent breaking dawn, preternaturally still and empty save for the many musics of many birds.  Everyone had disappeared while I slept.  The newlyweds, I presume, were on their way to their honeymoon, and to their new life together, leaving us all the richer for the privilege of having witnessed its glorious moments of inception. 

                                        

two, always better than one

                   

               

Thoughts of a Gun Owner

 

            Amidst so much talk of privately owned guns, I feel compelled to say a word about my own, for I indeed am a gun-owner.  My gun is a forty-five caliber Colt revolver, a genuine original “six-shooter”.  It probably was manufactured in the 1880s.  It belonged to my maternal grandfather, who was an employee of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, stationed in Salida, Colorado.  For a country showing signs of political senility, the United States is a comparative infant.  My father knew a man who had known a man who had known George Washington.  My grandfather was born shortly after the Civil War and my mother, his youngest child, was not young when I was born.  Three family generations easily occupy more than half our national history.  My gun is an antique from America’s antiquity.  It has been fired once—meaning one shot--in the last seventy years.  My late elder brother, who inherited it in 1950, wanted to see if it still worked then.  It did.  He hit a tree at about fifteen yards.  I don’t know where he came up with a projectile for it.  We have never tried to find any.  It has been preserved ever since in a safe place in the metaphoric mothballs of a leather holster probably dating from the early twentieth century.  At rare intervals it gets a light wipe with a faintly oiled cloth.  I don’t want anybody to take this gun away from me.  My hope is that it will be passed on through generations yet unborn, a significant antique, a beautifully precise steel forging from a great age of American industry, and an intriguing material link to a proximate but vanished past.

 

            My grandfather never heard of an event like that in Uvalde, though such events now seem almost common.  Just how common?  It depends upon whether you address the question from an ethical, a comparative, or a statistical point of view.  From the ethical point of view, which must command the attention of every person with a conscience and surely commands our communal national consciousness at this very moment, the mass murder of young children in a primary school is an event so obscene as to render the question just asked about it obscene as well.  The suggestion seems to be that we should establish a baseline number of annual school massacres against which the actual number might be deficient or excessive in any given year.  If we use the language of ought, there ought to be no such events.  But the tragic empirical fact is that there have been many, precisely documented by police and medical officials, and recorded and broadcast by journalists.  We are thus provided with a very sound basis to make the comparative judgement that the United States is the runaway world leader in such atrocities.

 

            It is the third approach to the question, the statistical part in its narrowest sense, that proves troublesome.  How statistically likely is it that a given student will be murdered at any given school by a maniac?  I don’t know the answer, except that it is very unlikely.  On the day that the school in Uvalde was attacked, just about a hundred thousand other American public schools were not attacked.  But current thinking about “safety measures” seems about as antiquated as my grandfather’s six-shooter.  It accepts as a matter of grim possibility that all our schools are potential abattoirs.  They are all “targets” to be “hardened” with high security techniques possibly appropriate for a military laboratory conducting classified research but hardly conducive of a wholesome and open educational experience.  Teachers and students are further to enhance their own safety by training in simulated attacks.

 

            According to Wayne La Pierre  of the National Rifle Association, the appropriate response to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  This is a strategy of war.  It was the strategy of Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease policy in the Second World War.  It is the strategy of President Biden and other Western leaders in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.  Here’s the idea: you supply the good guys, Mr. Zelensky, we’ll help supply the guns.  In civil society the authorized armed good guys are the police.  There were many police on the scene in Uvalde including a small group specially designated as school-protectors.  We have learned that as many as nineteen of these assorted good guys stood by in uncertainty and inaction outside the door of a schoolroom within which children were being murdered.  This is now the cause of probably justified criticism and even outrage, but can I honestly claim that I would have been the first to rush at that barricaded door?  Or can we believe that a hundred thousand schools can indefinitely maintain honed and effective defense plans against rare events?  Perhaps this grotesque episode at least provided a useful hint of the likely results of proposals, should they come into effect, to “Defund the Police!”

 

            The patent renewal date stamped into the metal of my six-shooter is 1874.  In the manufacturing of killing machines there have been giant strides since 1874.  I will not fault vocal advocates of “gun rights” for introducing the language of military strategy into school safety, but surely there should be an update in the strategy reflecting revolutionary developments in the military weapons being used by the perpetrators.  What military commander would begin by ceding a would-be assailant all the ground up to your very front door before taking action?  If a disturbed youth armed with war weapons makes it to the school door, let alone penetrates a classroom, it will be a near miracle to escape without carnage.  My own quixotic suggestion would be to rescind the second amendment, as Americans had the good sense to rescind the high-minded, well-meaning nineteenth (prohibition of alcohol) when it led to disastrous unintended consequences.    Then our legislators could start afresh, liberated from eighteenth-century technological assumptions and the further mystification of an ambiguous ablative absolute about well-ordered militias.  I already said this idea was quixotic.  In fact it would probably embarrass the old hidalgo himself.  So I move on.  But even back in the surreal world of Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde there are intelligent and, yes, truly “common-sense” initiatives to address the problem of school shootings that do not await the firing of the first shot in a third-grade classroom to implement and that do not interfere with the right to own and bear arms any more than driver’s ed courses, vision tests, and insurance requirements interfere with an unenumerated right to own and drive a car.  I will not rehearse these common-sense proposals.  They are in the press every day. They reflect two main ideas.  The first is that in America the available armory has changed quite a bit since the time of Natty Bumppo.  The second is that it is best to keep mentally disturbed people and known criminals away from guns.  These common-sense ideas do not rest on the assumption that gun owners are knuckle-dragging knuckleheads or that the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence is a sodality of effete leftists.  They do begin with the assumption that Americans, polemically divided as they may be, are still bound together by a bond of common human decency, and for all their parochialism still wish to exhibit (as Jefferson put it) “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”  This may already be a bridge too far.  But everybody else in the world surely thinks we are crazy.