Culture – Page 51 – Into the Woods

On being warm

The low temperature here last night was 11.3 degrees F. To those who live in northern latitudes, this may not be a big deal. But, here in the South, it is a very big deal. It’s also dangerously cold for any warm-blooded creature.

Ken Ilgunas’ recent post on how he stays warm while living in his van got me thinking about how important it is to stay warm and how our houses, in cold weather, are not just about comfort. Without shelter and warm clothing, you die.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I worked on the phone desk of the Winston-Salem Journal typing up the obituaries phoned in from the funeral homes, you always knew if there was a severe cold spell that the number of obituaries could easily double. Mostly this was old people. My elderly mother will be 88 next week. When she visits, she complains of being cold if the temperature is not above 70 degrees. With the thermostat at 71 degrees, she will sit bundled up in front of the fireplace.

And yet it is amazing how brave and resourceful human beings have been in dealing with brutal cold. My Celtic ancestors migrated north into the British Isles at the end of the Ice Age, almost 15,000 years ago. Soon they were as far north as the Faroe Islands and Iceland. I don’t think such a feat would have been possible without young warm-bodied adventurers like Ken. They must have been extremely good at managing fire and building shelter.

In the northern latitudes, cold and hard times seem to go together. Cold is an important theme of the literature of these northern latitudes. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the word “cold” appears more than a hundred times. Sometimes she is describing the cold and hunger of the miserable students at Lowood School. Sometimes she is talking about the coldness of which the human heart is capable. Hugo, Dickens: Most of the writers of 19th Century northern Europe have a great deal to say about cold. In the history of human misery, hunger is the constant companion of cold.

When it’s cold here, my chickens huddle together inside their chicken house. Sometimes, walking past a big cedar tree at dusk on a cold evening, I’ve startled a dozen or more doves out of the tree. They were huddled too, no doubt, inside the cedar tree. I’ve read that squirrels, high up in their leafy treehouses, huddle together so closely that sometimes their tails become tangled together. My cat, Lily, with the thermostat lowered at night to a balmy 59 degrees, creeps under the covers with me, snuggles her head between the pillow and my shoulder, wraps her paws around my upper arm, and purrs before she falls asleep.

I have paid my dues in cold houses. Back in my days as a young hippy, I lived in several houses with no central heating. I’ve seen water glasses freeze on the hearth, and I’ve dealt with frozen pipes and wet firewood. I’ve gone to bed in unheated houses on snowy evenings, between flannel sheets and under a heavy down comforter. No more of that! Only young adults generate enough body heat to manage such austerity.

To all us poor, fragile animals, whether feathered or furred, old or young, warmth is a wonderful thing. Particularly to children and to old people, cold is dangerous.

According to the Department of Agriculture, 15 percent (and growing) of Americans don’t have enough money for food. Those who can’t afford enough food also can’t afford enough winter fuel. It is disturbing to think about how much more frightening the prospect of foreclosure must be in cold weather.

Where are the Charles Dickenses and Charlotte Brontës of our era? I strongly suspect that, in the wasteland of our media — which glorify the rich, the beautiful and the powerful and stigmatize the poor — there are stories we are not hearing.

Restaurant china

New soup bowls made by Buffalo china

I have long had a great fondness for restaurant china. It’s heavy and durable, and it’s relatively inexpensive. I bought eight soup bowls on eBay that arrived today. Somehow I have to find room for them in the cabinets with the Victor “truck driver” mugs and the Buffalo cups and saucers. They don’t match? No problem, at least to me.

A while back, I wrote about how the right mugs and cups help to get coffee to the right temperature for drinking and keep it there. With soup, something similar is going on. Serving soup from deep, narrow cereal bowls just doesn’t work for me. The soup won’t cool properly. In my opinion, soup should be served very hot, and in small servings. The hot soup should go into a wide, narrow bowl, where it will cool quickly to the right temperature for eating it. The shapes and sizes of the bowls, plates, cups and mugs that we all use reflect a cultural consensus on how food should be served. Consensus changes. For example, these days there seems to be a growing consensus that coffee should be served in something gigantic. I object.

The makers of institutional china, at least in previous decades, got it about right, in my opinion. These bowls are new old stock, probably made in the 1980s. Buffalo china is still being made. Buffalo is now owned by Oneida.

Jane Austen

Why have we had a Jane Austen revival? Why do we remain fascinated with 200-year-old novels in which nothing much happens but drawing-room conversations and emotional detective work by women to figure out the intentions of men? Partly, I’m sure, the answer to that is the BBC. We can’t get enough of those BBC costume dramas, those lavish sets, those charismatic young English actors and actresses. I’ll argue, though, that reading Jane Austen, for some mysterious reason, is more entertaining than the BBC productions.

It had been more than 30 years since I’d read Jane Austen, so I’ve had a bit of a Austen marathon during the last month. First I read Sense and Sensibility, then Pride and Prejudice. Then I watched the 2009 BBC production of Emma with Romola Garai. How many versions of Emma have we seen? Still, we’re always ready for a remake.

Many readers today probably find Austen difficult to read. Her sentences are long and tangled. Though her world is a world of strict and repressive rules, if she has a rule for using commas, I don’t know what it is, unless it’s that long sentences must have lots of them, with some semicolons mixed in for variety. Some new editions include notes to help modern readers understand some of the references to elements of culture that are now lost. For example, my 2003 Barnes and Noble edition of Pride and Prejudice includes notes from a scholar. But on the very first page this scholar proves that she doesn’t know as much as she thinks she knows. Jane Austen writes (Mrs. Bennet is speaking):

“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

This sentence, the scholar deems, requires two notes: One is to tell us that a chaise and four is “a four-wheeled closed carriage.” I laughed out loud, because this is very wrong. A chaise and four is a carriage pulled by four horses. Anyone of Jane Austen’s time would have known that a carriage carrying a single person pulled by four horses means either or both of two things: That the person is rich, or he is in a hurry. The second scholarly note tells us that Michaelmas is the feast of St. Michael, celebrated on Sept. 29. Michaelmas also marked the end of summery weather.

That Sense and Sensibility was Jane Austen’s first novel (1811) is, I think, evident in a certain lack of confidence in her writing style and an unevenness in her sense of drama. For example, she pulls off a stunning piece of drama in one place, but misses the opportunity in another. Near the end, Marianne falls ill while she and Elinor are traveling and staying at the home of a friend. Marianne takes a turn for the worse, and Elinor fears that the situation is so grave that she sends for their mother to come in all haste. In the dark of night, a carriage (drawn by four horses!) comes roaring up to the house, and Elinor assumes it is their mother. But actually it is Willoughby, who has heard of Marianne’s illness and who comes to say that he has loved Marianne all along. Contrast this high drama with the book’s climax, when Edward reveals to Elinor that it is she he loves after all, but without a bit of drama.

No film version of these novels can reconnect us with our lost culture (and lost powers of the English language) the way the books can. We seem to realize that something important is missing in our post-industrial lives, but we’re not sure what. And how could we know, without some research? These classic novels help to remind us of what was lost when we went to work in factories and paved the world.

As an example of the loss of a picturesque element of culture: In chapter 7 of Sense and Sensibility, Sir John Middleton decides to have a party on short notice:

He hoped they would all excuse the smallness of the party, and could assure them it should never happen so again. He had been to several families that morning in hopes of procuring some addition to their number, but it was moonlight and every body was full of engagements.

These days we hardly ever notice the moon. Once upon a time, our social lives revolved around it, because those carriages (and poorer people on foot) could move around much more safely and conveniently in the moonlight.

We traded our moonlight for headlights and street lights. What a sorry deal.

Rolling back the clock … if only for a summer

Ken Ilgunas with the chickens, June 2010

Summer is over. Ken went back to school yesterday.

One of the disappointments of getting older is that most young people care so little about how the world used to be, or whether in some ways it might have been better. I have often said that I will measure my success at Acorn Abbey according to how well I can roll the clock back to 1935. How many young people would understand what I mean by that? Young people are transported by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, both the book and the movie. But how many of them grasp that the Lord of the Rings is a critique of industrial society or that the Shire is a representation of the Late Victorian England in which Tolkien grew up? Tolkien was born in 1892.

Ken is the only young person who has ever asked me, why 1935? What was it about 1935 that is worth going back to?

I see 1935 as the peak of a sustainable American economy, with a healthy mix of industry and agriculture. In 1935, Americans’ level of consumption was reasonable and sustainable. In The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Wendell Berry talks about how our homes have become centers of consumption, where nothing is produced. We leave home to work. In our homes we consume astonishing quantities of energy, food, gadgets, and throwaway stuff and produce a similarly astonishing quantity of waste. In 1935, it wasn’t like that. Homes were centers of production as well as consumption. Non-city households were able to produce most of their food. Most people worked at home.

Modern homes can’t even produce their own entertainment. It comes in on a wire. People used to have pianos. Piano ownership peaked around 1930. Everybody had to have one. In 1930, the most expensive item people bought other than their house was their piano. By the end of the 1930s, that had changed, and cars displaced pianos as the most expensive item other than the house.

During the boom of the 1920s, there was a huge migration of young people off the farms into the cities. In the 1930s, this reversed, and young people went back to the farms. [Rural Poor in the Great Depression, Bruce Lee Melvin, et al.]

I was not alive in 1935, of course. I was born in 1948. But most of my earliest memories from the 1950s have to do with the places in which my relatives lived. These were family farms in the Yadkin Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains, all of which had been running at full tilt in 1935. In the 1950s, many of my relatives still kept cows and churned their own butter. They had chickens, pigs, mules, tractors, pastures and fields. I saw how it all worked, and it must have fascinated me as child, because those images of productive households are burned into my memory.

I was born 56 years after Tolkien, so my witnessing of the industrialization of the United States picks up five or six decades after Tolkien’s witnessing of the industrialization of England. As The Lord of the Rings Wiki says, “The industrialization of the Shire was based on Tolkien’s witnessing of the extension of the Industrial Revolution to rural Warwickshire during his youth, and especially the deleterious consequences thereof. The rebellion of the hobbits and the restoration of the pre-industrial Shire may be interpreted as a prescription of voluntary simplicity as a remedy to the problems of modern society.”

During the course of our lives, we our all blown around, sometimes even battered, by economic forces and economic trends, but we rarely pause to think about it. We are no less battered today than the young people who moved off the farms in the 1920s, only to move back again in the 1930s. In the 1950s, I witnessed how my father moved his family away from a small-farm lifestyle to a more suburban lifestyle. When I got my first job in the early 1970s working for a newspaper in Winston-Salem, N.C., even though I didn’t fully realize it then, the economy that supported that newspaper (not to mention the economy that supported old Southern cities like Winston-Salem) was based on manufacturing. By 1991, when I moved to San Francisco, manufacturing was dead. Winston-Salem was in decline. Whether I knew it or not, it was an economic wind that blew me to San Francisco, during the trough of a recession. Lucky for me, the California economy started to roar again by 1995. When I worked for the San Francisco Examiner from 1995 until the Examiner closed in 2000, we were riding the dot-com boom. After the dot-com boom, San Francisco rode the housing boom. When the housing bubble broke, I didn’t particularly want to stick around San Francisco for the lean times. Instead, I read the tea leaves: Just as in the 1930s, economic winds were blowing me back to the farm.

But I didn’t have a farm. Most of those we once had have been lost.

In my family, there is a precedent for starting a small farm from scratch. It was around 1935 when my father’s family’s home in the mountains of Virginia was destroyed by a fire. My father would have been about 18 then. Rather than rebuilding there, they moved to the Yadkin Valley and acquired about 10 acres of land from a relative. They built a small farm. I spent a great deal of time there when I was a child. I can still see clearly every inch of ground. I can still see the house and each outbuilding in detail. I can remember my grandmother’s cow, which she once let me try to milk. I can remember gathering eggs for her, and carrying in wood for the stove. I can remember what everything smelled like.

Ken Ilgunas is the only person who ever asked me about that little farm and what kind of infrastructure it had. Ken is the only young person I’ve ever known who has shown any curiosity about the economics and routines of family farming. I can walk around my grandparents’ farm in my memory and find answers to the question: What was considered essential on a family farm in 1935? There was a small house with three bedrooms, built from local logs and wood from local sawmills. There was a wood cookstove and a coal-fired heating stove. The house had a large, floor-model Philco radio for entertainment, though no piano. The enclosed back porch was a sort of laundry room. The front porch was where you went to cool off when the weather was hot. Attached to the back of the house was a concrete platform with a well and an insulated well house. Water was drawn from the well by cranking a windlass and raising a bucket with a rope, a chore I loved to do for my grandmother. The well house was where milk was kept (jars were immersed in a trough of cool well water) and where canned foods were stored. These were the outbuildings: a small barn with two stables and hay storage in the loft; a tobacco barn for curing tobacco; a woodworking shop (my grandfather was a carpenter); a woodshed; a large chicken house; a granary where animal feed was stored; a garage. Most of the 10 acres, except the fields and garden area, was fenced for a pasture. There was a small orchard. There was a wood-fired outdoor stove made of brick that was used for heating water for laundry. This was a small, newly built farm. The nearby farm on which my mother grew up was much older and larger, around a hundred acres. My mother’s family farm had the same kind of buildings, though larger and with the addition of a smokehouse for curing hams.

On Ken’s blog, some commenters sometimes accuse Ken of being somehow fraudulent for his determination to revisit and rethink, in how he lives his own life, all the givens of industrialization. This revisiting and rethinking is not an easy project. By default, most young people don’t much question the world they were born into. What’s not to like about a life of consumption? Quite a lot is not to like, of course, such as enslaving ourselves to buy things or indenturing ourselves with debt.

I’ve known a lot of brilliant young people. But I have never known a young person other than Ken who was willing, even driven, to rethink everything before putting on the heavy harness and stepping onto the treadmill of industrial (or post-industrial) life. How did he do this?

He did it by reading and thinking, and by seeking experiences that wouldn’t interest most young people, like working in Alaska for several summers. Instead of becoming a creature of popular culture, Ken has, through his reading, kept company with some of the greatest minds of the past and present. He is a sterling example of why a liberal education is of such great value, though it won’t help you make money on Wall Street. From talking with Ken, it’s clear that this project of reading and rethinking has been going on since he was a boy. His graduate studies at Duke are a continuation of that process.

His summer at Acorn Abbey also was part of that process. I don’t think it necessarily means that he’ll become a monk or a farmer. His intense need for exploration and adventure will produce a lot of creative tension with his cloister instinct. But Ken realized that, by the accident of when he was born, he lacked certain experiences that industrialization has robbed us of: how to start a farm, how to grow at least some of your own food, how to build things, how to fix things, how to use hand tools. Ken also got a taste of the cloistered life, because we lived like monks, with much silence and much reading along with the labor. I told him that it’s a shame he can’t get course credit at Duke for what he learned this summer.

Ken’s hard work at Acorn Abbey this summer brought this place much closer to becoming the productive tiny farm that I want it to be. The work he’s done here will be visible for many years to come. It’s amazing what two adults working at home can accomplish. All my grandparents made their livings at home and still had time to sit on the front porch and smell the gardenias.

And I’ve added a second way to measure my success, in addition to how well I’m able to roll the clock back to 1935. That measure of success is whether people like Ken Ilgunas want to be here.

Two books on Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello

As a Southerner (not to mention as an American) I have long been curious about Thomas Jefferson. The excellent HBO series on John Adams (available from Netflix) greatly increased my interest in Jefferson, and I resolved to read a bit about Jefferson as soon as I could get my hands on the right books. I asked an old boss of mine (thanks, Charlie) who loves that period of history for some recommendations. Ken Ilgunas recommended the same books, and Ken even picked them up for me at the Duke University library. They are:

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph J. Ellis, Knopf, 1997

Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, Alan Pell Crawford, Random House, 2008

Though, to my surprise, I think I would have agreed more often with Adams than with Jefferson on the political issues of the day, still Jefferson shines through these biographies as an incredibly nice man, an idealist, a product of the Enlightenment, a Southerner’s Southerner, an American’s American.

In the epilogue of Twilight at Monticello, there is an unexpected section on the decline of Virginia, and, along with Virginia, the decline of the South. This decline started around the time of Jefferson’s death. Southerners brought it on themselves:

“By the late 1840s, Virginia’s decline had become a matter of public comment, though little was done to arrest it. Before the Revolution, the Richmond Enquirer reported, Virginia ‘contained more wealth and a larger population than any other State of this Confederacy.’ By 1852, the Old Dominion, ‘from being first in wealth and political power, ranked below New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Ohio.’ These states, except for Massachusetts, were ‘literally chequered over with railroads and canals.’ …

“Intellectual life was almost nonexistent. Virginians published few newspapers and few books. Almost all literary works came from the North. The well-to-do refused to be taxed to pay for the education of their poorer neighbors, and the great majority of young people, white and black, received no formal schooling. A result was the almost complete absence of an educated middle class. There were only land-rich, cash-poor gentleman planters at the top, a somewhat larger group of lawyers, doctors, and merchants just below them, and then poor whites and free blacks at the bottom, followed by great numbers of slaves. Costly in itself, the presence of slaves discouraged the immigration of white laborers, denying Virginia much needed skills and enterprise.

“With discussions of slavery prohibited [by an act of the Virginia legislature], and the mails opened to confiscate abolitionist literature sent from the North, the entire society came to operate under censorship. Slavery, under increasing attack from the North, was passionately defended.”

By the time, about 110 years later, when I started becoming aware of the world, and the South, I’d been born into, not much had changed.

Old Southern house trimmings

Much of the South’s old rural housing stock is falling into ruin. This is the case with the Yadkin Valley house that my mother was born in. It was built by her grandfather. The house, and most of the land the house sits on, is no longer in the family.

I’m considering salvaging a tiny bit of tradition by duplicating the trim on the front porch posts of my mother’s childhood home. My brother did this. He copied the pattern and used it for the front porch of his house, which is about 25 years old.

Though the pattern is not exactly Gothic revival, I’m thinking that tradition may trump strict adherence to the Gothic revival style of Acorn Abbey.

The methods of 100 years ago

Here is a link to a scanned copy of Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes and Processes. The book, which is in PDF format, is more than 800 pages long and covers just about everything a self-sufficient American in 1914 might need to know — farming, shelter, tools, homemade cosmetics and medicines, preserving food, and so on. The PDF file is more than 100 megabytes. Everything is arranged in alphabetical order.

Stilton

Note to myself: Those glass plates don’t photograph very well. I need to go to some junk shops and find some photogenic dishes.

Blue cheese and garlic are the best of friends. Though I love a good Roquefort, I prefer a good Stilton. I suspect this is because the Roquefort (sheep’s milk) is richer than Stilton (cow’s milk). Blue cheese loves onions, too. The Fat Ladies, every ounce of them English, in one of their cooking shows, made a Stilton and onion soup that I made at home a couple of times, and it was good. The dressing on the salad in the photo contains a whole head of garlic. What a great peasant supper — a garlicky salad, Stilton, and a loaf of homemade peasant bread.

Rural England is a dairy culture, and they make great cheeses. Last time I was there, they still home-delivered fresh milk in bottles. Friends in Wales once served me for dinner a whole array of English and Welsh cheeses, including the Welsh Caerphilly, which you can sometimes find in American stores.

As for the Fat Ladies, one of them (Jennifer Paterson) is dead now. Netflix has the DVDs of their cooking show. Their show is extremely entertaining and rich with ideas for those of us who respect peasant food.

The Fat Ladies (YouTube)

Le Cordon Bleu in Paris

Serving English cooking. The photo is about 10 years old.

If you saw Julie and Julia, in which Meryl Streep plays Julia Child, you saw the film version of what Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris was like in the 1940s. It’s been 10 years since I was in Paris, but I came across these photos recently while pulling files off an old computer.

The event in the photos is an international buffet cooked by the students at Le Cordon Bleu. They make foods from their native cultures. A friend of mine was a student at Le Cordon Bleu at the time, and he took me to this event. I was not surprised to see that the Asian students’ tables were mobbed, while there was only a small group around the English students’ table. That kind of snobbery is a shame, because the English students had cooked an amazing example of an English Christmas dinner.

Le Cordon Bleu does these international buffets several times a year, I believe. They are mobbed.

Serving Asian cooking…

I’ve eaten in lots of places — Bangkok, New Delhi, London, Ireland, Denmark, and all over Mexico and the United States. Paris is not my favorite food city. Parisian food is just too rich and meaty to appeal to me, so I found myself going to Asian restaurants or to this vegetarian restaurant near Notre Dame, Le Grenier de Notre-Dame. The vegetarian food there is only so-so. Americans do vegetarian food much better. The cities with the best vegetarian food, in my opinion, are New York and Los Angeles. The food in Ireland is about a million times better than the food in England, especially outside of London.

I don’t aspire to, or fawn over, haute cuisine or trendy food. To me, it’s all about honest foods skillfully prepared. I’ve been asked a few times to name the restaurant that I’ve most enjoyed. That’s pretty easy: Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Alice Waters‘ restaurant.

The awful 14th century

Pieter Bruegel, the Triumph of Death

I have written previously about the dark and miserable era that followed the fall of Rome, starting in the 5th Century. Here’s another: Europe in the 14th Century.

In 1978, the historian Barbara Tuchman, who won a Pulitzer for her history of World War I, published a book that also became a best-seller: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. This book caused quite a stir when it was first published, and I had long meant to read it. I finally did, after I found a copy of it in a junk store in Madison for 75 cents.

Centuries before, the ideal of chivalry had provided a little light in the darkness of the Middle Ages. But by the 14th Century, chivalry had fallen into decadence. The nobility lived as parasites off the labor of the peasantry and gave nothing to speak of in return. War and extravagant consumption, it seems, were all the nobility lived for. Wars went on and on from their own inertia, though no one even remembered what they were fighting for.

The church too, in centuries past, had preserved a tiny light of order and learning in the darkness of the Middle Ages, but by the 14th Century the church was as decadent and corrupt and parasitic as the nobility. Everything was for sale: the sacraments, annulments, dispensations, pardons, offices, emoluments. The church also was torn by schism. There were two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon. Torture and Inquisition were highly refined and ruthlessly practiced.

The peasantry was miserably poor, lived in filthy hovels, was racked with disease and saddled with crushing taxes. Up to two-thirds of their children did not live to be adults. Several times during the century, there were peasant revolts. But always those revolts were put down as quickly as the nobles could rally enough men on horseback to cut the peasants down.

And if that wasn’t enough, there was the Black Death, which killed up to 60 percent of Europe’s population. There were no longer enough people to till the fields, further increasing the misery for those who survived the plague.

By 1415, French chivalry was in ruins, with thousands of nobles dead in the mud at the Battle of Agincourt. Those ruins of the fortresses and abbeys of the Middle Ages that we see today: Much of that was not the result of centuries of gradual decay. Rather, it was destruction caused by the wars, raiding and pillaging of the 14th Century.

A saint was born out of this ruin: Joan of Arc.

Why is this relevant to a relocalization blog? Because human nature doesn’t change. We would do well to not forget how thin is the veneer of civilizaton, or how fragile the rule of law. No matter what the cost of war, we humans never seem to learn. Elites, glorifying war, have the same tendency to become ever richer and to make ever greater wagers to increase their wealth and power. Again and again we find that the times of greatest luxury for elites are the times of greatest hardship for those who actually do the work.

To quote Barbara Tuchman:

“Chivalry, the dominant political idea of the ruling class, left as great a gap between ideal and practice as religion. The ideal was a vision of order maintained by the warrior class and formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between the ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.”

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Barbara W. Tuchman. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978. 720 pages.