It's July. These are very turbulent times. Nothing seems at all normal. The number of COVID-19 cases is on a dramatic rise again, especially in FL, TX, and AZ. Many countries around the world have seen declines in their cases and rates. But the US leads them all, and in deaths too. The news cycle this Saturday has President Trump at last in public wearing a mask. A blue one with the Presdiential Seal on it. He doesn't look very happy about it either. But it was a photo-op in a hospital.
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If it seems like I'm just thrashing about in the dark, that's pretty much how it all feels. Raphael died on April 6, five hundered years ago. Leo X issued the papal bull Exsurge Domini in June of 1520 telling Martin Luther he had to cease preaching, threatening him with excommunication, and to be branded a heretic if he did not stop. In it Pope Leo, formerly known as 'the Happy' Pope, the latest Giovanni Medici, petitions God to arise and judge his cause:
"Be mindful of the daily slander against you by the foolish; incline your ear to our supplication. Foxes have arisen which want to devastate your vineyard, where you have worked the winepress. ... A roaring sow of the woods has undertaken to destroy this vineyard; a wild beast wants to destroy it."
By 1520, everyone in Europe seemed to be talking about Luther and, he himself after the Liepzig debate, had begun a profound change that was coupled with a period of great creativity. August, October and December would see new works by him.
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Better hurry up. If I can make another post in June I'll be surprised. I also need to eat and remember to drink this water. The reading continued at a good pace this year despite both typical and untypical ups and downs. History repeats and rhymes and pulls the rug from under all at once these days.
Demonstrations, faked riots, statue pulling, police brutality have become constant, numerous, and widespread . The name 'Karen' became a thing. 'Cancel Culture' should not. For the last three weeks straight, somewhere in all fifty states. Most of the basics are well summed up here - 33 minutes of anyone's time - in three wide-spread videos from Killer Mike (from June 01), Trevor Noah (on May 29), and the author broadcast by John Oliver, Kimberley Jones . You can get her young adult novel that came out last year I'm Not Dying With You Tonight here.
All the rest of the news over the last month seems to pale in significance. Even the drastic increase in COVID-19 cases.
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But today I read Goethe. June 21, Goethe's pale anti-hero Werther wrote his friend about going and yearning. All he wanted was 'to be near' a young woman that was already engaged to someone else, but who was himself absent. Still it was this popular fictive story that set Europe alight nearly 250 years ago. It was also semi-autobiographical. Highlighting that when individual yearnings can never be satisfied, terrible inclinations are manifested. Napoleon claims he read Werther seven times.
Yesterday I'd finished a 20th century take on the beginning of the French Revolution up to the storming of the Bastille. This one centered on much of the politics and debt debate, the arraying of factions, the call for the States Assembly, its disastrous dissolution. This section followed a romp through European-wide politics and art and culture, literature: the salons of France mid and late-century, the noisy, smoky arguments in British Parlement, the rise and fall of Poland, the intrigues of Frederick and Catherine, Mirabeau and Necker. The debates excited by Voltaire and Rousseau, Kant, Schiller and Goethe, the music of Mozart, the drunken decline of Venice.
It's in the Will Durant series called the Story of Civilization which did for armchair histories much beginner work for as popular as it was, and widely distributed too. As its stated goal of being 'integral history', the series tried to bring as much from as many parts of lived history as possible. If not everything we know about all areas, then at least the brightest and broadest of swathes, the basic elements disentangled, and lain out in human set pieces, one after the other, revealing the home and family, the land, the places, the society, politics, religious practice and ideals, the politics, the art, and changes in thought, in colorful, human prose.
No one needs another Will Durant fan even now, fifty years after this massive series was finished. Nowadays, the hugest detraction from this amazing work was how unawarely silent it remained for much about Asia and Africa. Which is where his generation of American was - they just didn't know or have access to know. But his, and his wife Ariel's multi-volume, life long work remains a decent inroduction for Americans for, in this case, European history.
Also restarted, or reengaged with two more in the Durant series, The Reformation and the Renaissance. For me, this revisits a 'going back out' to a 'larger view' from rummaging in the details of all the specific threads of my studies in the last several years and looking again from a more general point of view. I read these when I was twenty and they got me enthused in the idea of broad-ranged historical study. I knew they were 'general knowledge' but the style was more personable than much else I saw in the American 1980's. And so this year in a return to history rather than mostly the fiction reading of the last couple years, I also return to a favorite author, despite his frequent mistakes and popularizing manners.
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brief dailynotes On February 1:
Experiencing several brief encounters with old friends early last month: co-workers and people in town. Weather changes too from dry to wet to snow. Already three fairly light snows blanketed the ground and after a couple days receded. I've also had time to read a lot of book introductions this month. So many so until I'd started several different books this first month of the first year in this a new decade. Yet this month's over, a new one begun, and I'm just now looking for the first time at what has transpired, just thinking without much of any documentation.
There are at least three different places I write (or type) activities and doings outside of work and here. One set of continually added drafts on 'regular' activities,
Also restarted, or reengaged with two more in the Durant series, The Reformation and the Renaissance. For me, this revisits a 'going back out' to a 'larger view' from rummaging in the details of all the specific threads of my studies in the last several years and looking again from a more general point of view. I read these when I was twenty and they got me enthused in the idea of broad-ranged historical study. I knew they were 'general knowledge' but the style was more personable than much else I saw in the American 1980's. And so this year in a return to history rather than mostly the fiction reading of the last couple years, I also return to a favorite author, despite his frequent mistakes and popularizing manners.
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brief dailynotes On February 1:
Experiencing several brief encounters with old friends early last month: co-workers and people in town. Weather changes too from dry to wet to snow. Already three fairly light snows blanketed the ground and after a couple days receded. I've also had time to read a lot of book introductions this month. So many so until I'd started several different books this first month of the first year in this a new decade. Yet this month's over, a new one begun, and I'm just now looking for the first time at what has transpired, just thinking without much of any documentation.
There are at least three different places I write (or type) activities and doings outside of work and here. One set of continually added drafts on 'regular' activities,
one handwritten set of both activities and books, and then
the (also) handwritten booklist that gets renewed (and rewritten) when enough of that page gets filled up over time.
The last two are there to remind me where I'm at with the various projects I have in progress. The first, the set of 'regular' drafts of activities show daily routines and is online in email drafts. None of that has been documented here but explains what I'm up to.
Fiction had become a focus across the last couple years. A return to history is in store for the coming year and compared with what I've done here, in other periods and places.
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Next day (31Jan) I took care of bi-weekly errands. Leisurely I went about it until it took up all morning.
The day after that I read.
Volkogonov: Lenin, Stalin
Durant: Isabella, Ximenes, Rousseau
John Dos Passos: letters from 1916
Fiction had become a focus across the last couple years. A return to history is in store for the coming year and compared with what I've done here, in other periods and places.
________________________________________
Next day (31Jan) I took care of bi-weekly errands. Leisurely I went about it until it took up all morning.
The day after that I read.
Volkogonov: Lenin, Stalin
Durant: Isabella, Ximenes, Rousseau
John Dos Passos: letters from 1916
