Anatomy of Melancholy V

As I slink wearily over the keyword to produce this post,
With nary a spark of the human vigor of our Enlightenment forefathers,
My mind a broken shadow of a machine, vaguely recollecting images of coherent ideas now shattered.
I dreamt in confusion of old breasts and stale Christmas candies,
I gave a go at subconscious self-abandon, but my brain and vital power were not in it.
To sleep, to wallow, to procure an abacus and tally the days till death,
Is the only remaining instinct.
There are no prospects for productive action,
No universes, no signifiers to be revealed.
I am perhaps dangerous, but only to myself, and only in an absurdist state of existence,
Which we may however inhabit.
Don't tempt me, don't tempt me, don't tempt me.
But of course you won't.
Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Cancun, Ibiza, Johannesburg, Bombay, St Petersburg, Beograd.
Albany, Winnipeg, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Newcastle, Glasgow, Gdansk, Kaunas, Vichy.
All offer the equivalent life, the equivalent temptations to me.
I overheard a woman say she wanted to quit her job and go to the Burning Man Festival.
If I quit my own job and went to the Burning Man Festival I would not even have any fun there.
If I checked into a Super 8 in Rochester and pulled the curtains tight with the goal of sleeping in I would be stone awake at 7:30am with nothing to do.
Whether I pay for bottle service on 5th Avenue or go to $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon night in Crown Point,
Whether I go to the concert or the exhibition or the film festival of the Earnest and the Trite,
My own proper crowd, with our shared secret knowledges and confidential intrigues, is never to be found there.
It doesn't exist.

Now that I have had my little amusement let us move onto Burton:

"...it is better to sharpen toothpicks than to beg the favour of the great with literary productions." This is true.

On the neglect of learning by the contemporary European aristocracy: "Thus they reason, and are not ashamed to let mariners, prentices, and the basest servants be better qualified than themselves. In former times, kings, princes, and emperors were the only scholars, excellent in all faculties...Julius Caesar mended the year, and writ his own Commentaries: '(from Latin--Lucan) In the midst of warfare he found time to study the stars, the heavens, and the upper world.' I would write out the Latin if I felt I understood it and had some sense of the literary quality of the passage. In most instances however, I do not.

A ten year's lawsuit, inevitably unhappy for the personage referenced by Burton, is described as "as long as Troy's siege".

There is a whole section devoted to Bad Nurses, the premise, on the authority of "Favorinus, that eloquent philosopher", being "that there is the same property in milk as in the seed", which provides several good anecdotes. Cato, for instance, "...for some such reason would make his servants' children suck upon his wife's breast, because by that means they would love him and his the better, and in all likelihood agree with them." There is also an unnamed "...Queen of France, a Spaniard by birth (I don't recognize this person offhand), that was so precise and zealous in this behalf (viz., that a mother should suckle her own baby), that when in her absence a strange nurse had suckled her child, she was never quiet till she had made the infant vomit it up again".

Burton is those authors who is fond of making a very long argument on behalf of some point, to which the average reader will long have submitted, and then switching and making an equally long and persuasive argument against it.

Burton seems fascinated by the idea of Iceland. He refers to it a lot.

"...milk in gold cups, wine in silver, beautiful maidens at his beck..." When the rich man goes a-visiting.

On the learned and noble but impecunious man: "'If he speak, what babbler is this?', his nobility without wealth is more worthless than the seaweed on the beach, and he not esteemed." The expression and the expansive understanding of man's unhappy lot--not much is neglected--is what makes for the appeal of these otherwise long-acknowledged truths.

There is much that is wise in the depiction of the lives of slaves and servants, but I am going to pass over it because taken out of context the examples come over as crass and gratuitous, I think.

"A Sybarite of old, as I find it registered in Athenaeous, supping at the public tables in Sparta, and observing their hard fare, said it was no marvel if the Lacedaemonians were valiant men; 'for his part, he would rather run upon a sword-point (and so would any man in his wits) than live with such base diet, or lead so wretched a life'."

"If we may give credit to Munster, amongst us Christians in Lithuania they voluntarily mancipate and sell themselves, their wives and children to rich men, to avoid hunger and beggary; many make away themselves in this extremity". My people.

These last few examples are all from the section "Poverty and Want". Continuing in that vein:

"Dante, that famous Italian poet, by reason his clothes were but mean, could not be admitted to sit down at a feast." The citation for this is Gomesius (no, I haven't heard of him either; he does turn up on internet searches on pages that are basically catalogues of antique books, but I don't see any casual information about him). This (Dante) besides being perhaps the greatest Western poet of all time other than Homer, is the personage Ruskin called "the central man of the world". Yet even he was unrecognizable as such in inferior clothes, which is to me really a major point to be grasped here.

I don't like to recount atrocities, which sorts of things people know to happen even if they usually suppress that knowledge in their conscious daily life. But I suppose I need to remind myself of what people can really be like more frequently than I do. Because even if Burton's anecdotes are not completely accurate, one knows similar actions of the sort happened sometime.

"Alexander commanded the battlements of houses to be pulled down, mules and horses to have their manes shorn off, and many common soldiers to be slain, to accompany his dear Hephaestion's death; which is now practised amongst the Tartars, when a great Cham dieth, ten or twelve thousand must be slain, men and horses, all they meet..." This is from the section "Loss of Friends".

"Conradus the emperor would not touch his new bride till an astrologer had told him a masculine hour".

The Anatomy of Melancholy III

The Anatomy of Melancholy II was a weak post, with little elaboration or personal input on my part, so I am going to take up III straightway as a corrective to that barren effort.

Fairy sightings: "Pauli, in his description of the city of Barcino in Spain, relates how they have been familiarly seen near that town, about fountains and hills." There is lots of stuff like this throughout the book.

"...prodigies frequently occur at the deaths of illustrious men...as in the Lateran Church in Rome, the Popes' deaths are foretold by Sylvester's tomb." The tomb of Sylvester II (999-1003) is still marked by a memorial, which dates from 1910, in this church. According to this informative web page with regard to relics, this monument "is said to 'cry' before a pope dies (its marble becomes moist)."

"Men's miseries, calamities, and ruins are the devil's banqueting dishes."--Lactantius. To be honest, the ideas at work in most of these quotations are at such a remove from my usual thought processes that I am hard put to say much of anything about them. As they are so different and imaginative after a fashion however, I like to have such expressions around me to a degree.

Stories of possession: "A nun did eat a lettuce without grace or signing it with the sign of the cross, and instantly possessed...Durand...relates that he saw a wench possessed in Bononia with two devils, by eating an unhallowed pomegranate, as she did afterwards confess, when she was cured by exorcisms." Bononia appears to be the Roman name for several different cities, including Bologna, Italy, Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France, Vidin, Bulgaria and Banostor, Serbia. I am guessing Durand was referring the one in France. Burton is obviously fascinated by any incident or story which introduces to human life some element outside of ordinary existence, the cause both of the interest and the invention I suspect he would take to be Melancholy. The section on palm-reading and astrology went over my head because I was unfamiliar with and could not get a good grasp of the terms.

Witches are said to have carnal copulation with the devil, after which their brains are crazed. The devil of course being the ultimate bad-boy alpha male.

"...in all ages there should be (as there usually is) once in six hundred years a transmigration of nations, to amend and purify their blood, as we alter seed upon our land...to alter for good our complexions, which were much defaced with hereditary infirmities, which by our lust and intemperance we have contracted." Well, here we are. Burton was looking for the Northern Goths and Vandals, innocuous, and free from riot and diseases, to come and reinvigorate the faltering stock of mainstream Europe. There is a lot of circulation of peoples in our time of course. I am not sure yet which carry the freshest and most vigorous reinforcements of blood however. I don't think it is supposed to be people like however, and indeed, I am almost certainly a double-barreled transmitter of the melancholy gene.

"...if a drunken man gets a child, it will never likely have a good brain, as Gellius argues..." I love to think of myself as a drunken man--it would give some texture and the possibility of unpredictability to my existence--but I really have not been one in a long time, and compared to serious drinkers, never.

The chapter on Bad Diet as a cause of melancholy is one of my favorites in the whole book, as numerous of my favorite foods, and the damage they do to one's body and mind, are investigated at length. For example: "Carp is a fish of which I do not know what to determine. Franciscus Bonsuetus accounts it a muddy fish. Hippolytus Salvianus, in his book de piscium natura et praeparatione, which was printed at Rome in folio, 1554, with most elegant pictures, esteems carp no better than a slimy, watery meat." They eat a lot of carp in the Czech Republic, especially fried--it is even the traditional Christmas dinner. There are ponds stocked with them all over the country. For home dining the custom is to bring home a live one--and they are rather large fish--as we do with lobster, and have it swim around in the bathtub until dinner time, at which one kills it by clubbing it in the head with a mallet. My impression is that having this huge fish swimming around in your tub makes it less of a bother to beat it to death, if one is queasy about such things, by the same principle that one doesn't have a problem setting traps for or setting loose a cat to feast on the mice that share one's abode. You are highly motivated to get it out of there.

"Among herbs to be eaten I find gourds, cucumbers, cole-worts, melons, disallowed, but especially cabbage." What? Cabbage is bad too? here is a poem, translated from Plautus:

"Like other cooks I do not supper dress,
That put whole meadows into a platter,
And make no better of their guests than beeves,
With herbs and grass to feed them fatter."

Another translated poem, from an author called Crato, on the black Bohemian beer of middle Europe:

"Nothing comes in so thick,
Nothing goes out so thin,
It must needs follow then
The dregs are left within."

"Venus omitted produceth like effects...some from bashfulness abstained from venery , and thereupon became very heavy and dull; and some others that were very timorous, melancholy, and beyond all measure sad. Oribasius...speaks of some, 'that if they do not use carnal copulation, are continually troubled with heaviness and headache; and some in the same case by intermission of it'...Villanovanus...saith. he 'knew many monks and widows grievously troubled with melancholy, and that from this sole cause'."


"Felix Plater, in the first book of his observations, tells a story of an ancient gentleman in Alsatia, that 'married a young wife, and was not able to pay his debts in that kind for a long time together, by reason of his several infirmities: but she, because of this inhibition of Venus, fell into a horrible fury, and desired every one that came to see her, by words, looks, and gestures, to have to do with her..." Among the charms of Burton is that he writes as if he is talking to himself, oblivious to any kind of outside audience, which has the effect for the reader who can find some commonality with him of having a greater intimacy than is usual. It also has the effect of making all of the incidents and reactions that appear in the book seem as if they could happen to anybody at any time, and in an atmosphere of exalted intelligence such as is extremely rare in real life but is strongly desired by the most desperate readers.

We move on to another favorite chapter, that on Bad Air. This sentence regarding the effects of heat is nothing I can really gloss on, but it is the sort of sweeping anecdote packed illustration of a facet of human experience that gives a lot of pleasure, (even where it depicts things that are actually extremely unpleasant): "At Aden in Arabia, as Lodovicus Vertomannus relates in his travels, they keep their markets in the night, to avoid extremity of heat; and in Ormus (located in what is now southeastern Iran, on the Persian Gulf), like cattle in a pasture, people of all sorts lie up to the chin in water all day long. At Braga in Portugal, Burgos in Castile, Messina in Sicily, all over Spain and Italy, their streets are most part narrow, to avoid the sunbeams. The Turks wear great turbans, to refract the sunbeams; and much inconvenience that hot air of Bantam in Java yields to our men that sojourn there for traffic; where it is so hot, 'that they that are sick of the pox lie commonly bleaching in the sun, to dry up their sores'."

We are reminded that cold air is almost as bad as hot however, and the list of places condemned for having air both cold and bad is too long to fruitfully include in the post here. Lithuania was among those locales singled out however, a very rare reference in literature to the land of 25% of my ancestors. If you follow food trends at all, you have probably observed that the Mediterrenean diet, especially favored by persons with ancestral roots in those countries, wins a good deal of approval. Unfortunately the Baltic Diet favored by my generations of my people--centered around whitefish, sausage products, heavy breads, beer by the hogshead, cabbage, potatoes, cream sauces, etc--does not seem likely to be embraced by the global foodie community any time soon. Which is kind of a shame.

Sports Old-Fogeyism, Part II

My God it takes me a long time to write even a single little post on nothing.


The 1977 NFC Divisional Playoffs. Minnesota Vikings vs. the Los Angeles Rams at the L.A. Coliseum. Rain and mud. The underdog Vikings, being in a state of general decline from their mid-70s peak, and playing without Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton, who had broken his leg a few weeks earlier, won 14-7. I remember watching this game live. I was seven years old, about a week shy of eight. It was the Saturday between Christmas and New Year's. My grandparents were having a cocktail party which in my memory was quite well attended, at least 15 people or so. Even if one had that many friends nowadays, he would be hard-pressed to get such a turnout on that weekend. The guests were almost all old full-blooded ethnic Lithuanians, and such they were not particularly riotous, though they all drank and smoked at least. An old great-uncle who had palled around with Babe Ruth in a former life was there, though he was on his last legs at that party, and was hooked up to an oxygen tank; I'm sure it was the last time I ever saw him. The game was on in the background--sporting events were always on in the background at such functions in my youth. I was excited because I was rarely allowed to watch the 4pm game at home. At age seven, I regarded this as something cool people who lived in more laid-back households got to do, even if I would not have been able to express it in this precise terminology.

Rewatching some of this game 33 years later, along with some other vintage footage that is up on Youtube, I cannot but say that I miss these old days of football, especially the media coverage of it--doubtless if I could remember 1961 or 1950 I would lament them even more, but '77 has become, in relation to the present, quaint enough to be lamented too. Yes, the players are inferior, extremely so in certain notable instances, but the atmosphere surrounding the '77 game looks a lot more fun. Though complained about at the time too, everything--the tickets, the stadiums, the salaries, the groundskeeping, the television contracts, the joie de vivre of the fans--has only become ever more expensive, more extravagant, more contrived and more deadly serious with the passing of time. In 1977 the players' bodies, the hype, the luxury, even the personality of the fans, were still somewhat in line with the scale of what I would regard as normal life. But I have written about all of this before...

The abysmal quality of the field in this game is unbelievable. It goes without saying that nobody involved with even serious high school football would submit to playing in this kind of muck nowadays--maybe some Class C schools in Maine wouldn't be able to see any other solution and just deal with it. Otherwise all the good coaches and players would be indignant, and the wannabes would feign it, hapless lower-level employees responsible for the upkeep of the field would be publicly berated or even fired. For a while there were still a few old-timer broadcasters still around--even John Madden to a certain extent made one of this group--who would have downplayed the complaints about playing on a muddy field with poor footing, but adherents of this attitude are almost all gone now.

The quarterback play in this game is atrocious by current standards. The Vikings backup QB, Bob Lee, who mercifully only had to throw about ten passes the entire game, literally does not look like he has a skill set much broader than mine when he tries to run around and throw the ball more than five yards downfield. The Rams QB, Pat Haden, who was a Rhodes Scholar and college standout at USC, was supposed to be better, a rising star even, but he stunk the joint out in this game too. Mentally soft, as legend has it, he would go on the next year to choke in an even more humiliating fashion in a 28-0 loss to the Cowboys in the NFC championship game in the southern California sunshine which effectively ended his career. While the field conditions made passing perhaps especially difficult in this game, watching footage from other games of the same period played in decent weather is to be no less struck by how amateurish the passing game is vis-a-vis today. In some ways it makes for a more exciting game, as the risk of an interception is considerably higher than it is now, and a successful long pass play takes on the character of something of a minor miracle.

The commentators on this broadcast are the legendary Vin Scully and some guy who sounds like he broke into the business on Hee Haw and whom I have no memory of ever hearing again after this game. I must confess that for most of my life I detested Vin Scully, though he is practically sainted nowadays as one of the two or three most intelligent and greatest sportscasters of all time. My youthful animosity towards him came about mainly due to his association with and clear favoritism for the Dodgers, who I hated, and, like many people on the east coast at that time, I loathed and feared everything that was too blatantly and proudly from California generally, the Golden State then being perceived to be the ascendant, dynamic place, while we, who had formerly been the center of American life, were in terminal decline. (I realize that many people of a certain age now regard New York in the 70s to have been culturally in a golden age as well, though as I was under the influence in those days of people who had partied there during the Gatsby era and not spent any significant time there at all since the 50s, my impression was that the age of Studio 54 and the burned out Bronx represented a significant comedown from that city's former grandeur). My opinion of Scully is coming around, mainly as the result of much thoughtful and heartfelt writing extolling him that I have read in the last few years, his marvelous poetic powers of description, the classical smoothness and fluency of his American English speech that elevates the experience of the game, his nightly providing the Los Angeles metropolitan area with not merely the binding quality of a shared experience, but something almost resembling a soul, which latter would be a most impressive accomplishment indeed. Also he is in his 80s now, the Dodgers have been a mediocre and insignificant team for the last 20 years, I have become something of an adult; all of which has tempered my erstwhile visceral dislike of the him, though I don't think I will ever become one of his more fervent admirers.

On the other hand, this game also features my all-time favorite football coach, and maybe my favorite coach in any sport, Bud Grant. There hasn't been anybody remotely as cool as this guy in football in decades. In a playoff game, on the road in a monsoon with an undermanned team, an ulcer-inducing scenario for the typical coach, Bud Grant is not yelling, pacing, scowling, stalking, looking worried, looking confused or otherwise making a spectacle of himself. With only the hood of his windbreaker being pulled up acknowledging the downpour he is standing in, his expression and body language convey both intelligence and unflappability, the sense being, 'I know what I'm doing and I very well may win this game; if I do lose this particular game however, the overall quality of my life, with which I am genuinely at peace (and within which I have developed certain important mental faculties to a degree sufficient to make an informed determination), will not be significantly affected'. Unlike say, Phil Jackson, who states all this more or less directly and therefore convinces one it is actually insincere, Bud Grant never expressed his philosophy, or much of anything else, directly. I am projecting based upon what I detect.

Another odd thing about watching game footage from the 70s is that the gap in 'athleticism' between black and white players appears smaller than in any other era--that is to say, the white players generally look like they belong on the field, and many of the clearly better players even on defense are white, and no one seems to consider this unusual yet. In the 60s, there were often only two or three black players on the field at any given time who, usually being elite talents, really stood out athletically (think Jim Brown or Gale Sayers running on the nearly all-white defenses of their era). In recent years the reverse has become true, especially on defense, where white players stand out noticeably, and are frequently perceived as doing so in a negative sense with regard to speed, strength, etc, even when this is not necessarily the case. But in the 70s there was almost a kind of equilibrium reached, where many white non-quarterbacks were athletically competitive with the top black players. This was also true, albeit to a lesser extent, in basketball.

I had wanted to do even more stuff but this post has to go to press. Ridiculous.

My Antonia--Part 2

There is a notorious and horrible story in the first part of the book involving an incident with a Russian sledding party that was set upon by wolves that resulted in a couple of men's having to flee their village and emigrate to Nebraska. Apart from the horrors of the story itself, it struck me as an illustration of the dangers that can exist when people are dependent on animals (i.e., the horses' reaction to the wolves) rather than machines, which I had never really considered before.

Chapter IX: "Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bartender, a miner, had wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it...they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day."

Chapter XIII: "All day the storm went on...That afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter shop; the men brought in their tools and made two great wooden shovels with long handles." This is what I should do the next time one of my mass-produced cheap plastic shovels breaks. I go through a lot of them. I don't seem to have the woodworking instinct--I have no idea how one would go about doing such a thing--but oh wouldn't certain people be impressed if they found out I had made my own shovels? Well, probably not actually.

Chapter XIV: On the prospect of taking one of the horses out for a hard ride in a bad winter to take food to a starving family: "This is no time to be over-considerate of animals."

Chapter XV: "It was impossible not to admire his frank, manly faith." This passage I evidently found inspiring, and thought it was a excellent reminder of the real benefits of reading, that it helps to keep us in some contact with various heights attained by the human spirit as well as intellect, etc.

Chapter XIX: Opening paragraph about the corn fields of Kansas and Nebraska being "one of the great economic facts...which underlie all the activities of men, in peace or war" is a good one. I am sure all men and women who are not of an utterly sour disposition like to read beautiful, optimistic accounts of their own country and people.

Book 2, Chap. II: "With Charley, who was not interested in business, but was already preparing for Annapolis, Mr Harling was very indulgent." The Great Books program not having yet been instituted at SJC at this time, I presume 'Annapolis' refers to the Academy. I like how that is what is offered to a young man as an alternative to business. Really, as hard as it is, they ought to be bred up to something. I wasn't bred up to anything, and it does put one in a rather hard state in one's 30s and 40s. I have four boys myself now, and I really need to use my noggin to try to figure out what ought to be, or even if anything can be, made of them according to the somehow highly stringent requirements of the current world.

Chapter VI: "I can remember how glad I was when there happened to be a light in the chuch, and the painted glass window shone out at us as we came along the frozen street." Memories of youth in an old frozen town! Even decrepit middle age has its charms in such towns, but to be young, and I imagine especially to be young and beautiful in such a place, imagining yourself in your current state of greatness both realized and still waiting eagerly to be tapped as formed in large part by the vagaries of the climate, now that is a cause for warm and happy sentiments!

Chapter VII. A black singer passes through town. The description of him, alas, fails the racial sensitivity test: "It was the soft, amiable Negro voice...with the note of docile subservience in it. He had the Negro head too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have been repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy." Otherwise, the importance of music and pianos in the life of this isolated outpost is positively well-conveyed in this chapter.

Same chapter: "...he thought his wife a wonderful woman; he knew that without her he would hardly be more than a clerk in some other man's hotel." This is more or less what people say about me, if they bother to say anything at all.

Chapter IX. Now we are getting into high school and dances and desiring people and all that, which never fails to get me into a lather too. Now it is no secret, and is pretty obvious to anyone reading the book in our enlightened times, that Willa Cather is solidly of the lesbian persuasion, an issue she handled somewhat ingeniously in this novel by making her narrator a male. While in the author's imagination it is probably safe to assume that the sturdy farm girls the narrator prefers to the delicate, less physically active daughters of the local professional class tend more toward the stoutish, butchish side than most straight males have a taste for, it is not written in such a way that one cannot project a very attractive idea of one's own upon the descriptions of these girls that are given:

"All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living...to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school."

"When one danced with them (the more pampered high school girls) their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing--not to be disturbed." I frequently had a similar sensation on the rare occasions when I could get girls to dance with me.

"...sometimes a young fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating of his father's bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in her short skirt and striped stockings." Oo la la! I can't even decide which one I would want first!

Although Willa Cather was not an immigrant, this book is largely an immigrant story; they have the energy, the drive, they are for the most part the people who are in the ascendant in the book. I admit I am a sucker for a good, positive immigrant story, as long as with the contrast between the hard working, optimistic newcomers and the spoiled, lazy, ignorant native population is kept to a modicum. Unfortunately my own immigrant relations, the ones anybody can remember anyway, largely Lithuanian, seem to have been dull as dust, and, while hard-working and well-behaved enough, there was nothing especially spectacular about them. They were not vibrant, in other words, which is one of the qualities immigrants are said to be continually contributing to American life, which would otherwise be stagnant and lifeless, though probably still functional. My grandparents and great-grandparents went straight to stagnant and functional, skipping vibrant altogether.

Chapter XI. Here is the money-lender who took in Swedish serving-girls, which sounds like the kind of thing I would not mind doing myself: "He was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had lived in his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had taken to Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted her. He still visited her." Wow.

Chapter XII. This would have been me in Red Cloud, Nebraska, circa 1890: "...often went down to see the night train come in, and afterward sat awhile with the disconsolate telegrapher who was always hoping to be transferred to Omaha or Denver, 'where there was some life'. He was sure to bring out his pictures of actresses and dancers. He got them with cigarette coupons, and nearly smoked himself to death to possess these desired forms and faces."

1 more short post on this outstanding book.

Ruskin--Part VIII

I took a week off because I was busy and also because I am hoping that a longer gestation between posts will make the writing here better than it has been lately. It probably won't, but one must try.

The selections under consideration today are from the chapter titled "The Savageness of Gothic Architecture", savageness here by the way being understood in a mostly positive and superior sense.

Ruskin tended to understand works of art, and intelligence and stupidity in general, as the product of a particular society as a whole. Individuals such as craftmen--carvers, stone cutters, etc, are not regarded as having intelligence or stupidity unique to themselves, but insofar as their society is generally wise or foolish, whether it has made them, in his words, "tools... or men", by men seeming to mean people capable of imagination, and serious consideration of their, and by extension Man's place in the universe. He did not think much of his own society's prospects for producing anything beautiful or otherwise elevated, but this is the case with all men who find life as it is actually lived by real people discomforting and a great comedown from the contemplation of Art.

"It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves." Most of us are of course so far gone from any tangible sensation of what being a fully realized sentient human being in the classic sense is now that I think it has become almost intellectually impossible to imagine a form of life in which one's existential longings might realistically be made manifest. I'm sure I don't know what mine might even be.

"It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure." Ruskin's father was a wealthy wine merchant and the author himself never had to work out of material need. A society in which most men took pleasure in their work and, I would think by extension, in their stations, would I think by necessity have to be rather primitive, which I think is what Ruskin believes, and it certainly seems that he is willing enough to see modern civilization exploded, though he himself actually found a suitable occupation for himself in it as an intellectual and art critic, professions which only spring up in the inferior sophisticated, cultivated types of societies that follow the purer manifestations of civilization and improperly utilize the powers and energies of the human mind.

This topic is of great importance to me, since I don't really work, either in the classical sense of doing something expertly that is the culmination of a long, meticulous process of mental development and acculturation that enhances and dignifies myself and my society, or in the modern sense of economics as a global talent competition for which the winners are rewarded money, status, and power (it is some indication of how cognitively-oriented the new economy is that sex doesn't appear to be the same motivating factor for ambitious young strivers [even younger politicians seem to be exempt from this compulsion, aside perhaps from my contemporary mayor Kilpatrick of Detroit] as it seems to have been in, say, the 1950s. The internet is full of speculation as to why Bill Gates and other technology billionaires don't seem to have a lot of casual sexual affairs which surely would be available to them ). Another concern of mine, which has sort of played itself out in my own life, is that I am descended from groups--Irish and Lithuanian Catholics--that are not traditionally known for excelling in the most esteemed and lucrative professions, i.e. business, medicine, law, science and math, etc. The Irish are traditionally most renowned for excelling at, as far as I can see, literature, music, drinking, the priesthood, and being policemen and firemen. Around 1920 they were regarded as being gifted in sports, particularly football, baseball, boxing, and running, in all of which however they were eclipsed by blacks or hispanics when those sports became integrated. They have some skill at politics, though aside from the usual exceptions that can always be found for anything they seem to be pretty mediocre to inept at governing when compared with English, Germanic or even the better Italian politicans. People of Irish Catholic descent appear to be seriously underrepresented in mathematical and science-based fields, which especially on the internet and in Asia is all a lot of people seem to consider genuine learning nowadays. The male occupations on that side in my own family line include history teacher, chronically unemployed alcoholic and bad check passer (this guy was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania), pro golfer (this was my great-grandfather, back in the 1930s), sweatshop workers (these were the immigrants). Among my uncles there was a radio sportscaster (back in the 50s/60s), a guy who drove a newspaper truck, a guy who owned a garage, numerous people who had union jobs with the Philadelphia transit authority. Oddly there were no priests or nuns, though there were quite a few spinster aunts straight out of Joyce (and about his age) who lived in humble circumstances--tiny apartments or rooms, scanty meals, the same clothes for decades--into their 80s and 90s. By the way if you read Joyce or other Irish writers, the impression one gets of Irish economic activity is that 1) there isn't much of it and 2) no one is really exerting himself too much to get things going. I know the Republic has been doing better lately but my impression was that a lot of that was the result of foreign companies setting up offices which finally provided a lot of jobs, which had chronically been in short supply in that nation. Most people do seem to have abandonded some of their old drinking habits though (i.e. in place of working) which is impressive to me. I did not think a problem that entrenched in the culture could be changed that quickly.

As to the Lithuanians I of course know much less about them. Their most prominent talent on the global level, rather surprisingly, seems to be in basketball, where they have won several bronze medals at the Olympics, an impressive feat for a nation with 3 million people. They are a tall people, with proportionally a lot of 7-footers, and they have also proven to be faster and less clumsy on the court than they look. Johnny Unitas, the great quarterback of the Baltimore Colts, was a Lithuanian-American, and was also considered somewhat unathletic because his gait looked funny. I was under the impression that Chuck Bednarik, the greatest Philadelphia Eagle of all time who once nearly killed Frank Gifford with a hit, was Lithuanian as well, but he may have been Polish. Lithuanian 15-year olds have the lowest obesity rate in the world, at 0.2% (When I was 15 I was 6'3" and weighed 145 pounds, so I appear to have inherited this body type. Of course I am much heavier now). They are also right up there with Finland depending on what year the statistics are from for having the highest suicide rate, and the Lithuanians I have known in America are a pretty dour lot, so I'm guessing there is a natural bent towards what American norms would define as depression. There seem to be no famous Lithuanians in the pan-European sense in any intellectual field, though I am sure they have their poets (every nation has its poets). The modern nation is somewhat famed for its amber jewelry, amber being one of the few things found in great abundance there, and my impression is that there is an active mafia-like component to the society, which latter surprises me given the comatose temperaments of nearly all of my Lithuanian-descended relatives. My immigrant forebear was a tailor, which is a noble profession, and one I can see myself having been competent at if I had been brought up to it. The American descendants have been advertising men, other variety of travelling salesmen, office clerks. The older members of this line were quite good at tinkering with tools and mechanical apparatuses, which my Irish relatives showed no proclivity for whatsoever. I still don't see what direction to follow. It is of little concern to me personally at this point, but there are the children to pressure. And one must pressure them a little or they will have scant hope of making anything or themselves, right?

There is a long passage about the lower classes of men knowing and accepting their places and performing the duties these entail that is fairly elegantly laid out, but is not insisted upon with such uncontestable superiority of language, argument, tone as to be convincing to those who most need the lesson in Ruskin's eyes:

"...to obey another man, to labor for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery...Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him--the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant who, 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his chief?--as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, 'Another for Hector!'...therefore, in all ages and all countries, reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint, but rejoicingly; and famine, and peril, and sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave not less than the men who received them..." Wow. I can see this though, so long as the men are able to retain some sense, or some illusion, that the chief really does partake of a greatness that they do not, and 2) that the chief, this great being, nonetheless knows them and loves them, really loves them. Many people seem to have felt this even going into World War I. Books and movies from the countries of the former Hapsburg empire dealing with this period almost always include at least one character, if they aren't primarily about such a character, who just loves the emperor and the royal family, is motivated by his affection for them, and is only disillusioned at the very last minute, when it is already too late. And it is true that these characters attain a kind of nobility in their error that is hardly to be attained by our modern ironists. Whenever one of these mass shootings occurs, especially at a college, with little apparent resistance on the part of the men present, there is a great deal of commentary from some circles on the cowardice and general lack of manly spirit in young men today. A part of this derives from the circumstance that a lot of middle-class young men are not prepared to act themselves in a crisis, and this is a catastrophe, but I think a component of this problem is that there is more of a disconnect in our society than in traditional ones between the men who would be natural leaders, or chiefs, and the men who need to be led, have their confidence shored up, etc. The leaders don't really want to be bothered with the care of lesser men anymore either, and the lesser men naturally balk at the idea--as one must in our society to a certain extent, even if the posture is illusory--that they are inadequate and need considerable guidance not to disgrace themselves, and as a consequence the social fabric and the culture start to fray. Still, there seem to be far fewer specimens of the classic leader type, at least who would be capable of leading people of high intelligence, than there ought to be in a population the size of our current one; or perhaps I just haven't met them.

"All professions should be liberal, and there should be less pride felt in peculiarity of employment, and more in excellence of achievement." Next idea.

"...no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art...I believe there has only been one man who would not acknowledge this necessity, and strove always to reach perfection, Leonardo (picture above); the end of his vain effort being merely that he would take ten years to a picture, and leave it unfinished."