Flashback 2007: 'A terrifying, pitch-black cloud'

From "Ashen Sky," illustrated by Barry Moser

     I'm continually surprised what I can slip into the paper. Such as a review of letters from Pliny the Younger, which I think about whenever someone says a version of "fortune favors the bold," and I have to bite back my retort: "You do realize ... or more likely, don't ... that the guy who said that was rewarded for his daring by being buried in ash?"

     Fortune often favors the brave. Not always. I leapt to grab Ashen Sky, the new illustrated volume of Pliny the Younger's pair of all-too-brief letters describing the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii.

    

     The book is beautifully illustrated by Barry Moser's stark black and white woodcuts, and Virgil's famous edict on the usefulness of courage is spoken by Pliny the Younger's uncle, Pliny the Elder, a revered statesman and writer at the time of the catastrophe.
     Old Pliny has taken his family aboard a ship, seeking safety from the spouting volcano.
     "Suddenly the water became shallow and the shore was blocked by the collapse of the mountain," Pliny the Younger writes. His uncle "hesitated a bit, wondering whether to turn back," but then turns to the helmsman who urged him to do so and said, " 'Fortune favors the brave,' "
     In this case, boldness was fatal — Pliny the Elder was killed at his destination, on Aug. 25, 79 A.D.
     Since you probably won't rush out to get the book — I merely bumbled across it — I'll tell you what struck me as the most poignant detail. Pliny the Younger notes the people fleeing around him in fear as burning pumice stones rained down from the sky.
     "To protect themselves against falling objects, they tied pillows on their heads," he writes.
     You can't make that kind of thing up, a reminder of the frequent pitifulness of human effort in the face of nature's fury.
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 17, 2007

Fortune (sometimes) favors the bold

     The biggest catastrophe's are covered by the sands of time. If that isn't clear, tomorrow is Aug. 24, and if Aug. 24 does not resonate—and I imagine it doesn't—just remember that Sept. 11 will also be just another day in a string of same, if we wait long enough. 
     Aug. 24, 79 A.D. was the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, burying the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Not the sort of anniversary the media typically notices, and to be honest, I might have overlooked it, had not we visited the H & M downtown last week. 
     Notice the shirt above, as I did, waiting for the boys to pick out their purchases. The "good" is some fashion designer's notion; it's implied in the general saying, common for nearly 2,000 years, that "Fortune favors the brave."
     Unless it isn't implied. Because while the line did become an aphorism, it originated, or at least be most famously used, in Virgil's reworking of Homer, "The Aeneid." There, in book X, the Latin is "audaces fortuna iuvat"—"fortune speeds the bold" — uttered by Turnus, rallying his men to fight anew on the beach. 
     Though there might be some irony at work here. "Speeds" is not the same as "favors." Your bravery could be hurrying you toward doom, which is kinda what happens to Turnus. Yes, he wins  his duel, planting a spear into Pallas' chest. But this enrages Aeneis, and the gods, who basically boot Turnus away from the field of battle.  He does not end well.
    Seeing the shirt did not make me think of Virgil, however, that would be pretentious. The truth is worse. It made me think of Pliny the Younger, who was 17 years old when Mt. Vesuvius erupted. Twenty-five years later, he wrote a letter to the historian Tacitus describing the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, who commanded the fleet.  
    "On 24 August in the early afternoon, my mother pointed out to him the appearance of a cloud of unusual size and form," Pliny the Younger writes.
     In his account, Pliny the Elder orders a fast ship, and invites his nephew to come with him. "I replied that I should prefer to continue with my studies," another example of the under-appreciated life-saving qualities of studiousness.
     So Pliny the Elder sets out to save a relative who was close to the eruption: "He hurried to the place others were fleeing from, setting his course straight for the dangerous area."
     Ash rains down on the ship, then pumice and burnt stones. "My uncle hesitated a bit, wondering whether to turn back, but then said to the helmsman who warned him to do just that, 'fortune favors the brave.'"
     Not in this case. Though Pliny the Elder boldly made landfall unscathed, he decided to push his luck and linger there. The gases and fumes overcame him and he died. So yes, sometimes fortune favors the bold, and others boldness speeds you to destruction. Worth bearing in mind. Fortune may — or may not — favor the bold, but safety hangs around the meek. 

"Asparagus will not bear too much winter"

 

    Asparagus. Now there's an interesting word. If I had to guess, I'd guess French. The things seem French. But no, I'd be wrong. In medieval Latin it was sparagus which the common folk in England, rather delightfully, turned into "sparrow grass," where it had currency for centuries.
     "Sparrow-grass is so general that asparagus has an air of stiffness and pedantry," John "Elocution" Walker wrote in 1791 in his "Critical Pronouncing Dictionary."
     Not that asparagus aren't big in France. They are. Asperges. Particularly the white version, grown with dirt piled on them, so the shoots are never exposed to the sun, and photosynthesis doesn't begin. Manet painted their pallid stalks, and Proust studied them in "Remembrance of Thing's Past":
     “What fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world.”    
     The word is almost unchanged by time or distance. σπαράγγι in Greek "sparangi." You don't need to know Latin to notice the citation leaping out in Juvenal's 11th satire: "...montani asparagi, posito quos legit villica fuso"—"some wild asparagus, gathered by the bailiff's wife when she is done with her spindle," part of a modest rural meal of his, along with goat and grape leaves, which he contrasts to the wretched imperial excess of the banquets of today that he isn't invited to anyway, where the deeper the flabby  and indifferent host is in debt, the richer the provisions groaning on the table to his insulted guests.
    Cato and Pliny also praise the vegetable (Pliny says that the best comes from Ravenna which, being a Dante fan, I nodded at approvingly, even though the dour Florentine wouldn't be planted there himself for another 1300 years).
     The Romans dried them, then dropped them in boiling water as needed, a quick process that led the Emperor Augustus to say, when he wanted something done fast: "Citius quam aspargi coquentur," or, "Do it quicker than you can cook asparagus." (So fond was the emperor of the vegetable he created what was known as the "Asparagus Fleet" to rush it to his table).
    There are about 3o0 varieties of asparagus, and yes, they were grown decoratively.
    "The asparagus makes the strongest appeal to our sense of the beautiful," writes Charles Ilot, in his 1901 The Book of Asparagus, noting it belongs to the same order as lilies and tulips. (True then; but even plant families have their ruptures, and asparagus stalked off and formed their own family, asparagaceae).
     Yes, there are poems about asparagus.
     "Asparagus will not bear too much winter," Greg Kuzma writes, in the opening line of his brief elegy "Asparagus Beside the Road."
     Neither will we. Not too much more winter anyway. Two below on Monday. Time for spring to rattle the bushes a little. Just to let us know it's coming.
    Oh, and finally, yes, Edie prepared them for dinner Sunday, to go with t-bone steak that I grilled outside. Broiled, with a little olive oil and kosher salt, pictured above, which struck me as prettily green. Worth taking a picture of and, having the photo, a topic I hope might be worth delving into. 

Clematis redux

     Perhaps lazily, I considered the woody vine growing before my front porch as the "clematis," not really caring which of the nearly 400 species of clematis it might be.
     But when I paused, admiring the particularly lusty bloomage this week, I decided to pin down its exact variety. So I plugged a shot of the little white starbursts into Google Image, and, after an initial scare that it might be a Confederate Jasmine Vine ("the past isn't history, it isn't even past...") decided mine had to be either a Virginia Bower or a Sweet Southern Clematis.
     My initial inclination was to pull for the former, as my son is a loyal Wahoo alumni. And while the flowers look almost exactly the same, the Sweet Southern is considered invasive, because the seeds get everywhere, though they're so similar it seems almost a silly distinction.    
     The difference being the leaves. Serated = Virginia Bower = good. And smooth = Sweet Southern = bad.  Of course I have the bad variety, though it's been there for years, doesn't seem to be spreading and while I cut it back every fall, I'm not about to dig it out. Let the Invasive Species police come get me.
     I was more interested in the literary ramifications of "clematis," which comes to us unchanged from ancient Greek, κληματίς, meaning "a climbing plant." My assumption was that pickings would be slim — my Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" has no entry for "clematis" ("rose" has 79). 

     Because what rhymes with "clematis"? Arthritis? Bursitis?  That's the making of a lovely sonnet for sure.

     Plug "rose" into the Poetry Foundation web site and you get over 10,000 results. Plug "clematis" in and you get 63, and upon investigation, not all of those actually contain the word.
      Robert Frost's "The Wood-Pile"  does. Here he comes upon a neglected store of firewood, set aside by someone long ago, Clematis are part of nature reclaiming its property"

The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.

In a more recent poem, "America," German-born Aria Aber is trying to adjust herself to a "country of cowboys and fame" that tells her, "to keep quiet about certain things." And that was four years ago. To her:

I feared what had happened in your forest, the words that pursued the soft silk of spiders
The verbs were naturalize, charge, reside
The nouns were clematis, alien, hibiscus

     If Aber's scared of considering the past of America's forests, she ought to visit Germany's. She's at Stanford now, so I hope feels more sanguine about the place.

     The classics never let us down. The word's Greek origin made me suspect I'd find it there, and I wasn't disappointed. Pliny the Elder — who we saw being killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius after saying, famously but incorrectly, in his case, "Fortune favors the brave," gives the flower an in-depth consideration in his "Natural History."

     Old Pliny finds the leaves are good for cleansing leprous sores, and the seeds cure constipation. The Greeks, he notes, eat the leaves as a vegetable, with oil and salt. They must have been hungry.

     I was just about ready to wrap this up and call it a day, when I decided to do the Full Boy Scout Try and check Shakespeare for clematis. Coming immediately upon this piece, written exactly two years ago. 

    Two few things stand out — first, the author, delving into clematis in a fashion identical to my own, comes up with material entirely different from what I found, including the plant that inspired his rumination, which belonged to a neighbor. 

     And second, I am the author. 

    Which is vaguely terrifying. Usually I snap to recall something I wrote 40 years ago. Or at least to consider the possibility and check. Yet I could plunge into clematis without a shiver of reluctance that I afflicted you with the topic a scant 735 days ago. But also comforting in that, given the entirely different result, I can still post this. Answer me honestly: how many of you began this piece and thought, "Heyyyyy, wait a minute. Didn't we read about clematis in 2023?"

Ducks of a feather

     I would never accuse the Chicago Botanic Garden of being ordinary.
     However.
     When it comes to ducks, the choices usually run to mallards, mallards, or more mallards, with their standard dull brown mallard females and bottle-green headed mallard males. Oh, there might be a few American black ducks, which look very similar, thrown in for non-variety's sake. At least they aren't geese, who are in such plague-level abundance that the Garden has had to commission a company with the spot-on name of Wild Goose Chase to encourage them to head south, and quickly.
     But my wife and I were padding over the bridge to Evening Island Sunday afternoon and noticed a knot of people at the rail, so of course joined them, and were treated with a breed of duck I don't recall ever seeing up close before: a hooded merganser, boldly striped, with distinctive black, white and caramel color scheme and yellow eye with its pinprick, I'm-on-drugs pupil.

     The male merganser was accompanied, not by a female merganser, but a standard mallard, and the odd couple was harried by several bulked up carp, who hang out like a street gang under the bridge, waiting for visitors to feed them bread crumbs, which visitors really shouldn't do. It's gotten so bad that all you have to do is wiggle your fingers over the water and the carp will gather, expectantly. These carp kept nosing the ducks away and, since the fish weigh considerable more than the fowl, the ducks moved off, but kept circling back. The rarest of the mergansers, the hooded variety, as you surely know, are among the few ducks that specialize in eating fish. But this lone outnumbered, outweighed merganser certainly wasn't going to try to eat these fish. 

      I'm not sure the two ducks were a couple. The merganser never ruffled his famous crest, but then, they breed in the summer, so maybe, as often with star-crossed love, the timing was just wrong.
      So as not to put on airs, prior to looking into it, I assumed "merganser" was a tribute to some obscure 19th century birder, Henry Merganser or some such thing. Pure ignorance. The name is very old. Pliny the Elder identified a particular duck—we can't be sure which kind—as a mergus, or "diver," and these ducks do completely submerge themselves hunting for fish smaller than carp.

     This usage might seem unconnected to the verb "merge," as in what ambitious corporations do, but it's the same root, as the Oxford explains: "To be extinguished by absorption in a greater title, estate, etc. Hence gen. to sink and disappear, to be swallowed up and lost to view, lose character or identity by absorption into something else."  A definition that, for the first time, gave me a frisson of concern about the Sun-Times' pending marriage with WBEZ. Should it happen, I hope we're still recognizable afterward, as our own distinctive journalistic breed. 
     My wife and I pulled ourselves away, eventually, and strolled for a good 45 minutes before circling back just in time to catch a possibly significant moment in this anatine courtship, if that's what it was. We spied the happy—or should it be unhappy?—couple, far off in the middle of the lake. The female flew away first. And drab though his lost companion was, the merganser, after perhaps contemplating the situation and weighing his chances, took off after her, displaying the merganser's distinctive running-across-water style of liftoff. Wild ducks will cross breed, or at least try to.

And you shall anoint your beloved with cheesecake

     February already. Which means that Valentine's Day is ... two weeks away. And you have done ... nothing, right? No idea what special to do for your beloved. That's okay. Well, sad, but also okay, because I am here to help you.
     And a good thing, too. Because left to your own devices you would ... what? Merely buy something. Something random, last minute. A trinket. Some thoughtless cheap crap that will indict more than delight. What a sad commentary on both you and your love. Or would be, if I didn't save you. Which, luckily, I will. 
     Instead of doing something half-considered, why not go to trouble and expense while telling a story old as time?
     Why not be inspired, by how, two thousand years ago, the ancient Romans had trachemata — "second tables" — that were set aside for what we could consider "dessert." Laden with pancakes, sesame seeds, wine. The Greek playwright Diphilus lists a few delectables: "some myrtle berries, almonds, a cheesecake."
      Cheesecake? But what sort of cheesecake? Here the glozing hand of history is kind to us. Cato the Elder sets down no fewer than three distinct cheesecake recipes in his De Agri Cultura, a guide to managing estates written 2200 years ago, Eugenia Ricotti calls Cato's favorite cheesecake, Savillium, "the oldest known dessert" in her Meals and Recipes from Ancient Greece and claims it was found in the tomb of Ramses IV in the Valley of the Kings. First you mix 14 ounces of ricotta cheese with one and a half cups of flour ... actually, it gets rather complicated. You need a cookie press or pastry bag, plus boiling fat. 

     Far easier to simply order an Eli's Cheesecake. You might have noticed the festive holiday ad at the left of my EGD home page. But if that choice is overwhelming — so many kinds — let me draw your attention to the Belgian Chocolate Hazelnut Heart, perfectly shaped for the holiday. Look at it. You could drive yourself crazy trying to make that. You could hole up with your Cato, translating from Latin, messing with jugs of olive oil and such.   Or you could plan ahead and have it tucked away and ready in your freezer Feb. 14. "Rich chocolate cheesecake topped with a crunchy hazelnut and chocolate confection, baked on a chocolate cookie crumb crust in an elegant heart shape." How could it not be received with gratitude? Who does not want to love with similar dark intensity? Or one of my favorites, the Salted Caramel Cheesecake, if only for how it echoes Homer, who in The Illiad praises "the sacred offering of the salted cake."  Of course the Romans took cheesecake from the Greeks, along with so much of their culture, including this holiday, Cupid being the Roman version of the Greek god Eros. 

     Salted caramel not your style? I recommend the Basque Cheesecake, its burnt parchment wrapped evocative of the rough simplicity that wealthy Roman philosophers like Seneca paid lip service to, along with simple baths and unadorned pottery. Red is the color of Valentine's Day — which began at the tail end of Roman times, first set on Feb. 14 to honor the martyred Saint Valentine by Pope Gelasius in 469 A.D., just before Rome fell and the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed ... anybody? Do they teach you nothing in these schools? ... seven years later, in 476. So you can't go wrong with Strawberry-Topped Cheesecake. Just look. Are these not the "flame-red berries" Virgil lauds in Georgics? Or Cherry Vanilla Bean Cheesecake. Just say it out loud. "I love you, and so bought us this Cherry Vanilla Bean Cheesecake for us to enjoy together in bliss. "A thick layer of housemade Montmorency cherry filling and Madagascar vanilla bean cheesecake, topped with tart cherry gelée, baked on an all-butter shortbread cookie crust." 

     I know what you're thinking: "Neil, was not Cato the Elder something of a prude?" Yes, you are correct, no doubt remembering Pliny's Life of Cato, particularly this passage:

     Cato expelled another senator who was thought to have good prospects for the consulship, namely, Manilius, because he embraced his wife in open day before the eyes of his daughter. For his own part, he said, he never embraced his wife unless it thundered loudly; and it was a pleasantry of his to remark that he was a happy man when it thundered.

     Does that last part not contain a mischievous twinkle you could appropriate and present as your own? And a private setting is entirely fitting to the holiday. Why go out to a restaurant, on amateur night — prices up, service and quality down — when you could enjoy Eli's Cheesecake in the secluded bower of your home? 

     You could mention, opening the box, that Cato's libum was a savory cheesecake intended to be an offering to the gods. But that, like Prometheus stealing fire from the workshop of Hephaestus,, you have spirited this divine dessert away from its home on Mount Olympus and brought it here, now, for you both to enjoy on earth. Let eagles rip your liver for all time as punishment. Your loved one is worth the sacrifice....

     Okay, maybe that's corny. Maybe it's better to say nothing. Maybe you should bear in mind Cato's famous dictum: "He is nearest to the gods who knows how to be silent."

     Wordlessly remove the cheesecake from its sturdy cardboard freezer box and set a perfect slice on your best plate. Take one fork yourself, hand the other to your soulmate. Or better yet, skip the forks. Lock eyes with your adored one and whisper that the ancient Romans, whether soldiers or slaves or senators, would eat with their hands. Give yourself and your heart's true passion permission to do so now in celebration of your timeless bond and Valentine's Day, and let nature take its course.