2025 Readings 5

 This morning I finished Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb. It's sort of amazing that I had never tackled Chateaubriand's memoir, not only because of its beauty and historical importance (he knew everybody, including Napoleon and Washington, the latter of which he just essentially cold-called by knocking on the door at Mount Vernon) but also because both Proust and Pessoa loved his work. There's an overriding melancholy in Chateaubriand's work that I can definitely see appealing to both Proust and Pessoa. Some of the writing serves as an invaluable insider's view of the age of both the French Revolution (and many of his family members lost their lives to the guillotine) and the Napoleonic era, but there are also beautiful observations on life and love. There are way too many examples to cite here, but here's one that I came across this morning. Chateaubriand was living in Rome, and finishing up his memoirs, which he had worked on fitfully for around thirty years. 

He wrote: "Death seems to have been born in Rome. . . . There are more tombs than dead in this city. I imagine that the deceased, when they feel too warm in their marble resting-place, slip into another which has remained empty, just as a sick man is moved from one bed to another. One can almost hear the skeletons passing during the night from coffin to coffin." 

Recently I agreed to give one of Champlain's Blue Stool talks, which are fifteen minute informal presentations designed to be given publicly on campus as students are moving from class to class. I gave one years ago (I think it might have been something related to my time in the UAE, but truthfully I can't remember). Since a couple of my friends run it I thought I should be a more supportive colleague (although, truthfully, I think I've been more supporting of many of their efforts than they have of mine - the Debs Symposium being a great example, which precious few of my colleagues have attended or presented at over the years). I also agreed to give another Blue Stool because of a line that I came across in Chateaubriand. On his trip to America he stopped at a plantation for supplies. He wrote, "A Negress of thirteen or fourteen, practically naked and singularly beautiful, opened the gates to use like a young Night. We bought some cakes of Indian corn, chickens, eggs, and milk, and returned to the ship with our demijohns and baskets." The next line was the one that grabbed me: "I gave my silk handkerchief to the little African girl: it was a slave who welcomed me to the soil of liberty." The irony of that line, hardly accidental, is profound and brutal. I'm going to use it as an introduction to a brief talk on the lie of American exceptionalism, which is, as any poor soul who followed me on Twitter could verify, is one of my core beliefs.

There are also lines in Chateaubriand that are already finding their way into my Epics and Ramadan in Winter manuscripts. This is definitely a work that I can see reading again, and also inspiring me to track down some of his other writings, such as The Genius of Christianity. As usual, Proust and Pessoa knew what they were talking about.

Highly recommended.