Damnatio Memoriae

A friend sent me a copy of Latin Inscriptions: Ancient Scripts by Dirk Booms, a guide to reading the Latin on old grave markers, public buildings, and so on. It includes a photograph and explanation of the dedication of a bridge in Egypt, with two erasures: first of the prefect of Egypt who oversaw the building, then of the late emperor Domitian. Such erasure is called "damnatio memoriae", removal of someone's name from official records and monuments. It is not known why the official suffered this; Domitian's damnatio memoriae followed on his assassination.

I had heard of the practice, but never seen an example in stone. The penalty has no place in American law, but variants of it have been applied now and then. The aqueduct over Cabin John Creek in Maryland, now the Aqueduct Bridge on McArthur Boulevard, was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, begun when Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War. By the time the aqueduct was finished, Davis was president of the Confederate States of America, and the federal government removed his name. About forty years later, President Theodore Roosevelt had it put back.

Something like damnatio memoriae was applied to Benedict Arnold. He is remembered on the battlefield at Saratoga by an empty niche beside three with statues of the other American commanders, and by a boot with the epaulets of his rank--Arnold was shot in the leg on the field. At Saratoga there was no inscription or statue to remove, his treason having followed so soon after his services.

Keeping One's Books

In the New York Times this week, Roger Rosenblatt urgess\ us to keep our books. For me, and no doubt for many readers to the Times, this is like counsel to exercise, eat well, and get enough sleep: what else would we wish to do? However, it is not wholly practical.

This past Christmas, I received about 2500 pages of reading matter, say 60% biography and 40% history. I will keep most of this, if only because of who gave it. But it takes up space on the shelves, and shelves are finite. Something else will have to go, sometime. We have only so much space to put up bookshelves.

And how many books are "your" books? If you bought it for a college class or for the neighborhood book club and disliked it, is it "yours" in more than a legal sense? If you can't say how it came to be under your roof, and in any case there is a better edition on another shelf, is it yours? I think that Rosenblatt might have explored the imperfect match of ownership as recognized by the law, and possession as measured by one's engagement with a book.

Rosenblatt concludes by quoting from one of Theodore Roethke's poems. I thought that I had a copy of Roethke's collected poems, but apparently not. Did we give it away or lose it in a move? Or was it a library's and so not mine?

Ain't

In Allen Tate's novel The Fathers, a use of "ain't" gets a footnote:

I may as well say here that my father did not speak dialect but the standard English of the eighteenth century. In pronunciation the criterion was the oral tradition, not the way the word looked in print to an uneducated school-teacher. For example, though he wrote ate, he pronounced it et, as if it were the old past tense, eat. He used the double negative in conversation, as well as ain't, and he spoke the language with great ease at four levels: first, the level just described, conversation among family and friends; second, the speech of the "plain people abounding in many archaisms; third, the speech of the negroes, which was merely late seventeenth or early eighteenth English ossified; and fourth, the Johnsonian diction appropriate to formal occasions, a style that he could wield in perfect sentences four hundred words long. He would not have understood our conception of "correct English." Speech was like manners, an expression of sensibility and taste. This view no longer holds in an era of public schools and state universities.

The conversation would have been in the early 1850s, the speaker a man born about the turn of the century, resident in Fairfax County, Virginia.

State universities go a long way back in the upper south: there is "Mr. Jefferson's university" in Charlottesville, of course, but the University of North Carolina is older still. The attitude towards the state universities if not the schools seems much more of Tate's time than his narrator's.

 

Seven Times Daily

 Friday I took from the shelves Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness, purchased some time ago but not yet read. The last sentence of the third paragraph runs

The just man fall seven times daily.

Unfortunately, she does not offer a source for the statement, and I remain in the dark. 

 

A Sort of Universal Self-Affirmation

 In A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Quentin Lauer, S.J., I noticed in the chapter "Dominance and Subjection" the remark that

The self-certainty with which this whole thing [the dialectical progress of self-consciousness] began inevitably involves a sort of universal self-affirmation (we see this in children).

 We do.

 Quite a while ago, a friend who had no children asked me what the "terrible twos" were about. I thought about this, and said that they were about discovering the subject-object distinction. Some years later, at the Paulist Center in Boston, I heard the homilist say exactly that. My recollection is that he implied that many of mature years still hadn't mastered the distinction.

Proverbs

 A while ago, I happened on Proverbs 18:2,

A fool takes no pleasure in understanding,
 but only in expressing personal opinion.

That struck me as describing a great deal of social media.

 I had been looking for Proverbs 24:16,

for though [the just] fall seven times, they will rise again;
but the wicked are overthrown by calamity.

 A math teacher of mine in high school, a member of the Christian Brothers (FCS) quoted that as saying that the just man falls seven times a day. He inferred from this that if you made only seven mistakes a day you were perfect. I don't think he graded that way; perhaps he said it to excuse his own occasional errors at the blackboard. The period of a day to cover the seven falls or stumbles must have been his own, I think.

I have once or twice quoted 24:16, to ESL classes, when students have preferred silence to the chance of making a mistake. 

 (All quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.) 

 

Plates

 The cabinets with our plates is in a corner of our kitchen with two exterior walls. During the winter that is the coldest corner. From at least December through February it is well to get dinner plates out of the cabinet to warm up for some time before dinner.

I was struck some years ago in reading Disraeli's novel Coningsby by the paragraph beginning

Lord Monmouth’s dinners at Paris were celebrated. It was generally agreed that they had no rivals; yet there were others who had as skilful cooks, others who, for such a purpose, were equally profuse in their expenditure. What, then, was the secret spell of his success? The simplest in the world, though no one seemed aware of it. His Lordship’s plates were always hot: whereas at Paris, in the best appointed houses, and at dinners which, for costly materials and admirable art in their preparation, cannot be surpassed, the effect is always considerably lessened, and by a mode the most mortifying: by the mere circumstance that every one at a French dinner is served on a cold plate.

Disraeli goes on to blame the custom on the poor quality of French porcelain:

 The reason of a custom, or rather a necessity, which one would think a nation so celebrated for their gastronomical taste would recoil from, is really, it is believed, that the ordinary French porcelain is so very inferior that it cannot endure the preparatory heat for dinner.

 No doubt French manufactures have improved over the last couple of centuries.