the marvels of style

Readers of this blog who don’t care for Gibbon are in for a boring summer, because I’m unlikely to stop being fascinated. It is incredible that someone could churn out thousands of pages of such brilliantly elliptical and allusive prose while still telling a coherent story. I’d have a hard time writing one paragraph in that style (though that may be a fun parody project for some future posts… Gibbon writing about the Obama Administration). My only disappointment on the current reread is the boring Chapter VIII on Persia. He should have done much better with such a potentially interesting topic.

My citations of the Decline and Fall will become less noticeable, however, as soon as my own rate of original posts picks up again. This summer is unusually full, between trips to Croatia and England, two other articles due, and an as-yet unstarted book due as well, along with another book due in late December, various editing and administrative projects, and the like.

It’s hard to know where the limits of one’s energy are. Sometimes “inflationary universe” scenarios are possible where you can increase your energy tenfold in a certain sphere just by finding a few time-saving tricks, conserving your powers, or combining multiple tasks into one. Other times you find yourself saying “I was crazy to say yes to this.” There’s no a priori way to know which is which.

If you’re 23 years old and have lots of energy, enjoy it, because it won’t be there forever. But in compensation you’ll learn how to focus your energy better as the years go by.

that’s the end

The real end of the semester. It will take a few days to recover, and you still might not see me on here as much as usual.

Gibbon on the Germans

No offense, these were my ancestors too:

“In the dull intervals of peace these barbarians were immoderately addicted to deep gaming and excessive drinking; both of which, by different means, the one inflaming the passions, the other by extinguishing their reason, alike relieved them from the pain of thinking.”

Gibbon on political daydreams

“In the cool shade of retirement, we may easily devise imaginary forms of government, in which the sceptre shall be constantly bestowed on the most worthy by the free and incorrupt suffrage of the people. Experience overturns these airy fabrics…”

checking in

The reason for light posting lately has been academic duty… grading final exams, but also interviewing the candidates for the vacant Deanships: Humanities/Social Sciences and Business. That should ease up in a few days.

In the meantime, Steven Shaviro’s book just arrived (this time with no customs charges added– see what I mean about random?). Not sure when I’ll be able to read it yet.

Gibbon’s quasi-mythical side

This is the sort of wild passage you’d expect to find in Herodotus rather than Gibbon, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. On the death of the brutal Emperor Maximin:

“Such was the deserved fate of a brutal savage, destitute, as he has generally been represented, of every sentiment that distinguishes a civilized, or even a human, being. The body was suited to the soul. The stature of Maximin exceeded the measure of eight feet, and circumstances almost incredible are related of his matchless strength and appetite. We are told that Maximin could drink in a day an amphora (or about seven gallons) of wine and eat thirty or forty pounds of meat. He could move a loaded wagon, break a horse’s leg with his fist, crumble stones in his hand, and tear up small trees by the roots.”

I’m fairly good by now at detecting Gibbon’s usual signs of irony and tongue-in-cheek, and there simply aren’t any of those in the vicinity of this passage.

(ADDENDUM: The other weird thing about this passage is that it comes only at the very end of many pages on the rule of Maximin. Normally, if someone in a history were “eight feet tall,” we would expect to hear of this as a salient element of his person in the first sentence or two, not as a “by the way” point in his obituary. It’s even funnier to imagine this in the case of fiction, as if we were told only in the final Sherlock Holmes story that the detective was eight feet tall.)

Bultmann-Heidegger

The Bultmann-Heidegger Correspondence just arrived. It’s been out since February, I think, but it slipped my mind until now. I didn’t see any reviews, but Heidegger’s correspondence is usually better than expected.

The one disappointment was the $8 tariff I had to pay to the delivery man in cash. This seems to happen or not happen almost at random here. Amazon packages sail right in here, and sometimes they charge you nothing for a giant box, and sometimes $8 for a single book.

Electronic items and CD’s and software are always huge trouble, of that you may be sure. My father once sent me a piece of software for Christmas, valued at $150 sticker price. The customs officers contacted me and said there would be an additional tariff of $150 on it. I told them to send it back to America, and they said that would cost $140. So, we just abandoned it. But books are usually not a problem.

bus driver

Bus drivers should not be eating sandwiches with the left hand and fiddling with mobile phones with the right. He was also speeding a bit, and the roads are notoriously dangerous out there. I filled out a complaint form for the first time ever.

Gibbon on sensuality

How Elagabalus failed to manage his appetites prudently (and I love the first sentence here; it contains an entire potential ethics):

“A rational voluptuary adheres with invariable respect to the temperate dictates of nature, and improves the gratifications of sense by social intercourse, endearing connections, and the soft colouring of taste and the imagination. But Elagabulus… corrupted by his youth, his country [Syria], and his fortune, abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments. The inflammatory powers of art were summoned to his aid: the confused multitude of women, of wines, and of dishes, and the studied variety of attitudes and sauces, served to revive his languid appetites.”

Later in this same passage is the famous part about the “Empress” Elagabulus eventually dressing as a woman and taking a husband (and according to Cassius Dio, the young Emperor would even go to work as a prostitute in the taverns, making our own political scandals look fairly minor by comparison). But perhaps even weirder are the following two footnotes:

“The invention of a new sauce [under Elagabulus] was liberally rewarded; but if it was not relished, the inventor was confined to eat of nothing else, till he had discovered another, more agreeable to the imperial palate.”

And even weirder, as a sort of imperial precursor to Huysmans’ A rebours:

“[Elagabulus] never would eat sea-fish, except at a great distance from the sea…”

a noble Egyptian mannerism

Something else they do here, which is utterly charming, is their absolute respect for the sanctity of your home. This too can be found among perhaps 100% of Egyptians, and I have never seen it anywhere else.

Here’s what I mean… A repairman shows up at the door. You greet him. You then turn around and walk toward the source of the problem on the other side of the apartment and assume you are being followed. But you look behind you and find that he hasn’t followed you! He waits to be specifically invited over the threshold. He will often wait even to be invited to enter each successive area of the apartment. It’s charming as can be.