Forty-Two

 

I have been thinking back to some of the political and cultural events of the early decades of my professional career.  In retrospect these years now seem to me rather quaint and distant despite their still obviously formative and continuing influence on our lives.  As I was a college professor working closely with young people, my own perceptions were inevitably much influenced by the young.  In particular there has swum into my mind for some reason the great vogue of certain cultural events as they impacted the undergraduate consciousness.  One of the most widely read books on our campus around 1980 was Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, a very engaging serio-comic romp through, well, the Universe.  Its fame, buoyed by radio, television, film, and for all I know board game versions is by no means extinct today; but around 1980 it was a cultural craze.

 

The book is not without its prophetic elements as we gulp or tremble before the vague but definitely menacing specter of something called “AI”.  In Adams’s book a monstrous computer named Deep Thought, having spent millennia contemplating the mysteries of “Life, the Universe, and Everything,” at last utters a numerical answer to the question of the meaning of it all.  The answer is 42.

 

For me, as a medievalist, this answer was a comforting confirmation of an hypothesis that I had been harboring for some years.  In the time we were at Oxford together my wife came to know the history don at her college, the late Marjorie Reeves.  I myself would later come to know her well.  Indeed we published a small book together, a book for which I personally set the type, did the printing, and made the bindings.*  Ms. Reeves, in addition to being a marvelous human being, was the world’s foremost authority on the writings of Joachim of Fiore.

 

If you have never heard of Joachim of Fiore, which is quite possible, I will tell you just a word or two about him.  Fiore was (is) an abbey in a once remote part of southern Italy—secluded away in the arch of the cartographic foot, the toes of which almost touch Sicily.  Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202) was for a time the abbot of this monastery. Joachim was a deep-thinking monk and a prophet.  What “prophecy” meant for him was grasping the plenary meaning of the Scriptures, the hidden and inward meanings lurking beneath the literal sense.  He was also a philosopher of history much influenced by Augustine, and especially by Augustine’s theologico-historical theories in the City of God and his analysis of the Trinity.  The most mysterious doctrine of the Trinity holds that the unitary God is manifested in three “persons”—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Joachim observed that the Bible of the Christians had two parts or “testaments”.  In what he called the Old Testament he found the history of the marvelous dealings of God the Father with Israel.  The New Testament manifestly dealt with the life of God the Son, Jesus Christ. And they obviously document sequential historical periods.  But what about God the Holy Spirit?  Here there was no book.  Joachim nevertheless posited the necessity of a metaphorical third age, an Age of the Holy Spirit, to be documented not in a third written book but in spiritual activity.  The Second Age must indeed be the one in which he was living, and it was probably already much advanced.  A new, apocalyptic Age of the Holy Spirit must be nigh.  And following that, the End.

 

But could the durations of the three trinitarian ages be more precisely delineated?  Surely, they would be of equal duration, as the persons of the Trinity were coequal.  A lot of Joachim’s followers thought so, and they searched the Scriptures for answers.  There was, unfortunately, no specific text that gave a straight-forward world chronology.   However, you may have noticed that Holy Writ is very big on its begats (See Genesis 5, for example—the period from Adam to Noah).  Every begat signals a human generation, and by long-standing tradition a generation was measured in medieval terms as thirty years.  And the prologue to the Gospel of Matthew is explicit.  It details the generations between Abraham, the legatee of the old covenant, and Jesus, founder of the new covenant.  The Joachists (or Joachimists) now knew precisely when the Age of the Holy Ghost must begin: in the Year of Our Lord 1260.  And in fact in that year the roadways of many parts of Europe were filled with processions of eager believers marching forward toward some new, unseen, spiritual renewal.  Why was that?

 

 

 

The truth was in the numbers, and the numbers were everywhere.  How many times had the escaping Hebrews temporarily paused in their flight from Egypt?   (These were called the “stations of the Exodus”).  How many bad boys got eaten up by bears for calling the prophet Elisha “baldy” (2 Kings 2:23-24?) After what number of words at the beginning of the Book of Genesis did God separate the light from the dark (Genesis 1:4)? 

 

It is extraordinary that a medieval apocalyptic and a twentieth century comic guru would agree on the transcendental importance of a single two-digit number.  But they did.  There is no telling why for Adams the number 42 is the “everything” number, but that doesn’t mean there is no talking about it.  He himself casually suggests that forty-two is the product of multiplying nine by six, and there are internet dissertations explaining (quite unsatisfactorily) the mathematical circumstances that could make that true.  His is a delightfully nutty book, and one can but wish that all its copious exegesis was also delightful.  To be fair, some of it is.  But modern craziness lacks the coherence of medieval craziness.  Quite independent of Joachim, medieval exegetes had concluded that forty-two was the number of completion or fulfillment.  That may be the reason that that so many medieval literary works are distributed in one way or another into forty-two parts.  The motive seems pretty likely to me in Dante’s Vita Nuova, for example.

 

I surmise that Joachim was possessed not merely of a mathematical mind, but also more specifically a geometrical mind.  A remarkable feature of many of the surviving manuscripts of his works—and these are surprisingly numerous—are their elaborate and sometimes cryptic pictorial illustrations.  One of his famous books is actually entitled “The Book of Figures”.  Joachim surely drew the original figures with his own hand.

 

Joachism like other chiliastic (millenarian) schemes is no longer in vogue; it seems mainly to have run its course.  In that regard it is somewhat similar to Marxist Communism.  Fortunately—and here very unlike Communism--it did not have to heap up hecatombs of victims in running its course and demonstrating its debility.  We may regard it as a “curious divagation of the human mind.”  So many interesting episodes in the history of thought are the chronicles of brilliant human minds chasing batty ideas.  Alchemy, a project that captured the minds of most of the brilliant scientists of the early modern period, proved utterly baseless in its material aims.  The search for the Philosopher’s Stone was about as wacky as the fevered anticipation of the Age of the Holy Ghost, but its alembics, retorts, reductions, and evaporation still contributed to the construction of modern chemistry.  Joachism has many of the features of a dazzling artistic construct utterly useless except for its ingenuity and beauty.

                                

(The illustrations are all from medieval manuscripts containing Joachite works.)

 

                  *Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore (Princeton: Pilgrim Press, 1978)

 

 

 

 

Two Irish Neighbors

               Robert Boyle

 

The animating premise of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play Travesties depends upon the strange collocation of eminent people who in actual historical fact were living in Zürich at the time of World War I.  It must be great fun to imagine conversation between James Joyce, say, and Vladimir Lenin.  Today’s essay concerns two Anglo-Irishmen, both representatives of the English colonial (not to say imperial) project in seventeenth-century Ireland.  The two men, though united by their deep Protestant piety, differed dramatically in their intellectual and spiritual personalities.  One of them, Robert Boyle (1627-1691), was one of our earlier experimental scientists, a giant of early modern chemistry,  and a founding member of and mover and shaker in the British Royal Society dedicated to “the promotion of science in the benefit of humanity.”  The other gloried in the wonderful name of Valentine Greatrakes (1628-1682).  At mid-century he had been a soldier in the Puritan revolution under Cromwell.  After benefiting from a wide-ranging amnesty and conforming to Anglicanism he had withdrawn to his Irish homeland to live the quiet life of a gentleman farmer before, about 1662, becoming convinced—and convincing many others—that he had been given the divine gift of healing, with the touch of his hand, what was in that age a common disfiguring dread disease--scrofula.  The therapeutic method was a little more than mere touch.  It involved a kind of vigorous stroking of the affected areas, and its practitioner was often called “Greatrakes the Stroker”.   This tubercular ailment manifests itself chiefly in the area of the neck, throat, and chin, but in severe cases invades also the lower and occasionally the upper parts of the face.  In old England it was called the “King’s Evil,” the belief being that the monarch possessed thaumaturgical powers to effect its cure.

Valentine Greatrakes, the Stroker

 

Greatrakes and Boyle were very near contemporaries, and very near neighbors.  Boyle was the elder by a year.  His father was the great man of the district (the earl of Cork), and Lismore Castle, where he was born, is perhaps six miles from the hamlet of Affane, site of the Greatrakes family farmland.  Both spent many years of their lives in England; but it is quite possible, even probable, that they were as lads both in the same local primary school at Lismore.  What is certain is that when Greatrakes became an international phenomenon as a wonder-worker, their paths would once again cross.  Some years ago I told the strange story of Valentine Greatrakes in a book called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  That book was in large part devoted to the exploration of some of the less obviously “enlightened” aspects of that crucial phase of Western intellectual history.  I now am thinking principally about Robert Boyle, an Enlightenment figure if ever there was one.  In the fundamentals of their unwavering Christian belief, chemist and faith-healer were of very similar mindset.  They both clearly believed in the genuineness of Greatrakes’s cures.  But Boyle, though he certainly thought that the world was the work of a divine creator, was an empiricist and an experimental scientist who believed that, in general, the divine creator regulated things according to general rather than partial laws.  It is in the nature of modern science to explain and demystify the paradoxes of observed phenomena, such as what everyone calls “sunrise” is not in fact the rising of the sun.  Boyle suspected there must be some explanation to be found here, that is, a scientific explanation.

 

scrofula

 

Boyle managed to avoid deep involvement in the civil war that ravaged England in the middle of the seventeenth century.  His father was an unequivocal royalist, but he himself had considerable sympathy for the Parliamentary side.  For the most part, he kept mum, not a bad default position for people surrounded by competing passions.  Still, he spent the most crucial years of the war in Tory Oxford.  (Greatrakes had of course been an officer in the Parliamentary army, and apparently a good one.)  All that was in the past at the time of Greatrake’s stroking fame, which reached its zenith in 1666—and when he came to the attention of his boyhood neighbor Robert Boyle.  Greatrakes’s fame went international when, reluctantly, he made a therapeutic tour of parts of southern England at the importunate bidding of a learned English nobleman, Lord Conway, whose wife’s migraine headaches he proved unable to cure.  (Though he had begun with scrofula stroking, and continued to specialize in it, so to speak, the Stroker had soon moved on to what might be called general practice miracle cures.)  It was through Conway and Conway’s erudite circle of scientific and theological friends that he reconnected with his boyhood neighbor, the now eminent Robert Boyle.  Greatrakes even became acquainted with several other members of the nascent Royal Society.

 

Remember that Boyle, like his even more famous younger contemporary Isaac Newton, was quite as interested in theology and scriptural exegesis as he was in experimental science. One could probably better say that for such men speculative theology and a close attention to the phenomena of the physical world were parts of a still unified quest for knowledge.  To the extent that Greatrakes’s supposed cures have been considered seriously at all by modern scholarship, they have of course been rejected as impossible.  Greatrakes had many doubters and even violent opponents, but none of them, so far as I know, took the view that miracles were impossible because there are no miracles.  If you read the rather shallow article on Greatrakes in Wikipedia, you will be told that he was a man self-deluded.  That is because what is known of his luminous moral character is so inconsistent with conscious fraud that the fraud must have been unconscious.  As to the (literally) hundreds of independent witnesses of his cures, they were not independent at all, simply participants in a self-generating mass delusion.  Certainly episodes of mass delusion are not unknown to history.  Yet none of the Stroker’s contemporary doubters made that argument.  The most powerful attack on the possibility of religious miracles in British philosophy would come only in David Hume, who lived just about a century after Boyle and Greatrakes, and who addressed the “miracle” question head on only in 1748.  But actually Hume’s argument is an argument based in probability.  Is it more likely that a man walked on water or that a man was mistakenly (with or without conscious fraud) reported to have walked on water?  To Hume (and modernity) the answer is obvious.

 

The hostile doubt that Greatrakes faced in the 1660s was of a slightly different sort.  There were, to be sure, skeptics.  But the main objection was that it was simply not appropriate that a Protestant should be performing miraculous cures, such cures being staples of the old unenlightened Romish, medieval religion.  So he was immediately hailed by one of his champions as “the miraculous Conformist”.  The word conformist meant that he was not a non-conformist.  He had submitted to the doctrine and the discipline of the national Church of England.

 

There is a good deal more to the Stroker’s amazing story though the part of it concerning me now is the reaction of his childhood chum, Robert Boyle, FRS, to the affair.  Boyle does not seem to have questioned the cures, but as a scientist he sought a scientific and material explanation for them.  He seems to have devoted a good deal of private thought to the matter, though he never arrived at firm conclusions, and we have a few--tantalizingly few—of his “lab notes” that record his thinking.  Some theory of contagious diseases had by Boyle’s time replaced that of miasma, or foul air.  (Think of the origins of the word malaria.)  Boyle seems to have toyed with the following hypothesis: if disease could be cause by contagion—meaning “touching together” in Latin—might also sanitation—being made healthy—be achieved by a similar process?  If a human agent could be a spreader of disease, might a human agent possibly be a spreader of health?  Thus Boyle was prepared to consider the possibility that the Stroker was such an agent, a man sanatively contagious.  The idea of sanative contagion, which appears as a trial balloon in some of the writings of the age, does not appear to have merit; but it is a scientific idea, not a religious one.  Boyle shared most of Greatrakes’s principal religious ideas, but he sought to examine the physical phenomena that the Stroker and others attributed to the realm of the supernatural in the realm of experimental science.  What is Boyle’s most famous book has an intriguing title: The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes (1661).  As I read that book I see an Enlightenment updating of a once famous work of medieval philosophy, Anselm’s Fides quarens intellectum, “Faith Seeking Understanding”.

 

 

Queen Anne: female thaumaturg

 

Edification by Example

 

 

Traditionally the twin aims of poetry, as expressed in Horace’s Art of Poetry are to instruct and to please.  He says the poet aims at either of these goals, but that the best poets aim for both, mixing the “sweet” with the “useful”.  The didactic side of some of our early classics is quite pronounced.  Some poems are presented as actual instruction manuals, only partly tongue in cheek.  Virgil writes a poem “useful to farmers”.  Ovid writes an Art of Love useful to everybody.  As late as the Romantic period, Percy Bysshe Shelley extravagantly claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”!  How much of today’s “creative literature” has an explicit or even implicit pedagogic aim?

 

Medieval preachers, poets, and historians frequently used exempla—anecdotes drawn from history or phenomena observed in the natural order—to illustrate the points they were interested in making.  One of the meanings of Modern English example preserves the sense of the singular form of the Latin word, exemplum.  There were many compilations of wise sayings and exemplary stories attributed to the great men of ancient history.  It appears that the first book printed and published in England was a translation of something called The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, a medieval Arabic anthology of ancient and ecumenical wisdom

           

This week I have found myself interested in a particular exemplum that I have by chance run into a couple of times.  It might be called the example of “Alexander the Great and the Pirate.”  Its most influential appearance in a major work of medieval literature is that found in The City of God of Augustine, who found it already established as an ethical exemplum in Cicero.  My own first encounters were in two late medieval works of poetry, one in English (John Gower’s Confessio Amantis), the other in French (François Villon’s Testament).  In general, Alexander had a particularly good medieval press.  He was one of the “Nine Worthies” of historic myth, three of whom (including Hector and Julius Caesar) were ancient pagans. He had a whole large literature of his own, including a Romance of Alexander and several other fictive “biographical” works.

 

But in this anecdote he doesn’t come off so well.  The Emperor has brought before him a captured petty marauder and pirate, intending to berate him—doubtless before having him executed.  “What do you think you are doing,” he asked the man, “terrorizing the seas in this manner?”  But the malefactor was staunch and fearless in his reply.  “Just what you think you are doing in terrorizing the whole world.  But because I do it with a little boat, I am called a brigand.  Because you command a great fleet, you are called an emperor.”*

 

It is a medieval illustration of this exemplum that I have put at the top of this essay.  It is from a fifteenth-century manuscript of Gower’s Confessio Amantis.  It depicts a magnificently dressed and baby-faced emperor and a scruffy pirate with his loot beside him and his pirate ship in the waterway behind.  If you have never heard of John Gower, you are certainly not alone.  He was a friend of Chaucer and a man of similar learning, an energetic scholar and writer.  He produced extensive works in three languages: French, Latin, and of course English.  He was thus an important literary figure: what he was not was a great poet.  Comparing the work of the two men, one immediately perceives the difference between artistic genius and artistic so-so.  But for exemplary purposes—and I am writing about exempla, after all—he is a more obvious and uncomplicated representative of the conventional morality of his age.  The title of his poem means “The Lover’s Confession,” and its content is, indeed, in the form of auricular confession made by an allegorical penitent to an allegorical priest.  It has many of the features of a medieval manual of penance and delineates in detail the nature of each of the seven deadly sins and deals at length with their several ramifications.  (Chaucer’s corresponding work is the “Parson’s Tale,” which is not a tale at all, but an undisguised confession manual.)  What medieval writers considered important and what their modern readers think is important are not always the same thing.  The “Parson’s Tale” is very long and tedious; yet Chaucer obviously thought it was very important for his scheme, implying that it is the key to the whole of the Canterbury Tales.  I doubt that anyone but literary scholars have read it in the last three hundred years, and few if any of them with pleasure.  For his part, Gower blends his religious framework with the elements of a love allegory—producing an odd literary goulash. But his poem is very important for its opulence of classical materials, especially those from Ovid.  Modern readers are likely to think that like the curate’s egg, Gower’s poem is “good in parts”.

 

In Augustine, the exemplary purpose of the little story of the pirate (elsewhere named as Diomedes) is clear and serious.   The opening argument of the City of God, especially developed in its first four books, is that the Roman Empire had lost the divine approbation for its want of justice. In some ways the argument is not dissimilar to contemporary left-wing critiques of western imperialism in the modern period.  Of course it is not advanced in material or “dialectical” terms, but in those of the categories of traditional antique ethics and philosophy.  Its categories are those of the great Greek philosophical traditions put into a Latin vocabulary by Cicero and others.  If you suppress justice, writes Augustine, what are kingdoms except great criminal enterprises?  And what is a criminal gang except a small kingdom?  This is part of an entirely serious treatise on political philosophy.

 

But sometimes a little story meant to serve as a teaching device takes off on its own.  That is what happens in Gower.  The Emperor is so impressed by Diomedes’s gutsy response that he immediately inducts the pirate into his household, makes him a knight and bestows upon him an estate of land.  All thoughts of Augustinian social justice vanish from the narrative.  In his new life the pardoned pirate becomes a famous warrior in his own right.  People can read of his exploits in the chronicles. Soon enough Gower himself seems to realize that what is a pretty good moral exemplum is not the plot of a decent narrative poem and struggles to get back to the point, at least to the degree that he can recall what it is. 

 

Perhaps the most popular exemplary book in late medieval England was one called the Gesta Romanorum (The Deeds of the Romans).  It might also be described as one of the most fantastic books ever written.  The stories, anecdotes, or “deeds” are followed by moralizing interpretations.  The book’s content has no really coherent organizing structure, and the moral “applications” are often as incoherent as the stories to which they in theory relate.  But it is absolutely full of amazing little “historical” narratives, many of them involving the weird, the violent, and the miraculous.  Since it was a book of free-standing anecdotes, more or less anybody could have added one to the collection, and apparently did.  But it appears that everybody in the literary world read it.  Its moral applications are sometimes hard to figure out.  I recall one little tale, for which the “application” tells us that the “king” means God.  That would hardly be surprising were there a king in the story, but there isn’t.  No matter.  A literary device so versatile as to have served the purposes of Augustine’s probing theology of history and the moralizing authors of pre-modern comic books must capture our attention.  Absolutely everybody seems to have read and borrowed from the “Deeds of the Romans”, including major English writers of the Renaissance period.  Gower certainly did.  A moral application without its tale is perhaps more tolerable than a tale with no conceivable moral application, which seems to be our most prominent current mode in fiction.

 

 

 

           

*City of God, IV, iv.

Pangur Bán

 

Pangur bán, meaning something like “Whitey” in Old Irish, or perhaps “Super-White” or “Snowball,” was the name of the pet white cat made famous by an unknown monastic scribe toward the end of the first millennium.  For him and his brethren the name would have had mystical associations to which no modern detergent ad could aspire.  For them it recalled the shekinah, the visible sign of the presence of the Lord, of Moses and then Jesus on the Mountain, a spiritual radiance and a whiteness “that no fuller on earth could achieve.”  (Mark 9:2). 

 

Reichenau, the small island in Lake Constance in southern Germany where the cat and the scribe lived out their companionate lives, was the site of a Benedictine monastery that became an important center of learning in Carolingian times.  The subject of the ancient and most unusual poem “Pangur bán” is a comparison of a mouser cat in its stealthy pursuit of mice and a scriptural exegete in his arduous search for the hidden meaning of a biblical text.  It is a delightful jeu d’ésprit composed and recorded not in Latin but in the vernacular language of his distant native land. Its unique character has made it one of the best known examples of Old Irish lyric poetry, of which there are unfortunately few surviving models.   I append the full text of the poem in the translation of one of the most distinguished of recent Irish poets.

 

In turning to what some may regard as an obscure subject (monastic cats) I meant consciously to seek refuge from the exhausting political scene that has been preoccupying me and so many others.  But of course there is no escape to be found.  The topic had barely forced its way to the periphery of my mental landscape when an exhumed years-old insult directed at childless “cat ladies” by J. D. Vance, Trump’s hand-picked running mate, forced itself on my attention.

 

            We happily housed a couple of cats for many years, but when they in the natural cycle of things expired, we did not replace them.  Our only current pets are turtles.  So I am not a “cat person”.  I do claim to be a “monk person,” however, having spent many years studying forms of Christian religious life in the Middle Ages.  It is understandable that most of the (few) people who have written about the poem “Pangur bán” have been most interested in the cat part.  But as a scholar I am more interested in the monk part.  The monk, after all, is the one who wrote the poem, and its subject is monastic scholarship, for which he wittily finds a surprising analogue in a cat’s mouse-hunting.

 

            Mr. Vance is a fairly recent convert to Roman Catholicism.  I have read that while he was preparing to enter the Church he chose from among the saints Augustine of Hippo as a special spiritual inspiration.  I myself am a great admirer of Augustine, and have spent many years reading and thinking about his writings, especially as they touch upon linguistic, moral, and social issues.  Without beating about the bush, I will say the silent part out loud.  Quite by accident, I know a great deal more about Augustine, his thought, and his writings than Mr. Vance is ever likely to learn on purpose.  Ordinarily the quality of an American political candidate’s Augustinianism is not a pressing issue, but Mr. Vance has made it one by declaring that childless women among our citizens necessarily lack a vital connection with the fate of the nation.  "We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable…. It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC--the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children."  I cannot say with certainty that no American politician dependent upon popular election for his position has ever uttered such a gratuitously stupid remark, but I must say I doubt it.

 

            Augustine, though not quite so fanatical about celibacy as some of the other early Church leaders, does make it clear in dozens of places, including two whole books explicitly devoted to  the subject of marriage, that wedlock is an inferior state, its redeeming virtue being that it turns to a socially useful good (the  continuity of the human race) an intrinsically evil phenomenon (the irrational supremacy of sensuality in the sexual act).  Much of the comedy of Chaucer’s brilliant presentation of the Woman from Bath is recreated from the rich controversial literature (mostly deeply misogynist) created by unconvincing clerical cheerleaders for celibacy over several centuries.

 

            But I will leave Senator Vance to wander alone and with unsure foot through the landscape of verbal pitfalls of his own digging.  He is a man who has talked a lot, often volubly and vehemently, and an army of Democratic Party gnomes are even now busy picking their way through a sizeable mountain of his careless obiter dicta.  There are bound to be many more remarks of the “cat lady” variety.  My own eccentric interest as a medievalist is with the feline-loving scribe of Reichenau a thousand years ago.  We do not know his name or his age.  That he wrote in Irish makes it virtually certain that he was an Irishman.  The text of his poem strongly suggests his amiability, self-effacement, cleverness, and studiousness.  His type should be well known to us from the sweet pages of a great book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, by the late French monk Jean Leclercq, a Benedictine scholar in the still living medieval tradition himself.  The phrase “opus Dei,” the Work of God or the Divine Task, is probably most familiar to most readers, if known to them at all, in reference to a controversial society within the contemporary Roman Church.  But its main meaning in earlier centuries was the wholeness of the life lived by the black monks, usually referred to today as Benedictines.  It was a carefully organized life of regular, scheduled prayer and work, the work including the manufacture and study of books by scribes and scholars.  These were the men who did the heavy lifting of passing on the cultural history of ancient Greece and Rome through the centuries of the formation of Europe to the rebirth of learning in the Renaissance.  Many of these cultural heroes are known to us not at all, many others only by a name or a date in a necrology.  Concerning this particular monastic “cat man” we do not even know these things.  We know only that he must have been a lovely fellow, a friend to feline and man alike, and that he led a life of gentle, unostentatious utility, the kind of life that makes the world a better place.

 

 

 

Pangur Bán and I at work,

Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:

His whole instinct is to hunt,

Mine to free the meaning pent.

 

More than loud acclaim, I love

Books, silence, thought, my alcove.

Happy for me, Pangur Bán

Child-plays round some mouse’s den.

 

Truth to tell, just being here,

Housed alone, housed together,

Adds up to its own reward:

Concentration, stealthy art.

 

Next thing an unwary mouse

Bares his flank: Pangur pounces.

Next thing lines that held and held

Meaning back begin to yield.

 

All the while, his round bright eye

Fixes on the wall, while I

Focus my less piercing gaze

On the challenge of the page.

 

With his unsheathed, perfect nails

Pangur springs, exults and kills.

When the longed-for, difficult

Answers come, I too exult.

 

So it goes. To each his own.

No vying. No vexation.

Taking pleasure, taking pains,

Kindred spirits, veterans.

 

Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,

Pangur Bán has learned his trade.

Day and night, my own hard work

Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.  (trans. Seamus Heaney)

 

 

                 

 

 

Life's True Treasure

 

“How vainly men themselves amaze to win the palm, the oak, or bays”  Andrew  Marvell

 

Over the years, in our household, various bits and pieces of poems, songs, Shakespeare plays, and bad movies have become a part of the family idiolect.  One of these is “life’s true treasure.”  Early in our marriage we watched an unremarkable Western in which a young man obsessed with the desire to strike a rich rift of gold allowed the obsession to destroy his own life and that of his lovely young wife.  One of her phrases became part of the household vocabulary: life’s true treasure.  That, claimed the wife, they had already at hand in the daily challenges and rewards of a shared life.

 

I thought of the idea of life’s true treasure again on Sunday, when in the political world that had been obsessing so many of us, the thread snapped.  I was taking an afternoon nap at the time, but when I woke up, I just sort of had a sense, and I was right.  I refer, of course, to the situation of President Biden, and to the thread suspending the sword of Damocles.  Everyone used to know about “the sword of Damocles” because everybody used to have read Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations or, more probably, heard about it from somebody who had, as was certainly my own experience in, I think, fourth grade.  But late in my teaching career I used the phrase before a small seminar of undergraduates, eliciting blank stares.  You can always tell the difference between student reactions, at least the reactions of ordinary boredom and those of honestly not knowing what the hell you are talking about.  Mainly my readers are, shall we say, of mature years, but for reasons soon to be made apparent my mind is at the moment on some rather young ones, and on the off chance there are a few others like them in the audience, I’ll say a few words about Damocles.

 

            He was a real person, a courtier in the entourage of the Sicilian tyrant, Dionysius of Syracuse, in the fourth century before Christ.  The following legend concerning him is, well, legendary.  Damocles had spoken enthusiastically of the great happiness that must characterize his boss’s life.  In order to teach him the lesson probably better know to us from Shakespeare’s “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” Dionysius invited Damocles to a sumptuous banquet, but placed him in a seat over which hung a heavy sword suspended from the ceiling held only by a single thread of uncertain but dubious tensile strength.  Well, President Biden spent a few most uncomfortable days recuperating from Covid as he awaited the breaking of the thread or the falling of the ax or the spring of the trap or whatever other metaphor you can come up with to emblematize a dreaded fate seemingly inevitable yet teasingly uncertain in its exact nature or timing.  He announced the decision in a brief, dignified, straightforward letter while I was having a Sunday afternoon nap.  His resignation threw the political world into chaos, which is another way of saying that we have shifted from one flavor of uncertainty to another.  Well, we are creatures who thrive on variety; but I prefer the uniquely quiet character of quiet familial love to the ragged uncertainty of national passion.

 

For what are for many others the stimulating new paroxysms of the rapidly changed political scene are leaving me free to enjoy our summer visit from the Montrealers (son Luke, Melanie and their two absolutely delightful kids, John Henry and Hazel) to the full.  We have been able to sublease a sizeable house in the neighborhood for them—a three-minute stroll through sylvan glades from our own.  Those arrangements are nearly ideal, offering an adjustable quotient of privacy and togetherness that recognizes the variety of tempos needed in a multi-generational household.

 

            Like all kids their age—Hazel is ten and John Henry headed for his twelfth birthday this week—these two are growing fast.   (The illustrative photos in this post were take by Melanie on their very recent vacation in Costa Rica.)  All grandparents have the right, and many of us believe the duty, to cluck over their grandkids.  This process usually begins with their astonishing rate of growth, all those incremented inches since last sighting.  On a white wainscotting panel in the kitchen we keep on display in penciled markings the dated increments in the heights from one visit to another.  The measurements are always taken with an elaborate show of exactitude, and the results are always dramatic and cluckable.  Since there are four other grandchildren whose measurements have over the years been recorded in that same place, the panel has become a little crowded—you might even say messy—but a just emblem of the dynamism of young life itself.

 

The households of the elderly benefit from infusions of dynamism, so long as we are talking about a disciplined dynamism.  Luke was able to rehabilitate three bicycles hanging unused for far too long in the garage.  Thus there is now available both a home base and a convenient escape from it, an excellent feature of successful inter-generational venues.

 

            Later today we shall hope to pack the whole kit and kaboodle into the Montrealers’ big Dodge van and drive up to Richard and Katie Dixon’s farm in Kingwood.  That’s only about thirty miles as the crow flies, but in terms of the sensation experienced, it could be three hundred or three thousand.  I haven’t been there myself in more than three months.  I wrote about the ambitious tree-planting party we participated in on that occasion.  That trip was in the still lightly-leaved spring.  We shall find it now, no doubt, in its preferred state, that of incipient jungle, full of mystery and challenge.  The kids will love it, and so will I.

 

 

 

 

 

Political Roundup

 

 

I honestly made repeated attempts to avoid another political topic this week, but my best intentions were overwhelmed by, first, a generalized panic in the Democratic Party, then an attempt on the life of the Republican presidential candidate, and then the sudden prominence of J. D. Vance, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, in the national consciousness.  The evolution of my thinking moved from great sympathy for Joe Biden to shocked concern for Donald Trump and then on to a kind of generalized confusion.

 

To begin with President Biden, he did dig himself into his own hole with a debate performance that had to be alarming for friend and foe alike.  In what I took to be a loosely organized but potent and coherent plan to dump him, the press turned his every move into a competency test.  There was a brutality about this process which, as it stems from intention and conscious purpose, might be better called cruelty.  I recall a scene in one of the Holocaust movies I saw years ago—perhaps it was “Schindler’s List” or one of the episodes in “War and Remembrance”—which portrayed a death camp “selection.”  The word “selection” had different shades of meaning, but in one convenient history I have found the process in general use at Auschwitz, in use beginning in 1942, was as follows.  “The selection procedure carried out on the ramps was as follows: families were divided after leaving the train cars and all the people were lined up in two columns. The men and older boys were in one column, and the women and children of both sexes in the other. Next, the people were led to the camp doctors and other camp functionaries conducting selection. They judged the people standing before them on sight and, sometimes eliciting a brief declaration as to their age and occupation, decided whether they would live or die.” 

 

By this process large numbers were sent almost directly from the boxcars to the cremation ovens as “unfit”—meaning unfit for productive slave labor.  But “selection” was a recurrent event.  Having successfully made the first cut, though it qualified the “successful” prisoner for assignment to hard labor and starvation rations, was far from a permanent reprieve.  Life as a slave laborer was, to put it mildly, unhealthy and debilitating, and at periodic intervals prison “medical” officials tested the slaves by perfunctory cosmetic inspection and by requiring them to show their continuing vigor through calisthenics, by running around in circles in grotesque foot races, and so forth.  Numerous Holocaust memoirs touch upon the desperate efforts desperate people made to pass these tests.  For them the issue was literally a matter of life or death.

 

There is a difference between corporeal and political death.  It is the latter that President Biden faces, or faced, or may face.  But I nonetheless saw evidence of an Auschwitz syndrome.  He is now required by the press and Democratic pundits--speaking anonymously because of etc., etc.--to run around in circles in the public square.  His every move (by which I mean bodily as well as verbal move) is now under intense scrutiny.  He is supposed to demonstrate appropriate levels of stamina, vigor, and verbal coherence.  The papers now spend less time reporting what he says than evaluating the degree to which he did or did not mess up in saying it.  As for content, it’s mainly binary.  Confused the name Trump with those of Zelenski and Putin (bad!)  Gave a “fiery speech” in Michigan (good!)  This is demeaning treatment for our president, and the open glee with which some of his opponents are greeting it is offensive.  They could at least dissemble the schadenfreude.  But of course, the problem is one of grave substance rather than of perception only.  Put aside the pragmatism of political reality.  Is it not obvious on medical and moral grounds, as well as those of national self-interest, that Biden should not be the candidate for the presidency?

 

Even well before the disastrous debate I had noted in television clips that President Biden on certain public occasions seemed to be walking with a rather peculiar gait—one that gives the impression of a short-stepped quasi-trot.  This phenomenon has been frequently commented on by others, sometimes with the assurance that it certainly does not suggest incipient Parkinson’s or dementia or anything else but maybe a touch of arthritis.    I am sensitive on this issue because my own walking has become poor and is deteriorating further.  Even with a supporting stick I am unsteady.  My own culprit is severe peripheral neuropathy in the lower legs, a long-time problem exacerbated considerably by the side effects of chemotherapy.  But I can still speak English.

 

            Yes, I know, one size does not fit all.  You read every day about septuagenarian marathon runners, octogenarian bungee jumpers, nonagenarian Sumo wrestlers.  But hard cases make bad law.  In one of Thurber’s great short stories, “The Curb in the Sky,” a hen-pecked, Mittyish husband whose narration of personal anecdotes is constantly interrupted and “corrected” by his wife, seeks material for narrative in what should be his own uniquely personal and singular possession, namely the stuff of his own dreams.  Is there anything that I, and I alone, could possibly add to the public cacophony surrounding the dilemma of Joe Biden?  The answer is “No”, but I might come close.  Not much of the commentary is coming from the President’s fellow octogenarians.  How does someone who is a documented decrepit assess the President’s situation?  I am in my late eighties and under attack from a progressive fatal disease which happily, at the moment, is in a “robust” remission (the comforting adjective of a super-expert).  I am not quite ready for the rocking chair, but I am certainly not trying to run the Free World.

 

I have nothing to add to the cataract of commentary concerning the attempt on the life of Donald Trump.  Political murder is perhaps not inherently more damnable than murder of other kinds, but it generally garners more attention.  The sensational incompetence of the security authorities on this occasion will legitimate the wildest of surmise and guarantee a profusion of conspiracy theories.  Irrational acts are not always without rational explanations.  My own tentative surmise, which I advance with no authority beyond what seems to me a common sense guess about an opaque matter, is that there was no conspiracy, maybe no political thought at all, only something perhaps more appalling because more senseless.  It seems likely to me that this poor lost young man who shot Donald Trump did so for the same reason that Mark Chapman shot John Lennon and John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan.  Chapman eventually said: “I wanted the fame.”  There are many categories into which we distribute people in our minds.  Donald Trump is a politician—among other things.  For some folks he is a savior, for other the devil incarnate.  Before any of these things, though, he is a celebrity, somebody being famous for being famous.  He is a very big celebrity.  In the overheated kitchen of our current politics everything seeks a political explanation.  But, as Milton tell us, fame is the spur.  Fame is the last infirmity of noble mind, and perhaps the first infirmity of the small, stunted mind of an obscure lost youth.  The death of one spectator and the wounding of two others was simply the collateral damage of an obscure neediness.  But Donald Trump’s defiant, courageous response, captured in a photograph likely to take a place in the iconography of American patriotism alongside that of the Marines atop Mount Suribachi, may well play a significant role in the election.  Talk about presidential!

 

            What, finally, of Veep candidate J. D. Vance?  Well, both as an English professor and a kind of hillbilly myself I have to say I admire his autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, especially as I have the deepest suspicion that he wrote it himself.  He is very smart, articulate, forceful and ambitious.  Some of the more extreme opinions he has espoused in the past will be under attack in the campaign ahead, and he will be assailed for inconsistency.  In very recent history he was a die-hard opponent and critic of Donald Trump.  Now he is showing every sign of taking on the role of attack dog in the service of that same man.  Perhaps there will be a debate between Mr. Vance and his presumed counterpart, Vice-President Kamala Harris.  If so he will have to defend and explain what he calls his intellectual evolution and what some others less charitably call flip-flopping.  And  he will need to throw back to Ms. Harris the pithy inspirational advice she has repeatedly—and I do mean repeatedly—proffered in recent months.  That advice is to concentrate on “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”