A Minor Correction

In the exhibit "Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections", now at the Getty, there is a relief showing Alexander the Great borne up to heaven by a pair of griffins. I took this to be an apotheosis when I saw the exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, but find that I am wrong.

The anthology I picked up last week has excerpts from Eckhart of Aura's universal history, both of them concerning Alexander the Great. According to the second, the flight with griffins was a matter of aerial exploration. So far from his being received on Olympus, they and he eventually returned to earth ten days walk from his army, to which he returned safely. But I still wish that I had a postcard of the relief.

Back to Camp Hill

For many years, we drove up to the "West Shore", the trans-Susquehanna suburbs of Harrisburg, about every six weeks. Over the last five years, we have been there only two or three times. One was last week, to see friends and family, and stock up on food easier bought there than here. I noticed again that

1. One sees a lot of turkey vultures soaring above I-270 out past Germantown. Certainly they are around closer in--I saw them on a chimney down the block early this year, and have seen them in Rock Creek Park. But the open country makes them easier to see.
2. Pennsylvanians understand smoked sausage as well as anyone on the continent, perhaps in the world.  Lebanon bologna is a wonder.
3. The West Shore Farmers Market in Lemoyne still has the fluorescent lights that make anyone over 20 look embalmed. (It would probably violate some health code to hold a wake and viewing in the market; but the location would offer an excellent excuse for the mourners to say "He looks so natural.") 
4. The Bookworm on the upper level of the market still has not exhausted its lode of Norman Mailer in various languages. The stock seemed strongest in Armies of the Night (I think Dutch, maybe German--I didn't look closely) and Tough Guys Don't Dance (I think Danish, and perhaps Hungarian). I did not deplete the stock, buying instead a Essays in Disguise by Wilfrid Sheed, and an anthology of medieval writing.
5. There is no longer an exit from Simpson Ferry Road west to US 15 south. I think it was gone by our last visit a couple of years ago, but it caught us by surprise.
6. It is "The Ashcombe Farm and Greenhouses" on Grantham Road, not "Ashcombe's". For years I vaguely supposed that the Ashcombe family owned the establishment. Not so. The name "Ashcombe" comes from the estate of some Anglophile or Cymbriphile who built a house a bit east of there.

Pictures at the Zoo

In Chapter 4, "Don't Ever Become Sentimental", of  Joachim Fest's Not I, there is picture of him with his two brothers, taken at the Berlin Zoo in 1933. The older two boys are holding lion cubs; the youngest shares a chair with the middle brother and holds his hand on the cub's hip. The older boys have a look of confidence, the younger seems to be worried about what the camera will make of him.

A friend of ours, some years dead, was born to a Jewish family in Berlin, and got to the US in 1936. The one picture of her German days that I remember showed her in a chair, holding a lion cub. She was a very pretty girl of about 10 or 12 when the picture was taken. If the bad times had arrived, they do not show in her face. I suppose that the picture could have been taken in 1933, and her cub could have been one of those in the picture with the Fests, and so for that matter her chair.

Was it a custom of the prosperous classes in Berlin to have such pictures taken? No American zoo of the last half century would want to risk the liability, I should think.

Noticed in Burke

Happening the other day to open a book to Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America, I noticed the sentences

I do not say whether they were right or wrong in applying your general arguments to their own case. It is not easy, indeed, to make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries.

And farther down he answers Samuel Johnson's

how is it that we hear the loudest YELPS for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

 in detail, if without at all blunting its point:

There is, however, a circumstance attending these Colonies which, in my opinion, fully counterbalances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the northward. It is that in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude; liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal. I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the Southern Colonies are much more strongly, and with an higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty than those to the northward. Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic ancestors; such in our days were the Poles; and such will be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves. In such a people the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.

Footnotes, Or, Oh, That Hegel

I have been reading, with much interest, Not I by Joachim Fest. I have been distracted here and there by the footnotes. These can be very helpful, as when they identify German poets and writers little known to most of us in the English-speaking world. They can also be a bit odd, something I noticed with a footnote on page 102, which explains a board game of naval strategy, the text  being

later we replayed historic sea battles from Salamis to Trafalgar and Jutland.

The note reads

These are major historical maritime battles from the Greeks via the Napoleonic Wars to the First World War; to Germans it is the Battle of Skagerrak, not Jutland.

Now, given that Fest's memoir is largely about his life under the Third Reich, and about his decision to become a historian, it is fair to assume that most who buy the book will have some interest in history. Those who have enough interest in history to spend $17 and tax on the book seem likely to me to have heard of Salamis and Trafalgar, if not Jutland. Is the footnote in effect an apology for the translator rendering "Skagerrak" as "Jutland"? I'm not likely to find out.

On page 387, discussing the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Fest writes

Consequently, broad but fickle sections of the population, who were essentially well disposed  to the republic, believed themselves to be threatened by radicals of the right and left; they increasingly surrendered to the idea that nothing less than the spirit of the age was against them. With Hegel in one's intellectual baggage one was even more susceptible to such thinking.

And the footnote explains

Fest here refers not to the Hegel whose reception, especially via France, has dominated so much of postmodern Western thought. He writes of the founder and main representative of German Idealism as he was popularly dispensed in German secondary schools and universities well into the 1960s. One of the seminal modern thinkers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1700-1831) has profoundly changed speculation in most fields of philosophy from logic to ontology and from philosophy of history to aesthetics.

 I cannot imagine who can both understand this footnote and require it.

Not News to Many, But Good News to Me

This morning I happened to be passing by Kramerbooks just above Dupont Circle, when I noticed that the sign gave the ours as 7:30 am through 1:30 am. The closing did not surprise me; the opening surprised and delighted me. I had to go in and buy a book. (Not I, by Joachim Fest). This is yet another reason to walk to work, and take the long way.

Solidarity on Columbia Road, NW

Seen today on the 1700 block of Columbia Road, NW:

The orange sign is headed "ENVIOS DE DINERO"--words more commonly seen on the signs along this commercial stretch.