Flawed Ecclesiastics and Other Tales

Today was truly a day of rest, as Sunday should be. I've rather wondered if God (at least hypothetically speaking) does mean that one should rest on the Sabbath day even if one hasn't worked on any other day. But that's just by the way.

It was sunny and tempting outside, but I stayed inside. I read two Western novels as well as A Sicilian Romance, and played much Beethoven and Bach and a little Chopin on the piano. The piano has gone splendidly yesterday and today. Without conscious effort I'm playing with considerable variety and feeling and fluency, and finding new ways of playing every piece. But this is probably not a sign of a lasting improvement; it is like a lovely enchantment in a tale of Hans Christian Andersen, an interlude which fades out like a dream, to vanish for ever without hope of being recaptured. In a few days the sonatas and waltzes and minuets will most likely revert to their usual clumsy state, and I will be forced to explore the lesser magic of scales and technical exercises again.

Anyway, the Sicilian Romance, which I'd already read before, was considerably amusing. It was written by Ann Radcliffe, and I'm sure that Jane Austen read it. The heroes are Ferdinand de Mazzini, his sisters Julia and Emilia, and his friend Count Hippolitus de Vereza (who is the beloved of Julia). The villains are the father, the Count de Mazzini; the stepmother, Maria de Mazzini née di Vellorno; and the Duke de Luovo, a suitor of Julia. Romantic conventions crowd the novel: picturesque and rugged scenery, unnatural characters (either angelically good or diabolically bad), banditti, caves, secret passageways, a castle, a shipwreck, a monastery, a deeply flawed ecclesiastic, a saintly nun, idealized peasant life, imprisonment in a dungeon, a wife locked away in a gloomy chamber, faithful retainers, a serenade, swordfights, and at least four deaths that turned out to be false alarms. And, in the grand finale, there is one suicide by stabbing, one murder by poison, the reunion of the Mazzini children with their long-lost mother, and the wedding of Julia and the Count de Vereza. A rattling good yarn, as it were.

At least I'm reading non-online books too. Yesterday evening I finished the Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew, which was slightly maddening as far as its limited insight into her personality went, but pleasant on the whole. I'm also leafing through Tennyson's poems. I'm working my way up from the short bits like "The Kraken" and "Charge of the Light Brigade," and the longer sentimental narrative poems, and diving into In Memoriam, "The Voice and the Peak," and more of his comparatively drier poems. His short play "The Falcon" particularly interests me. I think the way he presents it is too saccharine and contrived, but the story itself (which is out of the Decameron) somehow really gripped me, and I intend to write something based on it. There is another poem, narrated by a woman who has come to live with her husband, who is a leper. I can't say I admire the poem's masochism. I did wonder, though, what I would do if I married and my husband had a fatal contagious disease (Ebola, for instance), and I was fairly sure I would stay with him too, unless we had children who still needed a parent. It would be more because I would despise myself eternally if I abandoned him than for any higher reason. Probably most people would do the same.

Anyway, the only other non-virtual reading I've done today was of the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on beer, for the purposes of J.'s homework about monasteries. He had to write a letter from a monk to a secular, free-range friend. It was quite funny. He writes that the monastery's donkey got loose in the barley field and rampaged until Brother Theodosius, who is fond of beer, came onto the scene and unleashed a torrent of curse words. Brother Petrus felt faint and had to go to the infirmary. In the evening everyone was going to pray for the soul of Brother Theodosius.