Tag Archives: Italy

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: A Taxi in Italy

Oddly, I was in Italy again this week. I say oddly because, as chance would have it, I tagged along, once again, with my friend who attends those philological congresses. As a novelist and blogger, I am there just to listen and learn. I won’t bore you with the pedantic-sounding details of this particular congress, rich as it was in variant readings and passages in manuscripts that have been interpreted, reinterpreted, and often misinterpreted from antiquity to the present. “Does this Latin word end in –es or that word in –is or the same word in –os?” These are, quite literally, the kinds of things that are debated at such congresses, and add to this that there is much consternation over the new interpretation.

To make an example of what I just wrote: imagine that sentence was fragmentary and all that was left in a manuscript was something that vaguely looked like, “… over the new interpretation.” Now imagine that it was (of course) handwritten, and imagine, too, that I have, as I do, very illegible handwriting and, two thousand years from now, or even less, say a year from now, two people stumbled upon this fragmentary, seemingly hastily scribbled, sentence. One interpreter of it might say, well, “I think that it says, ‘aver the new interpretation.’ That sounds like something H.R. Jakes would write” (assuming it was even agreed upon that I had written it). Then that person might add, “He likes archaic-sounding language, and his use of ‘aver’ on this occasion fits the bill.”

Someone else might say, “No, no, this is obviously but a fragment of a much longer sentence. He probably wrote something like ‘there is much debate over the new interpretation.’”

Yet the first person might retort, “But he is a decisive writer, and I think he wrote, ‘I aver the new interpretation.’ That means he agrees with this interpretation.” And so the debate would rage, perhaps you are thinking “Yes, and quite pedantically,” yet someone else, a philologist perhaps, might find such deliberation stirring.

Yes, it was this very type of congress that I attended, and then I needed, of course, a ride to the airport, for flying out of southern Italy, particularly its mountainous regions, is not easy. The airports are near the sea, and thus if one is at all inland, as we were, one must get a ride to the coast—in my case, to the lovely zone (and airport) known as Lamzia Terme.

I had enjoyed dinner the night before with my friend and his primary contact at the university, a lovely and wise professoressa who enjoys the fortunate circumstance of studying poetry and rhetoric for a living. My friend had known of her for some time, as he had many years before reviewed one of her books and then connected with her at a conference, in France I think; I’m not sure, as he attends many of these international congresses. And so it went over dinner and drinks—a lovely conversation about the environment, philosophy, literature and, finally, even the quite serious topic of immigration and human displacement that is so sadly not just affecting the world in general but, especially, disquieting the lives of those displaced, disheartened, and often quite desperate individuals who have lost all—more often than not fleeing at the peril of their very lives. Each of us agreed as to the severity of the situation, the sadness of the lives of those involved, and the need for a fair and equitable solution.

The conversation turned from these serious, quite human but comparatively mundane topics to those of the spiritual realm. How strange, I thought, for among intellectuals the concept of a spiritual realm, let alone God, is but rarely discussed. If it is, it remains just that, a concept and an “it.” But this was an interesting conversation because the name Jesus Christ was mentioned more than in passing and not merely, as it usually is, as an expletive. Rather, the passage from the Bible that was discussed was that of Mary and Martha, and Jesus’ elicitation of Martha to be calm and listen, “To ‘be still and know that I am God,’” my philologist friend said, obviously quoting a Psalm.[1] The conversation then shifted to grace, a concept stressed, I think I might have pointed out, 500 years ago by Martin Luther, who reaffirmed the words of St. Paul, “For by grace are ye saved, through faith; and not of yourselves: it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast.”[2] And thus went the conversation until I, undoubtedly clumsily and characteristically off-cue, brought up the comparatively entirely mundane subject of getting to the airport the next morning.

“Oh, don’t worry, there is a taxi,” said the professoressa. “It is all arranged. You can both ride together.” (Indeed, we were on the same flight at least as far as Rome.)

“Do we pay cash to the driver—I think I’m running low on Euros?” inquireth I, in an equally tactless manner.

“No, no, no …” she said. “It is all paid for already. Just get in and enjoy the ride.”

“Coincidentally,” my friend said, “That is precisely how grace works. No need to pay the bill—that’s already been paid at Calvary. One needs simply to,” and then he paused, as I could tell he was going to quote something, and I thought he was going to say, “be still and know that I am God,” for that would have made perfect sense at this climactic moment. But instead he said, “… glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

Of course I recognized the quote, as it is from the shorter Presbyterian catechism, a beautifully concise piece of sublime theology. We all had a good laugh, thinking of how a taxi ride could be a metaphor for grace. And, by the way, I did enjoy the ride to the airport, for Calabria is stunningly beautiful, and I am enjoying that other, more sublime ride, as not only in Italy, but perhaps here somehow more poignantly than anywhere else, la vita e’ bella. Enjoy the ride; it’s paid for.

[1] Psalm 46:10.

[2] Ephesians 2:8f.

 

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: “Just Sayin'”

just sayin

“Just sayin’” is not just a Philly expression, but it might as well be. I’d love to know where it actually started, because it sounds to me as Philadelphian as an expression can possibly be. Just sayin’.

But what does it mean? Once all the Philly-ease and Philly accent is stripped away—that is to say, when one translates it from the vernacular to the highbrow, mutatis mutandis it might be rendered, “If you will permit me to broach the subject” or perhaps more directly, “Might I take the liberty of mentioning…?” And a person who would use such language might feign not enjoying talking about what they are talking about, however prurient his or her interest in the subject might be.

Along the same lines but more negatively, another person might use the expression haughtily. Such a rendering might be “If one really must descend to such considerations” or the like. Now this person might in fact share the same immodest interest as the person in the previous example, but he or she would not want you to know it; hence the apparent disdain. The topic is portrayed, of course, as well below that person’s normal level of discourse. Yet by pretending to be compelled to speak about it in this way, the person has an immediate out. That person enjoys complete deniability for, with the modal verb of compulsion, he has cleverly redirected the blame for the topic of discussion to a fictional conversational interloper or, worse, to you yourself.

But we have not exhausted the full range of the seemingly innocuous but actually quite potent expression “Just sayin’.” For there is also a rather crusty, even crude and inappropriate aspect to that declaration. Beneath the surface lurks a certain incongruity. In such a case, its user is essentially stating “I shouldn’t mention this, but I will anyway” (along with an implied, “I don’t care what you think about that”). This occurrence, what I am calling the “crude” usage, may actually be seen as an improvement over the first two because, on the surface at least, it seems more honest. It seems fresh, even brash; it seems to be ignoring the rules of proper etiquette, and maybe even smacks of a kind of “truth and nothing but the truth” of the courtroom or barber’s chair.

barber's chairIndeed, this third category—the one involving the barber’s chair—seems to me the most interesting and is why I decided with this blog to broach the subject of the sometimes quite condensed but too often indelicate expression “just sayin’.” Don’t get me wrong: I like honesty and, like most people, I find forthrightness refreshing. But the bit about the barber’s chair, a place where sometimes truly complex problems are swiftly whittled down, whether to splinters or usable planks, that is the part that I would like to consider briefly here.

I begin with a disclaimer. I love barbers, I really do, and I love conversing with them. I shan’t ever forget Jerry, my favorite barber—though he is no longer a barber, so I’ve heard, and no longer attends my church—who gave me a haircut just before my eldest son’s wedding. Though I tried to pay him, he wanted it to be a gift to me for the wedding. I’ve never forgotten his kindness, and the touching simplicity of that gift. Nor shall I ever fail to remember the barber of my childhood in the “Four Seasons Mall” in New Hope, Pennsylvania. There I would go by myself as a child, for I had no father to take me, and I would sit in the waiting chair next to all the magazines and newspaper, glutting my eyes on The Sporting News, memorizing baseball players’ statistics and reading the articles that speculated how the Phillies might wind up their season. Then up into the chair I would hop, for it was a very large (or so it seemed to me at the time) chair. I had to do all the conversing with my barber myself, as I hadn’t a father to take me or to engage Mike—for as I recall his name was Mike—about sports, or the weather or politics. But that was years ago and a world away from where I now am, Italy.

Bologna

Nevertheless, I was reminded of such erstwhile conversations when I arrived in Bologna, almost two two months ago now, to stay for a few days with my dear friend Piergiacomo and talk about hot peppers and Renaissance art (separately, of course) in his temporary “Man Cave,” for his lovely wife, Annamaria, and daughter, Margarita, were out of town. There the first thing I did, even before getting over jetlag, was seek out a barber to get a haircut, for I hadn’t had time to get one before I left. Somehow I found myself in the dingiest barber shop I’d been in for years, with music distortedly flooding the small square room through an iPhone speaker echoing off the high-walled ceiling. The lyrics seemed to me to be in Arabic—not exactly Rossini or Mozart—and the music surprised me by being in the rather modern sounding rap-style. Various magazines, well-thumbed and colorful, all in Arabic, adorned the small table next to the uncomfortable waiting seats.

straight razorI did not have to wait long. Kalam stood at the ready, inviting me with a less-than-welcoming glance to sit in the barber chair. A single light bulb on a wire string dangled above my head like the sword of Damocles. He held in his hands the implements of his trade, a straight razor and electric clippers. In very broken Italian with a thick Pakistani accent he told me he had come from Islamabad just a few months before. He didn’t like Italy much, he said, but you eat well here.

Kalam then asked me where I was from. I said Texas. He hadn’t heard of it. I said it’s a part of America, the south part of it. Ah America, he said, wielding his straight razor in a fashion that made me just a little uncomfortable. He went on to tell me of his hatred for Americans, but since I came from South America, he said, “That’s okay.” (What I had actually said was that Texas is in the southern part of America; he took that to be South America.) “I don’t hate South America,” he continued, “Just the USA. That is the great Satan.” As an accidental representative of what was to him a Hellish empire, I decided not to say much more, noting well the discomfiting combination of his palpable animosity toward America and the blade in his hand. Needless to say, I did not fuss over how ridiculously short he cut my hair, as bald fear in me produced in the end, a nearly bald appearance. Just sayin’.

Now will merely that expression “just sayin’ ” actually justify a story that might be deemed as Islamophobic? Indeed, it is thoroughly and quite literally Islamophobic, or at least Islamobadophobic. I was honestly scared as I sat in his chair, alone in such an off-the-beaten-track and quite shabby barbershop, while an insufferable coiffeur, in the course of reducing my head to little more than a lunar landing spot, wielded his blade, scratching away this and that bit of hair while he spoke between scratches of the evil decadence of the West and the great Satan, assuming all the while that a “South American” like me would agree with him.

But I leave that all aside to say that however baldly honest we may want to be whether about our political or our religious views, perhaps we would do well to recall that every once in a while it is good to leave them aside, every once in a while just to keep them to ourselves, especially when our most welcome allies accidentally, thanks to a minor misunderstanding, come from South America or, quite beyond that, in an election cycle when the candidates themselves are all too baldly dishonest in their honesty and vice versa. You never know when you might find yourself in the chair of an uncivilized version of the barber of Seville—no Figaro, him. Anyway, I’m just sayin.’

12092_JustSayin_Flat

 

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Kingston upon Hull and Est! Est!! Est!!!

You would think that, being in Italy, I might want to write yet again about Italian food. You might think that the time has come to stop skating around culinary delights here and just come right out and describe a sumptuous feast. I could, perhaps, talk about my time at the lovely Le Naiadi Hotel, Teresa and her lovely daughters at the front desk, or its superb restaurant located on Lake Bolsena; and I could describe the gentle and warm Giustino and his tireless restaurant staff, the superb pastas they prepare and serve, the tasty secondi, accompanied each night by the superlative local vintage Est! Est!! Est!!! That white wine, Montefiascone, is truly remarkable. Somewhat full-bodied (for an Italian white) local production, it preserves just a hint of sweetness amidst a dry background.

Fugger tomb
Tomb of Bishop Fugger

The story goes that a twelfth-century German bishop by the name of Johann Fugger, a wine aficionado, en route to Rome in A.D. 1110 for the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, had instructed his attendant, Martin by name,[1] to go ahead of him to identify the finest wines for the cleric to enjoy. The servant would, according to the legend, write on the door of an establishment with good vintage the Latin word for “it is (good wine).” When the servant found Montefiascone he knew he had found an excellent vintage, and rightly (according to my taste, as well) wrote “est” thrice.[2] Of course, the idea that exclamation points were added to emphasize the wine’s goodness is an anachronism, as exclamation points had barely begun to evolve beyond the Latin evocation “io” (a cry of joy recorded in ancient Latin texts that eventually would be transformed into an exclamation point by shifting the ‘I’ above the ‘o’—but was not found widely in manuscripts as such until after the twelfth century). So taken with, even sidetracked by their fine discovery of the wine, were they that Father Fugger and minion Martin never made it to the coronation.

Lake Bolsena
Lago di Bolsena, Italy

But I should get back to the reason I am not going to write about the delicate taste of Montefiascone or the truly fantastic food here in Italy or even the loveliness of Lake Bolsena, a place that it is my first time to visit. That reason is, of course, Brexit, England’s rebellion and unexpected break with the European Union. No, I am not going to get into the politics of that exit—I have my own opinion, and it is as farraginous as it is tiered. Nay, rather I would speak about the courage behind the vote rather than the vote itself.

A recent poll of the denizens of the city of Kingston upon Hull (aka Hull), a town located on the east coast of central England that serves as the gateway for European trade,[3] showed that they, among all Brits, were especially in favor of the UK’s break with the Europeans. The reasons for it are multifarious, but not to put too fine a point on it, I think the people of Kingston upon Hull are at bottom hoping to keep England British. That may indeed be too fine a point; it may be too monolithic an explanation. But it may also be right. The open border policy that the UK has had now for many years and its cred busoncomitant trade agreements have essentially promulgated the dissolution of the British way of life. When’s the last time you heard a “Cheerio!” or a “Pip pip!” or even a “Chin up, then!”? When I am in England I very much miss hearing these things, expressions that once characterized British parlance. At least the occasional “Cheers!” survives.

Now someone might say that such an argument is merely reductionist and that I and all the folks of Hull need to face the fact that the world is changing. Now while that person would surely be right about the world changing, the people of Hull have bravely decided that it can simply change a little more slowly. They cast a vote meant to put the breaks on the rapidity of global change; they voted, nearly three to one for an attempt to preserve the remnant of English culture. And whether you think it’s realistic or not, whether you agree with the risk of doing or not, well that’s another matter, and not the point of this blog. Rather, the point of this blog is that at least one important aspect of Hull’s vote and the vote of the rest of the UK was an attempt to preserve cultural identity.

9781480814738_COVER.inddAnd that is one of the major themes of the Curious Autobiography: that the peculiar ways, the timeless values, the enduring faith that we inherited from our forebears (in my case Welsh forebears) are worthy of being preserved, that they do in fact have meaning, and that hastily and heedlessly tossing them out—particularly for the hope of mere financial gain, even if that is only part of the motivation—is, well, for lack of a better word, heedless. Heedless, yes, and dreadful, too. And yet though it has resisted losing its Britishness, Kingston upon Hull remains, according to The Guardian, ungentrified.[4]

But I say, “Bully for Hull!” and “Bully for Hull’s bravery!” As for whether it will prove to be wise or not[5] and what indeed Brexit will mean for the world, time will tell. But the courage it takes for a single town located at the cross of the Humber and Hull to resist democratically a world telling you that its cultural identity is no longer relevant and that money and the global economy is the only thing worth pursuing, well that is a courage worth commending.[6] Until next time then, I offer you a warm “pip pip” and in the face of the terror that has ruined lives of innocent folks in Istanbul in the last few days, a sincere “chin up!” And to my friends in Hull, I shall close with a “cheers,” one set to the clink of a class of, if you can find it, Montefiascone’s best, Est! Est!! Est!!!Est.est.est wineVino di Montefiascone, Est! Est!! Est!!!


[1] “Curious Legend Surrounds Naming Italian Wine,” NYT (1980), rpt. Bangor Daily News, Apr. 15, 1980 [https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=CHg-AAAAIBAJ&sjid=tVkMAAAAIBAJ&pg=2888,6318448&dq=est+est+est+di+montefiascone+wine&hl=en].

[2] Tom Stevenson, The Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia (2005) 286. Wine encyclopedia

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/oct/30/hull-the-city-that-gentrification-forgot

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/oct/30/hull-the-city-that-gentrification-forgot

[5] Some are certain that it is national suicide: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-brexit-national-suicide/ and likely to lead to a recession: http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/28/news/economy/uk-economy-brexit-taxes-spending-austerity/index.html. Yet others see benefits: http://time.com/4381865/brexit-trump-global-economy/

[6] I realize that there will be some who will make the opposite argument, namely that it is greed in fact that drove the Brexit vote. I simply answer them in this way: even a less-than-well-informed voter knows that dissolving trade agreements is not likely to promulgate further trade. Nay, the real motivation behind this vote was cultural, not monetary. You’re welcome to disagree, of course. Though I have never been to Hull and I can’t speak from firsthand knowledge of that town, I have a strong hunch that I am right about this. I would love to hear from my British readers on this matter. See also https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/the-sunny-side-of-brexit-staycations-set-to-rise-133358961.html

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Lo Sciopero (The Train Strike)

SONY DSCA train strike (sciopero) in Italy gives you time to think. And when you are traveling, sometimes time to think is just the right thing. For traveling should be—at least when you are traveling by yourself and especially not with small children—a time to think, to reflect, to ponder. Questions germane to traveling like “How did I get here?” or “Where am I going?” are also germane to our lives and, in a manner of speaking, they provide a framework for the kind of thoughts we should think if we are to be properly thoughtful people.

And traveling, in Europe at least, also helps us to think about being thoughtful because one often travels by train there—or I should say here, for I am writing this blog from Rome—and when one travels by train one has to negotiate one’s way through hoards of people, all trying to go in about the same direction. crowded train stationReally, they are going in various directions, and that is what makes working your way to your train so difficult. I try my best to be gentle about it, whenever possible acting as if getting to my train or making my connection isn’t all that important to me—even though it invariably is.

Now not making such a connection in Italy in the summer is not so bad as missing one in Switzerland or Germany in the winter. Of course the reason for that is the stations there are sometimes open-air and it is hard to stay warm in a not well-insulated or warmed station in the north. But in summertime Italy it is a different matter. Here one need not rush, need not bustle, for the country relies on a natural kind of lateness. Even my Italian friends call that “Italian time” and they take pride in a small amount of tardiness the way my German friends take pride in (or at least seem to expect) a certain punctuality.

Which brings me back to thinking. For thinking about big questions based on little ones is a good thing, and thinking about being gentle and knowing that what time you have to leave is not nearly as important as where you’re going or how you get there. Sometimes you just have to face the fact that in life there will be a “sciopero” of sorts, a personal train strike or temporary setback. You may not meet an objective because of external forces. You may be criticized by someone fairly or unfairly and have to slow down and remind yourself of the long-term goal, that responding sharply is very unlikely to be the right thing to do. Rather, that right thing is likely to be gentleness.

One of the things that struck me on this trip so far—aside from how fabulous Italian food is and how impossible it is not to mention food in every blog that I write while I am in this country, even in a world gone mad—was a conversation that I had at a fancy affair with an American, a very nice and courteous chap, a fine human being, a gentle person. Yet there was, it seemed to me, perhaps something recently missing in his life, and that missing thing had not to do with food but with traveling.

excavationNow it could have had something to do with food. After all, the fancy affair at which we met was a grand party thrown for a recently successful archaeological team, a party that I, as a mere novelist and blogger, was clearly crashing. They were wrapping up an excavation of an Etruscan tomb near Viterbo. The person with whom I enjoyed a rich conversation seemed at first blush to be a hired musician, for he deftly played the guitar at this affair, accompanying a marvelous accordion player. That same person in question, however, turned out to be there at the invitation of one of the archeologist. As for me, I was invited along by a friend of a friend, and, being naturally curious, I accepted the invitation, even if in fact I was more or less crashing the party.

And I am glad I did, for I had never been in a movie before. No, this was not a real film, but it was as if a scene from a movie, a particular one, perhaps my favorite: TheThe Godfather Godfather. Mutatis mutandis, it was as if we were in the opening wedding scene, a great celebration with food of a high order of deliciousness that just kept coming, course after course. Over a glass of wine that was hand-crafted by one of the local magistrates (a certain Angelo, whom everyone called Sant’Angelo), the gentleman and I fell to talking about the big questions, what I am calling in this blog, the travel questions.

Like me, he had thought about such questions. But when he had encountered a certain sciopero in his own life—a complicated church situation—the strike in his life had presented him with an unwelcome challenge, temporarily perhaps driving him away from church. Still, I encouraged him in the midst of it to remember that there is a directional aspect to the whole question of religion, an aspect that simply by going through the motions sometimes maintains a true faith or, better yet, even sometimes kindles a deeper faith, a faith perhaps one never realized was possible—a faith in a God who can produce miracles. And thus do I hope that he finds his direction back to church, with his guitar in hand, for I liked him and I suspect that his joy won’t be complete until he finds peace in his music, in church, in life—in God.

And here I will stop, for it was, after all, merely a lunch I was crashing, not a scene from a movie, not something from my usual world of fantasy, of otherworldly ideas beyond reality. Yet even if it was reality, it sure did feel like a scene from that best of films. Could we have been, for a moment, with a real godfather, could we have been characters in a story? Perhaps that is the point, perhaps we are a part of a story, and we need to be reminded of that from time to time. And to grasp that, to garner what we need to live, and love, and thrive, perhaps we may require, from time to time, to experience a sciopero.

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Traveling

piergiacomo
Piergiacomo Petrioli

 

“May you be praised, my Lord, for our sister, Bodily Death, from whom no living human being can escape.”[1] Thus wrote St. Francis of Assisi some time just after 1200 AD. To St. Francis, my good friend Piergiacomo Petrioli assured me just yesterday, everything was good. “That’s the point,” he said as we sat in his living room in Bologna discussing how the Renaissance, which began almost precisely a century after St. Francis wrote this canticle, came about. “The point is that Francis cared about all of creation, saw everything as good because it came from God’s hand. And so,” he added, “even death could be seen as good, as a release from the troubles of this life.”

Giotto's St. Francis before the Sultan
Giotto’s St. Francis before the Sultan

And that, we agreed later in the course of the conversation, was the beginning of the period of Western history in which the focus on repeating over and over in the cold echoing chamber of the high-ceilinged central nave of a Gothic cathedral, “God is Pankrator (Ruler of All)” reverted to the idea that “God is a human being, too.” Piergiacomo added, “The point is that the emphasis of the Renaissance is not that ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world’—he was quoting Browning, of course—“but that God, as a human being, suffers with us humans, participates in our humanity; that human suffering is thereby redeemed, dignified to the extent that even morte corporale can be nostra sora (i.e., sorella), our sister.” This he said, with my slight adaptation, of course, in a lovely Italian accent. St. Francis himself must have sounded like Piergiacomo, I thought to myself, gentle and warm.

But the title of this blog is not St. Francis’ views on death, but rather “Traveling,” and I come back to that now. For when I am traveling, one of the things I like to do best is to visit my friends on the continent and chat with them about things like the origin of the Renaissance, something I had never before connected with St. Francis. The reason for that is, perhaps, that somewhere in my mind the cautionary words of G.K. Chesterton were still rambling about, for he once wrote of St. Francis, “… it is not true to represent St. Francis as a mere romantic forerunner of the Renaissance and a revival of natural pleasures for their own sake. The whole point of him was that the secret of recovering the natural pleasures lay in regarding them in the light of a supernatural pleasure.”

What I think Chesterton is cautioning against is not the importance of the emphasis beginning with St. Francis on all created things being good that Piergiacomo and I were touting as foundational to the notion of humanity that the Renaissance would advance. In any case, such emphasis certainly owes itself much more to the rediscovery of ancient texts than to St. Francis’ memorable declarations about death or Brother Sun or Sister Moon. Rather, I think that Chesterton is railing against those who want to put St. Francis on a pedestal, or more precisely, those who would distort his views about the interaction of man and God. That same group might emphasize St. Francis’ love for animals as a part of creation to the exclusion of his view on redemption and humankind.

Elsewhere in his biography of that saint, Chesterton offers a vivid description of Francis that I think is likely to be precisely right:

“He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ. Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person; but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea.”[2]

As usual, Chesterton gives us more to ponder than we may have wanted. His challenge to his reader is to consider St. Francis not in general, but in particular. And this is the challenge that Chesterton and later C.S. Lewis would lay at the feet of every churchgoer, every human being, to consider God in particular and each person in particular. It is much easier to love the idea of humanity than to love your neighbor.

Which brings be back to traveling, for how can I love my neighbor when I’m journeying such a long way from home? Well, if you’ve been reading any of my other blogs so far, I imagine you may know my opinion about the answer to that question. But in case you haven’t, I’ll tell one last story about traveling that might illustrate what I mean.

There once were two couples who went a traveling. One went to a large, impoverished city in Africa and bought bread and carried it with them everywhere they went in case they met any street children there. street children(As it turned out, they gave a great deal of bread away, and much more than food, as well. Indeed, I believe they would have surrendered their bodies to fire, were it necessary, to help those in need.) The other couple went to some other far more luxurious spot—Hawaii, I think it was—on vacation; that second couple gave money to world hunger relief organizations from time to time, especially when there was a crisis in the news. That same couple felt very good about their donations, and from time to time would tastefully mention their own generosity to their friends over dinner. But they could see no reason to encourage the other couple about their trip to Africa, or to help them in their admittedly limited-in-scope “humanitarian” effort. In fact, they gently rebuked them when they were having lunch together before they left. “You know, it’s a vain effort, you going there. It won’t cure all the ills in the world; you might even come back with one—a disease. Better to give money to some relief organization or something—that’s what we do,” they told the first couple in a well-intended, but condescending way.

The first couple was not taken aback. Rather they might even have expected as much, for they had long before come to love Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and even to understand that Bodily Death, too, is the sister of the moon and sun, and our sister, too. They were not going to Africa to rebuke that sister. They were going to find and help their brothers and their sisters. They did not love the idea of humanity, they loved human beings.

Now I myself did not and still do not understand one thing about the first pair, the couple who actually went to Africa, for I do not understand St. Francis’ idea that death could ever be our sister. I am rather angered by death, with Herculean emotions welling up from deep within. When a friend or family member dies, I feel that something fundamentally bad has happened, something gone wrong in the universe. But that is me, not Chesterton, not the first couple, nor probably the second. But I wax mystical.

Pope FrancisYet I was speaking about traveling. St. Francis’ travels are well known. Now another Francis, a new Pontifex Maximus, to use a Latin (and quite ancient Roman) term, is traveling, as well. He has just left Italy, to build a bridge to the needy, the poor in another hemisphere, one with which he is quite familiar. I will leave Bologna for a different America, the one with which I am familiar, only a few days after him. This Francis is not voyaging to Africa, but to Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay, countries where life is rife with challenge, where in every valley death casts a long shadow, where there are needy and weeping souls, real people, about whom it seems to have been forgotten by far too many who could care (but don’t) that they are human beings. In his travels the Pope will—indeed, I believe, already has—like St. Francis, bring warmth and love for human beings, not just for “humanity.”

Compianto
Compianto

In the meantime, until I leave, Piergiacomo and I will sit by and by, eating Parmesan and raising a glass to The Curious Autobiography, which he is now reading, and more especially and fittingly a cup running over to both the pope and the saint, whose love for humanity and human beings was and will be, I hope, remembered and, by the time this blog is posted, seen, as well. For our part, we shall consider the importance of the Renaissance again and again, admiring the work of artists, and reading a piece of literature or two—I hear Petrarch beckoning—and, before I leave, perhaps even visiting again Santa Maria della Vita here in Bologna. To the right of the altar of the central nave one can see the masterpiece of Niccolò dell’Arca, his Compianto, a sculpted work that portrays the humanity and pain of human beings in the face of the most horrific death in history, before history could be changed by a single naked act. But the nakedness of that act involves a trip I once took to Estonia, which will be the story of another blog about traveling, a blog I will write perhaps a long time from now.

For more on Renaissance Art, see Artsy’s website and follow your favorite artists. For example, see on Raphael.

[1] Laudato si mi Signore, per sora nostra Morte corporale, da la quale nullu homo uiuente pò skappare, from Michele Faloci Pulignani (ed.). Il Cantico del Sole di San Francesco di Assisi. Foligno: Tipografia di Pieter Sgariglia, 1888, pp. 10–11; http://www.prayerfoundation.org/canticle_of_brother_sun.htm. My translation.

[2] The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (Ignatius Press, 1986), 70, 29.

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: The Ghost of Sulmona

Madison I
Madison K. BEA booth

“Well, this is quite a booth,” I said when strolling the floor of the vast Book Expo of America Exhibit 2015 in May. “The colors are vivid and jump right out at you—pink and black. And the artwork is well done, so deftly thematized to your book.” All this I said when I first met Madison Kaplan, the namesake and, qua character, heroine of the book series that her talented mother, Nina, writes and illustrates. “She does all her own artwork,” Madison volunteered proudly. It was refreshing and frankly a bit surprising to see a young woman of twenty-three so proud of a parent.

I soon met Nina herself, the warm and friendly author of the popular Young Adult fictional work entitled Madison K. As Nina described it to me, the series tries to speak in a new and fresh way to girls becoming young women, encouraging them to think twice before making just any moral choice, before believing just any trendy way of thinking. I confess that I have not read much of this series whose target audience is obviously a demographic quite a bit different from myself. Kaplan complements her book series with a rich and various website (BLC; www.beautylandcouture.com) that speaks to young women about their appearance, focusing on something I am fairly unfamiliar with, makeup; but I shall return to that below. For the moment, suffice it to say that after my admittedly cursory perusal of one of the books in the series, I am honestly impressed. This series is doing something different than most YA fiction, and I am inclined to start my blog by warmly acknowledging that uniqueness; after all, Elaine Jakes taught me to embrace things that are perhaps a bit different and to be a bit wary of those ideas that are not.

Adriatic Coast
Adriatic Coast

Yet as the title of this blog implies, this is a ghost story that ostensibly is about a haunting of Sulmona, an Italian town, a small one, located on the edge of the Majella National Park near the Adriatic shore, forming a triangle with two nearby coastal cities, Pescara and Lanciana. It is far enough from them and from Rome that there is no chance that the ghost of Sulmona could wander in either direction. It stays confined to the arboreal park and only occasionally wanders into Sulmona’s center, always at night. And when it does, it makes a beeline for the main square where there is displayed prominently a fine statue of the town’s most famous poet, the long-dead Ovidius Naso, whose very shade, it is said, is this ghost.

Piazza in Sulmona Italy
Piazza in Sulmona with Bronze Statue of Ovid. Photo by Boblyp.

That ghost is as playful as Ovid was a poet. Ovid, you may know, was so playful, so bawdy, that he was banished by the emperor Augustus; to give a historical context, this is the very emperor who was reigning when Christ was born. So, Ovid and Christ were contemporaries, Christ the younger, as Ovid was born in 43 BC. Yet why Ovid’s shade, if it is Ovid’s, haunts Sulmona is a mystery. There is a rumor that it has to do with women.

Now it is not what you might be thinking; yes, if you recall your history, Ovid was known as a bit of a dandy not only because of his poetry but also owing to the unsubstantiated claim that he was spending far too much time of a romantic nature with Julia, the emperor’s daughter. While it may not be (and need not be true) that Ovid was carrying on with Julia, it is certainly true he had the gumption to write at least to two tomes of poetry explicitly for women and that he wrote much more than that about women. The facts are these: the third book of his Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) was addressed to women, to help them create rendezvous with men; his Love’s Remedies (Remedia Amoris) was for both women and men, so it does not count. He also wrote the Heroides, letters in the first person penned by famous heroines to their often less famous lovers—and Ovid donned the female voice to accomplish this; I say nothing, in passing, about my role in the composition of The Curious Autobiography.

Yet clearly Ovid’s boldest venture, his “I’m-treading-on-territory-that-should-perhaps-better-fall-to-the-too-little-known-Roman-poetess-Sulpicia” work that could have been perceived as sexist, was the less than catchily entitled Medicamina Faciei Feminae (On Makeup). This work never was among those great books, those Harvard classics that most people talk about when quipping dilettantishly about antiquity. This lesser known work is a book about makeup, much like Nina Kaplan’s lovely website.

The difference, however, between that website which appeals to young women who are just now learning to apply makeup correctly and to make good choices about that (and about life) and Ovid’s work is simply this: Nina Kaplan is a woman and thus can speak from experience. She knows her makeup and she knows what it feels like to be a young woman figuring out womanhood and this particular aspect of it—though admittedly makeup is not for everyone, of course. Elaine Jakes, for one, rarely wore it. Ovid’s transgression into the world of makeup was, from a netherworldly perspective, a much greater offense than the poet’s possible dating of Augustus’ daughter, or his recherché and erotic elegies, the content of which ostensibly bothered the emperor. So, while Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis in his lifetime, it is said that in his after-lifetime, the shades of Roman women, like those who hounded Orpheus to death, called down an irrational curse on Ovid’s soul, a curse that compelled his shade to have no rest and ever to wander the (admittedly lovely) Majella forest, whence he cannot return to Rome but at least finds himself on Italian soil.

Parrozzo Cake
Parrozzo Cake

When he does come into town, pieces of Parrozzo (a soft cake characterized by a rich chocolate coating and almonds) left out for the ghost at the foot of Ovid’s statue in the town’s square by caring contemporary Italian women always is taken up, it seems, by the ghost, but never quite eaten. Rather, it finds itself strewn out in a line going back into the woods like a Sondheimian trail of breadcrumbs, as, of course, a ghost can’t really eat or drink, as it is made of spiritual matter.

I did not tell Nina Kaplan this story, as I did not want to frighten her or anyone at the Madison K. booth. In any case, I felt it did not befit so busy or august an event as the BEA. But I did warn her that Madison K. just might show up in a blog about a ghost. Is there a moral to this story in a blog that purports to affirm that life is worth living and books are worth reading? Well, of course there is, for the continuum, if an imperfect one, between Ovid, Madison K., and “BLC” remains unbroken, in a sense, and the warning to a man with too little knowledge of makeup, such as myself, not to interfere stands, lest he wind up in the doghouse or, in the case of Ovid’s ghost, experience something worse. And, more importantly than all of this, of course, is the notion that the past is ever with us, a repository of stories, within the context of which we are writing our own, which form a strand in yet a grander narrative, the Author of which will, perhaps, eventually be the topic of another blog.