Atmospheres Present and Past

Today there was gloomy and wet weather such as I seldom even remember from winter, but I liked it. I like the irony of such weather during the summer solstice. But it was not too dark outside, though comfortably dusky inside; still, the air was considerably damp. Since I did not go out in the rain, I even enjoyed that. I think that it's repetitive weather that is the most annoying. Too much rainy weather is (of course) not nice (though lightning and thunder such as transpired today considerably relieve the tedium, as does a stiff wind), but too much sunny weather is not nice either. It always annoys me when I watch television on a hot and humid day, only to hear a weather news anchor announce an even more hot and humid day with the cheerful remark that a "nice day" is coming up. Perhaps weather people live in parallel universes with built-in air conditioning.

My main activity today was helping J. on his homework. It took an unnecessarily long time, but we enjoyed ourselves until we came to the last question of his recent Spanish exam, where he had to write a dialogue with a friend whom he wants to invite to a film. At that point we squabbled about the wording and other matters. I kept on wanting J. to use the phrase "Que lástima!", but J. had a wholly undeserved prejudice against it. And so on and so forth.

T. was, in the meantime, better employed; she made crêpes for dinner, which we then consumed with apricot marmalade and cinnamon sugar and apple sauce. We also have bowls full of fresh fruit, whose summery poeticness is marred by the flocks of fruit flies that visit them. Fruit flies, by the way, behave differently here than they did in Canada. They don't only fly but also crawl around with cockroach rapidity (they look like flightless insects then); in Canada they were much more laid back, and they were always either flying or stationary on whatever attracted their interest. It is nice not to see any ants here, except for a small red ant that painfully bit me perhaps a month ago. The juicy big black termites that overran our house one May, and smaller normal black ants that did the same in another year (where, in single file, they trekked across the grand expanses of the living room and continued to my room, at which point they flocked under the electric heater until pools of ant poison put an end to that) are entirely absent here.

I'm also reading Nature's Serial Story, another Roe book that goes into detail about the four seasons on a farm. The atmosphere is marred by the bird-hunting anecdotes at the beginning, because surely someone with a true love of nature would not approve of birds being shot down indiscriminately, especially rare ones. Nature is also idealized in a moralistic way that probably sounded as unconvincing when the book was written as it does today. Besides Mary Robinson's Beaux and Belles of England (which I might discuss in another post) my other major online reading was the news, in the Guardian. There was an article about the Australian government's intention to ban alcohol and pornography for the Aborigines in the Northern Territory. My first reaction was that it is indeed a paternalistic proposal; the second, that it wouldn't work anyway (vide Prohibition in US, or modern-day drug laws) and would lead to criminalization; the third, that the sudden deprivation of alcohol might have adverse medical effects. Wouldn't it be far better to work on reducing unemployment?

As for last evening, I continued writing on my England-in-the-time-of-Bloody-Mary story. William Lamington and Lady de Plessy (aunt of the hero, and the new guardian of the heroine) are having a cryptic conversation, in which they first trade witticisms about jousting, and then use metaphors from the classics to refer to certain people and events. The Calydonian Boar, for example, represents Her Majesty's minions. Lamington (who has insider knowledge) warns Lady de Plessy that Queen Mary's emissaries are imminent, and that they must be greeted with disarming hospitality. As for the hero (code-named Meleager), he is plotting away in exile in the Netherlands; but I've just read that they were under Spanish rule then, so I'll have to change that to France. I used the Netherlands because that's where one of the villains intends to go in Children of the New Forest, and because the ports made it fairly easy to travel to, and because I figured that it must have been Protestant at around that time. Anyway, the mythological references were crudely done, so I'll have to rewrite all of that later. And, though the heroine is beginning to be a trifle boring, the plot should become less so as the Boar arrives.

Anyway, some day I would like to write a really well-researched historical book, or series of short stories. It would not be a regurgitation of my research, but it would be well-rounded and naturally written because I would have a comfortable grasp of detail about the politics, education, art, literature, science, fashion, and society of the day, and I would try to capture some of the Zeitgeist. I think that, in historical novels, the present mentality is usually superimposed on the previous time; in my books I don't want to do this (consciously, at least). But my present theory is that people and their lives are basically alike no matter what the century or decade; certain material characteristics alter but, in the main, the routines and mentalities are the same.

To digress further, perhaps the idea is rubbishy or trite, but I've long thought that the atmosphere of a time is most clearly perceptible in its paintings. From the subjects one can tell the preoccupations of the times -- religion, for instance, or fashion --, from the faces one can tell how acute the psychological insight of the painter was, and from the clothing and surroundings one can, of course, gather the physical realities of the time. Medieval paintings, for instance, give me the impression of a lively, squalid time, where the average mind was perhaps solid but often rough. The paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael suggest a time where beauty of the highest sort was appreciated, and a deeper thought was prevalent, but the surroundings were still squalid. In this context, I must admit that I often regret it when paintings are restored so that the paint is as bright as if it had been applied yesterday, instead of being interestingly aged and subdued. (For example, if I remember correctly, the green in Holbein's "The Ambassadors" is quite glaring in the original.) But most painters probably never intended their paintings to be delightfully old-fashioned. Anyway, last of all, it is evident that there are many paintings which do not, or do not only, reflect the time of their origin.