Went back to the apartment
in good spirits after a dinner with friends but progressively felt more tired and feverish upon
arrival, though I couldn't sleep. To divert
myself, I picked up a critical edition (with modern English
interpolations) of Alfred the Great's Anglo-Saxon translation of the
Venerable Bede's Latin history of the Christian foundations of England.
I had been meaning to read it but had to finish and organize my
thoughts on other books first.
*
I
was distracted from my unseemly inward whining about invisible aches
and pains by the rendering of one passage, in particular. The scene
takes place on the outskirts of York, where the buildings of ancient
Eburacum, the Roman capital where Septimus Severus died, were still in
only the first stage of their existence as ruins. Edwin, king of
Northumberland, at that time the most powerful prince of the British
heptarchy, had recently received a request from a Christian missionary
to evangelize in his land. He summoned his council. As was fitting, the
high priest of the local deities, a certain Cofi, was invited to speak
first.
"To be frank, Your Highness," he said in effect, "since
I have served our gods and presided over our sacrifices, I have been
neither happier nor more fortunate than a man who is not devout, and my
prayers have rarely been granted. Therefore, I am in favor of welcoming
another god who may be better and stronger, if he can be found."
The
priest spoke pragmatically; the leader of the clan who followed spoke
as a poet. Asked to give his opinion on the introduction of a god named
Jesus into Northumberland, this thane, whose name (according to the
scholarly commentary) is unknown, replied:
"The life of man on
earth, my lord, in comparison with the vast stretches of time about
which we know nothing, seems to me to resemble the flight of a sparrow,
who enters through a window in the great hall warmed by a blazing fire
laid in the center of it where you feast with your councilors and liege
men, while outside the tempests and snows of winter rage. And the bird
swiftly sweeps through the great hall and flies out to the other side,
and after this brief respite, having come out of the winter, he goes
back into it and is lost to your eyes. Such is the brief life of man,
of which we know neither what goes before nor what comes after."
The
thane's conclusion accords with that of the priest: since we know
nothing, why should we not appeal to those who may know? The monk
Augustine was then authorized to preach Christianity in Edwin's lands
and the rest, as they say, is history.
But setting aside this history and its effects, let's go back to the thane's speech, which I found very interesting. Adveniensque unus passerum domum citissime pervolaverit, qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per alid exierit.
Bede's Latin prose is awkward and yet perhaps still too classical to
express the metaphor contained in the passage. Alfred's English, on the
other hand: Cume an spearwa and braedlice thaet hus thurhfleo, cume thurh othre duru in, thurh othre ut gewite.
(But for all that, it's misleading to fall into the cliche that would
set this mental world, which looks forward across a thousand years to
the somber poetic universe of Shakespeare's "Macbeth," in opposition to
Greco-Latin parameters of thought, which is assumed to be more logical
and much less mysterious. It's a matter of epoch, I think -- a hero out
of Homer or an Etruscan lucumo might have spoken the same way).
Looking
closely at the text, which is beautiful in itself, one perceives that
the thane's thought opposes certain age-old habits of mind which
persist even today. Those who, like Vigny, see life as a luminous
interval between two infinite periods of darkness readily depict those
two shadowy zones of before and after as inert and undifferentiated, a
kind of frontier of nothingness. For Christians, despite their belief
in a blessed or infernal immortality, what will follow after death
(they pay little attention to what came before life) is perceived,
above all, as eternal rest. Invideo, quia quiescunt, said
Luther. For this unknown man, in contrast, the bird issues from a storm
and returns into a tempest. Between these two storms, the thane
interprets the flight of the bird across the hall as a moment of
respite (spatio serenitatis). That's quite surprising. Edwin's
thane knew perfectly well that a bird which has flown into a house of
men darts about madly, running the risk of dashing itself against
walls, of burning itself in the fire. Life as we know it is hardly a
moment of respite. Yet, there it is.
*
Of course the
image of the bird come out of nowhere and gone back into nowhere is a
valid symbol for man's brief and inexplicable passage on earth. One
might even go further, and make another symbol of the hall besieged by
snow and wind, lit up for a brief moment in the depths of winter -- a
symbol, perhaps, for the mind, that lighted chamber, that generating
fire, so to speak, placed for each of us temporarily at the center of
things, without which neither the bird nor the storm would be either
imagined or perceived.
*
To bed, I think. It's so chilly here.
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