Daily Blague

Yesterday was pretty raw at first, dark and grey, but in the late afternoon the sun came out and I went for a walk. The forsythia was in bloom. Forsythia always looks best from a distance, as a vague yellow cloud. Up close, it becomes very unruly. I don't think that there's a flowering plant that looks more normal to me. When I was growing up in Westchester, it was everywhere.

I sat on the Finley Walk by the River and read two essays of Montaigne, "On liars" and "That no man should be called happy until after his death." Ovid, Lucretius, Macrobius, and Seneca are quoted in the latter. It was the quotations that wowed me when I was a boy. Imagine having all of that Latin verse on the tip of your tongue! The beauty of Montaigne's essays is that the quotations don't seem pedantic at all. They are pearls of granite wisdom, authoritative in their antique concision. In Montaigne's day, it was by no means taken for granted that contemporaries would ever write literature to rival that of the ancients. French, Italian, Spanish, English, German and the other languages of Europe were "vulgar tongues," unsuitable for serious thoughts. (Montaigne plays with this idea in every essay: writing in French, he rarely fails to announce the casual nature of what he's doing.) It was possible to be a learned man in the Sixteenth Century. There weren't that many ancient books to get through. There were very few unimportant books.

I wonder what Montaigne would have made of the East River, which, being a strait, flows sometimes north and sometimes south. When I got up to leave, the river and sky shared a rose complexion.