Literature and Science

Currents similar to those of the hairs of the nettle have been observed in a great multitude of very different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested that they probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all young vegetable cells. If such be the case, the wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the dulness of our hearing; and could our ears catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.

— Thomas Henry Huxley, "The Physical Basis of Life," 1869

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

— George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-2 (begun 1869)

Huxley's essay comes close on the heels (in my anthology) of Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Science," in which Arnold argues that the humanities will always have a place in education, because we have a "desire" for "conduct" and "beauty." Studying science (at the schoolboy level — he doesn't mean research) is like piling up so many interesting facts — interesting, but not meaningful; the student is left spiritually hungry. I don't think he argues very well, and he doesn't even write as well as Huxley, but essentially I agree with him. (It doesn't help to put the argument in either/or terms, which is how he starts out, apparently taking his cue from Huxley. But he goes on to frame the question more cautiously — "will always have a place.")

However, you could say — George Eliot may suggest — that the habit of observation that science cultivates in its students, of paying attention, is preparation for a moral life. (Paying attention: there's a lot on this in the chapter "Seeing" in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

Huxley argues enthusiastically that the writers of the future will take inspiration from science. George Eliot (probably) did. And I read this in Edith Wharton's memoir A Backward Glance:

In looking back over my memories of Theodore Roosevelt I am surprised to find how very seldom I saw him, and yet how sure I am that he was my friend. He had the rare gift of bridging over in an instant those long intervals between meetings that so often benumb even the best of friends, and he was so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed, that each of those encounters glows in me like a morsel of radium.

What struck me is how little of this there is in twentieth century writing. Does her last word ring false only because we now know that radium causes cancer, or is it the case that this is an impulse that didn't go anywhere? How common are metaphors based on (for example) the double helix? How successful are they?
I'm about to read Michael Frayn's Copenhagen — I saw it a few years ago — and, yes, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is all over that play. But that's not the sort of thing one can refer to off-handedly.

A Backward Glance: interesting, but really only for die-hard fans of Wharton. It's really like a big thank you to all the wonderful people she's known, too polite to be revealing. At first I found all the name dropping irritating, but then it occurred to me that she's not showing off; on the contrary, she's being modest: "My life is interesting only insofar as I've known interesting people." But only her portraits of Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt are satisfying; the other sketches are at best only tantalizing. (Not a bad thing: I've put on my to read list some totally forgotten novels by various contemporaries, mainly friends, that she warmly recommends: David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox, Robert Grant's Unleavened Bread, Howard Sturgis's Belchamber. She also loves The Egoist and Harry Richmond by George Meredith, who may not be forgotten, but — I don't know anyone who's read him. On to my list.)
So for her strained relationship with her mother, the failure of her marriage, etc., I'll have to go to Hermione Lee's biography. But I'm glad I got Wharton's view — "glance" — first.

This is funny:

…the first time I went to Washington after [the Roosevelts] were installed in the White House I was promptly summoned to lunch, and welcomed on the threshold by the President's vehement cry: "At last I can quote 'The Hunting of the Snark'!" "Would you believe it," he added, "no one in the Administration has ever heard of Alice, much less of the Snark, and the other day, when I said to the Secretary of the Navy: 'Mr. Secretary, What I say three times is true,' he did not recognize the allusion, and answered with an aggrieved air: 'Mr. President, it would never for a moment have occurred to me to impugn your veracity'!"

Paris 1919

On November 11 I went to see the documentary Paris 1919 by Paul Cowan. The film mixes original footage with (usually silent) recreations, in color, of scenes for which footage is lacking: diplomats and cartographers at work or taking a stroll, the attempted assassination of Clemenceau, a German negotiator who resigned, back home at the dinner table with his wife and children. Most of the talking is voice-over narration, which relies heavily on the letters and diaries of Harold Nicholson, John Maynard Keynes, and one of the German negotiators. The actors seldom speak, so that when they do we sit on the edge of our chairs. There are no talking heads to break the tension and help provide perspective; it is all painfully close and inexorable. I was a bit uneasy about the format of the film before I saw it — who needs a frivolous mixture of fact and fiction about the events of 1919? — but was soon won over. I can't recommend it highly enough; it's one of the best historical documentaries I've ever seen.

Here's what I learned:
Lloyd George, who had done so much to stir up revenge hysteria in his recent electoral campaign, at the very end pleaded with Wilson for a more generous settlement with Germany. But by then Clemenceau had won Wilson over, and the American president, who had expended so much energy in trying to moderate French and British demands, dug in his heels on the other side. Why? Had Clemenceau really convinced him? Or was he eager to get the conference over with so that he could go back to the US to campaign for the League of Nations? And why did Lloyd George have a change of heart? Had Keynes convinced him, finally, that Germany was capable of paying only a small fraction of what Lloyd George had promised the British public?

An armistice is not the same thing as capitulation. One learns that Germany lost WWI, and one assumes (or at least I did), that it was a case of utter defeat, like WWII. But no: an armistice is a truce; the German negotiators went to Paris expecting to negotiate, not to have the terms of the peace dictated to them. Of course, they were anxious about their reception; on the train into France they are shown busily drafting arguments showing, on the basis of international law, that the war was justified, or that Germany was not solely responsible, or that all sides engaged in atrocities. The long suspense, as the German delegation does its homework in an unheated hotel, their shock upon receiving a copy of the draft treaty, and the speech of their chief negotiator before the assembled diplomats are among the high points.

A small, memorable detail: the Germans suspected that their hotel was bugged, and so they played Wagner on the gramophone all day, at high volume. After they saw the draft treaty, however, they turned off the gramophone. Why? In despair? Or was it a way of saying to the French, "We have no important secrets to keep from you; go ahead, listen in."

But the film does not focus exclusively on the main actors; it also does a good job of evoking the myriad negotiations that settled borders, with fateful consequences, all over the globe, from Africa, to Iraq and China.

I love Macaulay! Here he is reviewing Southey's Colloquies:

SC.13
Mr. Southey's political system is just what we might expect from a man who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste and feeling. All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with themselves. In his youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his preface to these Colloquies, he was even then opposed to the Catholic Claims. He is now a violent Ultra-Tory. Yet, while he maintains, with vehemence approaching to ferocity, all the sterner and harsher parts of the Ultra-Tory theory of government, the baser and dirtier part of that theory disgusts him. Exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if necessary rather than any concession to a discontented people; these are the measures which he seems inclined to recommend. A severe and gloomy tyranny, crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling the minds of the people into unreasoning obedience, has in it something of grandeur which delights his imagination. But there is nothing fine in the shabby tricks and jobs of office; and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has no toleration for them. When a Jacobin, he did not perceive that his system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of religious distinctions. He now commits a similar error. He renounces the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving that it is also an essential part of that creed. He would have tyranny and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption.
SC.14
It is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration of the work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed, illustrates in almost every page our general remarks on Mr. Southey's writings. In the preface, we are informed that the author, notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to the Catholic Claims. We fully believe this; both because we are sure that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and because his assertion is in itself probable. We should have expected that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr. Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a great practical evil. We should have expected that the only measure which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would have agreed with himself in opposing. He has passed from one extreme of political opinion to another, as Satan in Milton went round the globe, contriving constantly to 'ride with darkness.' Wherever the thickest shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is Mr. Southey. It is not everybody who could have so dexterously avoided blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.

***

We despise those mock philosophers, who think that they serve the cause of science by depreciating literature and the fine arts. But if anything could excuse their narrowness of mind, it would be such a book as this. It is not strange that, when one enthusiast makes the picturesque the test of political good, another should feel inclined to proscribe altogether the pleasures of taste and imagination.

The New York Times is not going to publish my letter, so here it is:

To the Editor:

I read Jiri Pehe's opinion piece, "A Spring Awakening for Human Rights," with sympathetic interest. I was startled, however, to read that "After 1968, once powerful communist parties in France, Italy and other Western European countries gradually faded." This is not true in the case of Italy. Indeed, the Italian Communist Party, under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia: in a speech he gave in Moscow in the presence of Leonid Brezhnev, Berlinguer declared that the "tragedy in Prague" had revealed fundamental differences within the communist movement on national sovereignty, socialist democracy, and cultural freedom. The Italian Communist Party continued to be the main opposition party through the 1970s and 1980s, and is the direct ancestor of the main center-left party in Italy today.

Storia degli Italiani, vol. I: very, very good. I had despaired of finding a book like this, but volume I of Procacci's history is as good as I could have wished. Three things stand out:

One is the tenuousness of men's hold over the land: people have lived in Italy at least since the Neolithic age, but there were ages of retrenchment and ages of expansion (settlement). During the periods of retrenchment the population declined (huddled in towns and castles) and vast regions became malarial swamp. Sometimes the causes of the swamps' expansion were political. I lose sleep over desertification, and it was interesting to come across an analogous circumstance. (But swamps — even malarial swamps — don't scare me nearly as much as deserts.)

Apparently the Venice/Genova dichotomy is a commonplace, but I found it fascinating:

La fortuna di Genova si veniva però sviluppando su basi assai diverse da quelle di Venezia. Il suo armamento era prevalentement privato, i suoi convogli mercantili e, talvolta, le sue stesse spedizioni militari delle "maone" organizzate da privati, i fondachi dei magazzini appartenenti a privati e i suoi viaggiatori degli avventurieri che non esitavano a mettere le proprie competenze al servigio di chiunque fosse to disposto a pagarle. Marco Polo, davanti al khan dei tartari o in prigionia non cessò mai di sentirsi un cittadino veneziano, per Venezia egli combattè e a Venezia si ammogliò e morì. Ma già agli inizi del XIV secolo noi troviamo un genovese, Manuele Pessagno, ammiraglio del re di Portogallo e un altro, Enrico Marchese, costruttore di navi sulla Senna per conto di Filippo il Bello. Essi sono i capostipiti di una progenie di genovesi per il mondo cui appartiene anche Cristoforo Colombo, scopritore delle Americhe per conto del re di Spagna.
Questo "individualismo" genovese, del quale si è tanto parlato e del quale non si può fare a meno di continuare a parlare, si riflette nelle strutture stesse della città. (p. 46)

Rough translation:

The fortunes of Genova developed from very different foundations from those of Venice. Its arsenal was predominantly private, its mercantile convoys and at times even its military ventures were privately organized, its warehouses were privately owned and its travellers adventurers who did not hesitate to put their abilities at the service of anyone willing to pay. Marco Polo, before the khan of the Tartars or in jail, never ceased to consider himself a Venetian citizen, for Venice he fought, in Venice he was married and died. But already at the beginning of the XIV century we find a Genoese, Manuele Pessagno, admiral of the king of Portugal, and another, Enrico Marchese, ship builder on the Seine for Philip the Fair [of France]. They are the forefathers of a line of globe-trotting Genoese that includes Cristoforo Colombo, discoverer of the Americas on behalf of the king of Spain.
This Genoese "individualism," of which much has been said and which we shall go on discussing, is reflected in the very structure of the city.

***

The fates of the two cities seem to be contained in this difference in mentality: after a financial crisis in the fifteenth century, in which many small savers were wiped out, Genova became the fief of an oligarchy — creditors who sat on the board of one single bank; it suffered periodic uprisings, and was a prey to outside intervention — what else could you expect when the whole city was mortgaged? Venice, with its formidable cohesiveness and civic pride, its single-minded mixture of diplomatic cunning and bravery, lasted over three centuries longer. It finally fell to Napoleon in 1797. This is another moment in history that brings my father to tears: "The British navy was around the corner ready to help, but Venice didn't lift a finger in her own defense." It reminds me of what Hans Scholl said about Paris in 1941. I can't help having some sympathy for Venice and Paris: occupiers may come and go (they must have thought), but a city this beautiful happens only once.

I like the neat symmetry of the dichotomy: Venice in the northeast, Marco Polo, China; Genova in the northwest, Columbus, the Americas.

I used to be unsympathetic to Venice because I thought that women were much less free there than in other cities. I think I was misinformed. Now I love it for its cosmopolitanism — its openness to the Byzantine Empire, later the Ottoman, Germany, and everything in between — for Aldo Manuzio's press, for its policy of religious toleration, and for standing up to the Vatican. (The whole city was excommunicated several times, and nearly became Protestant.)

The last thing that struck me was the explanation for place names such as Villafranca, Francavilla, and Castelfranco. I'd always foolishly thought these had something to do with the Franks, but as Procacci explains, towns with these names began as settlements of newly enFRANChised serfs (usually founded around the year 1000). I'll think of those freedmen the next time I pass through a town with "franco" in its name. (There are many.)

This is kind of interesting (from Wikipedia):

The ethnonym has also been traced to a *frankon—"javelin, lance" (Old English franca, compare the Saxons, named after the seax, and the Lombards, named after the battle-axe—the throwing axe of the Franks is known as the Francisca) but, conversely, the weapon may also have been named after the tribe. A. C. Murray says, 'The etymology of Franci is uncertain ('the fierce ones' is the favourite explanation), but the name is undoubtedly of Germanic origin.' [2]
The meaning of "free" (English frank, frankly) arose because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks had the status of freemen.

Joan Bos, at the Mad Monarchs website, paints a very difference picture of Don Carlos.

Here I am in Rome, studying Latin. My mother reported to me that her friends had asked, what was I going to do with it? And so I said that after I finish this course I'll be able to teach more advanced students, and that Marvell wrote some poems in Latin, and I'm interested in neo-Latin poetry. All of which is true, but I think it's a bit rich of these academics to ask why I should want to study Latin. Why do they do what they do? It's their job, fine. But does their job feed anyone? How can it be justified? In the end you're left with an article of faith: thinking about these things is a good in itself. I'm actually quite happy to say that studying literature and history equips us for our own lives, but I know my mother is against this means-to-an-end argument: she believes in history for history's sake. No compromises with expedience. I'll accept that, but she shouldn't question how I spend my summer. Especially after teaching so much this year, I feel no compunctions about abandoning myself to the luxury of study for two months.
There's also the feeling: we owe it to the past — to the legions of dead who were once so alive — to think about them. I know that's something R. F. feels strongly too; why else would he draw our attention to the shrug of the shoulders, the wry, half-finished joke, the saltiest colloquial moments? Why else, to point out the obvious, would he speak in Latin? He often says, "This morning, friends, this happened this morning," about something that in fact happened 2000 years ago. (But: this approach scants extra-ordinary uses of language — we hardly do any poetry at all.) I don't think we'll measure up so well to posterity: we produce too much excruciatingly bad prose. In comparison to the Romans — to anyone before the 20th century — we shall seem humorless, wooden, false, pompous, inhumane.

Update: I told my mother to read Alexander Stille's chapter on R. F. in The Future of the Past, and now she's thrilled about my course — prompts me to talk about it in company, etc.

I've had more than a thousand pages of US history in the past month, and I'm getting tired of it. Not that the books I'm reading aren't very good, and not that the subject isn't interesting, but I've had enough. Now I'm reading Middlekauf's The Glorious Cause. He's clear, funny, and detailed, but I miss Wilentz's passion. Wilentz could be funny too, but his humor was mordant; Middlekauf's is airy and light. He seems to think that everyone was getting a little too excited.* Of course, he never says this; it's in his tone. And actually I'm sure he doesn't think it either. In fact, I'm being terribly unfair, and perhaps it's just like what happened when I heard the Brahms Requiem and the Mozart Requiem in one day, in that order: the juxtaposition made Mozart sound like fluff. I hated myself for thinking that, but couldn't help it. Moral of the story: eighteenth century first, then nineteenth century. Never the other way around.

*which is one's suspicion about the American Revolution to start with. Middlekauf's introduction insists that there's no irony in the title. Later on, he admits, "On the surface the Americans' preoccupation with their property … seems petty, demeaning, poor stuff with which to make a revolution." He tries to explain why it wasn't, but... One just has to assume that the ideas of "rights" and "property" were on a seamless continuum — not such a hare-brained notion in the days when small farmers could be economically independent, before the crop-lien system. But still!

I finished Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln the other day. I highly highly recommend it — through all its 796 pages it never got boring. Even some of the footnotes were worth reading. Here are some of the most memorable quotations:
"You have come into Life with advantages which will disgrace you, if your success if mediocre," Vice President John Adams wrote to his son [John Quincy Adams] in 1794. "[I]f you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession, but of your Country, it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy." (p. 257)

And this, on Bleeding Kansas:
The Yankees originally found themselves outnumbered by thousands of pro-slavery Missourians who had crossed the border and set down stakes. Few of the Missourians or emigrants from other slave states actually owned slaves, but they despised the New Englanders for what they saw as their air of moral superiority and their sickly love of blacks. Mocked as "pukes" and "border ruffians" by the free-staters, the pro-slavery men were determined to harass the abolitionists out of Kansas by any means necessary. ("We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over," the ever violent [Missouri] Senator David Atchison predicted.)

Elsewhere Wilentz describes Atchison as "profane and provocative." But this takes the cake:
The territorial legislative elections in March 1855 turned into an even nastier and more corrupt proceeding than the delegate elections four months earlier. With Atchison once again the chief instigator, thousands of Missourians — some of them members of a new semisecret pro-slavery society, and many identified by a badge of hemp, the area's chief slave cash crop — poured over the border to vote illegally. "There are eleven hundred coming over from Platte County to vote," Atchison shamelessly exclaimed, "and if that ain't enough we can send five thousand — enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory." (p. 686)

There's a town in Kansas named Atchison; it's Amelia Earheart's hometown.

I now understand why Goodwyn is so scornful of Progressives; they're firmly in the Whig tradition of self-improvement. Some of Wilentz's best pages are on the Democrats vs. the Whigs:

There was, without question, a dominant antistatist cast, both symbolic and substantive, to Jacksonian economic politics. The neo-Jeffersonian motto of Blair's Washington Globe … — "That government is best, which governs least" — powerfully expressed the antigovernment creed. Yet as Jackson himself always made clear, the Jacksonians opposed large government not because it burdened business but because they believed it was a creature of the monied and privileged few, constructed in defiance of popular sovereignty, that corrupted democracy. "Experience will show," the New York Evening Post said, "that this power has always been exercised under the influence and for the exclusive benefit of wealth. Too rarely have historians understood or even taken seriously the Jacksonians' repeated claims, after as well as during the BUS veto battle, that they aimed not to liberate private business interests from a corrupt government, but to liberate democratic government from the corrupting power of exclusive private business interests. Too rarely have historians appreciated the Democrats' willingness to wield federal power forcefully, over economic issues no less than over nullification, when they thought doing so was necessary to protect the democratic republic. (p. 438)

From this rejection of archaic Federalist politics followed a number of important consequences. The Whigs contended that in the United States all freemen shared a basic harmony of interests that had effectively banished the existence of classes. The older, tough-minded conservatism of John Adams, shared, in part, by James Madison and other Republicans [Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans], assumed that the clash between rich and poor would forever shape politics and government, even in the American republic. In the new conservative view, America was a great exception among nations, fundamentally different from Europe, where, as Webster remarked, there was "a clear and well defined line, between capital and labor." Thanks to America's abundance of land and wealth, its shortage of free labor, and its lack of hereditary aristocracy, the idea of the few and the many had been banished — and, contrary to the Democrats, rendered permanently antithetical to the genius of American politics. In America, rich and poor alike were workingmen, and all workingmen were capitalists, or at least incipient capitalists, ready to strike out on the road to wealth that was open to everyone. The Jacksonians and their labor radical friends understood nothing about this blessed nation, where expanding commerce and manufacturing, according to the American Quarterly Review, placed "within the reach of even the very poorest, a thousand comforts which were unknown to the rich in less civilized ages." What was good for the wealthy of the country was inevitably good for those of aspiring wealth, and what was bad was bad — worse for the aspirants than for the already affluent. "It is moneyed capital which makes business grow and thrive, gives employment to labor and opens to it avenues to success in life," one Whig publicist observed. "The blow aimed at the moneyed capitalist, strikes over the head of the laborer, and is sure to hurt the latter more than the former."
A second corollary was political: Jacksonian politicians, and not privileged businessmen, were the true oppressors of the people. In place of the monied aristocrats whom the Democrats disparaged, the Whigs substituted what they described as a new class of selfish elected officials and appointees, led by King Andrew I — connivers who had turned government into their trough, robbing the people of their money as well as their power. (p. 486)

Democratic corruption was spiritual as well as material, the Whigs asserted. Playing off the stigma attached to freethinking radicals, Frances Wright above all, and the nativist fears of dissipated pro-Democratc immigrants, chiefly the Irish, Whig propagandists proclaimed their opponents dangerous to the very foundations of pious respectability and secure democratic government. If every Democrat was not an infidel, libertine, or a drunk, the Whigs assured the upright, surely every infidel, libertine, and drunk was a Democrat. "Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order," Greeley charged, "there you may be sure of one vote for Van Buren."
For the Whigs to purport to represent the people, they had to talk more like the people, or how they thought the people talked. Some of the party's Federalist and National Republican predecessors had already experimented with popular campaigning… Some Jeffersonians-turned-National Republicans, most famously the gregarious Henry Clay, were excellent treaters and braggers on the campaign stump — forms of public performance that long predated the democratic breakthroughs of the Jeffersonian era. Suddenly, in the mid-1830s, Whig "cracker-barrel" philosophers and down-home wits began appearing in print. The most successful of them was the transformed fictional Major Jack Downing. As invented by Seba Smith, the sage of Downingville was a humorous figure who poked fun at Jackson and his coterie. In the mid-1830s, however, "new" Major Downings appeared — the most brilliant of them being the creation of Charles Davis, a close friend of Nicholas Biddle's and a director of the New York branch of the Second Bank of the United States. Davis's Downing was a Whig ideologue through and through, praising bankers as benevolent people who "in the nature of things" would "never do any thing agin the gineral prosperity of this country," and who were locked in a struggle against the true "monied aristocracy" of "politicians [who] manage to git hold of the mony of the people, and keep turnin it to their own account —… buy up a party with it." Better a government of enlightened businessmen than of politicians out "jest to git into office; and then, to keep themselves in office." The first modern conservative folk hero was born in a branch office of the Second BUS.
There were other Whig populist heroes, some real, some imaginary, and some a combination of the two. David Crockett's emergence as a buck-skinned Whig celebrity was widely imitated. Whig favorites suddenly showed a fondness for manly, plebeian nicknames, including Tom "The Wagon Boy" Corwin, Henry "The Natick Cobbler" Wilson, and Elihu "The Learned Blacksmith" Burritt. Henry Clay, known widely as "Harry of the West," "The Great Compromiser," and even "Prince Hal," began to favor a name supposedly pinned on him in his youth, "Mill Boy of the Slashes" — a bit wordy but definitely down-home. On a more elevated level, the Whigs tried to match the Democrats' hard-money pamphlets with popular defenses of the credit system, the BUS, and high tariffs, the best of them written by Matthew Carey's son, Henry C. Carey.
Binding together these new-school Whig themes — American classlessness and underlying social harmony, the oppression and corruption of Democratic government, Whig populism — was the doctrine of self-improvement and reform. Attacks on the Jacksonians' dishonesty and class-war demagogy could only carry the Whigs so far in reimagining America for the electorate. Even in the Whigs' classless pastorale, some citizens were better off than others, and despite rapid economic development, the curses of crime, pauperism, and drunkenness appeared to be growing worse, not better. How could these disparities and pathologies be explained? Not, the Whigs insisted, with sinister talk of systemic social inequalities, class warfare, or corrupt institutions (apart from those the Jacksonian politicians had inflicted). Rather, the problems were individual and moral and their solution lay in individual self-reform, or what Boston's eminent Whig Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing called "Elevation of the Soul" — an elevation that benign Whig government could help to encourage.
Whig self-reform adapted ethical precepts from across the spectrum of post-Calvinist American Protestant belief, evoking the emotional revivalism of the Presbygationals [a hideous word] and more proper of the southern evangelicals as well as Channing's rationalist Unitarianism. Their common theme, sacred and secular, was the all-surpassing importance of moral choice. The wealthy did not make the poor lazy and thriftless; the sober did not make the drunkards drink; law-abiding, decent men and women did not make murderers murder, or thieves rob, or wife-beaters beat their wives. Rather, the lazy, the drunk, and the criminal chose wrongly, succumbed to sensuous temptation, and failed to exercise human faculties of self-control that could elevate their souls. What was at stake in the United States, the Whigs proclaimed, was nothing less than a battale over these self-evident facts — a momentous conflict between those who understood the basic moral conditions of human existence and those who rejected them. "We have in truth, in the last eight or ten years, been in a continual state of moral war," the Tennessean John Bell said when he announced, in 1835, that he was joining the Whig Party. That war, as the Whigs depicted it, was essentially a democratic conflict, not between the privileged and the people or the wealthy and the poor, but between the righteous and the unrighteous.
Self-reform in turn became the basis for an uplifting idealism that defined Whiggery as a spiritual cause as well as a political party. Later writers have mistaken this aspect of Whig ideology as a belief in the corrective, liberal, "positive" state, in stark contrast to a Democratic laissez-faire, backward-looking liberal "negative" state. In fact, like virtually all American political parties and movements, the Whigs and the Democrats blended aspects of both "positive" and "negative" government. In some spheres, notably with regard to the currency and the national bank, Whigs greatly preferred private to public power. and tried to limit government regulation. They wanted to halt what they called the Democrats' "war on the currency of the country… on the merchants and mercantile interests" — a war they said was designed "to support the power of the federal government." But the Whigs did promote the uses of government to help direct and even coerce individuals toward what they considered personal improvement — the basis, as they saw it, for social and political progress. Materially, this program had already reached its apotheosis in Clay's American System, a coordinated plan of federal-supported commerical expansion anchored by a privately managed BUS. Morally, it led new-school Whigs in the late 1830s, most auspiciously the more liberal Whigs in New York, to call for increased state support of institutions that would help keep the young on the path of righteousness and help lead the fallen toward the elevation of their souls: public schools, benevolent societies, rehabilitative prisons, reformatories, and for the truly unfortunate, insane asylums.
"Of all the parties that have existed in the United States," John Quincy Adams's dyspeptic grandson Henry would later remark, "the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas." Given the subsequent intellectual history of other political parties, that judgment now seems severe. (pp. 486-489)

Among more orthodox religious liberals and evangelicals alike arose the more compelling feature of a new-school Whiggery, a broad Christian humanitarianism of the sort that had nourished the movements against Indian removal and, in the North, for the abolition of slavery. Just as post-Calvinist churchmen denounced human coercion and unbridled passion as unchristian, so they rejected everyday cruelties — the beating of children, wife abuse, the harsh treatment of convicts, and (according to some) the physical and mental torments of slavery — which other Americans took for granted as natural and even necessary forms of correction and social order. (p. 490)

The Democrats, scornful of the opposition's mediocre nominee, tried to exploit Clay and his supporters' bitter disappointment — with disastrous results. Shortly after the convention, the pro-Van Buren Baltimore Republican baited the Whigs with an insult reportedly delivered by a Clay man against Harrison: "Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin." The superannuated general — "Old Granny" Harrison, some Democrats called him — was simply too old, too befuddled, too undistinguished to be a credible president. But the insult played directly into the hands of Weed as well as the old-guard Whigs. Richard S. Elliott, a Harrisburg Whig editor, was one of the first to grasp fully the implications, in a postconvention conversation over some rare Madeira with the banker Thomas Elder at Elder's mansion on the Susquehanna. The Van Burenites' mockery could, the two figured out, become the Whigs' pride, projecting Harrison and his party as paragons of plain rustic virtue while condemning the Democrats (the possibilities grew rich with each sip of the Madeira) as scornful, out-of-touch nabob politicos. And so the Whigs' famous Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign began, with an enormous Harrison transparency mounted in Harrisburg depicting a log cabin with a cider barrel by the door. New-school party managers were fully aware of political genius behind the ballyhoo. "The Log Cabin is the symbol of nothing that Van Burenism knows, feels, or can appreciate," Weed later explained to the readers of the Albany Evening Journal. "It tells of the hopes of the humble — of the privations of the poor —… it is the emblem of rights that the vain and insolent aristocracy of federal office-holders have… trampled upon."
The Democrats, not taking this new Whig campaign symbolism at all seriously, entered the lists in their time-tested ways. Van Buren, outwardly unflustered as ever, did not reply to the volley of personal attacks on him, preferring to have his supporters calmly restate his positions on the issues and leave it to the state and local Democratic campaign committees to stir up the faithful.
…The length of the workday, said the self-proclaimed champion of labor Horace Greeley, ought to be left to "mutual agreement" between workers and employers: "What have Governments and Presidents to do with it?" Shipyard workers thought differently. Looking back, a free black Washington Navy Yard hand named Michael Shiner wrote in his diary that "the Working Class of people of the the United State Machanic and laboures ought to never forget the Hon ex president Van Buren for the ten hour sistom… his name ought to be Recorded in evry Working Man heart."
…Early in the campaign, Democrats remained confident that their old campaign weapons would suffice, and that the Whigs' demagogy about "Old Tippecanoe" Harrison, the heroic Indian fighter, would flop. "The Logg cabin hard cider and Coon humbugery is doing us a great service every where," Andrew Jackson wrote to Van Buren from his retirement at the Hermitage, "and none more so than in Tennessee." When the Whig chorus swelled ever louder, puzzled Van Buren men responded unavailingly with sweet reason. "The question is not whether Harrison drinks hard cider," William Cullen Bryant remonstrated, "… The question is what he and his party will do if they obtain the power." Bryant may have been right, but he missed the point by a mile.
The Democratic side contributed the only intellectually forceful product of the 1840 campaign, an astonishing, rebellious essay by George Bancroft's discovery, Orestes Brownson, entitled "The Laboring Classes."…
"The Laboring Classes," formally a review of a brief book on Chartism by… Thomas Carlyle, appeared in the Boston Quarterly just as the presidential campaign heated up. In part it was a biting restatement of the radical economic ideas that had become mainstream Democratic principles, directed against "the chiefs of the business community" — "nabobs, reveling in luxury," while "building miniature log cabins, shouting Harrison and 'hard cider.'" Some of the essay's fiercest diatribes pierced through the moral reformism typical of new-school Whigs — "priests and pedagogues," Brownson called them, who "seek to reform without disturbing the social arrangements which render reform necessary." (pp. 497-500)

(Jennie once e-mailed me long portions of Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "I wish I could be a professional transcriber!" she wrote.)

I'm glad I don't live in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — would I have voted after Emancipation & the end of Reconstruction (if I could have voted) for the party of big business and abolition, or the party of slavery and the common man? Today's manichean party system suits me much better. (But NB: There were antislavery Democrats — Van Buren eventually became one — though their star began to wane in 1852. The Whigs collapsed under the pressure of the slavery controversy, and the Republicans, who sprang up in their place, were a motley crew united only by opposition to slavery. They were admirable & admirably effective for a few decades, but they sold out with astonishing speed and thoroughness. I'm about to find out how that happened.) Frederick Lewis Allen calls the Democrats in the 1920s "that coalition of incompatibles." The same could be said of the Whigs.
Here's an interesting contrast: in the US the left-wing party has a more or less continuous genealogy; it's the right-wing party that has collapsed and recast itself again and again (Federalists - Whigs - Republicans). In the UK the opposite is true (Whigs - Liberals - Labour — oder?). The Tories and the Democrats are the two oldest political parties in the world.

Karen complained about having to make collages in English class in tenth grade, and other insults to her intelligence that she endured in high school. Steven: "You turned out all right in spite of that." Karen: "But for years I was filled with rage. I had nightmares about not graduating from high school because I had to fulfill the kindergarten requirement."

I asked them (as I've been asking everyone) what happened to the revolutionary* fervor that animated so many Texans in the 1890s (how can a political tradition vanish without a trace?), & Matthew mentioned the discovery of oil. That's very plausible!

*I didn't know what word to use here. "Populist" has a debased meaning, except as a proper adjective, and Goodwyn (rather perversely) redefines "Progressive" to mean "reactionary." Maybe I should call it "socialist," as their enemies did. (But they can't have objected, since they allied themselves with Eugene Debs!)

In spite of its jargon-filled introduction, The Populist Moment is very good.

I wish I could say the same of Georges Mounin's Storia della Linguistica. In spite of the title, and the publisher (Feltrinelli), this is not a book for the general reader. Mounin seems to think that the point of his book is to suggest directions for future research, and he's pathetically eager to prove that he's done his reading:

Si facevano ricerche qua e là su molti problemi dello stesso tipo: per esempio, quello dell'a indoeuropea, dove appare chiaro l'immobilismo rappresentato dalla teoria schleicheriana dell'antichità del sanscrito. Lo stesso Curtius aveva proposto un principio di soluzione, scartato da Schleicher. Esattamente in questo clima si debbono situare gli articoli di Brugmann e di Osthoff sulle sonore; il primo, nella prefazione, si riferisce, con elogi, del resto, a Scherer e a Leskien.

It sounds like a parody, but it's not. Does it have to be that boring? I don't think so. The first sentence refers to Sanskrit's tendency to turn every vowel into "a," but does he explain that? Of course not! "Then would be some stooping, and I choose never to stoop." He's constantly alluding to things that sound interesting, but he never explains.

I was quite excited about this book at first, because it has a long section on the ancients, the premise being that writing systems tell us a great deal about how people thought about language. It sounds like an obvious point, but so often people date the birth of linguistics to the nineteenth century, or worse, to Saussure. So I was delighted to see an acknowledgement that people had ideas on the subject thousands of years ago, even though they failed to put their ideas into scholarly format. But even this part of the book was a disappointment, because it wasn't illustrated.

Enough. If you know a good book on the history of linguistics, tell me about it.

The Closing of the Western Mind — it made me appreciate Aristotle; his worldliness and even humility. Not that I'm about to go back and read him, but at least now I understand why he's important. It was a shock to find out how quickly Christians changed, from a harshly persecuted minority, into a powerful, power-hungry, greedy engine of oppression. (I was going to say "instrument," but that would be an understatement.) It hardly took twenty years! The Closing of the Western Mind reminded me of another anti-Platonist polemic, From Plato to Derrida, Literature against Philosophy, A Defense of Poetry, by Mark Edmundson. (An excellent book!) Plato to Derrida is about critical theory in universities, Freeman's book is about a state religion that imposed itself by fire and by the sword, but, well, there are similarities. ("Once as tragedy, then again as farce.")
I'm especially interested in intelligent defenses of paganism by people like Symmachus. (Aren't they like defenses of poetry?) There was a very short chapter on Symmachus in Freeman, but he mentions another book entirely devoted to the subject.

Another excellent book was Austerlitz. In fact I can't praise it highly enough; I read it in one gulp, like a diver, and when I lifted my eyes from the page felt disoriented and uncomfortable.
One small point: the owner of the Antikos Bazaar in Terezin, which Austerlitz visits toward the end of the book, is Augustyn Nemecek. (I don't know how to do Czech diacritical marks.) "Nemetzki" means "German" in Russian, so "Nemecek" must mean the same in Czech.

My father nearly got blown up in the 1980 terrorist attack on the Bologna train station. My mother takes credit for saving his life, because she insisted that he leave the city to join us a day before the bombing, which was their wedding anniversary. My father couldn't understand her insistence (he has a terrible memory), and would have liked to stay in the city a day longer to work, but she won him over in the end. Anyway, a few weeks later we were in the station café. I was sitting at a table, and my parents had gone to the counter to get coffees and pastries. Behind me was a red velvet curtain, and I peeked through an opening. I saw a vast, unlit hall, filled with dust and rubble. I let the curtain fall and never said a word about it to my parents. I was convinced that I had seen the bombed waiting room. I know it seems unlikely that it would be separated from the café just by drapery, and that it would ever be neglected by workers or guards, but it seems even less likely that I would have imagined something like that, and the café (which doesn't exist any more) was right next to the waiting room (which does). So it must have been that.
It was such a contrast: on this side the flourescent lights, the clatter of teaspoons on saucers; stillness, dust, and death on the other.

Journey by Moonlight: a turning point in the novel takes place in the train station of Terontola, a train station I know well! (It's a place I never in a million years expected to come across in a book.)

A conversation:
Friend of a friend: "I never read just for pleasure."
Me: "Really? I always read for pleasure."
We soon figured out that we read for the same reasons, and were saying the same thing; different definitions of pleasure.

I spent much of December dragging myself through Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which counts as a magnificent failure. At first I really liked it, but it goes nowhere and is avowedly about nothing, so I soon got impatient (and it's over 300 pages long). The prose style is its great virtue. It's a parody of (nineteenth-century German) academic pedantry that somehow magically turns turgid into baroque; and it was often very very funny. It reminded me of Moby Dick. I think Melville was a fan of Carlyle.
The 1898 illustrations by Edmund J. Sullivan are wonderful.

The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach made a big impression on me; it's a really gripping book. Kaplan gives Brasillach's address (among others), and since I was in Paris when I finished the book, I checked out the building. Naturally, there was nothing in its innocent and cheerful façade to suggest that a vicious fascist, winner of literary prizes, had once lived there. What did I expect? Brasillach lived with his sister and brother-in-law, and someone with his brother-in-law's last name still lives at the address Kaplan gives.

Books:

August
The Botany of Desire (Pollan)
Tintenherz (Funke)
The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Kaplan)
The Mother's Recompense (Wharton)
The Language Police (Ravitch)

September
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
The Closing of the Western Mind (Freeman)
A Little History of the World (Gombrich)
The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris (Pawel)

The Botany of Desire was excellent, so good I wanted to read it out loud, so good I could have turned back to page one as soon as I finished it. (By the way: when I asked for this title in a bookstore, the assistant leered at me. Part of me wanted to laugh & say, "Read the back, you dummy!" But I managed to keep a solemn demeanor.)
Tintenherz was not so good. It pains me to say that, because Funke has her heart in the right place: she evokes the magic of reading very well, and the first chapter was so promising. I won't go into the details, but Tintenherz made clear why in all the great children's books adults are for the most part evil, or, if they're good, they're befuddled, oblivious, helpless. It's a capital mistake to put a strong, capable, good adult at the center of a children's book; it means that the child protagonist never comes into her own.
But I'm glad I've read it, because my students mention it, and because now I can say I've read a 550-page book in German.

The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach was superb. In writing about the novels, Kaplan speaks of Brasillach's characteristic "turn of the century charm and childlike joie de vivre," with WWI as a sudden, incomprehensible parenthesis; his pet notion of "brother enemies," so useful when he wanted to be forgiven by the Resistance figures whom he had hounded and betrayed to the Germans (going so far as to publish addresses of hiding places). One of his novels even features a love triangle involving a Frenchman, a German, and a woman named Catherine. Doesn't this all sound a lot like Jules et Jim? Now I know that movie is based on a different book, but maybe Henri-Pierre Roché was recycling something by Brasillach? I found a website that spoke of Truffaut's "predilection" for literature of the extreme right, and elsewhere I read that the editor Roché worked with had signed the clemency petition. (But that doesn't mean much, since so many men of letters did.)

I bought Gombrich's Little History of the World for my sixth graders. I've been looking for such a book for a while, and I was pleased to find one recommended by Philip Pullman. (And such a satisfying design! Such thick and creamy pages & beautiful woodcut illustrations!) I decided to read a bit to them every class, since xeroxing it would be impractical. The first chapter is a bit abstract, and I was afraid that they would find its extended metaphor for history and memory — dropping a burning scrap of paper down a well, and seeing what it lights up — abstruse or tedious. I was so worried that I'm afraid my voice trembled, and I rushed as I finished the chapter. But when I shut the book Viren exclaimed, "Oh my God, that's such a good book!" Patrick: "It's like he's talking to you!" That's exactly the effect Gombrich aims for, and it charmed me when I read it. But when I read it out loud I suddenly became self-conscious; would they find it hokey and condescending? I'm glad they didn't. Viren even appreciated the style: "He's such a good writer! It's really well-worded."

A few years ago my father began quoting a poem by D'Annunzio, "Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi." It refers to the following legend: some time in the first or second century, people on a ship off the coast of southern Italy heard a voice crying from the land, "Il dio Pan è morto!" Presumably they panicked. I love how the sea is comforting & familiar & the land mysterious & full of portents, & I'm fascinated by anything that has to do with the end of paganism. (Non to mention the following paradox: Christ is sometimes represented as a Pan-like shepherd, & the iconography of the devil clearly has something to do with Pan, or at least with satyrs.) Anyway, my father went so far as to send me a xerox of the poem. It's a vitalist, neo-pagan paean to Pan & the earth's bounty, & reaches its climax in the declaration, "Il Gran Pan non è morto!" I liked it, but couldn't understand my father's fixation (not that one needs an excuse to quote a poem, of course). Well, just a few months ago he told me about his Greek and Latin teacher in high school, who was more or less openly antifascist. At some point during the war he sent his family to live in Florence, which is where they were from, because he feared for their safety; he showed my father his hiding place. One day he enlisted my father to help him carry a load of reeds. (Why reeds?! My father couldn't remember, but it's perfect for the story — almost too perfect.) On the way they stopped at a café whose radio was tuned to the BBC. That's how they heard that the Americans had landed. And the Greek and Latin teacher jumped to his feet and shouted, "Il Gran Pan non è morto!" I like to picture how mystified the people in the bar must have been. And it's nice to think that the Americans landed not so far from where the ominous cry was heard so many centuries ago.

During an air raid my father and some of his friends, like the stupid teenagers they were, went and wandered around in the deserted streets. They came across some German soldiers and fell into conversation with them. "I'm a communist," one of his friends boldly declared, much to my father's consternation. But the German soldiers were not fazed. They talked about their plans for the future: after they'd won the war, they assured the Italians, they would start a revolution. Then the air raid ended, and such confidences seemed once more unthinkable.

Later, to avoid the air raids, my father went to live with his grandmother in the country. One Sunday he was at the local parish house for an afternoon social, and some troops broke in: they'd heard that the priest was hiding someone, and wanted to see if he was a Jew. They made all the young people line up, and one soldier poked his machine gun in my father's stomach; my father seized the muzzle & gently pushed it aside, smiling; the German soldier smiled too; perhaps he was ashamed. The priest's secret guest was not Jewish, so the Germans left without incident. But some time later Fascist militiamen tracked down the same unfortunate man in another nearby parish house, and murdered him: he was a partisan.

Four German soldiers were quartered in my grandmother's house. One was a high officer who had lost his face in the war. He lived in a darkened room and spoke little; his only pleasure was to play chess with my father, and this he did tirelessly, day in, day out. (I suppose my father didn't have much to do either.)

"Il più scaltro," and the most prescient, was a doctor. There was much talk of Hitler's secret weapon: whether it existed, what it was. "I know what Hitler's secret weapon is," the doctor told my father, grinning, and put his gun on the table. "This is it. He's going to shoot himself."

Then there was an officer who was in charge of some Russian soldiers who had agreed to join the German army in exchange for their lives. This man bullied his Russians, and endeared himself to no one else. Finally, there was Heinz Brandt, who became friendly with his hosts and even wrote his address and phone number in my father's German-Italian dictionary. When German troops rounded people up to dig ditches & such this man would hide with the Italians. After the war he came back to visit them, and told them how the bully had met his end. During their retreat, the Germans had to cross the Po in dinghies, because all the bridges had been destroyed. The bully and his Russians commandeered a rowboat, and in the middle of the river the Russians shot him and pushed the body overboard.

Addenda: My uncle says the prisoners were Turkmen, not Russian. And he says that when the Germans and the Turkmen packed up there was a panic because they had counted all their guns, which were kept locked in the credenza, and one was missing. The place was turned upside down, to no avail. In all the commotion one of the Turkmen winked at my uncle and said just above a whisper, "Kapitan kaput," and drew his hand across his neck.

Once a villager took my uncle aside and said, "The next time the bully is in the back garden, stay away from him. We could have killed him the other day, but it was a long shot and you were nearby, and we didn't want to risk hurting you." "He was a friend of the family," my uncle said, "I had no idea he was a partisan."

My uncle told another story when we passed through a small mountain town. "That house belonged to the Such-and-Such family, which grew rich during the occupation. The daughter of the family brazenly sunned herself on the rooftop balcony through the worst of the war, and the partisans would train their viewfinders on her. 'Should I shoot?' they joked." (They never did.)

After reading Hobsbawm's fine essay in The Invention of Tradition I was excited to read his four volumes on 1789-1994. So far I've read the first volume, and was very disappointed. It's the kind of history book that gives you the broad sweep, but don't expect names, dates, or God forbid, events. I couldn't help wondering: who is his ideal reader? Certainly not the expert: it's too vague. And the book is useless as an introduction, because it alludes to events, even very important events, without explaining them. The beginner would stumble around in that miasma of stage directions and throat-clearing. I felt he never got to the point, that what he considered background should have been in the foreground. His approach worked in Industry and Empire, a straightforward work of social and economic history, but it's disastrous if you're looking for political history, or a history of ideas.

Hugh Brogan's Penguin History of the USA, on the other hand, is an excellent introduction, chock-full of details and debates, and never tedious. And he doesn't consider it beneath his dignity to give character sketches, or memorable anecdotes, all of which serve as mental signposts, or a skeleton on which to hang the rest.

Things that move my father to tears (a partial list):

1) The Spanish Republican song with the refrain, "El pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido!" He and I were singing this, and he had to stop. My mother: "Oh Carlo, it happened over 60 years ago!" (Strange words for a historian.) Father: "I know, [sniff], but the Spanish people suffered so much [cough]."

The great-aunt of an erstwhile flatmate of mine was on a Spanish Republican poster urging women to donate blood; up to then it had been thought that women couldn't or shouldn't give blood.

2) The women farm labourers' song with the following words:

Sebben che siamo donne
paura non abbiamo,
e abbiam delle belle buone lingue,
e in lega ci mettiamo.

O, li-o li-o laa, e la lega vincerà
E noialtri lavoratori
siam per la libertà

La libertà non viene
finchè non c'è l'unione,
crumiri col padrone
crumiri col padrone

O, li-o li-o laa, e la lega vincerà
crumiri col padrone
son tutti d'ammazzar.

Except that he always changes the last line to "son tutti da legar," because scabs and bosses maybe should be tied up, but not killed.

3) Once he was telling me the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, and every few sentences he would stop to putter around. I waited expectantly for him to finish the story, and it took me a while to understand what these frequent interruptions were about. Finally he forced himself to finish, coughing and sniffing his way through Simonides's epitaph.
(I have to say that's how I feel right now about the Iliad. It's taking me forever to finish, partly because I don't want them all to die.)

4) In the country graveyard where my great-grandparents are buried there's the tomb of an anarchist who died in Libya or Ethiopia in the 1930s. The last time we visited the cemetery the tombstone was too decayed to read, but my father had memorized the epitaph: "...mourned by friends and family, he died in un'impresa violenta [I can't think of an English word that would convey the sarcasm of impresa], dreaming of a fatherland not of soldiers but of citizens."

5) Once, late at night, we passed Imola, and my father insisted on stopping to read the the words of Andrea Costa, father of Italian socialism, on a plaque in the main square of the city. It was too dark to read the whole thing, but we managed to make out a few words and even those brought a tear or two to my father's eyes. I've actually found the plaque on the internet, and it's a rousing speech. (http://www.er.cgil.it/im/homeimola.nsf/f3800598d0274240c12568c6004d2ca2/a352eb30fe5f182bc12568c7005029f6?OpenDocument) Here's some of it translated:

31 December 1900 - 1 January 1901 It's the dawn of a new century - Toss flowers with full hands - Workers, thinkers, men: if the century that's dying saw the unity and independence of nations, the coming century will see their federation. If the impulses toward emancipation of the working classes were ruthlessly crushed in blood from 1830 to 1871, the next generation will see their triumph. If woman lies still in centuries-old obbrobrio ['opprobrium' doesn't sound quite right], if the child lacks bread and education, if the old person finds no roof or rest, provide, o new century, for the redemption of woman, the protection of the child, the care of the elderly. ... Onward, citizens! ... Let us throw to the century that did not witness our birth but will see our death our living hearts, and thinking, working, struggling, loving, strong in our sense of destiny, by science enlightened, give, oh! let us give to all children of men work, freedom, justice, peace.

Politicians don't give speeches like that nowadays. Is that a bad thing? I think it is. It's a vague speech (but by no means so vague as to be acceptable to all) and perhaps that kind of rhetoric can become manipulative, but these are mealy-mouthed excuses. Besides, it might be easier to spot bullshit in magniloquence than in its opposite. (I know that sounds paradoxical.) But more importantly, one has to take the risk. People need to be reminded now and then (especially now) what politics are really about, what's worth fighting for.

When my father was very young his grandmother, a pious lady much admired for her charity, admonished him not to play with the children of farm labourers. I think that goes some way towards explaining why he became a historian of agriculture, and founded a museum of peasant culture (http://www.provincia.bologna.it/cultura/vsmeraldi/)

He has some good war stories which I'll post here in the coming months; I don't want to forget them.

My father recently went to California for the first time in nearly forty years. "What were your impressions?" I asked. "Well, California has changed a lot. In 1968 I read a book at the library of UC Berkeley. This time, I ordered that same book, and — they didn't have it!" I later repeated this exchange in my father's presence, and he objected: "That's not what I said." But it is. (This is very typical of my father.)

I re-read what I wrote above about time passing and I couldn't help remembering a friend's parody, I can't remember of what: "I was brushing my teeth, and suddenly I thought, 'This is life!' and sat down on the edge of the bathtub and burst into tears." And a friend who had edited her high school's literary magazine said half the submissions were exactly like that.

There’s a non-fiction version of this so-near-so-unreachable. Last spring, while idly googling my mother’s unusual family name, I came across the Polish Business Directory of 1929. There were my poor great-uncles, murdered in World War II:

Mojz.
Joz.
Kaminiskiego 3
Grocery Items-Retail
Kolonjalne artykuly-Detal

It sent shivers down my spine: an official record, perhaps the only remaining record, of their existence, beyond family knowledge (which, now that my grandfather is dead, amounts just to their names and occupations). Even Yad Vashem had never heard of them.

It’s unbearable how inexorably the past slips away from us. I cried on New Year’s Eve 1981, because all the festivities smacked of ingratitude to good old 1980. It’s incredible that within my short lifetime everyone who could remember World War I has died. In Oxford colleges at Armistice memorial services one still recites, “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them, we will remember them.” For how much longer? But ending the tradition would seem like a betrayal.

I own a xeroxed volume of the private memoirs of a woman who was born in 1896 and died in 1993. She once said to me, “Munich was such an exciting city before the war!” Really? In the 1930s? It was hard to believe. Later, after she died and I learned how old she really was, I realized she had meant before World War I. I still can’t believe I knew someone that old; and I never knew it.
In her memoirs she mentions having tea with Hans Richter, which puts me at three degrees of separation from Brahms, and eight from Bach (Brahms - Schumann - Mendelssohn - Mendelssohn’s great-aunt Sarah - Bach’s Berlin son). We could all have tea in heaven.