Decameron: "A Plain Most Fair and Delectable"

Illustration from Le Décameron, published  in 1432, in a Flemish edition.

Many thanks to the 20 participants in our group's first-ever virtual book discussion. It was necessitated by the coronavirus outbreak, and we held it via Zoom video conferencing last Tuesday.  In keeping with the zeitgeist, the spirit of this terrifying time, the subject of our discussion was Boccaccio's Decameron.  

The Decameron was written in the mid-14th century, and its introduction gives Boccaccio's reportage on an outbreak of bubonic plague in his home city of Florence in the year 1348. Ten different narrators, quarantined in a country villa, recount ten stories a day for ten days.

I suppose the Decameron is best known for its bawdy tales.  One we looked at, the tale of Nathan and Mitridanes from Day 10, in contrast is a deeply philosophical reflection on how and why the kindest souls among us strive to the nth degree to be generous to others.

Participants wondered why Boccaccio chose to narrate gory details of suffering and death. In fact, he explains his motive at the very beginning of his introduction:

This horrid beginning will be to you even such as to wayfarers is a steep and rugged mountain, beyond which stretches a plain most fair and delectable, which the toil of the ascent and descent does but serve to render more agreeable to them; for as the last degree of joy brings with it sorrow, so misery has ever its sequel of happiness.

Bibliotherapy for This Difficult Time

Boccaccio (1313-1375)

I'll be leading a Special Edition discussion of two portions of Boccaccio's Decameron, set during the plague year of 1348, on Tuesday evening, April 14th, at 7:15 p.m., via Zoom.

The first part is Boccaccio's eyewitness account of the plague conditions in Florence, the second the story of Nathan and Mitridanes, a parable on generosity.  Read Boccaccio's introduction and you'll understand how a 14th-century plague differed from our current 21st-century crisis.  Then join Boccaccio's storytellers on warm and verdant country afternoons for some great escapist literature.

To register and receive the Zoom link the day before the program, click here and scroll to bottom of page.

To get started with the readings (the "First Day Introduction" and "Day 10, Story 3") please go to:

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts/DecShowText.php?myID=d01intro&lang=eng

and

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts/DecShowText.php?myID=nov1003&lang=eng

OR

use a search engine to find the Brown University Decameron Web.  You will find the texts in both English and Italian, and a wealth of valuable information on Boccaccio and his Decameron.

Check here in coming days for details about joining our Zoom conversation.

"The Man Who Could Work Miracles," by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells (1866-1946)

Our featured selection this month is the H.G. Wells short story "The Man Who Could Work Miracles," first published in 1898 in the Illustrated London News. According to WorldCat.org, the world's largest bibliographic database, it appeared for the first time in book form in the United States in 1899 as part of a Wells story collection entitled Tales of Space and Time, published by Doubleday of  New York.

The story mentions a particular date, Sunday, November 10, 1896, as the day when our protagonist, Mr. Fotheringay, "egged on and inspired by Mr. Maydig [a minister], began to work miracles."  In reality, November 10, 1896 was a Tuesday!  Wells goes on to say, "The reader's attention is specially and definitely called to the date. He will object, probably has already objected, that certain points in this story are improbable, that if  any things of the sort already described had indeed occurred, they would have been in all the papers a year ago."

Is Wells skirting a boundary between fact and fiction?  He was, after all, the original author of the novel The War of the Worlds, about a Martian invasion of Earth. An adaptation of The War of the Worlds was broadcast as a radio drama narrated by the great Orson Welles on October 30, 1938. It created widespread panic among radio listeners fooled by Welles's "Breaking News" approach to the the broadcast. They thought Martians had really begun to invade New Jersey.  By the way, October 30, 1938 was a Sunday!

15 Years of Great Books at Huntington Public Library

Last night's cake showed off
Victoria Craven's baking skills.

Last evening, 18 patrons met for a stimulating conversation about Jane Addams's 1916 magazine piece "The Devil Baby at Hull House."  It marked the 15th Anniversary of our group.  One attendee, who has become a dear friend, had been at our first meeting in January 2005!  On that occasion, the group's "founding mother," Carolyn Hasler, a former librarian at this library, and I went out on a limb in terms of difficulty level by setting Shakespeare's Othello as the very first reading.  Many thanks to the hundreds of participants over the years who have embraced this community effort and engaged with literary masterworks.

Jane Addams's Urban Folk Legend

1940 Addams Postage Stamp

Jane Addams's "The Devil Baby at Hull House" was published in the October 1916 Atlantic Monthly.  It was also published the same year as part of her book The Long Road of Women's Memory.

"The Devil Baby at Hull House" describes a rumor of a "devil baby" with cloven hoofs, pointed ears, and a diminutive tail residing at the Hull House Settlement in Chicago, which Addams founded in the 1890s.  In modern parlance, we would say the story went "viral" in the surrounding immigrant neighborhoods.

The stories were told mostly by women, especially older women.  Addams writes, "Whenever I heard the high eager voices of old women, I was irresistibly interested, and left anything I might be doing in order to listen to them."

Nietzsche and Twain

Nietzsche in his mid-20s

When our group convened several weeks ago for our final discussion of 2019, our reading was Friedrich Nietzsche's "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life"*  In a post last month I mentioned Nietzsche's categorization of three kinds of history.  Also embedded in the piece is another Nietzschean triad, that of the historical, unhistorical and superhistorical man.  

The historical man has a passion for the past and its usefulness for the present.  This attitude, however, has its downside.  Nietzsche writes, "There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination of historical sense that injures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people, or a culture."  Conversely the unhistorical man does not have this sensibility. He lives in the present, almost as an animal does.  Nietzsche's superhistorical man understands how accidental the unfolding of events can be.  Further to his point about the superhistorical, he writes, "Whoever asks his acquaintances whether they would want to relive the last ten or twenty years will notice quite readily which of them is prepared for the superhistorical standpoint: they will of course, all answer, No!, but they will give different reasons for this No!" In the final analysis, Nietzsche says we should leave superhistorical men to their "nausea and their wisdom." 

Nietzsche invites us to consider the proposition, "The unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people, and a culture."  Is this the final takeaway of the piece, in light of his opening quotation from Goethe: "..I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity"?  Poised as we are on the verge of a new year and, depending on your method of reckoning time, a new decade, the time is ripe to consider what for me is Nietzsche's fundamental lesson here:  Sometimes it is better to remember, and sometimes it is better to forget.

Mark Twain in 1907

In the Janus-faced spirit of the season, permit me also to look back to October, when we took up one of Mark Twain's masterpieces, his short story "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," about a mysterious stranger who puts the reputation of the "honest and upright" town of Hadleyburg to a test.

Nietzsche and Twain were contemporaries!  A pair of late nineteenth-century geniuses, but in very different ways.

Happy New Year!

*The German title is the more expressive "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben"

Nietzsche: On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

This month our selection is Nietzsche's "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life."  The piece is early Nietzsche and forms part of his Untimely Meditations.  Nietzsche puts History in three categories, which he calls monumental, antiquarian, and critical. These categories will serve as a springboard to our discussion.  Some have critiqued the essay on the basis of a lack of examples.  Gentle readers, on Monday I will ask if we can address this shortcoming.