WTLB: savour
Words to live by: savour
These last few weeks, living in a foreign place, that notion of enjoying the moment, savouring, basking in it, perhaps even wallowing has been heavily on my mind. It occurred to me to add some “words to live by” to the Agincourt blog as a tool for understanding my own process. Today’s nominee is savour, largely because I’ve had so little time to actually engage substantially with the places I’ve been visiting.
In British English—whose spelling I often prefer to American alternatives; grey versus gray is a case in point, just one of my many affectations—there is but a single letter separating savour and saviour. Happily (for me) the OED offers two very different roots, each from the Latin through Old French. The first derives from sapere (to taste); the second from salve (to save).; though salvation is not currently on my radar. Among savour’s several meanings, these interest me especially: to relish or enjoy; to give oneself to the enjoyment of. They also suggest savor as a noun—the power to excite or interest—not a way I’d think to use it. Verbs are just so much more powerful than strings of adjectives.
My gut reaction is that savoring is a generational thing, but that’s just too easy. Generational differences are simply too convenient an explanation for why I craved more time on Friday afternoon to absorb Pere Lachaise Cemetery on the lumpy eastern edge of Paris.
The site of Pere Lachaise was acquired by Napoleon about 1803 as expansion for the shrinking capacity of Paris churchyards and crypts. But it didn’t flourish until a generation later when Napoleon III charged his planner Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann with clearing out those crypts and burial grounds. So many human remains were removed that a special rail line connected the city with this remote postage stamp of property that has been enlarged seven or eight times. A map and list of notable interments—Champollion, Proust, Collette, Oscar Wilde, et al.—was a pop quiz in 19th and 20th century history. I stood and savoured only that for nearly half an hour.
During and after the fact, I pondered my fascination with the place. Is it a question of (1) age-and-stage? Were Friday’s parks—I do think of Pere Lachaise as a de facto historical park—interesting because I might soon be one of its residents? Or (2) are they important because of when I was born and the circumstances—the Cold War, the Bomb—that shaped my generation? Or (3) are they more particular to my personal evolution; to the events that brought Agincourt into existence, for example? I won’t stop wondering.
The palpable melancholy of Pere Lachaise does have direct application to Agincourt. I hoped that my time there would help with the design of The Shades, Agincourt’s non-denominational cemetery. It will not be as dense or picturesque as Pere, but the inscription on ancient Greek above the entrance—”We are dead. Save your tears for the living.”—is intended to generate similar feelings for the sublime and nostalgic. Like anything we design, it takes time; architects, after all, are ruminants and must chew their cud again and again.
It requires savouring, one of my new words to live by.
Oh, and you’re probably wondering…
Yesterday’s entry carries a title—a toilet in the loony bin—that relates remotely to its content. These several weeks of relative isolation in Europe have afforded an opportunity to reflect on my brilliant career, forty-years in the saddle teaching, among other things, architectural history. As I ponder carrying on or stepping aside (or some other middle course), I hear encouraging words from friends and colleagues, positive assessments of past performance and and hints that a change of status might be hasty. While I’m grateful for their support, you know me: some see the glass half full, some see it half empty; I notice a chip in the rim and bring new dimension to the notion of cynicism.
Forty-plus years of doing whatever I do have inevitably touched many lives—some, no doubt, with inelegance or ineptitude. They, of course, are not the ones offering positive support. I hear, for example, appraisals of my career that reckon me a fixture at the department, an institution in my own right. Both of these are well-intentioned, honorific, generous.
My house is replete with fixtures. There is one in stained glass hanging above the dining table, but there’s also a porcelain one in the little room down the hall. And as an historian of architecture, institutions are my stock in trade: without them—feudalism and monasticism, for example, noble institutions founded by Charlemagne—the Middle Ages would have been really chaotic.
But the State Hospital at Jamestown is an institution, too.
Cecil (on himself)
This one will be deceptively easy: Cecil Elliott had little or nothing to say about himself.
I should defer to Kathy Colliton or Fran Fisher for their insights to who Cecil was. Cindy Urness and Mark Barnhouse certainly knew him better than I did. In fact, I suspect each of us in Elliott’s circle of acquaintances experienced a distinct aspect of the man, one that overlapped only slightly with impressions he gave to others.
Early in our relationship—perhaps four or five years along—we had a conversation that I cannot share with you. [Yes, it is possible for me to keep a confidence.] He made a request of me that I never had to fulfill. But it was the asking that mattered. It was only after his passing that many of us began to share stories and quotes and cobble together a fuller picture of the man we thought we had known. Two things stand out in my recollection.
When Fran cleaned out Elliott’s apartment, she found a large portfolio filled with drawings, watercolors and clippings—odd for a man who seemed not to have a nostalgic bone in his body. He often joked about the “incredimentia” that encumbers us; the debris that prevents us from moving forward, ties us to the past. Yet there it was—at the back of a closet or beneath a bed; I wasn’t there at its exhumation—a bundle of memories that Cecil couldn’t discard. How remarkably uncharacteristic!
Since Fran executed his estate, she offered some of us a memento from that folio; a shard of his output for those of us more inclined toward recollection than we thought he had been. I chose a watercolor of three zaftig, Rubens-esque ladies on point, pirouetting their way across a hanseatic streetscape. It was undated and, unfortunately, unsigned, but we titled it “Three Gdans-ing Ladies”. You can see it on my dining room plate rail, just above the thermostat.
Further confirmation of a compartmentalized Elliott emerged at his memorial service. Elliott was not only antithetical to religion; he was outright hostile to it. So we enjoyed the breadth of encounter that appeared in Monte’s rear courtyard one weekday evening: students from every generation of his tenure as chair and later as teacher; faculty and staff from those years as well. Virginia Merrill, a former secretary living in Montana, drove over for the event. I have no idea how she even learned about it. But the greatest surprise arrived half way through the evening: Cecil’s stepson David drove up from Minneapolis.
David was not the surprise. We knew that Cecil had been married (to Ruth, sister of actor Christopher Lloyd, believe it or not!) and had stepped into the role of stepfather. David materialized and was genuinely surprised to find so many of us eating, drinking, recollecting. Our surprise was that he had no idea Cecil had had this set of friends. We knew about David; David had no idea about us. The rest of the evening was a revelation for David and a further opportunity to share our experience of an entirely remarkable person.