Morning Read:
Clemency
In the middle of the Morning Read today, I discovered that the water in our line of apartments was shut off, would remain shut off for about two hours. I threw on some clothes and walked over to the Museum, partly to have lunch, also to take another look at my favorite Turner painting in the show that’s closing this weekend (Approach to Venice, Exh RA 1844), but mostly to walk into the Park to take some photographs for next week’s Daily Office. Because I’d had a bit of a walk yesterday, my legs began to complain as I came round the Museum toward Fifth Avenue — I’d the bright idea of walking the perimeter of the Museum, taking two sets of photographs (for two weeks of DO’s — pletty crevel, no?). I’d have taken a taxi home, but I was in no hurry to find out that the water was still off. Limping up to the building, I asked Dominic, the doorman on duty, to find out the status of my water supply, lest I have to go round to the Food Emporium to buy some Poland Spring. Never has a thumbs-up been so welcome as Dominic’s report.
Cleaned up and comfortably seated, I found that I could hardly pay attention to what I was reading. I wanted only to sleep. My impressions are correspondingly lackluster.
¶ Lord Chesterfield writes to his son (a boy of seven) about Roman History.
The Roman History furnishes more examples of virtue and magnanimity, or greatness of mind, than any other. It was a common thing to see their Consuls and Dictators (who, you know, were their chief Magistrates) taken from the plough, to lead their armies against their enemies; and, after victory, returning to their plough again, and passing the rest of their lives in modest retirement; a retirement more glorious, if possible, than the victories that preceded it! Many of their great men died so poor, that they were buried at the expence of the publick.
Just how many Cincinnatuses were there? My Roman History tells a rather different story, but note that for Chesterfield history is a sort of moral guide: great men are seen making their great decisions and their great mistakes. It is opera by daylight; in fact, opera itself was confined to stories from history — or from the history-as-it-ought-to-have-been told by Ariosto, Tasso, and many others. (See Don Quixote.) There is no sense of what we mean by society.
¶ La Rochefoucauld follows up the unsurprising observation that princes are clement in order to win the affection of the people with a elegant but equally obvious analysis: princes are clement sometimes out of vanity, now and then out of laziness, often out of fear, and almost always for all three reasons. I think he just disliked the Cardinals and Louis XIV.
¶ In Moby-Dick, a portrait of Nantucket that does not involve architecture. The island is so sea-swept, Melville giggles, that clams grow on the backs of chairs. The natives are the natural emperors of the waves. The chapter ends on a haunting note.
With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so, at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
A while back, I received a comment from Meg Guroff, who runs Power Moby Dick. So I knew right where to go to find out what a “spile” is. You can, too.
¶ Today’s chapter of Don Quixote is, in a word, tiresome. Marcela, the cold beauty, defends (at some length) her freedom to withhold her favors. This is what comes of having no day job.
¶ Squillionsought to be called The Letters That Noël Coward Kept: from 1929, we have two warm letters from Virginia Woolf — who evidently sent Coward’s missives to the circular file. Happily, you could call the book Letters That Snoop and his Mum Kept.
¶ After the Edwardians is not really a good Morning Read read. For some reason, I thought that its numerous chapters would be short and impressionistic, and full, as Mrs Clancy says, of quotations. But the chapters are long and meaty. Today’s concerns the hypocrisy of Britain in Ireland and the Middle East, deluded by imperial obsessions into one folly after another.
If today the world has problems in Israel-Palestine, in Iran, in Iraq, these stem directly from decisions which the British did or did not make in the crucial period of the early 1920s. So many different factors come into play when describing the origins of Iraq that it would require book-length treatment to make sense of it.
(Sigh.)