Montaigne

"For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed.  I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me."

I suppose it was a hopeless project to think I could revisit even a good sampling of Montaigne's many essays before our trip...I'm not even through Book One, and it's due back to the library tomorrow.  Oh well.  Two tidbits I wanted to save:

On the need to inspire curiosity in children regarding their education: "there is nothing like arousing appetite and affection; otherwise all you make out of them is asses loaded with books.  By dint of whipping, they are given their pocketful of learning for safekepping; but if learning is to do us any good, we must not merely lodge it within us, we must espouse it."

One of his most famous essays is "On Friendship", in which he discusses his intense bond with Etienne de la Boetie. ("So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries.") They only knew each other for six years before de la Boetie died, and yet he writes "what we ordinarily called friends and friendships are nothing but acquaintanceships and familiarities formed by some chance or convenience...in the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again.  If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering, Because it was he, because it was I."  It's tempting to read a love that was deeper than friendship into that statement.  One the one hand, the same essay does disregard the idea of a woman as the object of a true friendship...but it also contains a condemnation of "Greek love." Based on my Googling, theirs has been referred to as a "romantic friendship" to indicate the depth of feeling that was separate from sexual activity.

The Art of Travel

I'm not generally that into the Ted Talks, but a while back I came across one by philosopher Alain de Botton on the meaning of success.  One point that has stood out in my memory was his observation that the same people who society considered "unfortunates" in the ancient through early modern world are today called "losers", signifying a shift in how we assign responsibility for lack of success: once it was ascribed to forces beyond human control, but now it implies innate worthlessness.  Overall I was interested in his mode of address and his ideas, so I put some of his books, especially Status Anxiety, on my to-read list.  Then I saw that he'd written an a book entitled The Art of Travel, in the introduction to which he notes that despite all of the massive literature on where to go, there's very little written on why we go, or what we hope to gain from it.  There are a number of thematic essays in the book, each interspersing a personal journey of his own with the ideas of a "guide", among which are found Wordsworth, the naturalist Alexander van Humboldt, van Gogh, and Flaubert.  I found his many of his observations fascinating and on-point, but when I tried to share some of them with Sean, he was turned off by what seemed to him their "obviousness." (I later learned from his Wikipedia page that this division of opinions on his work is fairly standard!)

Here are some of the things that struck me:

• On travel in real life vs. travel as it's presented in art: "A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon.'  We sit in a train.  Lunch digests awkwardly within us.  The seat cloth is grey.  We look at the window at a field.  We look back in side...It starts to rain.  A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be [this goes on for an entire paragraph!].  A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening.  Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetitions, misleading emphases and inconsequential plotlines."  [Sean: So what?  Of course an author isn't going to write all that stuff, it'd be boring.  Me: But isn't it interesting to think about all the stuff they leave out?  Sean: No, because it's boring.]
• After reflecting on train travel as conducive to contemplative thought: "Journeys are the midwives of thought...At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves--that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us.  It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves.  The furniture insists that we cannot change because it cannot; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are."
• On our delight with points of difference in other cultures and places, whether an airport sign or a jam jar: "Yet difference alone would not be enough to elicit pleasure, or not for long.  The difference has to seem like an improvement on what my own country is capable of...what we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home."
• From a letter by Flaubert, on his deep hatred of his home country and the notion of national identities: "I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country--that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black--has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid.  I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man."
• On his lifelong passion for the East, which resulted in a 9-month stay in Egypt that would remain with him for the rest of his life: "Why did Flaubert so admire the camel?  Because he identified with its stoicism and ungainliness.  He was touched by its sad expression and its combination of awkwardness and fatalistic resilience.  The people of Egypt seemed to share some of the camel's qualities, exhibiting a silent strength and humility that contrasted with the bourgeois arrogance of Flaubert's own Norman neighbors."
• On the need for curiosity when we travel, particularly a curiosity about something in particular that has had time to develop: "A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to built up the necessary receptivity...the risk is compounded by geography, in the way that cities contain buildings or monuments that may be only a few feet apart in space but are leagues apart in terms of what is required to appreciate them...We are asked to be curious about Gothic architecture on one street and then fascinated by Etruscan archaeology on the next."
• On the travels of Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled to the still virtually-unknown continent of South America and returned to Europe with vast data sets about its geography, ethnography, biology, climate, etc.: an early biography of him was subtitled What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime--to which de Botton adds, "and seldom or never is."
• On Wordsworth's belief in the harmful effects of cities on the human soul: "The poet accused cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and a desire to shine in the eyes of strangers...however well-provided for, they had a relentless desire for new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which their happiness did not depend."
• On the emergence of the concept of the sublime with the Romanticists: "A landscape cold arouse the sublime only when it suggested power--a power greater than that of humans, and threatening to them.  Sublime places embodied a defiance to man's will...It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.  It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside."
• Ruskin's words to the Working Men's College, where he was teaching drawing with the goal of teaching people to observe the world more closely: "Now, remember, gentlemen, that I have not been teaching you to draw, only to see.  Two men are walking through Clare Market.  One of them comes out at the other end not a bit wiser than when he went into; the other notices a bit of parsely hanging over the edge of a butter-woman's basket, and carries away with him images of beauty which in the course of his daily work he incorporates with it for many a day.  I want you to see things like these..."

Commonplace some of these points might be, but I enjoyed reflecting on them in light of our travels, and especially on the eve of our next journey through France.  I especially enjoyed the chapter on "Eye-Opening Art", in which he explores how his original lackluster impression of Provence was changed through his experience of van Gogh (thanks to a charismatic PhD student leading a van Gogh tour in Arles, naturally!). His distaste for the low, gnarled forms of the grapevines amused me, because I had something of a similar experience.  The school in Florence had arranged for a Chianti tour, and when we arrived in the vineyard I was shocked to to that those ugly, stooped plants, which I had seen in innumerable fields out the windows of trains as we traveled around Italy, were really grapevines...to think I didn't even like wine back then.  Oh, 2006, how distant you seem!

Leaving Books Behind

I've thought before about the question of what books I'd bring to a desert island (isn't it interesting that this hypothetical assumes that you'll somehow be given advance notice of your impending exile, not to mention allowed luggage?).  Books that almost always find a place on the list include Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Lake Woebegone days, my Jeeves & Wooster omnibus edition, and Innocents Abroad.  There's a second-tier, too, which includes books I'm fond of and have re-read many times but could probably leave behind, like Illusion, or Howl's Moving Castle, or Judith Merkle Riley's books.  Of course, this kind of listmaking is just done idly; you never think you'll have to make those kinds of decisions.  That is, until you start thinking about your impending move to a foreign country.  Even within 100 lbs of checked luggage, there's not a lot of room for novels. 

The classics, like Austen and Twain, present no problem, because their e-books are cheap.  I already put Innocents Abroad and its semi-sequel, A Tramp Abroad, on my tablet, for example.  But what about the others?  Few of them are new or popular enough to be available within the e-lending libraries to which I have access (though Diana Wynne Jones' books are in the New Haven library's digital catalog), and since Kindle books cost $7-10, on average, replacing a bookshelf's worth of material with digital versions would be pretty expensive.  That means if I want any hard copies, I'll have to make some difficult choices on who gets to travel with me.  I can probably also acquire some books at the Paperback Exchange in Florence, or an equivalent store, if there is one, in Rome.  

I don't really look forward to a future filled only with e-books; I don't mind them (I just finished Zola's The Ladies' Paradise yesterday on my tablet, actually), but I'd always prefer a physical copy if I can get one.  What's annoying is that there is no version of the second-hand store or library tag sale for e-books; they're always new, never used--and thus never deeply discounted.  Would any e-book purchase ever be able to equal the price-to-value ratio of acquiring Lake Woebegone Days at the PapEx for 0.25 euro cents??

Another Philly Farewell

I got really lucky with the weather yesterday.  It drizzled and rained through most of CT, NY, and NJ, then cleared in NJ and PA; by the time I reached Philadelphia, it was warm and sunny.   I got to enjoy the late-afternoon light on the patio, with a couple of past issues of the New Yorker and a glass of the Riesling that  Phyllis texted me to tell me I should open.  In other words, whitest afternoon ever.

I guess I had forgotten that this region changes seasons a couple of weeks in advance of Connecticut, so where all the green things are just budding around New Haven, everything is in full and glorious bloom here.  In fact, I came too late to see the pink cherry blossom tree out front in all its true glory; it blooms in early May, and by the second week is already disgorging its blossoms onto the hapless cars parked below. I couldn't help smiling at the sight of the car that was positive covered in pink petals, parked in what used to be my spot--it might be pretty on the tree, but on your car it's a damned nuisance to get rid of without a full-scale car wash.

After dinner, Phyllis and I went over to Chestnut Hill, parked, and walked around in some of the leafy neighborhood streets.  We wound up walking down Gravers Lane, though not the side you'd typically use as an artery onto Germantown.  It was filled with beautiful houses, most probably from the late 19th century. One of the benefits of an area that's been lived in for so long by people with money to spend on landscaping is the profusion of flowering trees and plants.  Apple blossom, lilac, verbena, bleeding hearts...so many pretty sights and even more delicious smells!

Phyllis' soon-to-be-departed housemate, Laura, is off in Italy with her boyfriend right now, so when I got here yesterday I took the opportunity to go up to the third floor, which I haven't seen since I moved out.  It was strange, peering into rooms that are both familiar and not.  Laura doesn't have many material possessions, apparently, so aside from her bed frame, all of the furniture up there is either things Phyllis had donated over the course of my tenure, or that I had left behind.  The crappy Ikea couch that I'd put away in the storage room after Thomas peed on it (I guess the smell faded? I could never get it out); the little metal bedside table that I think I absconded with from Shelton; the bureau, one of my mom's tag sale finds, with the drawers that were always a pain to shut; the rocking chair; and the blue couch in the front room, which I kept covered by a green top sheet while I lived there (and now it's obvious how much more faded it is than the fitted sheet, from its years in the sun).  My green curtains are still up in the windows, too.

I miss the wonderful light-filled expanse of that front room.  I stood in front of the windows--finally seeing over the treetops again--and remembered practicing for my exams there in front of my DIY standing desk (stacks of art history books on the windowsill with my laptop perched on top, rolled-up yoga mat under my feet).  When it came to my oral exam, I paced in huge circles, talking to myself out loud, faking all the confidence that I didn't feel at the time.  It's been two years since then, which is kind of hard to believe.  Then again, when I told Phyllis that Sean and I would be celebrating our five-year wedding anniversary this year, she looked shocked.  Where does the time go, indeed.

Tonight, off to Morgan's Pier to see my friends--time to toast Jasmine's doctorate, Laura's upcoming defense, Suzanne's new job. I'm not planning to come down to Philadelphia again, so while Phyllis I'll see in Connecticut, and even Dr. Cooper told me she'd like to get together in Princeton over the summer, this is my last hurrah with them.

Busy, Busy

It's been something of a whirlwind the past few weeks.  Sean is almost at the finish line of the semester, having passed (with revisions) his second qualifying paper.  Doing not one, but two qualifying papers within the span of a month required many nights that were quite literally sleepless; there was a point at which he turned off the TV and remarked to me that it had probably been on for 48 hours straight.  It also led to a (mild) outbreak of shingles, brought on by the stress!  But his perseverance has really paid off, since he's now caught up on his requirements, after a long and grueling year.  2013 was the annus horribilis, and 2014 got off to a bit of a rocky start, but we're getting there.

I'm done with on-campus teaching now for the next couple of years, though I will be teaching the online AWW again this summer.  One student in my NVCC class, Spencer, gave me a 1972 copy of the Janson survey as a parting gift; another student, a woman named Saranda (who I later learned works for the mayor of Waterbury) told me it was the best class she'd ever taken.  That's always really great to hear, especially from people at the community college.  Fairfield students, on account of their generally greater economic privilege, tend to have a broader cultural grounding.  It's not that they have knowledge or appreciation, necessarily, but in general they have more exposure, plenty of them have traveled abroad, for example, or visited art museums.  That's much less the case at NVCC, and it's very seductive, as an instructor, to have the feeling that you are quite literally introducing students to entirely new worlds. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the compliments I received from some of my Fairfield students, of course.

But it's not always positive feedback.  The day of my sister's bridal shower, I woke up to an abuse-filled email from an anonymous Fairfield student, in which I was twice called a cunt, upbraided for daring to consider art history a course about which students should actually give a damn, and generally insulted.  It was long, bitter, and reflected an extremely selfish, consumer-oriented understanding of what college is actually about.  The nugget that revealed its origin was the complaint that I dared to grade papers on anything beyond the thesis and whether it was backed up.  You know, on things like reliability or sources, or indeed, presence of sources at all within a research paper.  I gave three Ds and three C-s this semester, whether for plagiarism (including copying directly from Wikipedia--genius!), for using irrelevant sources or making up sources, or for just having no actual research present.  All of them were male students except for one girl, who the chair of my department suggested as the most likely culprit of the email, since her initials matched part of it.  It's not enough to do anything about in a disciplinary sense, of course, but it was satisfying for me to give her a C+ as her final grade.

I'm also getting ready for our trip to France in a couple of weeks by beefing up my French literature and history reaching.  I'm working on the Cambridge Illustrated History of France, which is a very readable brief survey, as well as Montaigne's Essays.  We're going to go to Montaigne's house and see where he wrote, which is exciting!  Also on tap is Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise, which inspired the BBC The Paradise series which I've been watching (the only piece of Zola's 20-volume cycle of novels that I've read was Germinal in Court's HI30 class, and I remember hating it, but I wonder now if it was the style that bothered me, or the subject matter--the exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie in a mining town, and the inevitable bloody reprisal).  Beyond that, I feel like I should squeeze in some Baudelaire if I can....Stendhal...Flaubert?  There's no way I can do all this in a couple of weeks, obviously, especially since I really need to start focusing on dissertation research.  Still, when I can spend a couple of hours in the late afternoon reading French history in the sunlight that's coming into the living room, with a pot of pea soup simmering on the stove, it's been a good day.

But perhaps the first essayist would not agree, with his typical self-deprecating humor:

"If I had written to seek the world's favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture.  I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice, for it is myself that I portray.  My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed.  Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you that I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.  So farewell. Montaigne, this first day of March, fifteen hundred and eighty."