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The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: November 2016

Ovid

27 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by Tom Cooper in Exile, New Year, Ovid, Seasons

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Exile, New Year, Ovid

I have not read, listened to, or watched one single news story since election day. Seriously, I don’t even watch the comedy shows, for fear that the topical humor will keep me as well informed as the actual news. To say that I am disappointed in the outcome of our elections is a great understatement. I am trying not to be too cynical, but I feel in my deepest core that for most of my life I have been wrong about my fellow Americans. I have always felt that despite political differences, Americans are at heart decent, kind people. I no longer feel that way; at least not presently. I think Americans are selfish, spoiled, and self-entitled; and I suspect that they are more deeply racist, misogynist, and xenophobic than I ever knew.

So I am divorcing myself from caring about this nation. Even if the current administration were to accomplish everything it claims it is going to do (an absurd proposition from the start), there is absolutely nothing there for me, or for most people like me.

There is something liberating in not caring. I do not spend time online reading repetitive news stories, or checking the ridiculous comments. Instead of Meet the Press or Fox News Sunday I spend the day with the radio tuned to classical music. This has been a morning of Mozart, Schubert, and Haydn. Splendid. I am writing a chapter in my book on the history of the New Year, the chapter wherein Julius Caesar reforms the calendar and makes January 1 the beginning of the year.

This research involves reading a lot of Ovid, my favorite poet. He lived during the reign of Augustus Caesar, and much of his verse extols the wonders of his beloved Caesars. In his long poem called Fasti he explains the origins and significance of all the Roman festivals and holidays; so the poem’s first section is a conversation between the narrator and Janus, the god of beginnings, whose name is echoed in the month January.

There is a great literary mystery surrounding Ovid. Although he was so devoted to the Caesars, and wrote so much verse praising their accomplishments, he was at a certain point in his life sent into exile. Nobody knows why. He ascribed it to ‘carmen et error’—a poem and a mistake. But which poem, which mistake, nobody knows, and Ovid would say no more.

His exile was served on the shores of the Black Sea, in a barbarian community called Tomis. The great Australian novelist David Malouf wrote a novella about Ovid’s time there, called An Imaginary Life. I once interviewed Malouf, and he told me this was his favorite among all his works. As a preface to my edition of Fasti, there is a translation of ‘A Letter from Pontus,’ a Roman who visited Ovid during his exile. He writes that Ovid lived in a mud-floored hut, in ragged clothes, living on salt fish and dry biscuit, with sparse furnishings—’And implements for writing, nothing else.’

It was here that Ovid produced his Fasti. To sit in that rough hut and imagine all the splendors of the world’s greatest city, where once he was a noted and celebrated person, must have been a combination of grief and splendor. And in the end he wrote there one of the greatest works in all of literature.

I don’t compare myself to Ovid, but the experience is instructive. I am living a kind of self-imposed exile, distancing myself from any concern for the country where I have always lived. If they think they can run it so well, go ahead. You know, enough rope . . . I spend all of that spare time reading and writing more than ever; and remembering the America that used to be.

Predictions

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by Tom Cooper in Climate Change, Predictions, Seasons

≈ 2 Comments

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Climate Change, Predictions

Yesterday I bought gasoline for $1.89 a gallon. Again I shook my head over the unexpectedly low price, and at my own lack of foresight. Several years ago, in a discussion with my family about gas prices, I boldly pronounced ‘You will never see gas under $2 a gallon again. Those days are gone!’

But then we had the collapse of America’s financial markets, the worldwide recession, the sudden increase in domestic energy production, and other factors that completely changed the picture, and we have seen gas prices under $2 a gallon many times in recent years. I have borne considerable ribbing on this score.

I, of all people, should know better. I try not to be a pontificator, for one thing, and I am particularly averse to predictions. ‘There’s nothing more unreliable than a prediction,’ is a favorite saying of mine. Most predictions in my life I have lived to see disproved. It goes without saying that the current presidential election cycle has offered up a few examples of predictions gone awry.

So Americans are once again driving wherever they want, as much as they want, in whatever vehicle they want, all fueled by cheap gas. And as usual, while we’re happy about our freedom, we don’t consider the true cost of our excess, which is, of course, adding to the problem of climate change. And here again I think about the problem of predictions.

When we set up benchmarks, we only give naysayers ammunition to defeat us. If someone predicts that the world’s average temperature will rise to X degrees by year Y, or that the Marshall Islands will be underwater by this year, or Florida will lose 15% of its land mass by that year, or that the polar ice cap will melt this much by the end of the decade, and those things don’t in large measure come about, it hurts the cause of warning people about the problem. ‘The experts said this would happen,’ the Climate Change Deniers sneer, ‘and of course it didn’t!’ But missing certain predictions doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t  exist: it only means that it is a hugely complicated syndrome whose effects we can only hope to track and report.

It is enough to report that the coastline of the Marshall Islands is creeping steadily inward, as is the coastline of Florida; that 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have already happened in this century; even that I am sitting outside in shirtsleeves on November 1, a day that will run 10 to 15 degrees warmer than average, writing this down. I just drove from St. Louis to Columbia, a drive that takes me through many miles of wooded Missouri hills, and where there should have been a brilliant display of autumnal color, I saw only green trees fading, unable to enter their usual seasonal cycle in the persistent heat of summer. I am not an expert and I will not try to predict anything; I can only report what I see, and that frightens me enough.

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