An Addition To Thie Morning's Blog

In a few hours my husband and I are leaving for Rome, via Atlanta.  As I guess I have written recently, this is his treat, and a grand one, first class on  Air France to Fiumicino Airport outside of Rome where we will be met by a car and driver from our hotel, the Hassler Villa Medici, located at the top of the Spanish Steps on a small piazza to the side of the celebrated Trinita dei Monti.  We are excited, me particularly, because we both love Rome.  I lived there for two years so I have strong memories.  I saw the city first in September of 1962, walking aggressively form morning to night, intoxicated by the sights, the architecture, the people--the typical Roman experience.  This trip will be far quieter; we neither of us can walk well, so going from the hotel to the Borgheese Gardens will not be a stroll but a struggle.  This is a wordy introduction to the announcement that I will be silent at least for the next ten days.  Beyond that I am thinking of shutting up for good or for the foreseeable future.  I don't feel that I have that much to say, and would be better served by holding "in brain" conversations with myself.  It is my habit, has been all my life, to talk to myself, forming the words in my brain where they sound, or so it seems, but are not audible outside my head. I guess everyone does that, although how folks with those ubiquitous buds in their ears manage to hear themselves talk is beyond me.  Anyway, I am going to have a great time. 

Lost In The Selva Oscura

Yesterday I telephoned a credit card company to tell them of my whereabouts in the next few weeks.  The very pleasant voiced young lady with whom I attempted to speak asked me to begin with "what is your user name?"  I had no idea what she meant, nor could I subsequently recall for that particular name a "passcode" associated with it for which she also asked.  Somewhat rattled I called out to my husband to look on my computer, at the same time reassuring her that I would get the information she needed.  You may not have someone helping you with this," she said severely, but by then too late, he had called out the names and numbers and they clicked in recognition in my brain, and we were back in business.  And also yesterday I went online to find out some information from another account which just as the screen was coming into view was blocked by a legend telling me that it was a law or a federal regulation that I be told the inner mysteries of the financial system or something like that.  Why in heaven's name would I want to know this?  The box informed me that I could hit the "later" button five times and then I would have to stop and submit to this information.  Hey ,why can't I make a date?  I am always busy doing something when the command comes.  Google Plus has taken to sending me messages suggesting things I might do, places to go, and so forth.  What is this?  I am perfectly capable of amusing myself as well as informing myself.  Last evening I was talking with a friend in Vermont when the cellphone in my hand suddenly went dead.  Up in the left hand corner where it was supposed to say AT&T and other things it read, instead, "no service."  Now, what did that mean?  My first thought was old fashioned "oh, the telephone lines are down."  Nothing on the cellphone indicated the nature of the problem.  Was it me, the phone, telephone central, the end of the western world?  I put the phone down as I tried to wrestle with the issue.  A moment later I noticed that the AT&T sign had reappeared, and I called my son to see if his world were still intact.  "Dad," he said to me, "your phone got overheated.  Turn it off, and wait awhile."  I turned it off and went to bed.  Today it seems happy, works just fine.  Is temperamental the name of the game for the Iphone whatever number it is? the one before the one they are all jumping up and down about right now?  This is the one that still has some gizmo that the new one does not.  One feature it definitely does have, in addition to being oversized, is that the perfect place to set my fingers when holding the phone is also the place for the finger to lower the sound, so almost always I do not hear my calls and then if by chance I answer cannot hear the caller.  Perhaps it is time to switch to the old folks cellphone advertised in the AARP magazine.

You Can Take The Boy Out Of Iowa But You Can'T Take Iowa Out Of The Boy

I have been reading Jane Smiley's three volume epic history of Iowa people, one extended family through the twentieth century.  When I encountered the first volume I glowed with a kind of enthusiasm, since I was born in Iowa City in 1930, and I was to discover, a principal character grows up and leaves the farm and in 1954 comes the State University of Iowa, and is even described as taking medieval English courses with a Professor John McCalliard.  Here was a moment when reality came into the fiction.  I, Charles Beye, flesh and blood creature, took that very course, had to be a few years earlier, because I graduated in '52and went on to Harvard.  I was the son of citified persons from Oak Park Illinois, my father was a surgeon, professor of surgery, really, a far cry from these hardy farming people, descendants of the laconic direct Scandinavian immigrant men and women.  Still I read on.  I recognized many types from my high school classes, my university classes, people I delivered papers to.  They were all pretty much bland and good, and none seemed to be going through the tortured life of an early teenaged boy wanting a scandalous promiscuous life of sex with my male classmates who were at an age where instant arousal trumped the gender of the sexual partner.  But I read on enjoying a kind of sentimental deja vu of the rocks and rills, the fields of corn, the horses, those mild people.  But now I am reading the second volume, the next generation is spreading out; still they do not lose their unflappability, and in this portion I discovered why it was that I had to get out of Iowa, as did the majority of my siblings:  the people had no affect. Too much time with them and you would die of boredom.  My youngest sister who never left, raised three daughters, in a fundamentally loveless marriage, made the pies, wrapped the christmas packages, brought covered dishes to church suppers, grew to be immensely obese, had to have canes to get around, and in a moment of mournful candor confessed to me out on a visit that she guessed it was boredom that kept her hand in the cookie jar.  I went back to all my high school reunions and everyone was so nice, even when trying to express strong opposition to some national policy.  It was scary, Smiley's book is scary.  But what is even more disturbing is here in Sarasota there are the retirees from the Middle West, my age cohorts, come to maturity in the Eisenhower years, all of them nice, careful with their language, evidently so easily disturbed that the directors of the Asolo Repertory Theater have to advertise in this day and age--get that image in your mind--warning of "mature themes, mature language."  This is a major American professional repertory theater and it thinks Eugene O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness" is daring!  God forbid they try Tennessee Williams.Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Albee, or a host of others who have prodded Americans to rethink the simpleminded pieties they learned on the farm.  So Smiley's trilogy is affording me a wonderful look back, but also a closer inspection of the backstories of the people I meet  down here at the theater wine receptions where we exchange the blandest of platitudes in lieu of thinking about the plays.  I cannot imagine what they might have to say about Hillary and the Donald, and don't intend to inquire.

A Rivverderci Roma

Twenty five years ago my spouse, then a newly acquired boyfriend, was encouraged to buy a vacant studio for sale in the coop where I had a one bedroom.  This way, I explained, we would have living quarters in the one and a study (both of us were academics) in the other.  He, who had grown up in an impecunious circumstance, was a little nervous about committing himself to paying over the years what seemed like a lot of money, but I reassured him that this was the way of the world and rental left you with nothing at the end.  And so it came to pass, and the years rolled by, and the unit is now in the process of being sold, long after I sold mine, and we have moved successively to Massachusetts and now to Florida.  My husband could not get over the shock of the rise in price in the last years.  His gratitude to me was charming, the expression of it, dazzling: Tuesday he is flying me first class to Rome where we will be staying at the Hassler Hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps.  This trip has so much meaning for me.  Rome was almost my first experience of Europe, simple Iowa provincial that I was, in time it became my most profound as I lived there on two separate sabbatical years, thereby giving my children a chance to reside in a foreign land two years at different moments of their lives. We, my wife and I, were joined the first year by an English au pair, who went on to live and work in Rome for her entire life, and with whom I often stayed when in Rome to use the library of the American Academy.  I have walked the streets of Rome time and again, and to this day can see in my mind's  eye most of the consequential streets and plazas as though my brain were a Google map.  I certainly would find my way around Rome far more easily than almost any American city other than New York.  Richard for whom traveling has long since lost its charm, and who had the daring and enterprise as a young man to hitch hike all over Europe, and who speaks fluently all the major European languages, is doing this for me, and I am overwhelmed.  This, we both understand, is our farewell to Europe; more to the point, we realize that neither of us is physically able to walk very much, sometimes we both of us use canes.  From the Hassler to the Pincio for the view, or down the Via Sistina to the Palazzo Barberini museum.  The hotel provides a car to drive its clients to the base of the Spanish Steps so we will try to make it on foot to the Piazza del Popolo and take a look at the Caravaggios in the church there, sit at the open air restaurant that used to be so chic, maybe walk to the Piazza Navona, look at the Bernini Fountain, risk being knocked down by the tourist crowd around the Trevi Fountain--it will be like walking through Times Square before curtain time.  When I was in college and graduate school I was a young married man, and I never thought I would get to Europe.  I was too late!  But that is not how it turned out.  I am very, very lucky.  And now, yet again with an escort showering me with love.

Digging In The Old Garden

I've taken to sorting through the files that contain copies of every published speech, review, or essay that I wrote during my years of activity as a professor of classics, beginning with an interpretation of Euripides' Alcestis in 1959 and ending with an essay that began as an endowed lecture devoted to the Homeric representation of the character of Odysseus in 2012.  Some of them, well most of them I like a lot, and I am getting quite a narcissistic buzz on.  There seem to be thirty eight by my count, plus twenty five review essays published in the cyberjournal greekworks.com.  Then there are eleven books depending on the counting, which is to say, I could have counted translations into other languages as a separate book, but do not, sometimes do count a reprint with major editorial changes, and so on and so forth.  On the shelf and in the file cabinet it is a pitiful amount when you compare it to some of the guys--gals, too--I knew in graduate school.  Every book that I have written except for the first has been commissioned from me, so I am basically a passive scholar.  The funny thing is that the first book on Homer came about because I wrote out a specimen chapter of the sort of thing I had been saying about Homeric epic in a lecture class and sent it off out of the blue to Doubleday, just thinking to myself and very arrogantly, too, that this would make a nice Anchor Book, a new series just coming along at the time--this was sixty two or so--.  I sent it, as they say, "over the transom," that is, I had no agent, no request from the press, made no inquiry, just sent it, and lo and behold got a letter back and we went back and forth a bit about what I had in mind, and they sent me a contract.  This doesn't happen much anymore; I was extremely lucky.  Luck has shadowed me all the way, in fact.  The next two Doubleday books were commissioned when their original author, my friend Adam Parry, died in a motorcycle accident.  A friend took me to lunch with John Gardner who was editing a series at Southern Illinois and wanted a book on Apollonios.  I had just written a--if I do say so myself--super article on the Argonautica which my friend had read and wanted to get Gardner to read.  And so on and so forth.  For instance, my once upon a time student Robert Miller, became publisher of Hyperion and commissioned Odysseus A Life.  The grand coup was the last: Jonathan Galassi, the star dream publisher of the super publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux  personally asked me for my memoirs, edited them himself and FSG published them.  Now I sit in Sarasota Florida where no one I meet has ever heard of the details of Greek or Roman Literature, has only the dimmest understanding of that world of publishing beyond Danielle Steele and Dan Brown.  It keeps me honest, less the fatuous pompous ass of many former colleagues who just can't seem to leave the academic scene where the spotlights shown so bright for so long.  It's very cleaning, this odd understanding that that to which you have given your heart and soul, your aesthetic and philosophical propensities, ever since you were old enough to make serious choices, is utterly unknown and meaningless to almost every person in the country.

Ah, Music To Soothe The Savage Breast

Yesterday we went to the first chamber music concert of the symphony season.  The hall for these concerts is relatively small, certainly in comparison to the space in which the symphony orchestra plays in.  And ordinarily it is sold out; getting tickets to these performances is always a struggle, best done by subscription a year in advance.  To advance to a superior seat, that is with improved visual access requires the death of a long term ticket holder.  So it was remarkable to arrive to find empty seats in the choice rows. Of course, we reckoned "contemporary music," even though Anton Webern was not exactly that since he at his height one hundred years ago.  A speaker for the musicians who were to play, a fellow member of the orchestra, came out to introduce his colleagues, and he praised the audience for coming out, telling them how much it meant to the musicians to share this music with them. My husband and  I were there because I find it interesting to listen to all styles of music and he wants to see me get home safely in the late afternoon light, another act of selflessness which I fear is an ever increasing list.  The music itself was interesting and to my naive ear very hard to listen to.  To be frank, it was a two hour torture.  It says something about the attitude toward this music that the symphony orchestra does not schedule one or another of these pieces among other more familiar pieces on a regular winter concert evening.  They ghettoize the music, demonstrating its potential for alienating, when it seems to me they need to integrate it into the regular programs, pairing pieces that draw out similarities.  But what do I know?  Well, one thing: we are not going back to the second companion piece on Sunday with another all "contemporary" program.  Even I could not take it.

Different Strokes For Different Folks, As The Saying Goes

If you live in an open society, as we do, where its citizens are free to think what they choose about all of the weighty subjects and question that come up or are posed in various religious texts, churches, and traditions, then we should welcome newcomers of demonstrably different faiths and traditions because that is a feature of the American way of life.  I know that this open generosity of spirit seems trying in small towns where the varieties of faith and thought are few and far between.  But it should be a goal in any community.  It is easier for me to say this because I spent my life as teacher where discussion groups are the foundation of the classroom and for all kinds of reasons one hears the wackiest ideas put forth that deserve attention and discussion.  So we must always welcome it. But at the same time reject persons who grow angry when confronted with objections or alternatives to what they have to say.  I will always treasure Pope Francis responding to a question on homosexuals with"Who am I to judge?"  I am sure his handlers blanched, and if you look on the internet there are all kinds of explanations ("it was the devil speaking through him"), although what came to my mind immediately was Jesus saying "Judge not that ye be not judged," something I have always tried to live by, and very often failed miserably, as I have been judged and reviled again and again since my youth.  Those who believe inflexibly in the utter inerrancy of their religious texts need to develop the psychologically healing power of faith to counteract the inevitable arguments against the truths they hold.  I do not welcome into my community persons who cannot accept living among others holding alternative views   I will always be suspicious of aggressively religious persons, but at the same time, struggle to offer them love and trust and ask for that in return.  The current tensions over receiving religious Muslim refugees in our midst makes me think of the Book of Acts where Peter and Paul are described as being like young Mormons out on the road doing their preaching of the new truth, and the villagers rejecting them and saying "shut up," and often driving them out of town.  T'was ever thus.