Ruins for the Future

Jun20

I see this meme pop up from time to time. And yes, I too feel a certain pang about the Library of Alexandria. Even so, I can’t help but wonder if our grief might be a tad misplaced. For one thing, just which of the four fabled destructions of the Library of Alexandria is supposed to still upset us? When it was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar in 48 BCE, or destroyed—again accidentally—by the Emperor Aurelian in 272 CE? When it was vandalized and plundered at the orders of the Coptic Pope Theophilus in 391 CE? Or are we talking about an apparently apocryphal incident, its supposed destruction by Caliph Omar in 642 CE?

A single iconic “Burning of the Library of Alexandria” seems to linger in literate imaginations as a catch-all metaphor for the loss of any and all intellectual riches throughout the ages. But just what percentage of all the great ideas lost to time can really be blamed on those four purported catastrophes in that one place? A pretty small percentage is my not-so-humble guess.

A more pertinent if more unpalatable question might be — should we still be upset about it? In his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright doesn’t specifically mention Alexandria, but he does mull over another catch-all metaphor for cultural waste, the so-called Dark Ages. Wright challenges Thomas Cahill’s assertion in How the Irish Saved Civilization that Irish monks singlehandedly rescued humanity’s most indispensable treasures from barbarian hoards after the fall of Rome. Wright quotes Cahill:

Had the destruction been complete — had every library been disassembled and every book burned — we might have lost Homer and Virgil and all of classical poetry, Herodotus and Tacitus and all of classical history, Demosthenes and Cicero and all of classical oratory, Plato and Aristotle and all of Greek philosophy, and Plotinus and Porphyry and all the subsequent commentary.

Wright’s response to Cahill:

Well, them’s the breaks. But what people of the early Middle Ages most needed wasn’t a good stiff dose of Demosthenes. They needed mundane things, such as a harness that wouldn’t press on a horse’s windpipe.

Wright isn’t being as callous as he might sound. His guiding optimistic idea in Nonzero is that human history is a halting but inexorable proliferation of “non-zero-sum” games — a sometimes wobbly but ever-forward march toward increasing intellect, sophistication, and cooperation. This perpetual advance will continue, Wright insists, with or without the all-too-perishable poems, plays, novels, and artworks that we so touchingly revere. The truer essentials of progress are the more prosaic but vastly more durable technological memes ranging from horseshoes to iPhones — and these have an uncanny way of turning up when we need them.

Another such argument is voiced in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. In a scene set in early nineteenth-century England, a precocious fourteen-year-old pupil pines to her tutor about Julius Caesar’s destruction of the Library of Alexandria:

Oh, Septimus! — can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — thousands of poems — Aristotle’s own library … ! How can we sleep for grief?

Septimus replies:

By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

Much more trenchant is a passage from Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra. Here the elderly tutor Theodotus brings Julius Caesar desperate news:

THEODOTUS. The fire has spread from your ships. The first of the seven wonders of the world perishes. The library of Alexandria is in flames.

CAESAR. Is that all?

THEODOTUS (unable to believe his senses). All! Caesar: will you go down to posterity as a barbarous soldier too ignorant to know the value of books?

CAESAR. Theodotus: I am an author myself; and I tell you it is better that the Egyptians should live their lives than dream them away with the help of books.

THEODOTUS (kneeling, with genuine literary emotion: the passion of the pedant). Caesar: once in ten generations of men, the world gains an immortal book.

CAESAR (inflexible). If it did not flatter mankind, the common executioner would burn it.

THEODOTUS. Without history, death would lay you beside your meanest soldier.

CAESAR. Death will do that in any case. I ask no better grave.

THEODOTUS. What is burning there is the memory of mankind.

CAESAR. A shameful memory. Let it burn.

THEODOTUS (wildly). Will you destroy the past?

CAESAR. Ay, and build the future with its ruins.

My 90th Birthday

May23

Reaching my 90^th birthday seems to be important, but in another sense, this is just another day in a life full of a lot to think about and usually too much to do. There’s an unfinished fiber piece hanging on the wall that I haven’t gotten back to in months. There are art supplies ordered and so far unused. And there’s an unfinished novel lurking in my computer that’s a work of collaboration with Wim. (We’ve set a deadline for ourselves this fall and that’s where most of my creative effort goes right now.)

There are always freelance writing assignments to finish in order to pay the bills, and of course, there’s everyday life. (I do get help with those daily demands from both my daughter and husband.) The questions I get from random people are usually about how I am still on my feet. But there’s also that unspoken question: How is it I’m still here at all?

Photo from my computer camera yesterday.

Not that things are working perfectly. Of course there are lost words, dates, and specific memories — but the truth is, I was never good at knowing what happened when. A lot that took place between 1935-2025 doesn’t come into focus easily, but I’ve usually been centered on the present anyhow, or perhaps just outside of time. That has always had its disadvantages, of course, from long-ago history classes to present-day schedules.

The questions people ask about how deserve some thought. Some of the necessities seem to include a decent set of genes, physical activity, and mental and creative interests and efforts. Here are a few that make sense to me.

Curiosity
What is the trick to aging successfully? If you’re curious about learning the answer, you might already be on the right track, according to an international team of psychologists, including several from UCLA. Click here to read an article by Holly Ober about curiosity and aging.

Optimism
This one gets difficult when the world seems to go askew. But an article in The MIT Press Reader relates optimism and longevity. Click here to read an article by Immaculata De Vivo on this topic.

Change
The flexibility to deal with change is an essential when this much time goes by. Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff comments that, “We often think of change as something to endure. But change is how we grow.” Click here to read Le Cunff’s article about how curiosity transforms uncertainty from a threat into an invitation.

Make Life an Artwork
An article in the online publication Philosophy Break quotes Nietzsche on finding our true selves and suggests that we “view our lives as an artistic project.” I’d add that you have to be able to think of such a project as open-ended, not something to ever be finished and framed. Click here to read Jack Maden’s article about what Nietzsche has to say about shaping our lives creatively.

Of course there’s no one answer. If we humans can be whoever, whatever, wherever we are — people just relating to other people — we can better enjoy whatever time we manage to have.

Pat

“The Cruelty Is the Point”

May6

It’s been almost five years since I posted some thoughts about Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and how it relates to our times. Revisiting those thoughts today, they seem even more sadly apt than they were back then.

Illustration by Daniel Carter Beard for the 1889 edition of *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court*

A Connecticut Yankee is mysterious and disturbing book, so unlike its reputation that one can only assume that few people really bother to read it. It starts off as a light-hearted satire of medieval times and climaxes with an apocalypse of sorts—the mass slaughter of Europe’s knight errantry by electrocution, dynamite, and a Gatling gun.

But perhaps the book’s most unsettling episode involves children. When the protagonist, Hank Morgan, takes King Arthur on an incognito tour of the brutal realities of his kingdom, they witness a spree of mob violence in which peasants turn against peasants, butchering and hanging one another out of blind fear of their rulers. The next day, Hank and the king come across this scene:

A small mob of half-naked boys and girls came tearing out of the woods, scared and shrieking. The eldest among them were not more than twelve or fourteen years old. They implored help, but they were so beside themselves that we couldn’t make out what the matter was. However, we plunged into the wood, they scurrying in the lead, and the trouble was quickly revealed: they had hanged a little fellow with a bark rope, and he was kicking and struggling, in the process of choking to death. We rescued him, and fetched him around. It was some more human nature; the admiring little folk imitating their elders; they were playing mob, and had achieved a success which promised to be a good deal more serious than they had bargained for.

Twain’s account of children hanging one another to imitate their elders is truly a fable for these days of Trumpism. The question is often asked: Do you want your children to behave like Donald Trump, with his blatant narcissism, bigotry, misogyny, name-calling, cruelty, bullying, crooked dealings, and interminable lies? While few Americans would admit it aloud, I suspect that an alarming number of them want exactly that. As Elon Musk himself said to Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.”

Specifically, empathy is held suspect in male children. It’s an idea that’s deeply ingrained in our culture—that empathy, fair play, and kindness are for sissies and “girly men.” Boys must instead be taught the opposites of all those traits in order to grow up to be “real men”—men with power, fame, and wealth like Donald Trump. Life is a zero-sum game, and “nice guys finish last,” and to be a man, one must never show weakness, shame, or scruples, nor ever concede defeat.

We often say of Trumpism that “the cruelty is the point,” especially when it comes to the treatment of immigrants and their families. But Twain wanted us to believe that cruelty is not innate but learned, and that childhood is the aptest time to teach it. In “The United States of Lyncherdom,” a polemic Twain wrote to protest the rise of murderous violence against African Americans, he tried to explain the viciousness of mobs as motivated by moral cowardice, not pleasure:

Why does a crowd … by ostentatious outward signs pretend to enjoy a lynching? Why does it lift no hand or voice in protest? Only because it would be unpopular to do it, I think; each man is afraid of his neighbor’s disapproval — a thing which, to the general run of the race, is more dreaded than wounds and death.

As bitter as Twain became toward “the damned human race,” I fear that he remained naïve about human nature. Cruelty may well be indeed learned and imitated, not innate; but once it takes root, it becomes an illness, an addiction. Some addicts don’t merely pretend to enjoy their drug of choice; they convince themselves of it.

As Huckleberry Finn put it upon witnessing an act of mob violence, “Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”

—Wim

The King and the Duke are tarred and feathered; illustration by E.W. Kemble from the 1885 edition of *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*

In the Name of Liberty …

Apr10

Just as an individual, subjected to certain inner pressures beyond his endurance, will suddenly go mad and destroy himself or those around him, so too, apparently, can a segment of society take leave of its senses and deliver itself to the forces of destruction.

—Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror

These words written about the French Reign of Terror are scarily apt for America today. Perhaps that’s one reason why my yet-unproduced play The Mad Scene is getting quite a few readers these days. You can download the entire play here.

*The Death of Marat, by Jacques-Louis David*

Described as “an Our Town about the French Reign of Terror,” The Mad Scene tells a story of collective and individual insanity. As the Terror rages around her, the wax sculptor Marie Grosholtz (the future Madame Tussaud) uses the guillotined heads to shape her creations. Small wonder that she goes insane and holds conversations with wax figures of Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Maximilien Robespierre, and Jean-Paul Marat.

As ICE agents round up and deport alleged gang members to a Salvadoran mega-prison based on no sounder evidence than tattoos, and as foreign students with legal visas are detained and deported for exercising their freedom of speech, and as an American President wreaks lawless revenge upon his enemies, all with the sanction of far too many Americans, I’m reminded of the massacres of September 2-7, 1792, when Parisian mobs emptied the prisons of political prisoners and slaughtered them in staggering numbers.

In my play, the revolutionary firebrand Jean-Paul Marat harangues the mob:

Fools! The enemy is already here within our gates. Our prisons are full to bursting with aristocrats, priests, traitors, and conspirators, all of them lusting for revenge against every last Parisian who ever dreamed of liberty. And while you go out playing at soldiers fighting foreign enemies, they shall break out of their cells and slaughter your wives, mothers, sisters, and children.

Empty the prisons, kill every last enemy of freedom!

Kill them all before they destroy everything and everyone you love!

Vive la Nation!

Vive la République!

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

The September Massacres took the lives of some 1200 people, including priests, monks, and nuns—a small number compared to the victims of the Reign of Terror yet to come.

As Madame Roland said before she was beheaded on November 8, 1793 …

Oh, Liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!

*Mass killing of more than 200 prisoners in the Châtelet on September 3, 1792*

—Wim

“The Mad Scene” — prologue to Wim’s award-winning play

Dec14

Here is the prologue to my full-length play The Mad Scene, which has been aptly described as “an Our Town about the French Reign of Terror.” It was developed during 2020-21 as part of the Theatre at St. John’s Cyber Salon, hosted by Mark Erson. The parts were read by Everett Quinton, Jenne Vath, Sally Plass, Maude Burke, and Shane Baker; Daniel Neiden directed. The Mad Scene has yet to be produced.

The Mad Scene was awarded First Place in the Script category of the 91st Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. It was chosen for the Second Round in the Stage Play category of the 2024 Austin Film Festival’s Script Competition.

The entire text of The Mad Scene is available by clicking right here.

PROLOGUE

Characters:

Marie Grosholtz/Madame Tussaud
Marie Antoinette

The scene is the Madeleine Cemetery, Paris, the night of October 16, 1793.

MARIE ANTOINETTE’s head lies in the lap of MARIE GROSHOLTZ, who will later become known as Madame Tussaud. MARIE works by the light of a lantern. At first, ANTOINETTE’s eyes are closed; then they snap open.

ANTOINETTE. There is no sky.

MARIE. Madame, can you hear me?

ANTOINETTE. I never noticed it before.

MARIE. I must take your face.

ANTOINETTE. Carolina, look for yourself. You’ll see it’s true.

MARIE. I’m not Carolina.

ANTOINETTE. There is no sky. There are only stars. Oh, and a slender curved scimitar of a moon, hanging by … an invisible thread, I suppose. But tied to what? There’s nothing to tie it to, nothing to hang it from. There is no sky. (wincing) Don’t. Carolina, why are you touching my face like that?

MARIE. I’m not your sister. I’ve got to make a cast of your face.

ANTOINETTE. What are you smearing on my skin?

MARIE. Oil, so the plaster won’t stick.

ANTOINETTE. What a silly thing to do on such a night, with a moon and so many stars and no sky at all to gaze at. Look.

MARIE. I’m looking.

Marie Antoinette, by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

ANTOINETTE. No, you’re not. You’re looking down at me. You’re in the way of my view. But where are we? Oh, we fell asleep in the gardens again, didn’t we? I was counting clouds and you were giving them names and it got dark without us knowing it. Our dresses must be soaked through with dew. Odd, I feel so … dry. We’ve got to get back to the palace. The countess must be angry. Or beside herself with worry. Poor old thing, we’re so much trouble to her.

MARIE. We’re not in your garden in Vienna.

ANTOINETTE. Of course we are.

MARIE. No. This is the Madeleine Cemetery. In Paris

ANTOINETTE. What are we doing in Paris? Don’t touch my eyes.

MARIE. I’m only closing them.

ANTOINETTE. Why?

MARIE. Because they’re not glass. I’m covering them with plaster.

ANTOINETTE. I don’t understand.

MARIE. It’s best not to talk.

ANTOINETTE. Why not?

MARIE. The dead are usually quiet. Or at least they’re supposed to be.

Exécution_de_Marie-Antoinette,_Musée_de_la_Révolution_française_-_Vizille

Execution of Marie Antoinette, Museum of the French Revolution. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

ANTOINETTE. I’m not dead.

MARIE. Madame, you have been beheaded. You are certainly dead. Tomorrow you will be buried. It really would be best to keep quiet. You’ll upset yourself.

ANTOINETTE. You’re not Carolina.

MARIE. So I’ve been telling you.

ANTOINETTE. I’ve not been beheaded.

MARIE. You have, and it was hard to find you among so many dead, all thrown about every which way, so it’s hard to tell whose head belongs to whose body. Don’t you smell the stench?

ANTOINETTE. No.

MARIE. Death has its blessings then. I never guessed how blood and flesh could stink. It’s always such a chore, this scrounging through stench and open graves, looking for just a certain head. Your husband was even harder to find than you, and to make things worse, he was already dissolving in quicklime.

ANTOINETTE. My husband?

MARIE. But I found you. I recognized the white morning dress you wore on the scaffold, even though it was stained and caked with blood and dirt. Then your head was easy to spot, plopped right between your knees. But your face looks strange now—so thin and drawn, with a scalp of short white hair. When did your hair turn white? Oh, I hear it was after you were caught trying to escape—you and the king and your children. I can fix all this when I make your new face.

ANTOINETTE. Who are you?

MARIE. I hoped you’d remember me, madame. My name is Marie Grosholtz. I lived at Versailles nine years. I tutored Madame Elizabeth in molding wax, and I lived in her apartments and kept her company. You were very kind to me in those days, madame.

ANTOINETTE. Versailles? Madame Elizabeth?

MARIE. The king’s sister. You don’t remember. You’re confused. But don’t worry. The plaster will set, and we’ll be finished soon, and it won’t matter whether you remember or not. I needn’t tell you to keep still. You’re doing that anyway.

ANTOINETTE. There is no sky.

MARIE. I’m sure you are correct, madame.

ANTOINETTE. Oh, yes. Versailles. They tell me I’m going there. They tell me I am to become the Dauphine of France.

MARIE. If you say so, madame.

ANTOINETTE. I am to marry the Dauphin, they tell me—Louis-Auguste, some cousin I’ve never met. They say he is a clumsy boy, rather stupid, and he’s sure to grow fat, and he can’t dance at all. But then, I’m just a girl myself, and people say I am silly and I laugh more than I should and I like to dance too much. No, don’t deny it, I know that’s what they say. But he’s a boy, just a boy. I wish I could marry a man, someone wiser, someone I could trust to know …
… how to …
But it’s not up to me, is it? Nothing is up to me. And not only must I stop being an archduchess, they tell me I must stop being Austrian, and I must say goodbye to everyone I’ve ever known—even to you, Carolina, and also to Mutti—and I must forget how to speak German and speak French perfectly for the rest of my life. And when I go to France, before I meet the Dauphin in the Forest of Compiègne, I must be stripped of every scrap of my Austrian dress and be clothed anew in the manner of a French princess. Of course there will be people watching me change. It’s always been like that. I’ve never been naked alone. But in France there will be more people than ever, watching my every waking moment, and while I’m sleeping as well. I will put on my rouge in front of the whole world. It will never stop.

MARIE. There. The plaster is set. I’m almost finished.

ANTOINETTE. That pinches.

MARIE. Yes, but only for a moment, while I remove the cast.

(MARIE pulls the cast away.)

MARIE. I must leave you now.

ANTOINETTE. Where are you going?

MARIE. To where I work.

ANTOINETTE. You can’t leave me.

MARIE. I must. I’m sorry.

ANTOINETTE. I am your queen.

MARIE. France has no queen.

ANTOINETTE. Obey me.

MARIE. I must obey the National Assembly. I wish it weren’t so.

ANTOINETTE. Take me with you.

MARIE. I can’t take your head, madame. I’ll lose my own if I try. Adieu.

Marie Tussaud, by John Theodore Tussaud.

ANTOINETTE. Wait! I remember! Your name is Marie! You make likenesses from wax! Elizabeth adores you! She came running to me a little while ago to show me a Virgin you taught her how to make. “Look, sister!” she said. “Look at my little wax Mother of God! I made her look just like you without meaning to, I couldn’t help it! Was that blasphemous of me, sister? Must I confess it to the abbé?” “No, sister,” I said. “No blasphemy at all …”

MARIE. Adieu, madame.

ANTOINETTE. But what will happen to me after you go?

MARIE. I don’t know.

ANTOINETTE. Oh, but you do. I’ll vanish. I’ll die. Please, I beg you. It is only by the grace and bounty of your madness that I still live. Don’t let me die.

MARIE. You’ll live again in wax.

ANTOINETTE. But will I remember … ?

MARIE. I don’t know what you’ll remember.

ANTOINETTE. Will I still be myself?

MARIE. I don’t know.

ANTOINETTE. Am I myself even now?

MARIE. I said I don’t know.

ANTOINETTE. Please stay!

MARIE. Dawn is nearing.

ANTOINETTE. We’ll watch it together!

MARIE. I must go.

ANTOINETTE. We’ll skip barefoot in the dew, watch morning burst into blossoms of light, bathe ourselves in mad mists of swirling color! We’ll worship the sun and laugh and dance like Incan priestesses!

MARIE. Adieu.

(MARIE exits, carrying her lantern.)

ANTOINETTE (dying). There … is … no … sky …

BLACKOUT.

1557px-nicolas-antoine_taunay_-_le_triomphe_de_la_guillotine

Le triomphe de la guillotine, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay

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