Morning Read
¶ The Decameron, IV, v: The story of Isabella and her pot of basil. Well, that’s how Keats told it, inspired by Boccaccio. Boccaccio’s doomed heroine is called Lisabetta. There’s a picture at the MFA in Boston that was here for a show a few years ago, by John White Alexander, painter of the Met’s great Repose. My, what a big pot, you think — if you don’t know the story, which is that, long-story-short, Lisabetta put the head of her murdered lover, Lorenzo, in a pot, which she planted with basil that she watered with her tears. (The former gardener in me bristles: too much salt!).
So of course I had to read the Keats, which comes in sixty-three strophes. Two super lines for the tongue, the first a cool dismissal of mercantile wealth, the second a wild cry of grief.
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
and
Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
And one very arresting strophe.
Who hat not loiter’d in a green church-yeard,
 And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
 To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry death hath marr’d
 And filling it once more with human soul?
Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.
¶ That’s enough verse for today, so we skip the Aeneid and C K Williams. Clive James writes a note — no more — about Edgar Quinet (1803-1875), a public intellectual who may have been the first to ask whether the excesses of the French Revolution were “worth it” — still a question the asking of which can land you in hot water with the Left, which, frankly, Clive James has had enough of. Insofar as Leftists rely on theories, I quite agree. There is really no need for theories when confronted with injustices all round. It seems to me that the Right is pretty dependent on theories, too, most notably tiresome myths about private property (which is protected by law in order to avoid violence, not to guarantee claims) and “personal responsibility.”
¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: John Neff of Autoblog. It’s curious, but a blog about cars seems about as go-ahead as a blog about powdered wigs. Curious geographical slips: “We meet about every three months, either in New York City at AOL headquarters in Rockefeller Square, or in Dulles, Virginia, where the main office is.” Have they changed “Vienna” to “Dulles”? They certainly haven’t built Rockefeller Square yet, not in New York anyway. Plaza and Center, yes, but no Square.
¶ “Go-ahead” is a term used by Diana Mosley in a letter about one of her father’s ill-advised investments: “In those days wirelesses and plastic were both rather go-ahead.” The scheme in question envisioned “making millions” by encasing radios in plastic simulacra of fine old Chinese porcelains. Oh, dear; sounds straight out of Wodehouse.
Diana to Deborah, March 1998:
I’m not nearly as clever as you are & I terribly regret your one blind spot, you would LOVE not just Proust, but Flaubert, Henry James, George Eliot, Goethe’s novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, all these brilliant treasures & many more. I think possibly it comes from impatience, you want to be up & doing, well you are & think of the wonderful achievements! You have got the patience to plant trees, hedges,you know they take ages but once they’re in they grow & you can be doing again, something else. You don’t want to sit ruminating over a book, you want quick action. I do regret it, can’t help it, thinking how you would laugh at Proust’s jokes or be terrified by Conrad’s descrip of the slow fire in a cargo of coal ready to turn & drown them all if the wind changes. It’s true my world is peopled by characters in books, & it’s a mystery how you, so interested in human nature, can do without it seen through eyes of genius. But perhaps it’s clever nature at work which gave you a task far more important than just loving to read. Your fund of wonderful human sympathy is much more unselfish, in face reading is selfish & would probably waste your time which you spend making life bearable for one & all. So in the end I applaud your choice. It is much clever to do than just to think.
Deborah’s reply (excerpt):
Oh, Proust, shall I try it now or is it too late? I do hope it’s too late.
If I were to start up a school today, I’d have the sixth-graders spending their mornings doing morning reads just like mine — so many pages of this, so many lines of that, with brief commentary — and their afternoons memorizing poetry. Seventh-graders, in lieu of sex ed, would study Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, with the teachers required to Explain Everything.