In Search of Lost Time Again

by J J Cohen

"Although he had a weak spot for subclauses and patisserie, somehow, by sheer force of adjectives and loneliness, [Marcel Proust] intuited some of modern neuroscience's most basic tenets."

That elegant little sentence, with its unexpected conjunction of grammar and bakery, of wordcraft and solitude, comes from my recent bedstand reading, Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist. With chapters on Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Escoffier, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein (a chapter that enabled me finally to understand the ambition of her work), and Virginia Woolf -- well, what modernist-enamored aesthete wouldn't love Lehrer's book? He combines an artist's prose (subtitle from the Proust chapter: "The Lie of Yesterday"), a scientist's enthusiasm for detail, and a journalist's ardor for Big Picture narrative. I recommend the volume highly.

As a side effect of reading Lehrer, I've been inspired for the third time to attempt to make it through A la Recherche du Temps Perdu -- if only because this blog has always been in search of lost time. My first Proustian failure was in graduate school, during a bleak summer in which I was consigned to a 'German For Reading Knowledge' course. I purchased an aged copy of Swan's Way to enjoy in my spare time, for no other reason than I had always wanted to read the book with a big cup of tea and a madeleine to dip in it. The promised spare time failed to arrive, however. Three years later the paperback's glue binding dissolved, scattering lost time across the linoleum. Shortly after the dissolution of the novel I found a copy in French at a yard sale, and decided it would be good for me to spend a summer reading the work in its original. I am not sure whether I reached page ten or page twelve -- but as yet I had not reached the cookie-in-the-tea dunk.

Last Saturday in New York City, my son Alex and I had a cold, wet afternoon to ourselves. We visited Nintendo World, wasting all of thirty minutes. We weren't meeting the rest of the family for quite some time, we were already soaked from walking ... so we did what any normal American father and son do: we headed to the nearest bookstore and each purchased the fattest volume we could lay our hands upon (Alex got one of these, don't ask me which one). We then retreated to the nearest coffee shop, sat with warm beverages, and read quietly in each other's company until five o'clock. That moment of rest during a four day whirlwind of seeing, moving, and doing was bliss. I've always had a fondness for reading on rainy days, especially when a large window yields a view of passersby, mobile in their solitude, their faces not intended to be interpreted.

So I am now farther into Swann's Way than I have ever been (which is to say p. 71 of the new Penguin translation). And you know, I am not sure I was ready earlier in life to be bowled over by a sentence like this one, in which Marcel describes the two rooms in Combray where his aunt lives her circumscribed life:

These were the sorts of provincial rooms which -- just as in certain countries entire tracts of air or ocean are illuminated or perfumed by myriad protozoa that we cannot see -- enchant us with the thousand smells given off by the virtues, by wisdom, by habits, a whole secret life, invisible, superabundant, and moral which the atmosphere holds in suspension; smells still natural, certainly, and colored by the weather like those of the neighboring countryside, but already homey, human and enclosed, an exquisite, ingenious, and limpid jelly of all the fruits of the year that have left the orchard for the cupboard; seasonal, but movable and domestic, correcting the piquancy of the hoarfrost withe the sweetness of warm bread, as lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving and orderly, heedless and foresightful, linen smells, morning smells, pious smells, happy with a peace that brings only an increase of anxiety and with a prosiness that serves as a great reservoir of poetry for one who passes through it without having lived in it.

I love that single sentence so much that I'd give up any of the books I've written just to be able to compose something so artful. I immediately read it aloud to Alex in the coffee shop ... and he in return read to me a sentence from his own book, in which the Chaos Gem is shattered and legions of the undead enter the world riding dragons wrought of flame.

For March 17: A Graveyard in Dover

[image: Though the Tiny Shriner is technically a homunculus rather than a leprechaun, he does enjoy March 17]

by J J Cohen

Ah, Saint Patrick's Day. Debunk your myths here. Celebrate or burn with shame: identity is all about ambivalence towards its history, after all.

Speaking of ambivalence, I have just returned from a visit to see family in New England, where Saint Patrick's Day attracts significantly more hoopla than March 17 earns in DC. Every restaurant we walked into, for example, immediately slapped a shamrock sticker on my daughter Katherine. Leprechauns, green streamers, pots o' gold at the end of rainbows having nothing to do with LGBT rights, shillelaghs, and moss colored balloons dangled wherever the eye glanced. Begora was about all I could say.

My sister lives in Dover, New Hampshire, in a new house nestled among some older ones. We stay with her when we visit, because (1) she has the space for us and (2) she is not as crazy as some other family members. Dover is a small town that grew along the Cocheco River, mainly as a textile mill flourished in the mid 1800s. Its diminutive "downtown" area preserves the red brick mill, now turned into a modest office building. The center of town is as thick with shopping as an English High Street, and most of these stores have been around for quite some time: a run down music shop, a bakery, a tobacco store, a card shop, a funky coffee house where people still wear tie-dye earnestly. Not far from town center have sprouted the required amenities of twenty-first century American living: Pizzeria Uno, Applebee's, Costco. The center, though, has managed to stay (through no particular effort) noncorporate, without becoming a gentrified or Disneyland version of a New England town such as you might glimpse in Hanover or certain overly precious sections of Vermont. If you are looking for a haberdashery or gourmet chocolate, Dover is not your destination. You will find, though, an unpretentious Irish bar on the water, excellent whoopee pies, and a comfortable Indian restaurant run by a family who converted a storefront.

Across the street from my sister's house is a weedy cemetery. Though not the oldest in Dover (there is a "Settler's Cemetery" down the road dating to 1640), the graveyard is impressive: rows of marble and granite-hewn markers, many shaped as angels or crosses or obelisks. My son Alex and I walked through the cemetery when morning sun and white snow rendered the expanse a space where it was hard to think much of death. We squinted to read names, and marveled at the number of markers announcing from which county of Ireland the dead beneath had arrived. We noticed that scores of graves recorded a two year span in the 1860s as dates of death. An epidemic must have carried from life many recent arrivals from County Armagh. Most of them were women. We thought that they must have come to Dover to work at the textile mill, and then perished when whatever fever swept and emptied the brick building. We knew we were being touched by history's receding traces, by stories that we would like to grasp better but that were too distant from us to hold. What did these women leave in Ireland? How frightening and exhilarating was the crossing of the Atlantic? Did the textile mill treat them as badly as the mills of Lowell and Lawrence? Did they die lonely, homesick, afraid?

The graveyard in Dover is not especially well tended. An ordinary feature of an ordinary New England landscape, many of the stones have toppled as ice has shifted the earth and wind has pushed relentlessly against their weight. Few of the markers show any sign of memorial visits. The writing is fading beneath lichens, the rock is cracked. The day will come when something else is built upon that space, or when the cemetery reverts to quiet field.

The F-Word

by J J Cohen

So this summer we shipped our son away to the wilds of West Virginia for two weeks of camp. The house seems eerily empty without someone to pop out from behind the furniture to shoot elastics at us, or without the endless humor of sudden flatulence caused by his remote controlled fart machine.

Thank the gods for the internet. His camp has a website where daily pictures and a video are posted. Though he is not always featured, we glimpse his smiling mug enough to know how much he is enjoying swimming, hiking, camping, tennis, lacrosse, and so many other physical activities that I get tired just thinking about them. We can also send him emails. The camp prints these out and leaves them on his bunk for evening reading. He can reply on a special sheet of paper, scanned into PDF and made available for us to download the next day. Yesterday the following note arrived:

Dear Family,
Today I caught 4 fishes. One was almost a foot long! I had to pull for 5 minutes! Today, a few kids got yelled at for saying the f-word, and now I know it must be really bad. I used to think it was just a rude word you should never say, but now I know it's not. It was in the book Iron Angel, so please do something about that book, like throw it out, and you should punish me for reading it.
I'm deeply sorry,
xoxox

His contriteness broke my heart. He'd done a pretty good job of punishing himself, I'd say. So I replied:

Thanks for your your letter. I don't want you to be so upset about reading a book with "the F-word" in it. It is, after all, just a word. What matters is how the word is used. I trust you to know the difference. So I think it is OK to read a book with the word in it. You are a very smart kid, and you know how to read a book without thinking that everything in a book is how the world should be. Right? I love you. -- Dad

Should I have been harsher? I don't know. I'm not always as in control of my own "potty mouth" as I probably should be, so it is hard to preach verbal sanitization with much conviction. I remember vividly a conversation I had with his preschool teacher when I picked him up after a field trip. Miss Joan told me, with an amused smile on her face, that he'd been assigned to ride along with a friend and his mom. As the mother opened the door to place his car seat inside, he stuck his head into the vehicle and declared happily "Holy shit, this is a big mini van!"

I knew immediately from whom he had learned that cheerful exclamation.

Dead. Like Lindow Man.

You have read on this blog already how Lindow Man caused Kid #2 to have her first intimations of mortality. She even insisted on stopping by the British Museum just before we left London so that she could say good-bye to him, and this time not cry. Yet this encounter with a corpse has stuck with her in interesting ways -- most notably, as a new aphorism. Shortly after returning to DC, we were taking a family walk when Kid #2 came across a squashed beetle on the road. "It's dead," she declared, "Dead like Lindow Man." That weekend, as we moved Uncle Paul to the assisted living center, she heard her brother state flatly that the elderly enter the place when they don't have much longer to live. "Yes," Kid #2 agreed. "Soon they will be dead. Dead like Lindow Man." And so on.

I'm afraid she is doomed to be looked upon as a strange child, courtesy of Lindow Man.

At the Holocaust Museum

As I mentioned in the comments section a few days ago, last week we moved my spouse's great uncle to an assisted living center down the road from us. At 95 Uncle Paul is remarkably lucid, though he can't move around as much as he would like. Both our kids are fond of him, having known him via trips to Florida their whole lives.

With so much time on his hands and nowhere in particular to go, Uncle Paul spends much of his day time traveling while seated on his couch. He was born in Vienna, a city he loved until the Nazis came to power. He has unpleasant memories of abuse endured at their hands: being made to scrub a filthy sidewalk with a small brush, for example, while a crowd smiled, clapped, jeered. Most shocking to him was how customers from the shoe store at which he was employed -- men and women who formerly treated him with respect -- could find so much joy in humiliating him. Uncle Paul did in time flee to New York (via Italy), and was able after long labor to bring his wife, brother and sister over as well. A sorrow he now lives with every day, though, was his inability to convince his mother to flee. She vanished into a concentration camp, and he does not know where or when she perished. We assume that she, like most victims, was robbed, psychologically abused, stripped, gassed, and cremated. We suppose that many other women and many children died with her, in fear and in pain. Uncle Paul tells the story of his failure almost every day now, and cries each time he speaks the lines "I did not save her." We can't convince him that he could not.

My son has been haunted by these Holocaust stories, especially because they come from a person he loves. We decided yesterday that he and I would visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum together so that he could learn a little more about the event. Because our family has a membership in the museum (we are charter members, in fact), Kid #1 and I did not have to wait in line for admission tickets -- meaning that for the first ten minutes of the building's opening we had the dark exhibition to ourselves. I've visited the place perhaps four times already, but something about the elevator clanging shut to convey visitors to the start of the displays on the fourth floor gets to me every time. The doors open ... and you are staring at a huge photograph of dead bodies in stacks. That's the first time my son began to cry. Many more times followed.

I won't go through the minutiae of the exhibit, but I will say that these things struck both of us:

• very often it was the absence of the dead body that was most moving (an exhibit of shoes, of concentration camp uniforms, of abandoned toys ... all these items stand in for the lost life in a way that is individuating and painful almost to the point of being unendurable)
• nonetheless, to look upon the dead in all their numbers was agonizing
• most horrible was the enjoyment evident in the photographs of ordinary citizens demeaning Jews or making Nazi salutes. How can people love their hatred to such excess?

A horrible thought that struck me, and that I did not share with my son, was that in raising our children as Jews my wife and I are also endangering them. Ridiculous, I know, to think that ... but to see the chronicle of a world where Jews had gone from citizens to aliens in a few short years inspires such rumination. (And not that anyone was much better off being gay, disabled, or Roma in that world where myth masqueraded as science.)

At the age of ten Kid #1 is probably too young for the museum, but I don't regret taking him. We talked about what we saw during the day, and we both knew as well that there were times when we should stop talking and do something dumb (like go to my office and shoot elastics at the Office Manager, unlucky enough to be in that day).

A fine day in Wiltshire

At Avebury we dodged sheep pies to wonder at the megaliths, feeling puny beside their ancient bulk. Knowing that a crushed body had been found beneath the Barber Stone made Kid #1 and I race to touch its surface first, pressing palms against the rock to discover if we could feel some power inside. We ate lunch in a lonely pub with roof beams torn from a ship. A countryside pockmarked by barrows invited us to speak of the dead, but Stonehenge was so full of life that it was impossible to be gloomy. Kid #1 admitted that he thought the place would be ominous, the stones in their circle dark, but the sky was blue and the sun was bright ... and the circle shone radiant gray. Kid #2 sang about rocks and birds and dancing. At Salisbury cathedral we had cream tea so good my eyes watered. My spouse spotted Jude Law at the table next to us and I realized how easily she could leave me with the kids (luckily, Jude was their with his own daughter and her sports team). We glanced at Magna Carta, walked a city busy with its market day, then headed to Old Sarum ... where bright sun, grass so green it blinded, and chalky ruins of a castle touched us all the more for the Iron Age fortress they squatted upon. When we stood at the top of the wall built upon a mound built upon another mound, we thought we could see the very edge of the world.

A fine day in Wiltshire.

[Karl, Eileen: Sorry not to weigh in on your recent, substantial posts. I've barely been on the internet, only long enough to drop this postcard and little more]

A perfect 4 July

I will keep this brief so as not to detract from the Tools Chat below.

We met Liza, my former student and all around good person -- and, oh yes, frequent blog commentator -- in Cambridge. She was good enough to load all four Cohens on a punt, endure all manner of twaddle about the root system of duckweed (Kid #1), the wetness of river water (Kid #2), the coldness of her derrière (Spouse; her chivalric partner had given her the subaquatic seat while taking the dry one for himself), and the general gossip about medieval studies (me). Highlight: wind and currents conspired to render us stuck beneath a bridge, which we christened the Haunted Crossing. Liza handled everything with aplomb, even the loss of the punting stick. We enjoyed a view of ducks, cows, magnificent architecture (we sighed as we passed beneath the fake Bridge of Sighs), and beautiful gardens.

Lunch was at the Eagle Pub, where Crick and Watson first delivered news of their double helix. In my infinite kindness, I sat next to Liza so that she would not have to endure The Stare. The staff were even good enough to make Kid #2 her favorite meal: scrambled eggs with mushy peas. Then on to a foot tour of magnificent architecture (we sighed as we walked across the fake Bridge of Sighs), beautiful gardens, and so forth. As we strolled past Kings, a trumpet began to play the Star Spangled Banner from atop a tower. Liza whipped out a small American flag pin with sparkly LED lights, a gift from her patriotic mom. Kid #1 placed his hand over his heart, as if at a ballgame.

And here is our crescendo: back at our London flat, just as the kids were getting ready for bed, we looked out the window and saw that the London Eye was glowing red and blue. Fireworks suddenly erupted over the Thames.

Postcard from London

Dear Readers,

London is -- what else could it be? -- wonderful.

Tightened security meant that our plane was late arriving in DC from Heathrow, which meant in turn that we were late in taking off (1 AM). Despite having everything stacked against us for major jet lag and juvenile temper tantrums (and I'm just talking about me, let alone the kiddies), everyone has been cheerful from the very start. Our flat turned out to be at the center of London's gay pride parade, so getting there took quite a lot of time as well. Both kids are just out and out thrilled to be here, taking in everything with wide eyes and wider grins.

So far we have managed to: take a boat to Greenwich and straddle the meridian; ride the London Eye; visit St Paul's; view the remains of the Roman amphitheatre under Guildhall; visit the Tate Modern; eat chips with malt vinegar; take a tour of the Thames via catamaran; walk over the millennium footbridge; go to a street fair (where Kid #1 purchased a wooden gun that shoots elastics; he is terrorizing Kid #2 with it right now). We've been rained upon and have had the sun beam down on us in alternation. Tonight, off to a tiny toy store on Regent Street followed by dinner at Masala Zone. Does life get any better than that?

London

Gibbous Moon, London
The hum of cars, the cool of night, and a gibbous moon linger at the window.
I lay in a small bed in a small room in an unfamiliar city,
drowsed by the hum, contented by the breeze, disquieted by the moon.
I have walked the streets of London.
I have tasted what wine the city offers --
tasted too much of the good wine.
Today I climbed the dome of St paul's
and seeing the crowd undistinguished from the floor tiles
thought I knew a god's eyes.
Today I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
I had read the play once and thought Brilliant.
This day I have seen a city that swallows its astonished pilgrims
into green parks and streets that glow all night.
But the gibbous moon is draining the wine
And the sober beams remind me how much I paid the priest at the cash register
for that climb up the dome.
The rays recollect how bored I was during that play
and how angry I grew at myself for being bored in the midst of brilliance.
For all the color, for all the music, for all the marvel,
there were shabby sleepers in doorways
and others sifting the refuse.
Rising from the bes, I cross to the window,
pull down the dirty glass,
and draw the fading curtains.
London, gibbous moon.

Ah, London. It brings out the failed poet in all of us.

I composed these wretched lines twenty years ago. In the summer that separated the end of undergraduate study from the beginning of a doctoral program, I found myself on a humid night a tenant of a decrepit London hotel. As an aspiring teacher, I'd been awarded a small amount of money to pursue something educational and research-oriented in these months, so I decided to buy a plane ticket and backpack through as much of the British Isles as three months and my limited funds would allow.

I arrived in London filled with all the fantasies of the place an American English major could possess. From my study of Chaucer I learned to expect a cosmopolitan bustle; from Dickens some picturesque poverty; from Samuel Johnson a city of dreams. London turned out to be far more than the museum of distant literature I'd expected, alive with a vibe in many ways more modern than many American cities (and certainly much more contemporary in its ardors than Boston, where I grew up). London was also far more marked by its colonial past than I had anticipated. This was 1987, after all, and England was smarting from racial violence, anti immigrant sentiment, IRA bombs in the subway. Somehow everything seemed less romantic and more difficult than my books had led me to believe.

But, you know, two decades ago I was pretty much an idiot. My family had not been well off enough to travel internationally -- in fact, we barely traveled locally. I hadn't experienced many big cities other than Boston, Toronto, and New York. London, England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland were imagined geographies, places I'd studied in my literature and history and political science classes but locales more abstract than real, historical rather than possessed of a vivacious present.

Despite the effusions of poor poetry the trip triggered, a lasting positive outcome of that sojourn is this: meandering through the isles and wandering especially through London cured me of wanting to keep the past a monumentally still domain. If the London of 1987 could be possessed of so much vitality, shouldn't the London of 1387 be granted just as much ambivalence, joy, danger, messiness? I suppose I was fairly late in coming to this lesson, but I've always suspected that late bloomers are the ones who learn best.

I've returned to London frequently over the years and watched in wonder as the city has changed. Whenever I'm there I also can't help encountering the me of two decades ago, usually wandering some dusky street in Bloomsbury with his own portable cloud of gloom. If I could just touch that phantom, I'd grab him and shake him and tell him to snap out of his unearned melancholy. But then again, I'm happy that the ghosts of former selves have to remain as they are. They mustn't realize the future selves congregating around them, or it would be trouble for all of us.

This year for the first time the family is joining me on my London research junket. We've rented a flat not far from the British Museum for a few weeks. My wife lived in London as a student, and other than a week we spent there together in 2002 hasn't been back since. Kid #1 has been eagerly anticipating this trip for (according to him) his ENTIRE life (that would be ten years). Talk about former selves: he's a better adjusted version of me at that age, filled with enthusiasm for castles and dungeons and relics. He can hardly wait to be able to touch as solid objects the fortifications he's only dreamt about so far. Kid #2 likewise knows London only through books, and likewise feels quite confident that she will encounter the city as those books inform her it should be. Primarily this means that she KNOWS Peter Pan will appear by her bedside some evening to escort her past Big Ben skyward into Never Land. She has had a pink nightgown set aside for this trip for over two months. She realizes that you must be wearing a nightgown to be invited to Never Land.

So expect few postings from me in the future. I return on Friday July 13th (luckily I am not superstitious), but even then I anticipate being so slammed by work upon my return that it will be tough to blog. I will drop a note or two from London, though ... and promise not to compose any more poetry. Only Young Me did that. He was so sweet in his dire little way -- but Old Me will likely slap him if he catches him speaking of hunchbacked lunar bodies again.

Happy summer, and love to all.

Jeffrey

Two memories of an ordinary weekend

It's been a while since I've posted on the minutiae of life chez Cohen. Here follows a corrective, because I know you like stories with cute kids. And you will learn from reading that the local pizza delivery man is a CIA spy.

----------------
"Vous êtes francophone?"

I stood in blank silence for a moment before answering "Pas de tout" and handing the man his money. "And I don't think I've ever had someone delivering pizza interrogate me in French before."

"When I asked your son to give me haut cinq, he knew what to do, and said you taught him how to say five in French."

It's true, my French is so good that I can count to five. I also know how to recite the ABCs. Weirdly, I can also tell you what sounds many animals make when they speak en français, and that to a baby you say "coo-coo" rather than "goo goo ga ga." But I didn't expect to have a conversation about such things as the pizza arrived. Our deliveryman, it turns out, included among his former careers missionary in Africa, poet, and CIA language expert. He claimed to be fluent in five tongues. I can vouch for the fact that he spoke French with no accent. His Swahili and Russian seemed pretty good too, but what do I know?

He could also mimic any Loony Tunes character Kid #1 could suggest, leading to an extra large tip and very cold pizza.

--------------------

A perfect evening: to celebrate Father's Day, we went to a playground in Glover Park and let the kids go wild on the swings and spinning devices. We then strolled to the local Whole Foods, which has one of those hot and cold food bars where the gourmet creations are sold by the pound. Kid #2 loaded her plate with three cucumbers; a hard boiled egg; and "truffled macaroni and cheese" -- only the best for her. Kid #1 chose sushi and minestrone soup, a cosmopolitan meal if ever there was one. We watched two DC high school teams playing baseball on the field nearby, then had dessert at a shop that makes their own ice cream, hot fudge, and whipped cream. Could life be better than this?

At the end, Kid #1 confided that he'd be happy when Father's Day was over and we could go back to Kids Days.

And a historical note, to make this all medieval: Glover Park is a neighborhood in northwest DC where the group of medievalists known as "Front 190" had their second meeting, during a December MLA. I checked out the Thai restaurant where it happened; no plaque yet. I remember I got in a lot of trouble with Michael Uebel at that dinner for chatting with the medievalist next to me when we were supposed to be setting forth our plan for domination of the discipline, if not the world.

Impromptu Take Your Spawn to Work Day

A burst water main near Kid #2's preschool means she is here at the office with me, bringing a little funnel cloud of havoc along with her.

The Tiny Shriner has, much to his secret pleasure, been used as a princess in peril. At one point I believe he was being married to my Hawaiian tiki idol. She exhausted herself on my bungee cord chair before growing weary of what small amusement an English Department can offer. Above is a picture of Kid #2 in all her glory, pounding away on an office computer and wearing a court jester's hat (not mine; and no, I do not know why the English Department keeps one in stock; also, note that the little orbs that decorate the chapeau actually light up and flash).

On entering the double digits

Despite his parents' desperate attempts to arrest his development (and perhaps thereby forestall their own obsolescence), Kid #1 turned ten years old over the weekend. He celebrated with a sleepover party that featured a trip to a Mongolian barbecue, an intense game of dodge ball, a showing of Shrek 2, and a night of staying awake in the basement telling jokes about farts and butts.

Ten is a tough age: still kid-like enough to want to feel close to mom and dad, to want to have big and obvious signs of parental affection ... but proto-adolescent enough to become sullen when offered a children's menu or kid's cup at a restaurant, and to attempt through the strategic shutting of doors and wearing of headphones to create private space and independence. And the moodswings: I don't envy the boy for the little hurricanes of havoc his small surges of hormones are causing, and I'm sure that it is an odd experience to see that your body is elongating so quickly that almost every day you are reminded of how distant you now are from the small child you once were ... but damn, if this is a taste of what true adolescence is like, then Sergeant Stern's School for Young Men is looking like a pretty good option (you mail them your child just as he enters his difficult phase; they send him back in a few years as a well disciplined and obedient soldier) (downside: he will also be a killing machine).

All joking aside, I realize how fortunate I am to have had a decade with this amazing child proto-adolescent. I even look forward to the next decade, with all it will bring. He tells me he is going to live well into the triple digits, so I'm expecting we'll have a long time together.

How sad is it ...

... when you reach an age at which you look forward to spring break not for travel or time off or leisure, but because with a week of no classes and few appointments and sparse obligations, you can finally get some work done?

My students will be whooping it up in Florida and Mexico. I'll be huddled over my laptop finishing an essay on medieval animals, getting an edited collection in order, and obsessing about some paper presentations that have begun to loom.

On the positive side, I've just finalized summer plans. For the first time ever my London research junket will be en famille. Kid #1 is especially thrilled, since London has loomed large in his fantasies for quite some time. We found an apartment for two weeks not far from the British Museum. Shockingly, in these days of $1000 summer airfares, I even found "reasonable" tickets. Who needs Fort Lauderdale when they have London in July?

The god question

While driving Kid #1 home from Hebrew school Tuesday night, the following conversation unfolded. I'm trying to get it verbatim but no doubt I am creating as I record. It seems to me that it is the kind of conversation we have among ourselves here on ITM all the time (ethics, responsibility towards the other, belief, the meaning of life, the universe and everything ...) -- only here I wasn't using my medievalist/theorist vocabulary. It's kind of personal, I realize, but maybe it shows how some of the abstract ideas circulated here need to be translated to make them practical. It also shows that no matter how much Levinas you read, you'll never adequately answer the interrogations of a nine year old.

KID: Dad, if we don't believe in God, how come we have to go to a synagogue?
ME: You don't believe in God?
KID: Not really. I don't know if there is a God or not.
ME: That's different from saying you don't believe.
KID: I guess. I just think that people who believe in God make him into Santa or something they want. He gives goodies if you act like he wants you to.
ME: A lot of people think of God as a parent.
KID: Yeah. Full of punishments if you're bad. But most people don't think they're bad, they just want God to punish people they don't like.
ME: If God isn't anything but vengeance, I don't really want anything to do with God.
KID: Me neither. (Pause) So why do we go to a synagogue? So many religions are more popular than Jews. There are a lot more Christians.
ME: That's true. And Buddhists and Muslims. But your mother and I like the kind of Judaism we're trying to teach you. It encourages you to doubt. It doesn't tell you who God is or what goodness is. It puts you in charge of thinking about those things, and it makes you question and learn and argue. And it makes you realize that we have to heal the world.
KID: Also Jewishness is in our family.
ME: It's an important part of our history. We have family who died because they were Jewish. There were lots of points where Judaism almost disappeared from both sides of our family. So it's important to us to pass along some knowledge and traditions to you and your sister. You might reject them when you're older. That'd be OK, at least you have them to reject. It'd be worse not to have known.
KID: So is there a God?
ME: I don't know.
KID: Me neither.
ME: Sometimes people who are sure there is no God are really only sure the world is human. And small. I think there's something in us that's bigger than what's just human. I see it in the love I have for you. It always surprises me how much bigger it is than I am. It makes me realize that there's something in the way that humans can care for each other that takes us out of ourselves. Maybe God is there. Whatever God is. Or maybe that's not God, that's the best that we can be as humans.
KID: Hmm.
ME: I'm blathering.
KID: No. I just don't know.
ME: Neither do I. And guess I'm like you, I have my doubts about God. I can say what I suspect, and lots of time I'm afraid what I suspect is true. But I always hope the world is better than I think it is at the worst moments.
KID: What happens when we die?
ME: It's questions like that that made us sign you up for religious school!
KID: Can I have a Tic Tac?

If someone were to ask me point blank if I believe in God and an afterlife, my most direct answer is no. In the end, though, questions of belief aren't as important to me as questions of living, doing, acting. I think that's why I like the Jewish emphasis on praxis over orthodoxy. When it comes to the God question, and if I try to force myself to avoid pablum, it is difficult to say much that doesn't sound hollow. And you know, as medievalists, we are staring the God question in the face all the time.

The body remembers its pleasures

Medieval visions of the afterlife are replete with bodies eternally punished for the excesses of enjoyment in which they indulged in life. The fires of hell are simply a literalization of the flames of lust to which sinners succumbed during their terrestial sojourn. Dante is particularly adept at this kind of poetic justice, providing an aesthetically pleasing orgy of tortured flesh, agonies without endings. In his infernal realms, for example, those who read the story of Lancelot and are pushed to indulgence by its lascivious example spend their time after death blown by relentless winds, the restless and irresistible gale of their own passions.

I was thinking about Dante during my recent vacation not because it was in any way reminiscent of hell (at least not for me; I can think of many people, though, for whom being trapped aboard a Disney ship would be worse than finding oneself shoved up Satan's ass like the poor friars in Chaucer's "Summoner's Tale"). As Eileen observed while I was gone, sometimes we want to declare that we eat certain things simply because we are hungry -- that is, we as scholars tend to think think think about everything, so that each forkful headed towards the maw is freighted with a cultural and historical significance that makes the utensil almost too heavy to lift. Sometimes this inability to turn off the Super Meaning Detector is wearying, and we fall ill with blog ennui. Most of the time, though, we get good (even meaty) insights out of such reflection.

Back to Dante on the Disney ship. Most of the time I was pleasantly and mindlessly enjoying myself with my family. Let me get the sappy part over with: being with my family intensely for seven days straight made me realize how fortunate I am to have such amazing people in my life. Wow.

OK, back to the disembodied and non-sentimental scholar who makes cutting remarks about other people's enjoyments to mask his own maudlin core. An interesting thing about drifting the Caribbean with a boatload of fellow tourists intent on eating, drinking, purchasing and consuming as much as possible was to see, amply, how every pleasure the body embraces is recorded by, stored inside, remembered within the flesh. It does not take a personal declaration that you have been snacking on artificially flavored salsa chips and "creme" filled non-baked goods to make obvious to the world the fact these have been your enjoyments: your flesh keeps that record for you, expanding to store the adipose memories of those pleasures. Sadly, it doesn't take twenty or thirty years of such binges to leave the body altered: I was amazed at how many young children already carried with them the history of their overeating. Smoking, similarly: the face, the teeth, the skin betray the length of this chemical love affair. As those who have examined the Blogroll (at right) know, I have an amateur's passion for archeology. I find it fascinating how the bones of the dead can be read to reveal fragments of their living stories. On this vacation, though, I couldn't stop reading the living. Perhaps out of my own guilt at being such a consumer (why did I keep thinking of Jamaica Kincaid's "A Small Place" as we sailed to St Martin, St Thomas, the Bahamas ... ?), I overcompensated by judging those less frugal with their pleasures.

Every narrative needs its epiphany, so here's mine: when it comes to the body I'm mired in the medieval. It's hard for me to think of corporeality and enjoyment without immediately connecting it to some price to be paid.

The shrunken head upon my Christmas tree

Eileen gave us her holiday-inspired ruminations yesterday. Today I offer a few of my own.

Last week, just as Hanukkah was revving up, I mentioned the syncretism that haunts the various celebrations occurring at this time of year: both Christmas and Hanukkah have quietly absorbed rituals that don't have all that much to do with the historic events they commemorate. The birth of a child in a Bethlehem manger and the miracle of eight nights of oil are not innately connected to fir trees festooned with electric bulbs, holly and berries, gift giving, lighting candles against long nights, the celebration of winter's advent and the dwindling of the year. The present has a way of not forgetting what is ancient in human history: the impulse to joy at winter solstice, for example. Eileen was wondering about where god might be in all this end of the year activity, or in the command that sent Abraham with a knife to a mountaintop. Right now I'm wondering why it is that, even in the absence of gods, the short days and the long darkness here in the northern hemisphere move us not to gloom but to hope. I also wonder (following Eileen's train of thought again) if hope isn't really what we mean, in the end, by love.

Back to syncretism. The great historian of Anglo-Saxon England, Bede, wrote of a king of East Anglia who couldn't completely commit to the New World Order instigated by Christianity's advent. Rædwald kept two altars in his temple, one for sacrifices to the parvenu God, "and another small altar on which to offer victims to devils [that is, the pagan gods]" (Ecclesiastical History 2.15). Here we see vividly the syncretism for which the period is now renowned: a commingling of traditions without synthesis and (at least for people like Rædwald) without much cognitive dissonance. A contemporary analogue of Rædwald's dual altars might be the Easter Bunny: clearly this furry little fertility symbol, striding into houses to deliver more fertility symbols (eggs), has little to do with the person whose resurrection is being commemorated on that day. Easter silently gathered to itself primordial celebrations of spring, procreation, fecundity.

As you can guess, I have no problems with syncretism. We can be as purist as we like, declaring that randy rabbits shall have no part in our paschal solemnities, or that having a Tanenbaum in a Jewish home is like hanging a cross instead of a mezuzah, but we are thereby denying a part of what makes us creatures of history: our reluctance to abandon the ancient when asked to replace old celebrations with novel ones, our inability to forge wholly new identities, our intractable gravitation towards the cycles of birth, death, light and dark that provided humanity's first glimmer of an awesome and endless exteriority, of what might be the divine.

This is a long way of explaining why the Cohen family of Bethesda, Maryland -- who do in fact have a mezuzah on their door and a hanukkiah blazing away each night at their window -- also have a Frasier fir in their living room so decked with lights it can barely support itself. Yes, it is a Christmas tree, and it is topped with what looks to be an angel ... but on closer examination that Seraphim on the topmost branch is actually a dachshund in a white robe with a halo, a saintly version of our dog Scooby. You won't find a nativity scene beneath the Christmas tree, nor "small altar on which to offer victims to devils ," but on its boughs you will spot the following objects dangling: ornaments shaped like disco balls; two toucans; Sponge Bob Square Pants in a Santa hat; a pickle; some cows; a flamingo in a hula skirt; and a shrunken head. In our family we have a saying: "It isn't a Christmas tree without a shrunken head."

Happy holidays, everyone. May the year ahead bring peace, love ... and hope.