The Massachusetts Line

The Prince of Poets: In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

This Wednesday it will mainly be all about last Wednesday when, loyal readers will recall, we drove to the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, the site of a notable Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, where I delivered a lecture on Luís de Camões. The Director of the Center, Professor Frank Sousa, an affable and energetic Azorean, and his colleague Victor Mendes, a cosmopolitan peninsular, then regaled us at dinner at Sagres, a restaurant in nearby Fall River. While I cannot claim to have visited all three Azorean-Portuguese restaurants in North America, I will be bold enough to say without fear of successful contradiction that this is the best one. Until last week I had known Fall River only in two connections. The first, of course, is that of a famous murder case in 1892, when everybody but the jury knows that

Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.

The second is more personal. About twenty years ago, two middle-aged sisters, the daughters of a deceased Fall River printer, got in touch with me. They were attempting, perhaps somewhat tardily, to tidy up their father’s estate by cleaning out his letterpress workshop. It was a sizable building that had apparently been standing idle for about two decades. Its roof had in one place collapsed, and water had ruined a good deal of the equipment, including most of the type holdings. Nonetheless I was able to rescue several tons of foundry type, one nice old Pearl Press, and (the greatest prizes) two fabulous stone-topped oak composing tables. But now, at last, I have found something worthy to set atop them: a dish of baked stuff squid from Sagres!

Two specialties of Sagres: the windrose (Portugal); stuffed squid (Massachusetts)

Driving to the South Shore, as they seem to call it, had not been all beer and skittles. We left soon after first light, but even so there was already a fair mess awaiting us by the time we got to the George Washington Bridge. We had to make our way through toney but congested Fairfield County, and past darkest New Haven and Bridgeport, home of our latest jihadist, before we got to the handsome fields and waterways of the Rhode Island coast. The return trip, by way of contrast, was pure pleasure. We had decided to make a kind of mini-vacation of it by driving all the way across Massachusetts on the turnpike to visit our good friends Steve and Andrea White in Hancock, a hamlet on the outskirts of Williamstown, in the extreme northwest corner of the state.

Steve was for some years the superb Episcopal chaplain at Princeton, where Joan worked with him as a colleague and I as a sometime auxiliary in his flock. He typifies in his multiple competences a growing segment of the clergy of our church. He went into the priesthood only after a successful career as a business executive. He is also a fine carpenter—which gives the concept of the “imitation of Christ” a wholly new resonance—so that in addition to his clerical duties on the staff of the parish church in Pittsfield he has on the side been busy rehabilitating country houses, in a particularly stunning example of which the Whites themselves reside.

We had a mellow evening dinner with our friends, but what I will tell you about now is our busy day in Hancock and North Adams that preceded it. It happens that the “town” of Hancock includes one of the most impressive of extant Shaker archaeological sites . As most of you already know, the Shakers were one of the more admirable and impressive religious groups to flourish in New England and upstate New York (then the western frontier) in the early and mid- nineteenth century. Their communities were in effect mixed-sex Protestant monastic houses. Though the fact was probably unknown to them, the Hancock Shakers lived rather in the spirit of the pre-Benedictine house at Whitby in which the poet Cædmon composed (orally) the first known English poem—“Nu sculon herian”, to the considerable admiration of the monastery’s head-woman, Saint Hilda.

Shaker stone barn: Hancock MA

I should perhaps stoop to the phrase “mixed-gender” to avoid “mixed-sex”, since the Shakers avoided mixing sex so assiduously that they managed to become extinct. But during their heyday they were quite successful in replenishing their communities with converts willing to adopt celibacy. The term “Shaker”, like the “Quaker” that it followed and the “Holy Roller” it antedated began as a semi-insult; but then so did the term “Christian”, which, aided by various soi-disant Christians and the national press, is rapidly reclaiming that status. All Shaker communes housed remarkable craftsmen, designers, carpenters, and architects; but the one in Hancock has left an unusually impressive number of relics, including a huge brick residence hall and a vast stone barn, the likes of which I had never before seen. Original Shaker furniture is still to be found in the upper reaches of the antique market. Even the modern reproductions are out of my price range.

We then trundled over to nearby North Adams to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art , known in those parts at the MASSMoCA, which only sounds like the blend of the week at Starbuck’s. If you have never been there, as I never had, you must seize any proximate opportunity for a visit. The museum is housed in a vast, sprawling, old brick industrial building, as intrinsically ungainly as the great brick dormitory of the Shakers is elegant. I have never actually been in the execution cellars of the Lubyanka, but they probably would now be anti-climactic. Yet at a certain point heroic ugliness achieves majesty and even magnificence, rather like the Luna Moth eventually fights its way through its dung-colored cocoon. The fantastic show that is “up” at the moment features the vast wall paintings, several square miles of them, I would guess, by the late Sol Lewitt.

My first reaction was that no two tourist “attractions” could have been more different that the Shaker Village and the Lewitt murals, but one of the chief functions of college professors is to find spurious but momentarily plausible overarching field theories. It seemed to me then that the Shakers had reformed the complexity of communal living to an admirable simplicity. Sol Lewitt, for his part, had in the alembic of his genius distilled from the simplicity of geometrical units a mind-boggling complexity of effect. Another way to think about the two is in terms of the line. Both Sol and the Shakers were partial to the line dance.

Lines dancing

Mixed Messages

A mixed message

I must begin with an important message. Last week’s post was rushed because of unexpected intrusions into my midweek schedule. This week’s is rushed because I am spending most of my Wednesday driving in the direction of Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth (MA), where at 5 pm I intend to deliver a lecture entitled “Luís de Camões: the Poet as Scriptural Exegete”. The lecture is open to the public, and I shall hope to see in the audience several of my numerous fans based in the Greater Falls River Co-Prosperity Sphere.

That’s my message, but hardly the end of my musings about messages in general. Messages are becoming practically epidemic. According to most of the political commentators I read, the world’s movers and shakers do little else than send “messages”. The actions of legislatures, the venues chosen for political speeches, the names given to presidential pets—all these things are actually “sending a message”. The more opaque the law, the speech, or the onomastic activity, the more certain it is to be a judged “a very clear message”, or perhaps a “message heard loud and clear”. If the commentator doesn’t like what he heard, or thinks he has heard, it is a “terrible” message. But the very worst sort is the “mixed message”.

Actually, mixed messages are by far the most interesting ones. Anyone who doesn’t like a mixed message better not read a Shakespeare sonnet. My long departed mother was the queen of the mixed message. “Have fun,” she would say, “and be careful”—before releasing me for any activity of the sort designed to encourage a carefree spirit. What might be called the mixed messages of history are among the most interesting of all. I’d call them message of historical irony if the word “irony” hadn’t been so thoroughly debased by popular journalism.

One interestingly mixed message of history seems to be that nothing fails like success. Everyone knows Wordsworth’s marvelous “Tintern Abbey”. If by chance you do not, seek it out. There are few more beautiful expressions of the powers exercised by the beauty of Nature on our moral and psychological constitutions. But how many have wondered how such a huge ecclesiastical ruin ever came to be stuck so far out in the boondocks?

"Tintern Abbey", by J.M.W. Turner (1792)

In the twelfth century a group of zealous French monks, dissatisfied with the comfortable slackness that had overcome so much of the Benedictine establishment of their age, launched a rigorously ascetic reform of religious life. They did not think of themselves as a new order, but they came to be thought of as one by others. They were (and are) called Cistercians after their prominent “mother house” at Cîteaux in Burgundy. In their search for renewed simplicity of life they sought to imitate the ancient monks of Egypt and Palestine, who had made their remote dwellings in the deepest reaches of the desert. The “deserts” of medieval Western Europe were for the most part woodlands and scruffy, uncultivated moorland, lands whose agricultural value was limited to free-range grazing.

It was an age that admired sanctity, and considered it socially useful. Land-rich nobles, eager to score a few pious works for their often-alarming moral balance sheets, gave the Cistercians large tracts of their worthless land, which for the monks might be a kind of spiritual Lebensraum in which they might pursue their austere life of votive poverty undisturbed. Then in the thirteenth century something unexpected happened, something having to do with textiles. A lot of people wanted clothes. Clothes were made of wool. Wool came from sheep. Sheep ate grass. People who owned a lot of grass were suddenly rich. They needed stuff like barns, storehouses, stables, indentured agricultural workers, and the complex structure necessary for industrial enterprise. I have in the past had occasion to cite the Michael Corleone Theorem: "Just when I think I am out, they pull you back in." This happened to the Cistercians in spades, and one result was what might be called the architectural mixed message. It is a phenomenon without which the world would be a less interesting place.

Above : Monastic Tithe Barn, Great Coxwell, Oxon. (Photo: John Waine, 2004)

Below: Assisi's multi-million dollar monument to Franciscan Poverty

Sometimes the mixed message demands a certain amount of literary education for its full impact. I have a young friend in Paris, Bill Thompson, who is something of a genius at discovering brilliant mixed messages. Bill is a polyglot Texan expatriate, a one-time Marshall Scholar and British academic. He is a trained Soviet expert, but now works in Paris for the OECD. The OECD (ostensibly the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development) may be one of those shadowy, NGOish, Matrix-type entities that are secretly running the world, but if so, they haven’t let me in on the secret. I met him through the adult education program, of which he was the director, at the American Cathedral in Paris. Most recently Bill sent me the following mixed message, in the form of a photograph taken by his friend Bob in Barcelona:

Oxford Reunion

Jesus College, Oxford: my old room was on the ground floor in the corner

This weekend past Joan and I attended a “North American Oxford Reunion” at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. It is not without its irony that I have in fact become pretty enthusiastic reunioneer, since I spent the first three decades of my professional career making light of the annual Princeton class reunions. The Princeton reunions, which take place just before Commencement each year, are famous for their exuberance, and especially for the wackiness of the “P-rade”, the hours-long parade of the costumed alumni in their chronological phalanxes.

For many years we lived at the very edge of the campus, in a vast Victorian house that had belonged to the Class of 1914. One eminence of that class was Allen Dulles, an early head of the CIA, and legend has it that during reunions he would erect a temporary radio tower in the back yard of 39 University Place to facilitate the execution of his spooky duties. By the time we moved in, the classmates were nearly sixty years out and too thin on the ground to make use of the house; but its sprawling basement was full of poignant memorials. They included a half dozen maple wood tables of a rathskeller sort, and a luxurious twenty-foot mahogany bar with brass railing. There was one very moving trophy: a huge photograph, probably five feet across, of the youthful class gathered before Nassau Hall in June, 1914. How many of them would be claimed by the great slaughter announced by the guns of August only two months later?

The world of Princeton reunions seemed fascinating to me, but also anthropologically distanced. In fact, I thought it was fairly ridiculous. Then two things happened. I became active in APGA (the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni), and for the Centenary of the Graduate School in 2000-2001 the graduate alumni themselves started getting serious about participating in the P-rade. Shortly thereafter (2004) I attended the fiftieth reunion of my high school class in Mount Pleasant, Texas, and then (2008) my fiftieth class reunion at Sewanee. Both of these were terrific events, and I emerged from them a convert. Thus “fools who came to scoff, remain’d to pray,” as Goldsmith says in a slightly different context.

The venue for the reunion: the Waldorf Astoria

The Oxford North American Reunion is a very classy affair, and it is appropriately located in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. For me this has a private significance. My parents, neither of whom ever saw New York, were nonetheless sufficiently aware of its fabled luxuries that they regularly referred to the outdoor privy as “the Waldorf”.

The Waldorf, Baxter County, Arkansas

We ourselves are now half a century away from our undergraduate days in Oxford and could hardly expect to run into many—or any—of our contemporaries. But we did have a chance to meet and talk at some length with the “new” heads of our two colleges. The current principal of Jesus College is Lord Krebs, an eminent civil servant, and about as cool and unhaughty a peer as one is likely ever to encounter. Joan’s college, St. Anne’s, an all-girls band in her day, is now headed by one of Britain’s great journalism experts, Tim Gardam.

The British universities have been going through a bad patch. So far as the two ancient universities go—I mean of course Oxford and Cambridge—there has been a particularly bruising confrontation of ancient evolution and contemporary fiscal challenge. There is unquestionably a process of “Americanization” going on, but I had just about concluded that the Brits seemed to be adopting all the worst aspects of the American academic model and none of our best ones. If such things interest you, you will probably want to search out the recent essay in the New York Review of Books by my colleague and friend Anthony Grafton. It’s entitled “Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities.” In this context the reunion proved very reassuring. The Oxford presented by the reunion struck me as confident and energetic, its spiritual eye fixed on the challenges of the future rather than the hoary comforts of the past.

Perhaps as many as a third of the Oxford faculty and administrators whose names had been printed in the program were unable to travel, victims of the abrasive clouds of Icelandic volcanic ash. This meant that those who had escaped in time had to do double duty. One such was the new Vice-Chancellor, Andrew Hamilton. He pretty well typifies the new Oxford outlook. He is a distinguished chemist, British born, but with a rich experience in North American institutions, most recently as provost of Yale. He was very impressive, though in one respect rather annoying to a Princetonian. I heard him in two venues, and in both he did go on and on about how Oxford had just successfully lured Andrew Wiles, who may be the most famous of living mathematicians, back to his native England. This would be Sir Andrew John Wiles, KBE, FRS, the guy who solved Fermat's last theorem. The annoying part, of course, is that the place he lured him from is Princeton. Yes, I know, this guy proved Fermat’s last theorem. But remember—mathematicians are over the hill by age twenty-three.

The new V-C against the Dreaming Spires

The Rightful Duke of Cordova, in Spain

Effects of the wind in a nearby village

Once years ago in England I had to fill out a form on which it was required that in addition to my name I list my “titles and appellations”. This demand was traumatic, as of course I had no titles and, as for appellations, only ones that were informal and unflattering if not unprintable. I thought about claiming to be "the rightful Duke of Cordova, in Spain", but thought better of it. I date the beginnings of my acute “title envy” to that experience. I revel in what I can get. For example, as I recently boasted on this page, I am the Orator of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America. That’s pretty good, but everything is relative. The subject of one of my brief obituary orations this year was the recently defunct Corresponding Fellow Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler. Cardinal Stickler was “Pro-Librarian of the Holy Roman Church and Titular Bishop of Bolsena”. Now that’s a real title, though still not the object of my most intense envy, which is reserved for one of the titles and/or appellations of my old friend and Oxford classmate Michael Nicholas. Nicholas is among the most distinguished church musicians in the world, having held such posts as “Organist of Norwich Cathedral” and “Chief Executive of the Royal College of Organists.” But in the earliest years of our acquaintance he held a title more imposing yet: “The Organ Scholar of Jesus”. If you can’t get no respect with that title, you can’t get no respect, period.

Downed trees on the Common Ground

But the title of the moment, and the one that just blew up in a storm of trouble for me, is “Co-Chair of the Grounds Committee of the Gray Farm Neighbors Association”. The Gray Farm is a faculty housing development in Princeton, New Jersey, that dates from about 1960. It consists of about seventy houses nicely distributed along three curving roads on an old lakeside farm. In its center is a large plot (probably fifteen or twenty acres) of permanently undevelopable fields and woods called the Common Ground. Many of the houses back onto the Commons, and all have easy access to it along well-established paths.

Daffodil cultivation raised to an entirely new level

The original Gray Farmers had something of the spirit of kibbutz pioneers, and they cultivated a strong sense of community cooperation and participation in joint projects, especially the maintenance of the Common Ground. But practically all of the founders are dead or in nursing homes, and “newcomers”—meaning now most people in the neighborhood—have little or no sense of the original vision, which was already mostly a tribal memory when I myself moved in a little over twenty years ago. During the last two decades the Commons—originally carefully planted with flowering trees, evergreens, and shrubs—has been doing its best to revert to the semi-jungle conditions that characterize untended woodland in central New Jersey. Under these circumstances the Grounds Committee—meaning yours truly and one or two other septuagenarians—have mainly concentrated on trying to keep the paths cleared of arboreal debris and rampant vines, though I am proud to say that under “my” regime we have started a fairly ambitious bulb-planting program.

Some of the new daffodil plantings survived

Georges Lefebvre described the state of the French peasantry at the dawn of the Revolution with a striking image. The peasant, he wrote, was like a man standing in water up to his lower lip. So long as things remained absolutely calm he could continue to subsist, barely, but the slightest perturbation of the water was for him fatal. That roughly describes the condition of the Grounds Committee about March 10, 2010. On the immediately following weekend a violent windstorm, accompanied by flooding rains, ripped through our area. There were protracted power cuts over a very large terrain. In the Common Ground of the Gray Farm Association more than a dozen large trees, most of them shallow-rooted pines, were flattened. The main path through the woods was completely blocked. Our so-called “picnic area” was particularly devastated although, miraculously, the actual picnic table and benches were spared. I note that all the trees fell in the same direction—westward—suggesting that a blast of hurricane strength had come out of the coast.

Until yesterday, this tree was blocking the main path

Mr. Pedro Chavez and his crew of landscapers have made amazing progress with the first part of the necessary cleanup. But the costs of addressing the devastation far exceed our modest committee resources, and this means that I, too, have been out there with a chainsaw and will be again, off an on, probably through the winter. It is, as they say, an ill wind that blows no good. Mr. Chavez is smiling, and even the co-Chairman of the Grounds Committee has a unique opportunity to play a poor man’s version of Capability Brown. At least I might be able to plant a couple of dogwoods. But I have to say that the pain being inflicted on the Grounds Committee dwarfs any faint exhilaration of possibility. Just at the moment I’d give anything to be the Organ Scholar of Jesus, instead. Even “Titular Bishop of Bolsena” would be a huge promotion.

Spring Break

Yesterday's blog has been temporarily rusticated for technical reasons while the blogger himself is temporarily at an academic conference in Tennessee, where, I am happy to report, the dogwood and the redbud is everywhere in bloom.

From Bundren to Bodoni and Back

The French revolutionaries found it easier to overthrow the political arrangements of the Old Regime than to transform by legislative decree the old rhythms of life. From time immemorial they had been linked to the liturgical cycle of Christian experience. To change that would require a new calendar. They made one, and it had the virtues one would expect from a document composed by a committee of the Enlightened: logic, tidiness, coherence. The orderly decade trounced the mystical heptad. There would be twelve months of awesome regularity, each with three weeks of ten days each. The committee chucked out the old names of the months—admittedly a rather incoherent hodge-podge—and replaced them with a rational system of dull meterological and agricultural stereotypes. So you got Winey Month, then Foggy, Frosty, Snowy, Rainy, Windy, etc. As the earth’s revolutions around the sun did not perfectly coincide with the mathematics of the revolutionaries, there were five days left over for secular festivities of an uplifting and politically correct sort. Today would I think be Septidi, the 17 Germinal (Seedy) of the year CCXVIII. Except that fortunately Napoleon made a deal with the Pope about the year XII; and they decided to return to the Christian calendar, which had the advantage of relating not merely to the seasons of the year but to the seasons of human life, and to spiritual and mythic as well as meteorological and agrarian experience.

Last week, Holy Week, for those who enter it imaginatively a kind of calendrical roller-coaster, culminating this year in one of the most beautiful Easter Sundays in my memory, has put me to thinking about times and seasons and cycles. So has another circumstance, which will eventually become the subject of this blog. That might be defined as the special contours of love among family members. To be a little more specific, the subject will be our parental joy at the approaching marriage of our younger son Luke and his wonderful fiancée Melanie.

Luke and Melanie

Half a dozen extraordinary books read in my teen years were enough to encourage me to contemplate a life devoted to the study of literature. Among the American writers I knew, I thought Faulkner was the greatest. He was then still alive, still writing, still living just across the river from my own state.

His first book to hook me was As I Lay Dying. I didn’t exactly understand it. I felt better much later, after years of professordom, when I came to realize that nobody else exactly understands it either. But I knew it was great. As I Lay Dying is about a seriously Faulknerian outfit called the Bundrens. The Bundren who lies dying is Addie, the mother. Insofar as there is a plot, it is the story of her death and the grotesque and heroic effort of her children to cart her body by wagon to a town named Jefferson for burial. The oldest child, a man named Cash, is an expert carpenter. The reader hears him before meeting him. The first sound recorded on the first page is the rasp of sawing, then the “Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. of the adze.” Cash is constructing a coffin for his dying mother, as she listens from her sickbed.

There are times, perhaps, when true depth of love can be best expressed through the medium of careful craftsmanship. Cash Bundren had a Good Friday task. Thank God there are also Easter ones. For Luke and Melanie had asked me to print their wedding invitations—a task I completed yesterday.

As they lay drying...

I have been an amateur letterpress printer for forty years, though precious little has come off the presses recently. Luke and I have had a few joint printing projects in our time, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to find the most important printing I had ever done for him. It took a fair amount of rummaging around in half-forgotten files of child-memorabilia. One advantage of such rummaging, perhaps the only advantage, is that one uncovers stuff one didn’t know existed. In this instance, I uncovered quite a cache of Luke’s artwork. He was, and is, a talented artist, as is obvious in this miraculously preserved piece from his affreuse period. The exact date is uncertain, but most art historians place it in the second term of the Reagan presidency.

C.L.O. Fleming (1979- ) untitled Mother's Day Card--affreuse period

At last I did find what I was looking for—to wit, the announcement I had printed in 1979, to share our parental joy with friends and relations throughout the world. Joan and I wanted to name him Christopher—hence the technicality of the birth certificate and the iconography of the birth announcement—but we had already been told in no uncertain terms by his sister that she had no intention of honoring any “sissy” names like Christopher. (You know, as in Columbus, Marlowe, and other sissies of that ilk.)

Does he look like a "sissy" to you?...

I had set the birth announcement in the beautiful, large, fresh fourteen-point Bodoni I had acquired for the printing of the Latin texts in Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore. I clearly remember the look and feel of the pristine types in their cases. I can also remember, though barely, that thirty years ago I could without difficulty or magnifying glass set the six-point type of the psalm text! That old Bodoni type, considerably reduced by service in several book runs, and even at the cost of tolerating a dinged letter or two, I simply had to use for the wedding invitations!

There are a few passages in the Bible that might be called “Bible Passages for People Who Haven't Actually Read the Bible.” Perhaps the most famous of these is the third chapter of Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…a time to love…” Well, this is indeed the time for love. I love you. That's why I gave you this.

I placed the finished text of the invitation cards out on the dining table to dry for a few moments—it doesn’t take long—and returned to the press to work on the much easier task of the envelopes. With each revolution the old Chandler and Price makes a distinctive, rhythmic sound. I would be hard pressed to give it graphic representation—but “Chuck…chuck…chuck” is at least in the ballpark. So as the sheets lay drying, I thought of As I Lay Dying, and of times and seasons and cycles, and of the great wonder and mystery of it all.

Naughty Pleasures of the Aging Parents

Among the numerous benefits of having an all-star daughter—a topic touched upon in this space a couple of months ago—is that the APs from time to time have the use of a Manhattan apartment. So it was that for the first part of the week-end just past we were able to throw ourselves with abandon into a cultural orgy of the sort possible only in a few of the world’s great cities. It took me most of a lifetime to overcome my hillbilly prejudice against New York; but I now practically froth at the mouth with the zeal of the convert.

The Opera House: Brookly Academy of Music

On Thursday night we trundled via the number six line over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to view an amazing production of Henry Purcell’s amazing opera, The Fairy Queen (1692). The title, like most things about the piece, seems designed to confuse. The subject matter is not that of Spenser’s Faerie Queene but of (parts of) Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which supplies also the dialogue. You remember—the queen of the fairies, Titania, gets some magic love pollen in her eye and falls head over heels for the country bumpkin Bottom, who has himself acquired a donkey’s head through similarly mischievous magic.

William Christie: Musical Genius

The conductor was the brilliant William Christie with his famous early music group “Les Arts Florissants,” which usually hangs out in Paris. I have a recording of one of his earlier versions (Harmonia Mundi 901308.09); but the difference between the live performance and the two CDs is approximately that between taking a shower in the buff and taking a shower in a raincoat. Seldom have I realized so clearly how much the architectural and decorative magnificence of a theater and the imaginative dramaturgy of a director actually control the musical experience of opera.

The original audiences of baroque opera didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of other claims on their time, and this rambunctious production ran just under four hours. (So much for the “two hours’ traffic on our stage”.) About a third of the audience never reappeared after the intermission, which began roughly at the two-hour mark. Most of the early leavers probably simply succumbed to artistic fatigue—it certainly couldn’t have been boredom--but a few of the younger and more suggestible ones may have been inspired to hurry home by a remarkable scene, of which old Purcell must be found innocent, featuring a dozen or more gigantic copulating conies. I won’t even try to explain…I guess you just had to be there.

We managed to catch what must have been the night’s last train out of Brooklyn, and as we ourselves were for the moment living the life of Restoration or Queen Anne aristocrats we were able to recoup in leisurely fashion on Friday morning. Indeed I even did a little of what I laughingly call “work” in the Bobst Library of NYU while Joan tracked down some hiking gear to be used on her next stage of the Compostella pilgrimage later in the spring. We then headed north to the Metropolitan Museum where, by two sets of unique circumstances, there are two concurrent, once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions in the medieval galleries.

Alabaster Mourner

The Musée des Beaux Arts in Dijon, housed in the old palace of the Dukes of Burgundy, is one of the great provincial museums of France. It has been closed down for a period to allow for a major renovation. This unique circumstance has allowed its most precious treasure to go on an American tour. That treasure is the collection of exquisitely carved alabster “mourners”, each, with the exception of a child-chorister, about sixteen inches tall, created to decorate the tombs Philip the Bold (1342-1404) and his son John the Fearless (1371-1419). Tragically little of aristocratic funerary art of medieval France survived the ideological fury of the Revolution; but these extraordinary pieces escaped. They originally decorated the bases of the actual ducal tombs; in the Met they are displayed in amazing ensemble as a long and lugubrious liturgical procession of mourners. They will be in New York until late May, then later in Saint Louis, Dallas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Richmond. For many, it will be the chance of a lifetime.

The Riches Heures interrupt this blog with a most important announcement.

Some books are so precious that they have rightly been removed from the inspection of any but a small number of professional scholars and curators. Such are many of the most famous medieval books of hours, especially those executed by the brothers Limbourg. Even if you happen to be in that elect number of professionals, you are no more capable than any ordinary reader of examining more than one folio opening at a time. Only with the aid of photographs have students been able to study the often copious illustrations of medieval books in a comparative manner. A remarkable circumstance—like the temporary closing of the Dijon Museum never to happen again in the lifetime of any living person—has led the Met curators to unbind their greatest manuscript treasure, the “Belles Heures” of the Duc de Berry. This fabulous book usually resides at the Cloisters, the medieval “colony” of the Met way up at the top of Manhattan. But for the moment its meticulously disbound and uninjured sheets, which will of course, like the Burgundian mourners, soon be put back together in an improved and renovated housing, are available for viewing as individual sheets. This is the only known book entirely executed by the Limbourgs; and even they will never have had the opportunity to view it as you can—provided you hurry.

Not to be outdone, the Morgan Library, owner of the fabulous “Hours of Catherine of Cleves” has metaphorically taken a leaf out of the Met’s book—meaning that they literally took a hundred or so out of their own. The paintings of the disbound Cleves Hours, spaciously distributed throughout one of the Morgan’s most elegant galleries, are there for all the world to view. A recently produced facsimile of the whole book—extraordinarily accurate in its reproduction both of the parchments and the binding—lies open for general handling. Facsimiles of this quality now cost more than Mr. Morgan once paid for many of his sumptuous originals; this one is invaluable in giving you a sense of the engineered whole of the magnificent original parts displayed throughout the gallery. We did that on Saturday morning before having a tasty bite of Thai food on Thompson Street. Then, deeply grateful to two Catherines, we headed back home. Any more excitement so intense might have thrown my pacemaker out--if I had one, that is. But you can eat only a pound or so of fudge at one sitting. Had I known that retirement would be this great, I might have forgone the preparatory decades spent working.

A joyous Passover and blessed Easter to Catherine of Cleves and all our readers