Quote of the Day (Anna Quindlen, on Old Friends)

“The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life (2012)

The image accompanying this post of Anna Quindlen, Barnard College ’74, was taken Jan. 29, 2008 (when she was head of the school’s board of trustees) by Angela Radulescu.

Tweet of the Day (meghan@deloisivete, on Faxing)

“My mom asked what my office does for faxing since we're completely remote, so I had to tell her we're actually located in 2024.”— meghan@deloisivete, tweet of July 2, 2024

The image accompanying this post—a Panasonic Thermotransfer Fax KX-F90 with integrated answering machine and telephone, beginning of 1990s—was taken Jan. 14, 2006, by Pittigrilli.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine of Hippo, on Faith, Hope, and Love)

“When, then, we believe that good is about to come, this is nothing else but to hope for it. Now what shall I say of love? Without it, faith profits nothing; and in its absence, hope cannot exist. The Apostle James says: ‘The devils also believe, and tremble.’ — that is, they, having neither hope nor love, but believing that what we love and hope for is about to come, are in terror. And so the Apostle Paul approves and commends ‘the faith that works by love’; and this certainly cannot exist without hope. Wherefore there is no love without hope, no hope without love, and neither love nor hope without faith.”— Roman Catholic memoirist, theologian, and bishop St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), The Enchiridion: Being a Treatise on Faith, Hope and Love, translated by Professor J. F. Shaw (1883)

Quote of the Day (Emily Dickinson, on a ‘Helpless’ Personal Victory)

“When I am not at work in the kitchen, I sit by the side of mother, provide for her little wants—and try to cheer, and encourage her. I ought to be glad, and grateful that I can do anything now, but I do feel so very lonely, and so anxious to have her cured. I hav'nt repined but once, and you shall know all the why. While I washed dishes at noon in that little ‘sink-room’ of our's, I heard a well-known rap, and a friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet-still woods, and I wanted to exceedingly—I told him I could not go, and he said he was disappointed—he wanted me very much—then the tears came into my eyes, tho' I tried to choke them back, and he said I could, and should go, and it seemed to me unjust. Oh I struggled with great temptation, and it cost me much of denial, but I think in the end I conquered, not a glorious victory Abiah, where you hear the rolling drum, but a kind of a helpless victory, where triumph would come of itself, faintest music, weary soldiers, nor a waving flag, nor a long-loud shout. I had read of Christ's temptations, and how they were like our own, only he did'nt sin; I wondered if one was like mine, and whether it made him angry—I couldnt make up my mind; do you think he ever did?”—American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), May 7, 1850 letter to friend Abiah Root

Robert Frost wrote of the impact of personal choices in “The Road Not Taken.” One hundred and seventy-five years ago this week, as the above passage indicates, an earlier New England poet, Emily Dickinson, found herself at a threshold she couldn’t cross.

In American literature, few figures are more enigmatic than “The Belle of Amherst.” I have been particularly interested in her since a visit to the Dickinson Homestead in town nearly 20 years ago (which I discussed in this 2008 blog post).

Though 1,000 of her letters survive, her younger sister Lavinia, at her request, destroyed the rest of her correspondence. So the secret chambers of her heart remain locked, despite the curiosity of residents in her Pioneer Valley community during her lifetime and of biographers and literary critics in the nearly 140 years after her death.

Maybe I should have inserted “largely” before “locked” in the last sentence. After coming home from Mount Holyoke Seminary (later Mount Holyoke College) in her teens, she engaged in a brief period of social activity until age 24 in her family’s original home on North Pleasant Street: going to dances, calling on friends, and attending book club readings and concerts.

It was during this time—before her family repurchased and moved back into the home her grandfather lost to bankruptcy, the one we now know as the Dickinson Homestead—that she confided in her close Amherst Academy friend Abiah Root about the “great temptation” she avoided.

Why didn’t Dickinson join the male friend who “who asked me to ride in the woods,” despite wanting “to exceedingly”? 

Could she have suspected his intentions, even as she felt drawn to him, because of his strenuous importuning (“he said I could, and should go")? 

Despite her refusal to join others in Amherst in the “Second Great Awakening” sweeping New England in the antebellum period, did she still feel the restraints of religion that urged pre-marital chastity?

I suspect another cause, hinted at in the very first sentence: the obligations of family, in this case her mother.

Emily Norcross Dickinson, already 45 years old at this point, was a chronic invalid who suffered from postpartum depression. She went on to live another 32 years—only three years before her daughter. 

But her condition worsened in time, until a stroke in 1874 necessitated even more constant care, far beyond her daughter’s earnest initial attempts to “provide for her little wants—and try to cheer, and encourage her.”

Alfred Habegger’s 2001 biography of the poet, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, discusses her midlife deep attachment to Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly jurist and friend of her father whose marriage proposal she seriously considered.

But I can’t help wondering if the point of no return for her came years earlier, when she decided to resist a tug on her heart by a far younger man—whose identity, all these years later, has never been established. 

In 1856, while Abiah Root was urging her to come visit and meet her husband, Dickinson was resisting not just the responsibilities of marriage but even the freedom to step outside the Dickinson Homestead.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Get Smart,’ With a Desperate Moment for Max and Company)

Hathaway, the villain with an eyepatch [played by Eric Brotherson] [pointing a gun at Max, the Chief and 99]: “Only one question remains: who goes first?”

Maxwell Smart [played by Don Adams]: “Eh, you haven't volunteered for anything lately, Chief...”— Get Smart, Season 3, Episode 10, “That Old Gang of Mine,” original air date Dec/ 2, 1967, teleplay by Phil Hahn and Jack Hanrahan, directed by Norman Abbott

Quote of the Day (P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, on the ‘Sheer Variety’ of Popes Throughout History)

“Seventy-eight [popes] have been declared saints as well as, oddly enough, two antipopes; eight have been pronounced ‘Blessed.’ There have been seventy-seven Roman popes, one hundred Italian, fourteen French, eleven Greek, six German, six Syrian, two Sardinian, two Spanish, two African, one English, one Dutch, one Portuguese, and one Polish. Fifteen have been monks, four friars, two laymen, and one a hermit. Four have abdicated, five have been imprisoned, four murdered, one openly assassinated, one deposed, and one subjected to a public flogging. One died of wounds he received in the midst of battle, and another after a ceiling collapsed and fell on him. The sheet variety of the ways they began and ended is riveting in itself."— Scottish historian P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Chronicle of the Popes: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Papacy Over 2000 Years (1997)

Well, there is some limit to the variety of pontiffs, which you can see immediately in the accompanying composite photo: all aging white men.

Still, Maxwell-Stuart’s overall point is well-taken. Here are some updates on the helpful statistics above, as of yesterday:

*five popes have abdicated;

*83 have been declared saints;

*seven were German;

*one was Argentine;

*one is American.

Like his predecessors, Pope Leo XIV—the former Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost—will face immense challenges preaching the Gospel in a world increasingly hostile to its message of brotherhood, preserving the unity of the Church, and reaching out to other religions. He deserves our prayers, even as he prays for us.

One thing is for sure: he is likely to confound expectations, just as his predecessors back to and including Pope John XXIII did.

Appreciations: Ernest Hemingway’s Tale of Early Fascist Italy

“On the flat road we passed a Fascist riding a bicycle, a heavy revolver in a holster on his back. He held the middle of the road on his bicycle and we turned out for him. He looked up at us as we passed. Ahead there was a railway crossing, and as we came toward it the gates went down.

“As we waited, the Fascist came up on his bicycle. The train went by and Guy started the engine.

" ‘Wait,’" the bicycle man shouted from behind the car. ‘Your number's dirty.’

“I got out with a rag. The number had been cleaned at lunch.

" ‘You can read it,’ I said.

" ‘You think so?’

“ ‘Read it.’

" ‘I cannot read it. It is dirty.’

“I wiped it off with the rag.

" ‘How's that?’

" ‘Twenty-five lire.’

" ‘What?’ I said. ‘You could have read it. It's only dirty from the state of the roads.’

" ‘You don't like Italian roads?’

" ‘They are dirty.’

" ‘Fifty lire.’ He spat in the road. ‘Your car is dirty and you are dirty too.’

" ‘Good. And give me a receipt with your name.’

“He took out a receipt-book, made in duplicate, and perforated, so one side could be given to the customer, and the other side filled in and kept as a stub. There was no carbon to record what the customer's ticket said.

" ‘Give me fifty lire.’

“He wrote in indelible pencil, tore out the slip and handed it to me. I read it.

" ‘This is for twenty-five lire.’

" ‘A mistake," he said, and changed the twenty-five to fifty’

" ‘And now the other side. Make it fifty in the part you keep."

“He smiled a beautiful Italian smile and wrote something on the receipt stub, holding it so I could not see.

" ‘Go on," he said, ‘before your number gets dirty again.’"—American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987)

I had never heard of “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” until I saw it mentioned in the preface to the Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. It is not one of the more anthologized of the Nobel laureate’s tales—nor, based on my experience in high school and college, one of the more assigned titles in American literature courses.

But it is of a piece with some of his other classic fiction—and, given the world’s slide back into revanchist nationalism and authoritarian, more relevant than at any time since World War II.

It’s hard to read its early sentences without thinking of the longer, more symbolic, and more famous first chapter of A Farewell to Arms. It has the same close attention to natural description, and the same sense of wondering what is to come:

“Outside the villages there were fields with vines. The fields were brown and the vines coarse and thick. The houses were white, and in the streets the men, in their Sunday clothes, were playing bowls. Against the walls of some of the houses there were pear trees, their branches candelabraed against the white walls. The pear trees had been sprayed, and the walls of the houses were stained a metallic blue-green by the spray vapor. There were small clearings around the villages where the vines grew, and then the woods.”

The road that the two American travelers, the unnamed narrator and “Guy,” use is “not yet dirty”—an irony that will reverberate at the end of the story, when the road’s cleanliness and maintenance become a point of contention.

The first Fascist party member is anxious to hitch a ride with the Americans because, despite Il Duce’s boast that he “made the trains run on time,” transportation in his regime remains haphazard. His condescension is pronounced enough that the narrator tells Guy, “he will go a long way in Italy.”

The two travelers stop for a meal in the Ligurian city of La Spezia, with the woman waiting on them wearing “nothing under her house dress”—a waitress doubling as a prostitute. Uneasy, Guy asks if he has to allow the woman to wrap her arms around him. “Certainly,” the narrator responds sarcastically. “Mussolini has abolished the brothels. This is a restaurant.”

The shakedown by the bicycle-riding, revolver-wielding Fascist that concludes the quote at the start of this post illustrates the petty abuses that filter down even to the lowest levels of an unaccountable dictatorship.

Readers at the time of its publication in 1927 in The New Republic could have been forgiven for questioning if the piece was fact or fiction. I myself wonder, even now particularly after learning that Hemingway had driven through Spezia with a friend named “Guy” (Hickok, a foreign correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle), on his way to obtain a record of his baptism after being wounded in WWI—a document that enabled him to wed Pauline Pfeiffer in the Roman Catholic Church.

One thing is for sure, though: with each Italy-related work of Hemingway’s’ in the Twenties, his contempt for the harm that Mussolini was inflicting on the nation was growing apace. He had come to regard the dictator as a strutting liar with a dangerous appetite for power through his stint as a reporter for Toronto Daily Star (including an interview in which the newly installed dictator claimed ominously that “the Fascisti are now a half a million strong” and “have force enough to overthrow any government that might try to oppose or destroy us”).

Mussolini, the young writer noted acidly, had a “genius for clothing small ideas in big words.”

In 1929, with his WWI novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s account of the retreat from Caporetto would fly in the face of official propaganda that refused to acknowledge this unmitigated military disaster. In the same chapter, his description of the carabinieri—the country’s arbitrary, vicious military police---seems colored not just by their actions during the war but by their misconduct starting in 1922 as Mussolini’s paramilitary force for suppressing dissent.