“And this too,” muses Marlow as he floats down the Thames in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “has been one of the dark places on earth.” Whole theses have been written on the meaning of this statement. We can simply take it to mean that before London was London, it was just another obscure, humble town of ordinary farmers and artisans. That is, before the Romans came. So too Paris.
One of the world’s most famous cities got its start as a cluster of humble huts, walled compounds, and low, wooden buildings with thatched roofs and fenced-in pastures—the settlement of a Celtic tribe known as the Parisii, who began inhabiting the region sometime in the 3rd century, BCE. In the first century, the Romans conquered and settled what would become the Left Bank, and began to build an impressive, prosperous city with a forum, temples, bathhouses, and theaters.
The Roman town was first called Lutetia (or Luticia Parisiorum) and the central forum, in French, the Forum de Lutèce. Christianity came in the 3rd century, supposedly by way of Saint Denis, whom the Romans beheaded on the hill later known as Mons Martyrum (“Hill of the Martyrs”)—later still, Montmartre. Then came the Franks in the 5th century, establishing the Merovingian dynasty under Clovis in 508 and bringing with them Frankish speech, and later the Francien dialect of Île-de-France.
The rest—in broad outline or fine detail—you may know, but if not, like all city’s histories, it is worth getting acquainted. As you do, watch the video above from Dassault Systemes’ Paris 3D, an “interactive journey through time” that strips away hundreds of years of history to reveal virtual models of the city during the periods above and through the Middle Ages, French Revolution, and the 1889 World’s Fair, presided over by the just-built Eiffel Tower.
The project “required the work of over 40 people, including numerous experts about Paris’s history, for more than two years.” By 2013, it covered the city’s “18,000 listed monuments” with a website, free iPad app, and augmented reality book. Unfortunately, the features of its web application seem to have been disabled and its app seems unavailable, at least in the U.S. Still—like the virtual 3d videos of Rome we’ve featured recently—the promo video above offers some impressive, beautifully-rendered reconstructions of the city one-thousand, fifteen hundred, and over two thousand years ago.
No one can ever fully predict the consequences of their actions. Still, some warning bells should be hard to ignore. Take Alfred Nobel, for instance, the founder of the Nobel Prize. For most of his life, he had a different reputation—as the inventor of dynamite, one of the most destructive technologies of the age. Though he maintained his motives were pure, Nobel had no shortage of signs telling him his creation might do at least as much harm as good. He persevered and lived to regret it, it’s said.
Born in Sweden in 1833, Nobel became obsessed with explosives at a young age after meeting the inventor of nitro-glycerin. He spent some formative years trying to harness its power, even after a botched nitro-glycerin experiment at a factory killed his younger brother and five other workers. Nobel patented dynamite in 1867, a “new, transportable explosive,” notes the Sydney Morning Herald video above, that “was an instant hit in the mining and construction industries.” Originally called “Nobel’s Blasting Powder,” the chemist and engineer soon choose a new name, from the ancient Greek work for “power.”
It wouldn’t take long before dynamite became a conveniently devastating weapon of war, especially in the Spanish American War, which began two years after Alfred’s death. But ten years earlier, in 1888, when the bottle was already well uncorked, Alfred received a shock when a French newspaper misidentified him for his brother, Ludwig, who had just died. His erroneous pre-mortem obituary appeared with the headline “The Merchant of Death is Dead!” The unsparing bio went on to say that Nobel “became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.”
This may have not been his intention, so he believed, but when he saw the image reflected back at him, he immediately sought to atone for his wayward invention. “Legend has it, Nobel was mortified… and spent the rest of his life trying to establish a positive legacy.” He sought to connect people around the world, pioneering an early version of Google Earth “with balloons and rockets instead of satellites.” And when he died in 1896, he left half of his wealth, “over half a billion dollars today, to establish the Nobel Prizes.”
It is a fascinating case, if we credit the mistaken obituary for turning Nobel’s life around. Adam Grant—whom Preet Bharara introduces on his podcast Stay Tuned as “an organizational psychologist and star professor at the Wharton School”—mentions Nobel as a “pretty radical example of people changing in pretty radical ways.” There are several problems with this interpretation. Nobel may have seen the light, but he did not radically change as a person. He was already an idealistic inventor, as a Vanderbilt University biography has it, a supporter of “the peace movement” and a “truly international figure.”
Called by Victor Hugo the “wealthiest vagabond in Europe,” Nobel wrote novels, poetry, drama, and letters in five languages. He had a broad humanist outlook but for some reason could or would not see the worst uses of his product, even as his company sold weapons—to Italy for example, an act for which his adopted nation of France deemed him a traitor in 1891.
Nobel’s first Swedish patent was for “ways to prepare gunpowder” and his father, also an inventor, managed the family factory before him and made arms for the Crimean War. Like many a gilded age industrialist, Nobel turned away from the suffering he caused, endowing the arts and sciences after death to ease his conscience in life, many think, but not to truly ameliorate the damage done.
Nobel’s companies have survived him, making rocket launchers and the like as well as undeniably useful mining and construction tools. His prizes, whatever his intentions, have also done the world much good, not least in creating a global platform for deserving luminaries. (Those who have rejected Nobels have vigorously argued otherwise.) Nobel was a sensitive and complicated individual whose life was filled with grief and loss and who left a lasting legacy as a patron of intellectual culture. He was also a manufacturer of deadly weapons of mass destruction. Both of these things were true.
But even if he did not radically change—either his character or his business model—he did shift his perspective enough to have a tremendous impact on his legacy, which is the lesson Grant draws from his story. “Too often,” he tells Bharara, “we’re looking at our lives through a microscope,” oblivious to the larger scale. “What we actually need is a wide-angle lens where we can zoom out and ask, what is my legacy? What is the impact of this behavior on my reputation?” Sometimes, says Grant, “people do not like the person that’s staring them in the mirror, and they decide they want to change.”
Earlier this year we informed readers that thousands of works of art and entertainment would soon enter the public domain—to be followed every year by thousands more. That day is nigh upon us: Public Domain Day, January 1, 2019. At the stroke of midnight, such beloved classics as Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Yes! We Have No Bananas” will become the common property of the people, to be quoted at length or in full anywhere when the copyright expires on work produced in 1923. Then, 1924 will expire in 2020, 1925 in 2021, and so on and so forth.
It means that “hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films” will become freely available to distribute, remix, and remake, as Glenn Fleishman writes at Smithsonian. “Any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations… and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments.”
Those are just a few ideas. See more extensive lists of hits and obscurities from 1923 at our previous post and come up with your own creative adaptations. The possibilities are vast and possibly world changing, in ways both decidedly good and arguably quite bad. Teachers may photocopy thousands of pages without fear of prosecution; scholars may quote freely, artists may find deep wells of inspiration. And we may also see “Frost’s immortal ode to winter used in an ad for snow tires.”
Such crassness aside, this huge release from copyright heralds a cultural sea change—the first time such a thing has happened in 21 years due to a 20-year extension of the copyright term in 1998, in a bill sponsored by Sonny Bono at the urging of the Walt Disney company. The legislation, aimed at protecting Mickey Mouse, created a “bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release of works from 1922 and 1923.” It is fascinating to consider how a government-mandated marketing decision has affected our understanding of history and culture.
The novelist Willa Cather called 1922 the year “the world broke in two,” the start of a great literary, artistic and cultural upheaval. In 1922, Ulysses by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” were published, and the Harlem Renaissance blossomed with the arrival of Claude McKay’s poetry in Harlem Shadows. For two decades those works have been in the public domain, enabling artists, critics and others to burnish that notable year to a high gloss in our historical memory. In comparison, 1923 can feel dull.
That year, however, marked the film debut of Marlene Dietrich, the publication of modernist landmarks like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jean Toomer’s Cane and far too many more influential works to name here. Find several more at Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Lifehacker, Indiewire, and The Atlanticand have a very happy Public Domain Day.
Public domain films and books will be added to ever-growing collections:
While life lasts, let us live it, not pass through as zombies, and let us find in art a glorious passageway to a deeper understanding of our essential humanity.
- Sister Wendy Beckett (1930–2018)
Sister Wendy, a cloistered nun whose passion for art led her to wander out into the world, where she became a star of global proportions, entertained the television masses with her frank humanist assessments.
Unfazed by nudity, carnality, and other sensual excesses, she initially came across as a funny-looking, grandma-aged virgin in an old-fashioned habit, lisping rhapsodically about appendages and entanglements we expect most Brides of Christ to shy away from.
Having beaten the jokers to the punch, she took her rapt audience along for the ride, barnstorming across the continent, eager to encounter works she knew only from the reproductions Church higher ups gave her permission to study in the 1980s.
She was grateful to the artists—1000s of them—for providing her such an excellent lens with which to contemplate God’s creations. Eroticism, greed, physical love, horrific violence—Sister Wendy never flinched.
“Great art offers more than pleasure; it offers the pain of spiritual growth, drawing us into areas of ourselves that we may not wish to encounter. It will not leave us in our mental or moral laziness,” she wrote in the foreword to Sister Wendy’s 1000 Masterpieces, her handpicked selection of the greatest paintings of Western art. (“A thousand sounded like so many until we got down to it and then began the anguish of choice,” she later opined.)
A lover of color and texture, she was unique in her ability to appreciate shades of grey, delving deeply into the psychological motivations of both the subjects and the artists themselves.
Here, he shows the pope, father of the Catholic Church, both enthroned and imprisoned by his position. Bacon’s relationship with his own father was a very stormy one, and perhaps he has used some of that fear and hatred to conjure up this ghostly vision of a screaming pope, his face frozen in a rictus of anguish.
On Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Clown Chau-u-Kao (1895):
Toulouse-Lautrec, as the last descendant of an ancient French family, must have been bitterly conscious of his own physical deformities and to many people he, too, was a figure of fun…He shows us Chau-U-Kao preparing for her act with dignity and serenity, the great swirl of her frill seems to bracket the clown so that we can truly look at her, see the pathos of that blowzy and sagging flesh, and move on to the nobility of the nose and the intense eyes. This is a degradation, but one that has been chosen by the performer and redeemed by intelligence and will power.
On Nicolas Lancret’s The Four Times of the Day: Morning (1739):
Morning is filled with witty observation — a delightful young woman (who is clearly no better than she should be) is entertaining a young cleric, seemingly unaware of the temptation offered by that casually exposed bosom. He holds out his cup, but his eyes are fied, alas, on that region of the feminine anatomy that his profession forbids him.
On François Clouet’s Diane De Poitiers (c. 1571)
The implication would seem to be that this shameless beauty with her prominent nipples and overflowing bowl of ripe fruit, is a woman of dubious morals. Yet one cannot but feel that the artist admires the natural freedom of his subject. Her children and her grinning wet-nurse are at her side, and, in the background, the maid prepares hot water. /surely this domestic scene is no more than a simple and endearing vignette.
Her generous takes on these and other artworks are irresistible. How wonderful it would be to approach every piece of art with such thought and compassion.
Fortunately, Sister Wendy, who passed away last week at the age of 88, left behind a how-to of sorts in the form of her 2005 essay, “The Art of Looking at Art,” from which we have extracted the following 10 rules.
Sister Wendy Beckett’s 10 Rules for Engaging with Art
Visit museums
They are the prime locus where the uniqueness of an artist’s work can be encountered.
Prioritize quality time over quantity of works viewed
Sociologists, lurking inconspicuously with stopwatches, have discovered the average time museum visitors spend looking at a work of art: it is roughly two seconds. We walk all too casually through museums, passing objects that will yield up their meaning and exert their power only if they are seriously contemplated in solitude.
Fly solo
If Sister Wendy could spend over four decades sequestered in a small mobile home on the grounds of Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, surely you can go alone. Do not complicate your contemplation by tethering yourself to a friend who cannot wait to exit through the gift shop.
Buy a postcard
…take it home for prolonged and (more or less) distractionless contemplation. If we do not have access to a museum, we can still experience reproductions—books, postcards, posters, television, film—in solitude, though the work lacks immediacy. We must, therefore, make an imaginative leap (visualizing texture and dimension) if reproduction is our only possible access to art. Whatever the way in which we come into contact with art, the crux, as in all serious matters, is how much we want the experience. The encounter with art is precious, and so it costs us in terms of time, effort, and focus.
Pull up a chair, whenever possible
It has been well said that the basic condition for art appreciation is a chair.
Don’t hate on yourself for being a philistine.
However inviolate our self-esteem, most of us have felt a sinking of the spirit before a work of art that, while highly praised by critics, to us seems meaningless. It is all too easy to conclude, perhaps subconsciously, that others have a necessary knowledge or acumen that we lack.
Take responsibility for educating yourself…
Art is created by specific artists living in and fashioned by a specific culture, and it helps to understand this culture if we are to understand and appreciate the totality of the work. This involves some preparation. Whether we choose to “see” a totem pole, a ceramic bowl, a painting, or a mask, we should come to it with an understanding of its iconography. We should know, for example, that a bat in Chinese art is a symbol for happiness and a jaguar in Mesoamerican art is an image of the supernatural. If need be, we should have read the artist’s biography: the ready response to the painting of Vincent van Gogh or Rembrandt, or of Caravaggio or Michelangelo, comes partly from viewers’ sympathy with the conditions, both historical and temperamental, from which these paintings came.
…but don’t be a prisoner to facts and expert opinions
A paradox: we need to do some research, and then we need to forget it…We have delimited a work if we judge it in advance. Faced with the work, we must try to dispel all the busy suggestions of the mind and simply contemplate the object in front of us. The mind and its facts come in later, but the first, though prepared, experience should be as undefended, as innocent, and as humble as we can make it.
Celebrate our common humanity
Art is our legacy, our means of sharing in the spiritual greatness of other men and women—those who are known, as with most of the great European painters and sculptors, and those who are unknown, as with many of the great carvers, potters, sculptors, and painters from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Art represents a continuum of human experience across all parts of the world and all periods of history.
Listen to others but see with your own eyes
We should listen to the appreciations of others, but then we should put them aside and advance toward a work of art in the loneliness of our own truth.
Sister Wendy’s television shows can be found on PBS, the BBC, and as DVDs. Her books are well represented in libraries and from booksellerslike Amazon. (We have learned so much in the year her dictionary-sized 1000 Paintings has been parked next to our commode…)
Not to diminish the nightmare of mortars and shrapnel, but as evidenced by Crow’s Eye Productions’ period accurate dressing video above, one of the greatest horrors of WWI was wet wool.
Decades before the invention of Gore-Tex, Polar Fleece and other high performance, all weather gear, British soldiers relied on their woolies from head to toe.
An army of female knitters sent gloves, scarves, balaclavas and other such “comforts” to the front, in addition to seamless socks designed to last their boys three whole marching days inside their ankle high leather boots.
Alas, no amount of waxing and oiling could keep the trenches’ freezing cold puddles from seeping through those boots.
Nothing’s worse than the scent of three layers of wet wool when you’re catching your death in sodden puttees.
Prevented from joining the combat on the frontlines, British women helped out where they could, achieving a more comfortable level of dress than they’d known before the war.
Many of the upper class women swelling the volunteer nursing ranks were unaccustomed to dressing in such utilitarian fashion—cotton dresses, black flat rubber-soled shoes, aprons and sleeve protectors.
Their figures found comparative liberation, while their vanity found humbler outlets in dusting powder and the flattering army-style professional nursing veils they preferred to The Handmaid’s Tale-ish Sister Dora caps.
The greater physical freedom of the nurses’ uniforms extended to ordinary young women as well. Their underwear—a midriff baring chemise, knickers and petticoat—allowed for easier movement, as shorter skirts led to glamorous stockings and—gasp!—shaved legs!
Trendy cardigans, jumpers and waistcoats weren’t just cute, they helped make up for the lost warmth of those oh-so-restrictive corsets.
One might assume from a modern viewpoint that the hairstyles worn by monks arose to deal with male pattern baldness anxiety. As in the school uniform approach, you can’t single out one person’s baldness when everyone is bald. But this, again, would be a modern view, full of the vanity the tonsured—those with religiously shaven heads—ostensibly vowed to renounce. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the tonsure (from the Latin verb for “to shear”) began as a “badge of slavery” among Greeks and Romans. It was adopted “on this very account” by early monastic orders, to mark the total surrender of the will.
Would it surprise you, then, to learn that there were tonsure wars? Probably not if you know anything about church history. Every article of clothing and of faith has sparked some major controversy at one time or another. So too with the tonsure, of which—we learn in the Vox video above—there were three styles. The first, the coronal (or Roman or Petrine) tonsure, is the one we see in countless Medieval and Renaissance paintings: a bald pate at the crown surrounded by a fringe of hair, possibly meant to evoke the crown of thorns. Next is the Pauline, a fully shaved head, seen much less in Western art since it was “used more commonly in Eastern Orthodoxy.”
The third style of tonsure caused all the trouble. Or rather, it was this style that served as a visible sign of religious differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches in Britain and Ireland. “Celtic Catholicism was ‘out of sync’ with the Roman Catholic Church,” notes Vox. “Roman Catholics would use the differences between them to portray Celtic Catholicism as pagan, or even as an offshoot, celebrating the power-hungry magician, Simon Magus.” The Celtic tonsure fell under a cloud, but how exactly did it differ from the others? Since it disappeared in the early Middle Ages and few images seem to have survived, no one seems sure.
Daniel McCarthy, fellow emeritus at Trinity College, Dublin set out to solve the mystery. He speculates the Celtic tonsure, as you’ll see on a computer-simulated monk’s head, was a triangular shape, with the apex at the front. When the Roman Catholics took over Ireland, all of the vestments, dates, and haircuts were slowly brought into line with the dominant view. The practice of tonsure officially ended in 1972, and fell out of favor in English-speaking countries centuries earlier, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. But in any case, McCarthy sees the tonsure not as a spurning of fashion, but as a cult-like devotion to style. In that sense, we can see people who adopt similar haircuts around the world as still visually signaling their membership in some kind of order, religious or otherwise.
Just a little over fifty years ago, we didn’t know what Earth looked like from space. Or rather, we had a decent idea what it looked like, but no clear color images of the sight existed. 2001: A Space Odyssey presented a particularly striking vision of Earth from space in the spring of 1968, but it used visual effects and imagination (both to a still-impressive degree) to do so. Only on Christmas Eve of that year would Earth be genuinely photographed from that kind of distance, captured with a Hasselblad by Bill Anders, lunar module pilot of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission.
“Two days later, the film was processed,” writes The Washington Post’s Christian Davenport, “and NASA released photo number 68-H-1401 to the public with a news release that said: “This view of the rising earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn.”
The image, called Earthrise, went “as viral as anything could in 1968, a time that saw all sorts of photographs leave their mark on the national consciousness, most of them scars.” Life magazine ran it with lines from U.S. poet laureate James Dickey: “Behold/ The blue planet steeped in its dream/ Of reality.”
It’s often said of iconic photographs that they make their viewers see their subjects in a new way, an effect Earthrise must exemplify more clearly than any other picture. “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring,” said Apollo 8 command module pilot Jim Lovell at the time, “and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” At the recent celebration of the mission’s 50th anniversary at the Washington National Cathedral, Anders remembered, “As I looked down at the Earth, which is about the size of your fist at arm’s length, I’m thinking this is not a very big place. Why can’t we get along?”
You can download Earthrise from NASA’s web site and learn more about the taking of the photo from the video above, made for its 45th anniversary. Using all available data on the mission, including audio recordings of the astronauts themselves, the video precisely re-creates the circumstances under which Anders shot Earthrise, forever preserving a view made possible by a roll of the spacecraft executed by Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman. To what extent their photographic achievement has convinced us all to get along remains debatable, but has humanity, since the day after Christmas 1968, ever thought about its blue planet in quite the same way as before?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
When we talk about country club prison sentences, we tend to imagine a marginal amount of time spent on the inside, though the phrase sounds like an extended vacation. Napoleon Bonaparte—exiled to the island of St. Helena for his crimes against Europe—got the full treatment, what some might even call a sweetheart deal. As the Public Domain Review notes, “the British had agreed to provide Le Petit Caporal with plentiful wine, meat, and musical instruments.” He was given his own comfortable lodgings, a spacious country house, though it’s said to have been draughty and full of rats.
On the other hand, Napoleon had to foreswear “what he most craved—family, power, Europe,” for a condition of extreme isolation. The loss weighed heavily. After spending six years 1200 miles from shore, he died, some say of poisoning, but others say of boredom. Of his few amusements, conversing with Count Emmanuel de Las Cases—“historian and loyal supporter who had been allowed to voyage with him to Saint Helena”—proved most stimulating. Prevented from receiving newspapers in French, he longed to read the few he found in English.
Las Cases endeavored to teach Napoleon the language of his jailers, and the former Emperor struggled mightily to learn it. After three months on the island, he spent the following three studying every day, eventually producing translations from his French like that below:
When will you be wise
Never as long as j should be in this isle
But j shall become wise after having passed the line
When j shall land in France j shall be very content…
My wife shall come near to me, my son shall be great and strong if he will be able to trink a bottle of wine at dinner j shall [toast] with him… / The women believe they [are] ever prety / The time has not wings / When you shall come, you shall see that j have ever loved you.
Eight pages in Napoleon’s own hand remain from his time as a student of English on St. Helena in the first few months of 1816. They are “some of the most evocative documents we have from Napoleon’s time” on the island, the Fondation Napoleon writes, bearing “poignant witness to the frustration Napoleon felt in exile…. It is tempting to read a refusal of exile in these sheets, both in the sentences themselves, and in Napoleon’s insistent use of ‘j’ (as in the French ‘je’) rather than the English ‘I.’”
In one letter that survives from March 7, 1816 (see it scanned above), written for Las Cases to correct the following day, Napoleon takes stock of his progress, or lack thereof.
Count lascases — Since sixt week j learn the Englich and j do not any progress. Six week do fourty and two day. If might have learn fivity word four day I could know it two thusands and two hundred. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand; even he could must twinty bout much of tems for know it our hundred and twenty week, which do more two yars. After this you shall agrée that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged.
Las Cases reports that his student “had an extraordinary intelligence but a very bad memory.” Grammar came much more easily than vocabulary. His frustration over being “imprisoned in the middle of this language” is recorded in Las Cases’ Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, a record of his fifteen months on the island with Napoleon. The book became “a publishing sensation” and would “do much,” the Public Domain Review writes, “to turn the perception of Napoleon from a dictator into a liberator.”
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