I would rather have that Chrysostom manuscript

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From G.K. Chesterton’s St. Thomas Aquinas:

The new Paris ultimately left behind by St. Louis must have been a thing white like lilies and splendid as the oriflamme.  It was the beginning of the great new thing: the nation of France, which was to pierce and overpower the old quarrel of Pope and Emperor in the lands from which Thomas came.  But Thomas came very unwillingly and, if we may say it of so kindly a man, rather sulkily.  As he entered Paris, they showed him from the hill that splendour of new spires beginning, and somebody said something like, “How grand it must be to own all this.”  And Thomas Aquinas only muttered, “I would rather have that Chrysostom manuscript I can’t get hold of.”

This seems a near universal anecdote in the various vitae of Aquinas, though Chesterton, in typical fashion, polishes it up a bit from the drier phrasing of the originals, one of which is as follows:

“Once, coming from Saint Denis with his students, where he had gone to visit the holy relics and that holy college of monks, and when he had seen the city of Paris right at hand, his students said to him, thinking they would hear some edifying reply: “Master, see how beautiful a city Paris is!  Would you wish to be lord of this city?”  He responded: “With more pleasure would I have the homilies of Chrysostom on the Gospel of Saint Matthew.  For this city, if it were mine, would, on account of the concern given to ruling, carry off the contemplation of divine matters and inhibit the consolation of the soul.”(William of Tocco, Ystoria sancti Thome de Aquino 42, written 1323)

“semel ueniens de sancto Dyonisio cum suis studentibus,  quo iuerat sanctorum reliquias et sanctum illud monachorum collegium uisitare, et uidisset de propinquo ciuitatem Parisiensem, dixerunt ei studentes:  ‘Magister, uidete quam pulchra ciuitas est Parisius!  Velletis esse dominus huius ciuitatis?’, credentes ab eo aliquod uerbum edificationis audire.  Qui respondit:  ‘Libentius uellem habere Omelias Chrisostomi super Euangelium beati Mathei.  Ciuitas enim hec si esset mea, propter curam regiminis contemplationem michi diuinorum eriperet et consolationem animi impediret.'”

The homilies on Matthew do exist today, but I haven’t taken the time to figure out whether Aquinas simply couldn’t get a copy or whether (which seems unlikely, given the prominence of Chrysostom) they had been lost to circulation in the period.

 

 

 

I incline to Cain’s heresy

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

“I incline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

The reference is to Cain’s reply to God when asked about his brother Abel – “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9).

I’ve said this at work when people ask about the progression of someone else’s project or their absence in a meeting.  Like most of my answers it confuses more than responds.

The receipt of letters is the death of all holiday feeling

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage:

No one should have any correspondence on a journey; it is bad enough to have to write; but the receipt of letters is the death of all holiday feeling.

‘Out of my country and myself I go.’  I wish to take a dive among new conditions for a while, as into another element.  I have nothing to do with my friends or my affections for the time; when I came away, I left my heart at home in a desk, or sent it forward with my portmanteau to await me at my destination.  After my journey is over, I shall not fail to read your admirable letters with the attention they deserve.  But I have paid all this money, look you, and paddled all these strokes, for no other purpose than to be abroad; and yet you keep me at home with your perpetual communications.  You tug the string, and I feel that I am a tethered bird.  You pursue me all over Europe with the little vexations that I came away to avoid.  There is no discharge in the war of life, I am well aware; but shall there not be so much as a week’s furlough?

Just so much gained upon the wholesale filcher

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage:

For I think we may look upon our little private war with death somewhat in this light.  If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves.  And above all, where instead of simply spending, he makes a profitable investment for some of his money, when it will be out of risk of loss.  So every bit of brisk living, and above all when it is healthful, is just so much gained upon the wholesale filcher, death.  We shall have the less in our pockets, the more in our stomach, when he cries stand and deliver.  A swift stream is a favourite artifice of his, and one that brings him in a comfortable thing per annum; but when he and I come to settle our accounts, I shall whistle in his face for these hours upon the upper Oise.

Lost and confined in an equal solitude

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

The post-war period was a time when everyone imagined themselves to be poets and everyone imagined themselvesto be politicians; everyone supposed that one could, and indeed should, make poems out of everything, after so many years in which it had seemed that the world had been paralysed and struck dumb and reality lay on the far side of a sheet of glass, in a vitreous, crystalline and wordless stasis.  Novelists and poets had fasted during the fascist years, there not being many words around that they were permitted to use, and the few that had gone on using words had picked them with the greatest possible care from the meagre lexicon of crumbs that still remained.  During the fascist era, poets found themselves reduced to expressing only the arid, enclosed and sibylline world of dreams.  Now there were many words in circulation once again, and once again reality seemed within reach, and those who had fasted for so long threw themselves joyfully in the harvest.  And the harvest was universal because everyone decided to join in, and this caused a confusion between the language of poetry and the language of politics which seemed to have become mixed together.  But then reality turned out to be no less complex and hidden and indecipherable and enigmatic than the world of dreams, and it proved still to li on the far side of a sheet of glass, and the illusion of having shattered that glass turned out to be ephemeral.  Then many people turned away, disheartened and dejected, and fell back again into a bitter fast and a deep silence.  So the post-war period was gloomy and full of dejection after the joyful harvest of the early days.  Many withdrew and cut themselves off once more, either in the world of their dreams or in any work that would earn them enough to live on, work undertaken at random and in haste and that seemed petty and grey after so much excitement; and in any case, everyone forgot about that brief, illusory involvement in the life of their neighbour.  Undoubtedly for many years no one practised their own trade any more, but everyone thought that they must and should take on a thousand others at the same time, and some years went by before everyone took up their own trade and accepted the weight of it and the daily toil and the daily solitude, which is the only way that we have of participating in the life of our neighbour, lost and confined in an equal solitude.

Ubi Sunt in Old English

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

The Ubi Sunt sensibility hovers throughout Old English poetry but only in The Wanderer (92-96) does it take a form  – and rhetorical refrain – so close to the more familiar neiges d’antan of Villon.

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?

Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas?

Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga!

Eala þeodnes þrym! Hu seo þrag gewat,

genap under nihthelm, swa heo no wære.

 

Where has the horse gone? Where the warrior? Where the treasure?

Where the seats of feasts? Where are the hall joys?

Oh, the bright cup! Oh, the mailed warrior!

Oh, the prince’s glory! How that time departed,

grew dark under the night helmet as if it hadn’t been

(tr. Robert E. Bjork)

 

Tolkien lends a modified version of these lines to Aragorn in the Two Towers as he speaks of Rohan – “Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?”

Fate of the mead-mad man

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment
From the Old English poem, Fortunes of Mortals (translated Robert E. Bjork)

Sum sceal on beore     þurh byreles hond
meodugal mæcga;     þonne he gemet ne con
gemearcian his muþe     mode sine,
ac sceal ful earmlice     ealdre linnan,
dreogan dryhtenbealo     dreamum biscyred,
ond hine to sylfcwale     secgas nemnað,
mænað mid muþe     meodugales gedrinc. (51-57)

One through beer from the cupbearer’s hand will
become a mead-mad man; then he will know no measure,
will not give boundary to his mouth with his mind,

but he must very wretchedly yield up his life,
endure great misfortune bereft of joys,
and people will say he killed himself, well decry
the drinking of the mead-mad man with their mouths
Meodugal – here alliteratively rendered mead-mad – is a compound of mead (meodu) and an adjective (gal) defined with the Latin equivalent luxuriosus (immoderate, wanton, self-indulgent).  The root of that adjective is the same that yields geil (lit. horny) in modern german, and I can’t help wanting break the alliteration in favor of the anachronistic ‘mead-horny’ – on parallel with the similar split in sense of French-derived ‘besotted’ (‘madly impassioned for’ and ‘drunk’)
It’s a shame Malcolm Lowry never worked this passage into Under the Volvano as fortune of the mezcal-mad man

Today I read two lira

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

[Lucio] had learnt to read at the same time as me, but I had read heaps of books and he had only read a few because he read slowly and got bored; all the same when he was at our house he used to read, because every now and then I would get tired of playing and throw myself down on the lawn with a book.  Then Lucio would go and boast to my brothers that he had read a whole book, because they always teased him about reading so little.  “Today I read two lira.” “Today I read five lira,” he would say proudly, showing them the price written on the flyleaf.

Natalia Ginzburg, The Things We Used to Say, tr. Judith Woolf.

Overheard at the Uffizi

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

Again from Melville’s Journal Up the Straits:

“It’s as bad as too much pain: it gets to be pain at last” Heard this broken latter part of sentence from wearied lady coming from Ufezzi (sic) Palace. – She was talking no doubt about excess of pleasure in these galleries.”

This feels a pedestrian version of Stendhal’s response – now known as Stendhal Syndrome – to first arriving at Santa Croce:

Mon émotion est si profonde qu’elle va presque jusqu’à la piété … J’étais déjà dans une sorte d’extase, par l’idée d’être à Florence, et le voisinage des grands hommes dont je venais de voir les tombeaux. Absorbé dans la contemplation de la beauté sublime, je la voyais de près, je la touchais pour ainsi dire. J’étais arrivé à ce point d’émotion où se rencontrent les sensations célestes données par les beaux-arts et les sentiments passionnés. En sortant de Santa Croce, j’avais un battement de cœur, ce qu’on appelle des nerfs à Berlin ; la vie était épuisée chez moi, je marchais avec la crainte de tomber.

 

My emotion was so profound that it came near piety … I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, and the proximity of the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I saw it at hand, I touched it so to speak… I reached the point where we encounter the celestial sensations granted by the fine arts and impassioned feelings.  On leaving Santa Croce, I felt a fluttering in my heart, what they call ‘nerves’ in Berlin; Life was drained from me, I walked on but with fear of collapsing.

 

The comparison leads me to a hierarchy of aesthetically inflicted sufferings:

1)Stendhal syndrome – a genuine swooning from contact, nearly religious in nature

2)That of Melville’s sufferer – call it aesthetic exhaustion, a running through of your mind’s resources and resulting exhaustion; mental as much as physical, from over-exposure and over-stimulation

3)The average visitor  – who sustains memories of wrist-ache from too many selfie-stick selfies and possibly a back-ache as well from violently leaning over me in the process