On this last Wednesday of the month, we’re finally getting around to January, whose root is Janus, the Roman god of doorways, beginnings and endings, and transitions. His face appeared on either side of a door, so that he could look both in and out. He looks ahead to 2023 and backwards toward 2022, as we are also doing.
The Roman door, ianua (pronounced yah’-niu-ah), derived from Janus, which the Romans spelled Ianus. A janitor was originally a porter or doorkeeper, developing into the caretaker mode we recognize today.
My students sometimes wondered why boring doors needed a deity. Janus was certainly not as exciting as Apollo, god of the arts, or Mars, the god of war. No interesting or scandalous stories about him remain. But I’d propose thinking about doors opening onto opportunity or closing a phase of life behind. Thinking about movies focusing on a door. There’s the arrival home of the wandering hero, the bride being carried over the threshold, the slamming door, the creepy turning of the doorknob as the babysitter watches anxiously. Columbo was known for almost exiting the door before he turned and asked the key question that would nab the killer. Remember Dorothy and her friends banging on the great door of the Emerald City?
And who can forget Jack Nicholson breaking down the door in The Shining? You can bet Shelley Duvall was praying to some deity or other!
Doors are rich symbols. Doors have a metaphysical vibe. They’re holy, or at least woo-woo. The Romans weren’t crazy to ascribe a supernatural being to them. While you’re thinking of more movie examples, I’ll share this Ursula K. Le Guin poem, which my friend Mara recently posted on Facebook.
January Night Prayer
Bellchimes jangle, freakish wind
Whistles icy out of desert lands
over the mountains. Janus, Lord
of winter and beginnings, riven
and shaken, with two faces,
watcher at the gates of winds and cities,
god of the wakeful:
keep me from coldhanded envy,
and petty anger. Open
my soul to the vast
dark places. Say to me, say again
nothing is taken, only given.
My husband is reading one of my favorite books, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). He’s been tackling classics in recent years. I thought that was the reason for this choice, but just discovered he’s showing the 1939 Charles Laughton film version at the Cleveland Cinematheque in a few weeks. Movies often motivate his book selection, as in his last choice, White Noise by Don DeLillo, recently adapted by director Noah Baumbach.
Hunchback provided me with one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life, and it always brings to mind this Emily Dickinson quote: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it.”
I was sitting in a study carrel in the Kent State library in the mid-70s, reading the novel for a Comparative Literature class. I won’t describe the passage to you, because I have a mortal fear of spoilers, but let’s just say there are a few epically suspenseful pages in the middle of the book.
As I sat alone, huddled in the carrel by a window, I clutched the book, swept up in the dramatic action. My feet began to move, eventually stamping the floor, pumping away to dispel the anxious energy building inside me. When the passage ended, I laughed with relief, closed the book, and put my head down on the desk. I believe I was breathing hard.
In case your mind goes in this direction, there is no sexual innuendo going on here.
I didn’t feel cold, and I didn’t feel as though the top of my head was taken off, but I felt caught up in Victor Hugo’s imagination, present with his characters in Paris in 1482. It actually took me a few minutes to recover my equilibrium.
I can think of a few other examples, but probably none so dramatic. It’s awesome, isn’t it, how words on a page can make us laugh or cry or worry? That they can affect us physically, making our hearts pound or our stomachs clench?
Share your experiences in the comments. I want to know when you felt so cold no fire could warm you, or, at least, when a book overtook you.
On Monday, I shared the secret ingredient in my coffee cake with you all. Don’t tell my housemates, because they shun yogurt and sour cream. Mention using bacteria in order to “culture” milk? You should see the looks on their faces. The recipe’s one cup of yogurt is hidden under the rose, sub rosa.
What the heck does that mean? What do roses have to do with secrecy?
In Greek mythology, Aphrodite gave her son Eros a rose, who passed it to the god of secrets and silence, Harpocrates, as a bribe intended to keep Aphrodite’s many indiscretions secret.
And who was Harpocrates? The Greeks based this deity on Horus, Egyptian child god of the new day. Artists depicted Horus with his finger to his mouth, mimicking the hieroglyph for child. The Greeks misinterpreted the image as “Sshhh, don’t tell” and made him the god of discretion and silence.
If Harpo Marx, the silent brother, comes to mind, as he did for me, alas, there’s no connection. Harpo borrowed his name from the harp that he frequently played. (Harp, the instrument, is Germanic in origin.) Apparently Groucho did once joke that Harpo’s name came from Harpocrates. What a guy, that Groucho. Not only funny but smart.
Anyway, ever since the rose was bequeathed to Harpocrates, the Greeks, Romans, and moderns have all associated the flower with secrets and secret societies. Romans painted roses on banquet hall ceilings as a reminder that what happens in the banquet hall stays in the banquet hall. Councils and secret societies did the same, or carved roses on their doorways. Roses similarly appeared on the doors of confessionals to represent the sacred confidentiality of the sacrament.
Maybe I should paint a rose on my kitchen ceiling.
A chilly day like today, without too much going on, gives me the urge to bake. King Arthur Baking Company’s website features appealing recipes and videos. I decided to try their favorite coffee cake. I chose a cake that takes about thirty minutes to bake, rather than fifty, the sooner to dig in to a warm cake.
The recipe suggests a cup of sour cream or yogurt. I don’t always keep these items on hand, especially this volume, but as it happens our refrigerator holds a large container of plain yogurt right now. That ingredient needs to remain sub rosa, if possible, because the males with whom I live are suspicious of yogurt. “Live cultures” are not their favorite words. What they don’t know won’t repel them, so sshhh.
I substituted brown sugar for the white sugar in the topping, and added a tablespoon or two of cold butter, broken up in the mixture. I’d never added vanilla to such a topping before, but it was a nice touch.
Baking lasted about forty minutes, longer than I expected, but it took a while for the middle to bake thoroughly. The cake slid out of the pan (greased and floured) readily, giving my new square plate, a Christmas gift from my daughter, something to hold.
My son nicely suggested that I had prepared a birthday cake for Dr. King. I admitted I hadn’t thought of that, but since we’ve been reminded, we’ll take the opportunity to say, “Happy birthday, MLK.”
No spoilers below, but if you want to read this novel without knowing a single thing about it, stop right here.
Actually, two questions.
Do you feel you have to finish a book once you start it, or are you okay with sometimes quitting on a book?
If the latter, what are your criteria? How much of a chance do you give it?
I’m at this very crossroads with Richard Powers’s The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and “sylvan tour de force” (Booklist).
Here are some of the factors I’m weighing.
The Overstory is 512 pages long. To take in the plot and all the characters’ relationships, I would have to (at some point) reread the book. That prospect is discouraging when you’ve been stalled for at least a week.
I’m not reading anything else right now, because I think I should be reading The Overstory.
I put the book aside for days at a time, and when I pick it up I’ve forgotten who Ray is.
The Overstory is about environmental degradation, and that can be very depressing. And I already know about environmental degradation.
Much of the novel is beautifully written.
The Overstory overlaps with and relies on Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard and other similar works. I already know and appreciate these ideas.
The narrative is clever in the most positive sense. You don’t know how it ties together at first. Weaving it all together creates a tour de force, as Booklist says.
Once you see how it’s all tying together, however, some of the pleasure wanes.
I’m 271 pages in and maybe shouldn’t give up now? Or is persevering an example of the sunk cost fallacy?
I’m sorry if some of you loved The Overstory and are disappointed in me. I’m certainly not saying it’s a bad book. Ann Patchett, whom I love, loved The Overstory. Maybe it’s just not the book for me at this point in time.
Answer my initial questions, please. And give examples. Feel free to advise me.
Like the books I read, Wednesday Words are somewhat randomly chosen, today’s especially so.
Over the weekend, I ran across a video of the 60s Australian folk group The Seekers singing “I Know I’ll Never Find Another You.” The concert was part of their 2013 farewell tour. I have no clue how this clip entered my phone, from which it entered my consciousness, but for some reason it did. I remember the song fondly enough, but this performance struck me as not terrible, but lackluster, as sometimes happens when elderly stars sing their old hits.
If you compare the 21st century version to their original 1964 recording you’ll see what I mean. The group’s lead singer, Judith Durham, died just five months ago, and online tributes to her included clips of old performances, and you can perceive the difference. I can’t blame The Seekers for losing a little pizzazz over fifty years.
It’s just that since hearing the 2013 rendition, I’ve had the song stuck in my head. My playing it over again as I’m writing now is going to firmly implant it in my consciousness. Reflecting on why this particular ear worm is so annoying, the word insipid came to mind.
For a few minutes, the old folk song departed my brain, replaced by a question: Where does that word come from? I could tell it’s Latinate but couldn’t break it down.
Here’s the history. The Latin verb saepere, means “to taste.” Its related adjective, sapidus, means “having a taste or flavor.” You can see where this is going. The adjective metamorphosed into insipidus, that is, “without flavor,” and traveled through French—insipide–into English. Our insipid can refer to literally tasteless food but more often describes things “lacking vigor or interest,” such as, at least to me, a 2013 concert version of “I Know I’ll Never Find Another You,” playing in an endless loop in my head.
I made the Best Pancakes this morning. That’s according to an Epicurious YouTube video hosted by the affable chef Frank Proto, which I watched yesterday.
I realize I’ve written about pancakes before. Now I’ve added a fifth recipe card to my collection, which doesn’t even count the tried-and-true Betty Crocker cookbook version I’ve recently been using.
Chef Proto is very convincing. Watch the video and see. He’s stern but also encouraging. His recipe differs from my others in that he adds vinegar (instead of lemon juice, as I have been doing), more sugar, and vanilla. These last ingredients make for a delicious fragrance as you stand over the griddle.
The major learning outcome for me, though, was the importance of not over-mixing. I knew this already, of course, but Chef Proto is very, very emphatic. After mixing the batter, he looks at the camera and repeats, “No more mixing,” and shakes his rubber spatula at you. He leaves many lumps, many large lumps, in his batter. I have always been careful to do this myself, I thought, but I was not careful enough. This morning I made myself stop mixing and leave very many lumps.
The result was airy, fluffy pancakes—the goal I have been striving for. My pancakes looked exactly the same as Chef Proto’s. Because of the vanilla, sugar, and probably the vinegar, they are also quite tasty. I lacked only whipped salted butter, which Chef Proto slathered on his stack in memory of his grandmother.
My own taste testers’ response was, shall we say, underwhelming. My son and husband dug in to their pancakes without comment. After a little chewing, I asked, “What do you think?” They mumbled that they were good.
Then, “Thick,” my husband said.
I let a few minutes go by. “Are you saying they’re too thick?” I asked.
My husband looked like he wished he were somewhere else. “They’re fine,” he said, using the all-purpose adjective that is no help whatsoever.
He added, “You know, I like thin pancakes, too.”
I cannot rely on other people’s approval to evaluate my achievements. I needn’t look to others for validation. I have striven to produce thick fluffy pancakes, and I have at last done so. I have made the grade and cut the mustard. I have prevailed.
The Best Pancakes You Will Ever Make
3 cups flour
¼ cup sugar
1 ½ teaspoon salt Mix first 5 dry ingredients in large bowl.
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 ½ teaspoon baking soda
2 ¼ cups milk
¼ cup oil
1 tablespoon vanilla
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
3 eggs
Whisk liquid ingredients thoroughly. Fold them into the dry ingredients. Mix gently, and leave lumps. When you stop mixing, stop mixing. No more mixing. Melt(whipped, salted) butter on griddle. Drop large tablespoons of batter on the griddle. Turn when bubbles have mostly popped. Your pancakes are done when you press gently and the pancake springs back.
In Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better (1976), John Holt wrote, “A life worth living, and work worth doing–that is what I want for children (and all people), not just, or not even, something called ‘a better education.’”
Holt is known mainly as an education writer and reformer of the 1960s and 70s, like James Herndon, Jonathan Kozol, and others. He dived deep into educational issues and used his own life and pursuits to try to figure out what education was really for. Somewhere—I can’t find the line right now–he stated baldly that the goal of education and of life itself is to find our work.
By work, Holt did not mean a job, or not necessarily. He meant something like Joseph Campbell’s “finding your bliss.” A person, for example, might be the best, most joyful cab driver in the world, blessed in having found the perfect job, the perfect work. Another might be a competent cab driver who spends every off hour playing piano, coaching youth soccer, creating luscious dishes in the kitchen, or solving the world’s most nagging mathematical problems. Both people have found their work, one in a job and one in an avocation.
This “finding your work” is not a definable goal with a finite deadline. It may happen when you’re a child, like a little girl who knows she’ll be a pediatrician and successfully achieves that goal. For most people, though, finding your work is a process. A person takes tentative steps that feel right at a given moment and eventually, with luck and persistence, arrives at fulfilling and bliss-giving activities. A person falls in love, marries, and finds joy and fulfillment in creating a welcoming and loving home. Such a person had found his or her (or their) life’s work.
My husband is a good example. He loved movies from his childhood and teen years. In college, he majored in English and Theater and Film, making some small movies in the process. Gradually, he realized that creating films might not be his path and wrote about them instead, for his college newspaper and after graduation for small publications. This gave some satisfaction but still wasn’t quite it. He realized that he loved sharing movies. What he wanted to do and what he was good at was curating films. He ran film programs at local libraries and eventually co-founded the Cleveland Cinematheque. By taking small steps, following his bliss, he built a career–not blissful in every moment, to be sure–but creative and ultimately soul-satisfying.
We spent half of our honeymoon traveling in Alaska, and we both remember the young woman driving our tour bus in Denali National Park. We said to each other, “That guide is in the right job.” As she surveyed the vast distances of wilderness, pointing out moose outside our windows, she exuded a quiet joy; she was right where she belonged. My own modest position as an adjunct faculty at Cleveland State teaching Latin was finally, after years of teaching at all the lower levels, where I felt at home. Writing plus teaching plus raising my family were my work.
All this is a very roundabout way of returning to last weekend’s subject, the photographer and fashion journalist Bill Cunningham. And a roundabout way of explaining why he fascinates. Despite his disapproving conservative Boston family, he moved to New York and began designing avant-garde, wildly creative hats. He was obsessed with fashion. He saw clothing as a manifestation of our culture and as an expression, often a beautiful expression, of individuality. His camera recorded thousands and thousands of people wearing interesting clothes, as he pedaled around New York City on his bike wearing his little blue jacket.
Like John Holt, who became a skilled amateur musician in his later years (Never Too Late, 1978), our Denali bus driver, John Ewing, and even me in a small way, Bill Cunningham found his work. The collection Bill Cunningham, On the Street: Five Decades of Iconic Photographs (2019) is a stunning but only partial record of his work and his spirit.
What do you think? Have you found your work? Or do you find the whole idea simplistic, reductive, elitist? Let us know.
From ancient times well into the 19th century, Westerners believed that four bodily fluids governed human personality and health. These fluids, called humors, derived from the four elements–earth, fire, water, and air—because these four elements composed everything. The Latin word humor meant “moisture,” as in our English word humid. Stereotypes in drama and even our own sitcoms represent the four personality types connected with the four humors. (Or humours to the spelling-challenged Brits.)
The element earth presented in the body as black bile, the first of the four humors. An excess of this humor created depression. The Greek word melankolia, in fact, referred to black bile. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the melancholy Dane, clearly had too much black bile in his system.
Excessive fire equated with yellow bile, or choler, creating aggressiveness and anger. Petruchio describes the fiery Katherine as “choleric” in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Our word bilious, meaning “peevish,” is a remnant of this humoral connection.
Phlegm, associated with water, created laziness and indolence. Falstaff was phlegmatic. And in Henry IV, Prince Hal upbraids his lazy companions thusly: “I know you all, and will awhile uphold/The unyoked humour of your idleness.”
Blood was associated with the final element, air, but was believed to contain components of all four elements. If blood is your dominant humor, lucky you! You are courageous and optimistic, like Prince Hal! You have a sanguine, or cheerful, temperament, sanguine deriving from the Latin sanguis, meaning “blood.” The common medical practice of bloodletting was an effort to create an equilibrium among the four humors, a procedure that may have killed George Washington. Bloodletting, shockingly, continued into the 20th century.
In 1598, the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson’s comedy Every Man in His Humour, featuring an actor by the name of William Shakespeare, appeared in London, with characters exemplifying the four personality types. More recently, a blog called “My Fan Girl Life” finds the four character types in “Entourage,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Friends,” and other shows. Another writer relates the four Hogwarts houses in the Harry Potter books to the four humors.
The humors and their accompanying temperaments still live.
Humor, of course, has taken on a different meaning in modern English, although the old meaning survives in terms such as aqueous humor, the fluid between the lens and cornea of the eye. Eventually humor began to connote one’s mood or attitude, as in “Our boss was in good humor this morning.” Today’s common understanding of humor may have derived from this connection with a good mood. Or, our conception of humor as something funny may come from its common use in comedies like Jonson’s. Excess humors made people ridiculous.
Medical care based on bodily humors seems primitive to us moderns, but at least it focused on the body itself to diagnose illness, at natural causes as opposed to supernatural causes. It was a step up from blaming curses and demons.
Which temperament best describes you? Are you melancholy, choleric, phlegmatic, or sanguine? Or does it depend on the time of day?
I’m not resolving to try new recipes this year. That resolution has never taken hold.
Instead, I tried something new tonight, and I may do so again. It’s not a resolution. It’s just a thing I might do now and then.
This afternoon, I checked out good old Becky at America’s Test Kitchen on YouTube and watched her prepare vegetarian paella, combining (see this post’s title?) cauliflower, green beans, and butter beans. Paella, as you may know, is a Spanish rice dish traditionally cooked in a wide frying pan called a paellera, out of which the diners eat. You don’t need a special pan, however. A large skillet works, and you should feel free to offer diners their own plates.
Saffron and chorizo are frequent additions, and the bottom layer of rice is supposed to brown. My rice browned a little too much but wasn’t crispy, just too brown. I didn’t want to run to the store, so I substituted some ingredients, like black beans. My paella was less authentic, but it tasted okay and was fun to make.
It’s your lucky Monday, because you don’t have to wait until the Wednesday Word post to learn the derivation of paella. (This post is itself a combo!) The Romans called a plate or shallow dish a patera. The diminutive, or small version, of this word is patella. The Latin root of these words is the verb pateo, meaning “to lie open,” like a shallow plate. This verb also gave rise to our words patent and patently, as in, “She was patently (openly, obviously) lying.”
One more etymology for you. Doctors call your kneecap the patella, because it’s shaped like a cute little plate. Remember to share this with the waiter the next time you order paella at a restaurant. I’m sure he will be interested.
