Pater Familias

THE VAN GOGH LETTERS. The complete letters of Vincent Van Gogh have now been published in a fully annotated, indexed and illustrated edition. They are available here at an absolutely wonderful website. Van Gogh often illustrated his letters and those illustrations are reproduced at the site. Van Gogh is a wonderful thinker about art. He was also a great writer about himself. Richard Dorment in the New York Review of Books (March 25, 2010) writes that: “In these pages we come as close as literature can to taking the reader inside the mind of another person.”

MARRIED LOVE AND WESTERN LITERATURE. De Rougemont’s LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD is a book of literary criticism. (Google Books prints a number of pages from the first part of the book which I found here.) De Rougemont has a lot of interesting arguments which trace the view of love in Western literature to the tradition of courtly love and ultimately to the Cathars and the Albigensian heresy. De Rougemont says that Christian marriage was diametrically opposed to Catharism, which held that “the soul actually becomes the prisoner of a body with terrestrial appetites and subject to the laws of procreation and death.” (p.80).
What do I think of the book? I take these propositions as the core of the book: “Happy love has no history—IN WESTERN LITERATURE [emphasis in italics in the original]” (p.52) and “[Passionate love] stands for a radical condemnation of marriage.” Like Updike, I have seen confirmations of these propositions all about me—in books, poems, plays and movies. And, of course, I have also seen many happy marriages.

UPDIKE AND LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD. De Rougemont takes what he calls the “one great European myth of adultery—the Romance of TRISTAN AND ISEULT” as his starting point. Tristan and Iseult sleep beside each other with a sword between them to prevent adulterous consummation of their love. De Rougemont uses the sword between the lovers to represent all the barriers that can prevent consummation. I first encountered LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD in a review by John Updike in the New Yorker many years ago. Updike thought the book important, but said he had had one doubt about the thesis when he first read the book. It occurred to him, as a novelist, that the barriers between the lovers are useful plot devices, that conflicts and difficulties make stories interesting. But Updike said in his review that he had changed his mind. He had found confirmation of de Rougemont’s argument everywhere since he had read De Rougemont’s book.

LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD. While I was posting on John Keats and Fanny Brawne, I was surprised to see that the Search feature for this blog showed that I had not yet posted on LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD by Denis de Rougemont—surprised because many of my hobby horses have already made it into the blog. The main message of LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD appears on the first page: “Love and death, a fatal love—in these phrases is summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature, alike as regards the oldest legends and the sweetest songs. Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its PASSION [Italics in original]. And passion means suffering.” I thought of LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD in connection with John Keats and Fanny Brawne because their real life tragedy evokes the themes lovers separated by sickness and death.

MOUNT TESTACCIO. Mary Jane gave me Anthony Doerr’s FOUR SEASONS IN ROME for Christmas. She says she chose the book because it’s a memoir about a year in Rome and also about being the parents of twin boys who have their first birthday there. One of the things I liked about the book is the enthusiasm that Doerr has for the history that is everywhere in Rome. He writes about Mount Testaccio, which I learned about only within the last year. Doerr visits it. You need a “permesso” now to visit Mount Testaccio. It is a hill—115 feet high and 220,000 square feet— made up of shards of amphorae, an estimated 25 million of them. For six centuries, olive oil was transported to Rome in huge amphorae, each of which weighed 66 pounds when empty. The olive oil was poured into smaller jugs and the amphorae were broken, sprinkled with lime and piled in Mount Testaccio. There are pictures of Mount Testaccio in this wikipedia article.

The wikipedia article describes how many of the amphorae have “painted or stamped inscriptions which record information such as the weight of the oil contained in the vessel, the names of the people who weighed and documented the oil and the name of the district where the oil was originally bottled.” As I have posted, for example here, there is an ongoing debate among scholars as to whether ancient Rome had a market economy. It seems, from the article, that the inscriptions provide ambiguous evidence on the issue. While “the oil in the vessels was imported under state authority”, the inscriptions indicate that “many of those involved [in the oil export business] were members of joint enterprises, perhaps small workshops involving business partners, father-son teams and skilled freedmen.”