Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

After 500 pages of making fun of other countries and their peoples, and muttering how much better Lake Tahoe is compared to the Sea of Galilee and Lago di Como, Mark Twain wrote that little phrase a year after his trip across the Mediterranean on the Quaker City. That sentence comes after one of my favourite quotes: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”

Before he gets culture shock, Twain discovers the charm of European life that still resounds with us europhiles today. Here he is in Milan:

Afterward we walked up and down one of the most popular streets for some time, enjoying other people’s comfort and wishing we could export some of it to our restless, driving, vitality-consuming marts at home. Just in this one matter lies the main charm of life in Europe—comfort. In America, we hurry—which is well; but when the day’s work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep. We burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man’s prime in Europe. When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the continent in the same coach he started in—the coach is stabled somewhere on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days; when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon ourselves. What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!

I do envy these Europeans the comfort they take. When the work of the day is done, they forget it. Some of them go, with wife and children, to a beer hall and sit quietly and genteelly drinking a mug or two of ale and listening to music; others walk the streets, others drive in the avenues; others assemble in the great ornamental squares in the early evening to enjoy the sight and the fragrance of flowers and to hear the military bands play—no European city being without its fine military music at eventide; and yet others of the populace sit in the open air in front of the refreshment houses and eat ices and drink mild beverages that could not harm a child. They go to bed moderately early, and sleep well. They are always quiet, always orderly, always cheerful, comfortable, and appreciative of life and its manifold blessings. One never sees a drunken man among them. The change that has come over our little party is surprising. Day by day we lose some of our restlessness and absorb some of the spirit of quietude and ease that is in the tranquil atmosphere about us and in the demeanor of the people. We grow wise apace. We begin to comprehend what life is for.

Chapter 19: Who Glorifies Poor Mr. Laura?

In Venice, Twain describes the charming gondola parties:

Many and many a party of young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas handsomely decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their swallow-tailed, white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their tables tricked out as if for a bridal supper. They had brought along the costly globe lamps from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken curtains from the same places, I suppose. And they had also brought pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas, while the plebeian paper-lanterned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded around to stare and listen.

Chapter 22: Gondolas are Water-Hearses

Before he even gets to Rome, Twain begins to lose interest in travelling and begins complaining more than enjoying. In Rome, he is utterly full from art overload. Twain explains his bout of museum fatigue:

I suppose the Academy [of Fine Arts in New York] was bacon and beans in the Forty-Mile Desert, and a European gallery is a state dinner of thirteen courses. One leaves no sign after him of the one dish, but the thirteen frighten away his appetite and give him no satisfaction.

Chapter 28: The Good-natured Brother of Skulls

Among the horrors of Twain’s European tour is how many countless dogs died to amuse tourists testing out Vesuvius in the centuries leading up to the (slightly more) progressive modern day:

Everybody has written about the Grotto del Cane and its poisonous vapours, from Pliny down to Smith, and every tourist has held a dog over its floor by the legs to test the capabilities of the place. The dog dies in a minute and a half – a chicken instantly…..I longed to see this grotto. I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little and time him; suffocate him some more, and then finish him.

Chapter 30: The Rags and Riches of Naples

Luckily Twain’s party forgot to bring a dog and that lucky, unbrought dog lived for one more day.

Then there is this quote on tiresome know-it-alls:

…They are those old connoisseurs from the wilds of New Jersey who labouriously learn the differences between a fresco and a fire-plug, and from that day forward feel privileged to void their critical bathos on painting, sculpture, and architecture forever more.

Chapter 33: Constantinople the Bewildering

Twain gets a few things right. One of those things is that exertion makes relaxation so much better. Here is Twain and his fellow travellers in Damascus:

We lay on those divans a long time, after supper, smoking narghilies and long-stemmed chibouks, and talking about the dreadful ride of the day, and I knew then what I had sometimes known before—that it is worth while to get tired out, because one so enjoys resting afterward.

Chapter 44: I Drink out of Ananias’ Well

Finally, where I do agree with Twain is the humour in the repetitive abundance of saints’ relics in Catholic churches:

We had heard so much of St. Veronica, and seen her picture by so many masters, that it was like meeting an old friend unexpectedly to come upon her ancient home in Jerusalem. The strangest thing about the incident that has made her name so famous is, that when she wiped the perspiration away, the print of the Saviour’s face remained upon the handkerchief, a perfect portrait, and so remains unto this day. We knew this, because we saw this handkerchief in a cathedral in Paris, in another in Spain, and in two others in Italy. In the Milan cathedral it costs five francs to see it, and at St. Peter’s, at Rome, it is almost impossible to see it at any price. No tradition is so amply verified as this of St. Veronica and her handkerchief.

Chapter 54: Jerusalem – We are Surfeited with Sights!

Some good quotes hidden within the morass of culture shock and arrogance.

Perhaps the best part is the list of nineteenth century drinks (chapter 15: Down with the Dastardly Abelard!) that Twain’s group tried to order in a place that advertised “ALL MANNER OF AMERICAN DRINKS ARTISTICALLY PREPARED HERE” (all caps are Twain’s). Sherry cobbler, brandy smash, Santa Cruz Punch (no idea what it is), Eye-Opener, Stone-Fence and Earthquake (probably not this recipe as its purported inventor, Toulouse-Lautrec, could not have whipped up the concoction at three years old).

Totally hated Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All. Nevertheless, I did find some quotes to remember. Here’s one:

Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Kings brought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks “synagogues” or “churches” or “mosques.”

(Page 168)

And here’s another one:

A world leader who’s convinced that life is merely a trial for the more valuable and authentic afterlife is less hesitant to risk starting a nuclear holocaust. A politician or corporate executive who’s expecting the Rapture to arrive on the next flight from Jerusalem is not going to worry much about polluting oceans or destroying forests.

(Page 308)

Then again there is also this snippet of a song:

My heart is a Latin American food stall
And your love is a health inspector from Zurich

(Page 326)

I cheated and read the last paragraph of this new book I started reading last night. Here it is:

Wat Tyler, John Ball and the leaders of the country risings were the first ordinary men in the British Isles to mount a credible attack on the political and economic structures of their day. For all the flaws and inconsistencies in their stated objectives, and in the prosecution of their campaign, the rebels of 1381 succeeded in giving a voice to those those who had hitherto lacked any means of expressing their common political grievances. In spite of the defeat of its aims and the execution of its leaders, the Great Rising demonstrated that there was a latent political consciousness at all ranks of society. Denied any effective means of political representation, and subject to royal misgovernance and seigniorial oppression, the people of England found a voice for the first time in June 1381. Long after their defeat, the echoes of their cries reverberated in the politics of the English, and later British, states.

(Page 152 of The Great Rising of 1381: The Peasants’ Revolt and England’s Failed Revolution by Alastair Dunn.)

Here’s a cheery thought:

“We think of ourselves as rugged inidividualists, but where would we be without our E. coli? We are conglomerates. It’s not a bad thing to be. It means you never have to eat alone.”

Gary Lincoff, mycologist author, said it, in Eugenia Bone’s book Mycophilia (page 294).

Just read this line in Mycophilia by Eugenia Bone:

…Some of us are know-it-alls, a vanity that is the curse of not really knowing very much.

(Page 289)

I just finished reading a book and I am glowing, slightly in the sense of achievement. Lately, I’ve lost all my hope for the future, there’s nothing to look forward to and so a small victory like finishing a book grows extremely important in my little life. I did something, I think, and feel like I am twitching under my rocky shell home under the sludge-like ocean. I suppose this is like what it is being old.

(I suspect more people have lost their will too, only they delude themselves that their children will somehow succeed where they didn’t. Or they envelope themselves in their careers or a quest for ever more money through investments. They are probably better off for not seeing the world as it is.)

Having finished this book, I can say that it left me numb. It was about magic and opening our world to the barrow world, where all those magical Anglo-Saxon things live. The me of twenty years ago would have really fallen in for that sort of thing.

In a way, this book is about me and how far off course I’ve gone. I used to be depressed but still in wonder at the world. Now I am just utterly numb to everything. (I decided as my new year’s resolution this year that I am a failure and I shouldn’t even think about trying.)

Here’s the sentence that is about me:

“Maybe it’s just enough to know that there’s something marvelous still in the world, that all the mystery hasn’t been drained out of it by those who like to take a thing apart to understand it, then stand back all surprised because it doesn’t work anymore.”

(Page 269 if you’re wondering. Look up page 269 in every book you find and see if you can match it up to find the title of the book.)

A few months ago, I read this quote by Kitty, a cheating wife in the 1925 novel The Painted Veil:

“It’s not fair to blame me because I was silly and frivolous and vulgar. I was brought up like that. All the girls I know are like that…..You don’t ask for a pearl necklace or a sable coat at a booth in a fair; you ask for a tin trumpet and a toy balloon.”

Dear little Adelina Guinea Pig,

Reading this book about William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings and the Bayeux Tapestry, and there you are! Here’s what the author, Andrew Bridgeford, says about you: “The Domesday Book of 1086…..reveals that a lady jongleur (or possibly the wife of a jongleur) called Adelina held land in Hampshire under the patronage of Roger of Montgomery, the Earl of Shrewsbury.” And there’s more: “The land of Adelina Joculatrix lay in Upper Catford.” I think I am going to start calling you Adelina Joculatrix of Catford.

Love,

FG Maktaaq

As I wrangled terse notes into artefact captions all week, I’ve been watching all my circas, date ranges and correct addresses. I am pretty fussy with my history. If a story has a few too many versions, my captions make much use of “alleged” and “said to be” and things like that. Plus, I like to be consistent (Canadian spelling, metric) and I like exactness (I look up everything on a map to make sure that when I say something is on Jardine Street, there is actually a Jardine Street).

In the evenings this week, I turned to a book I started reading last fall. The book is 1066: The Hidden History of the Bayeux Tapestry by Andrew Bridgeford. Tonight’s much appreciated passage is, examines the maybes of the Bishop Odo of Bayeux’s involvement with the tapestry:

In popular books, or where space precludes the usual caveats, the ‘probably’ and the ‘perhaps’ have been hardened into statements of fact.

A sad fact from Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, a book by Antonia Fraser: “Estimates of the number of women who could actually sign their own name in this period vary between 34 and 15 percent” (page 43). No source listed, otherwise I would like to track down each estimate to see how they came to it.

And yet today, so many women waste their time reading nothing but repetitious women’s magazines that promote wanton materialism, self-hate and ridiculous stereotypes. End rant.