Patrick Leigh Fermor, RIP

Today's NY Times carries the obituary of Patrick Leigh Fermor. It is worth a look, and his books are worth reading.

Of them, I have read through A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, accounts of his late teenage journey, mostly afoot, from the Netherlands to Hungary, and from Hungary to the Iron Gates; also The A Time to Keep Silence, accounts of stays in Benedictine and Trappist monasteries, and of visits to long disused cave monasteries in Cappadocia. There are a couple more of his books around the house, collections of travel pieces on northern and southern Greece.

In 2006, the New Yorker carried a profile of Fermor by Anthony Lane. I was a little disappointed to learn that he had taken some liberties with the characters in his books; a German companion in Vienna was a stand-in for two brothers, he said. Still, I'm glad to have read his books.

He spent the middle 1930s on his walk across Europe partly because he had been expelled from King's School in Cambridge; his final offense, among he says many, was to be caught holding hands with a grocer's daughter. The other summer I noticed in a used book store a book on this school, and at once checked in the index. The book, published late 1950s or early 1960s, mentions Fermor without reference to his exit.

The Tutors and the Duke

In Wednesday's New York Times, I noticed

... the mother pointed out. She said she had paid Mr. Iyer’s company $750 to $1,500 each week this school year for 100-minute sessions on Liberal Studies, a total of about $35,000 — just shy of Riverdale’s $38,800 tuition.

The New York state median income for 2009 was about $54 thousand. That year the state spent about $15 thousand per student in the public schools.

I trust that the mother's offspring will get into a very good college. (If not, Mr. Iyer may need to hire a bodyguard.) Will they regard this as a case of merit properly rewarded? Will they complain about affirmative action if he is placed on a wait list?

I think now and then of the Duke of Wellington's good words for the Order of the Garter: there was "no damned nonsense about merit."

Another Book

Because David Ives's Venus in Fur is playing in Washington,  Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs  is the book for our next club meeting.

It's short. Still,

1. Evelyn Waugh writes "Nothing is more ludicrous than the posturing of a Svengali who fails to put his Trilby under." I suppose that the man who likes a good dry beating would find the book stimulating almost beyond bearing. For the man of simpler tastes it falls flat. One starts glancing at the page numbers somewhere in the 30s.
2. I am in no way prepared to dispute on antiquity with someone who came up through the Central European gymnasium system (even if he's a century and a quarter dead). Yet is the Venus of antiquity such a terrifying figure as Sacher-Masoch imagines? My impression of the Romans is that they were about about as romantic as the Wall Street Journal stock listings. And doesn't Homer treat Aphrodite with scant respect?
3. Sacher-Masoch's name survives in "masochism", a coinage of Kraft-Ebbing's. Once in the fiction section of  the now closed White Flint Borders I noticed in the Ds a notice saying "Works by de Sade are shelved under S". I doubt they had any such notice for Sacher-Masoch in the Ms; at least, without looking for it,  I do notice de Sade's work now and then, but never Sacher-Masoch's. Commercially it seems better to be hammer than anvil.

More Unexpected Sights

First, the Street View car again, this time downtown. Google is photographing Washington, DC, or at least 16th St. NW. The thing atop the mast is not a dodecahedron, I see. It is round, with cutouts for the cameras.

Second, in my neighborhood, a mockingbird diving at and scolding a black cat. The cat looked a bit heavy to be an efficient hunter. The bird's attentions moved it from the intersection toward the cover of bushes, not very far or fast.

Unexpected Sights

First, in Rock Creek Park, a bicyclist towing a trailer with a boom box on it, one the size of a small suitcase. I suppose he must have been going to meet friends, else why not bring an MP3 player with earphones and lose the weight? I didn't care for the music, but when I'm running  I prefer cyclists I can see coming, and he was hard to miss.

Second, on 16th St. NW, a Google Street View car. I spotted the superstructure first, a dodecahedron(?) on a tripod mast, then the car with its identification. One of these days I'll go to Street View to see whether it shows a glum fellow in sunglasses oppose 16th & Arkansas.

Study and Attention

In an essay of Simone Weil's "Reflections on the Right Use of Studies with a View to the Love of God", I find the paragraph

 Although most people seem unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention  forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. Most school tasks have a certain intrinsic interest as well, but such an interest is secondary. All tasks that really call upon the attention are interesting for the same reason and to an almost equal degree.

Her interest in the essay is on attention in prayer; in another essay in the same collection, she writes of reciting the Lord's Prayer (in Greek) every morning with complete attention.

She makes an excellent case for developing the faculty of attention. Clearly she had that faculty herself. Yet I wonder how far studying in any system I've met develops that faculty. I seem to remember a lot of looking at the window and daydreaming in my own school days. More recently the physicians have been helping the teachers. I suppose the kids sit stiller, but are they more attentive?

Nancy Mitford may have been more practical when in Love in a Cold Climate she suggested that the appeal of fox-hunting is that it makes the stupidest person concentrate for long periods. (I would not know about that, having small acquaintance with horses and none with hunting. Still, I can imagine that inattention could lead to painful falls.)

Executive Compensation: The Early Days, or, But Who's Counting?

The action of the Iliad begins when Agamemnon takes offense at Achilles's presumption and seizes the latter's slave girl, Bryseis, in return for the priest's daughter he must give back to placate Apollo. Agamemnon is already unhappy with Achilles for calling the meeting that has led up to the announcement that Chryseis must go back home; however the quarrel ignites when Achilles disputes Agamemnon's demand for compensation from the army:

"You must prepare for, however,
a prize of honor for me, and at once,
that I may not be left without my portion--
I, of all Argives. It is not fitting so."

Here "prize" seems to bear a naval sense, as indicating a spoil of war. Within a very few lines, tempers are to the point only Athena's intervention prevents Achilles from taking a sword to Agamemnon.

By Book IX, the Greeks, without Achilles, are in a bad way, and Agamemnon prepares to send offers to compensate Achilles and bring him back into the fight. The compensation up front will include gold, cooking implements, and horses, but also

"... seven women, deft
in household handicraft--women of Lesbos
I chose when he himself took Lesbos town,
as they outshone all womankind for beauty."

Now granting that the gold, tripods, cauldrons, and horses might have been brought from Argos, I wonder by what accounting the women of Lesbos don't count as "prizes of honor." Yet Achilles apart, the board, taking this to consist of leaders of the army, say Odysseus, Diomedes, the Ajaxes, Menelaus, Nestor, and Idomeneus, doesn't raise objections. Clearly Agamemnon's "reality distortion field" was in the same class as Steve Jobs's.

(The translation is Robert Fitzgerald's.)