Terry’s Almanac from this morning reminds me of this observation by John Ruskin about the Greeks, “… there is no dread in their hearts; pensiveness, amazement, often deepest grief and desolation, but terror never. Everlasting calm in the presence of all Fate, and joy such as they might win, not indeed from perfect beauty, but from beauty at perfect rest.”
Jane Harrison uses that quote in Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, which was first published in 1903. In her introduction, Harrison argues that our understanding of Greek religion “is an affair mainly of mythology, and moreover of mythology as seen through the medium of literature.”
She continues:

This habit of viewing Greek religion exclusively through the medium of Greek literature has brought with it an initial and fundamental error in method–an error which in England, where scholarship is mainly literary, is likely to die hard. For literature Homer is the beginning, though every scholar is aware that he is nowise primitive; for theology, or–if we prefer so to call it–mythology, Homer presents, not a starting-point, but a culmination, a complete achievement, an almost mechanical accomplishment, with scarcely a hint of origines, an accomplishment moreover, which is essentially literary rather than religious, sceptical and moribund already in its very perfection. The Olympians of Homer are no more primitive than his hexameters. Beneath this splendid surface lies a stratum of religious conceptions, ideas of evil, of purification, of atonement, ignored or suppressed by Homer, but reappearing in later poets and notably in Aeschylus.

It’s a fascinating book, and even if I weren’t interested in her topic, Harrison’s writing style alone would make me swoon. If you’re at all interested in Greek mythology and haven’t read this one yet, it’s worth searching out (Google books has it). I first learned about it thanks to a comments thread here.

I’m still processing Brett Favre’s retirement*, which if you’re from Wisconsin is a little like experiencing a death in the family — you’re sad he’s gone but you feel joy in remembering your time together, etc., etc. — so in honor of the moment a couple literary items about death, dying, and staying forever young:
• From a review of Julian Barnes’s new memoir/treatise about death, Nothing to be Frightened Of: “The youngest in his family, nothing if not competitive, Julian who longed as a child to grow old enough to crack the whip himself has finally achieved a lonely and illusory autonomy: ‘Far from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip myself … what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which can’t be shrugged or fought off.'”
• Vampire books never grow old:

And Columbia University comparative literature professor Jenny Davidson, 36, who is the author of a forthcoming paranormal YA book, The Explosionist, argued that vampire books going back to Dracula, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, often represent anxiety about modernity. “The Stoker novel really is a book about technology and modernity,” she told me. “It really is a book about telegraphs and letter-writing and wax cylinders that you might record madmen speaking onto. And that intersects with the idea that the vampire isn’t modern, the vampire is from the deep past. … The vampire seems to be a place for that intersection–very modern, but very much from the romantic past.”

* Earlier this week I was emailing with some friends from high school about the retirement. My friend K., who has two young sons, wrote, “The boys will be crushed. Sometimes when I say,’Hi Erik!’ first thing in the morning or getting in to the car with him, he’ll say, ‘I’m not Erik, I’m the children’s Brett Favre!'” For myself, I can say I know the exact moment that Brett decided to let go. It was during the playoff game against the Giants. The temperature at Lambeau was, you may remember, something like -200 degrees with wind chill, so that every time a player fell on the frozen field you thought their bones would just … shatter from the impact. Somewhere during that grueling overtime the camera panned in on Favre and I distinctly saw him think, “I am too old for this shit” And he threw an interception and went off the field.**
** Sorry to go on like this. I know this is an arts blog. But as long as we’re here celebrating Packer greatness, let’s also take a moment to remember Reggie White, who passed away a few years ago and who I don’t think gets talked about and remembered nearly as much as he should. Reggie, I remember!

This is White Rock Hall, née White Rock Church, built in 1909 and located in Madison County, about an hour north of Asheville. It belongs to our friends Keith Flynn and Denise Petry. Keith is a poet, author, musician, and the editor of the Asheville Poetry Review, and the church is the first piece of a small arts retreat and conference center he and Denise are putting together. When the campus is complete, there’ll be class spaces, a recording studio, and cottages for overnight stays.
On Saturday, Lowell and I were invited to watch the church get moved from its original spot, at a crossroads, to its new home on a nearby hillside, where it will preside over some beautiful rolling acreage. The morning was cold and gray with a steady drizzle, and the operation got halted a couple times due to wet conditions and an aggressive tree incursion. A couple officers from the Madison County Sheriff’s Department were on hand to control (the nonexistent) traffic and, Keith said, to shoot the moving crew’s foreman “if he drops my church.”
The church had been shut up for a number of years before it went up for sale (it has no power or electricity, and there’s a bigger brick church down the street); a neighbor who was watching the move, a Mr. Hensley in a green John Deere cap, told me he’d last been inside for a funeral in 1966. But the building is still lovely in its bones, with what Denise calls its witch’s hat on top and a bell that clanged once — loudly — as the church got hoisted from its original spot.
Photo: “White Rock Hall Arrives” by Lowell Allen. If you squint you can see a lone figure standing on the hillside behind the church holding a beige umbrella. That’s me! Catching a cold! More photos here.

I hab a cold so we’re favoring the light and amusing this morning.
• Daniel Kalder plumbs the Russian translation of his book, The Lost Cosmonaut. (Via.)
• All the ladies swoon for the man with the silver tongue: “… and it seems to me that this sprang like a golden sapling
out of the mad, beautiful head of Paul Thomas Anderson.” (Relatedly, I appreciated the theory advanced here for Rebecca Miller’s bordello-co-co dress.
• Maybe it’s the Alka-Seltzer Cold talking but Garfield minus Garfield is kind of great? (Via.)

I had an idea that when we visited Biltmore House last Friday I’d just nip over to the library and have a good look around, and then we’d venture off to the gardens. But the tour though the house is more regulated than it used to be. As I remember it, you used to be able to sortie out a little bit on your own; but as it is now, you shuffle in a line on a prescribed one-way route through all four floors of the house, every so often pooling in an inlet to a particular room. No nipping, no darting, no backtracking. It’s a well-organized tour, and I salute the estate’s curators for succeeding where many other museums and historic sites have failed, by keeping me on track and in the main exhibit area and not off in some custodial closet or dead-end hallway or any of the other places I usually end up when left on my own to navigate– but it’s a little confining, especially for a repeat visitor.
This meant I revisited a lot of rooms I hadn’t intended to. Not the worst thing but I was glad I’d reminded myself that morning about Henry James’s comments about the house: Whenever I was going through a room I wasn’t particularly interested in, I’d imagine Henry there looking disagreeable. The banquet hall — an enormous, anachronistic room with great tapestries and flags on the walls and heads of deer and moose looking down — has a Skinner pipe organ that occasionally blasts away, and it was nice to think of the dyspepsia it must have given Henry at his dinner.
Another change: The estate’s library is long and rectangular, and I believe you used to be able to traverse the length of it. Now visitors are kept to one end, while the majority of the books are on display on the other end, too far away to be able to see any of the titles. I craned, but it was no good. It was like trying to read something from across a ballroom. “You should have brought binoculars,” Lowell said.
I was curious about the collection because it’s supposed to be an unusually good one. Vanderbilt was a great reader and an avid collector of rare books. So the library wasn’t assembled just for show, with one of those bought-in-lot collections that look impressive at first glance but are really dreary on closer inspection, all Julia, Country Nurse with a Heart and Prize-Winning Sheep of Hertfordshire, 1918, etc. But while you hear many numbers attached to Biltmore’s collection — the two most cited being: that there are more than 23,000 volumes in all (with about 10,000 displayed in the library), and that Vanderbilt started keeping a list when he was 12 of the books he’d read, and at the time of his death (at 52) the list was 3,159 books long — details about the books themselves are harder to come by. I remember odd bits about the books from previous visits but I meant to record a little more on this trip.
As I said, the library’s a long room with a high ceiling. Overhead is a ceiling painting by Pellegrini, The Chariot of Aurora, which came to the estate from a palace in Venice. A second level of books is reached by a spiral staircase. The shelving and paneling are walnut, and there’s a good amount of natural light from windows and French doors that lead out to the patio. The couches and chairs are elegant although maybe not as comfy and luxe as you might expect. Off to one side is a giant globe, which I think we can all agree no self-respecting library should be without.
The part of the collection that was within my sight was beautifully bound, with lots of reds, golds and browns. On one low shelf were the “magnum” oversized books, mostly about art, including:
• A five-volume set of Fables de Fontaine bound in a gorgeous leaf green
• Two volumes of Drawings of the Florentine Painters
• Carter’s Ancient Paintings and Sculptures in England
• Gainsborough Works
• Two volumes on The Royal Collection of Paintings, with volume one devoted to Buckingham and volume two to Windsor
• A multi-volume set stamped in gold leaf with titles like Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, Penrose’s Athenian Sculpture, and Ionian Antiquities by the Dilettanti, my favorite title of the day.
A representative smattering of titles from the shelves above:
• A two-volume set of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer
• Musical Instruments
• Auguste Rodin: L’Oeuvre et L’Homme by Judith Cladel
• Glimpses of Italian Court Life
• Holbein’s Court of Henry VIII
• A 45-volume set, bound in a bright cherry red, of L’Art
• Le Livre D’or de Victor Hugo shelved next door to a five-volume set on History of the Indian Tribes of the United States, right where you’d look for it
• And bound editions of Country Life magazine dating from 1896 to 1904 (this tickles me, as it both describes and completely fails to describe what Vanderbilt set up for himself at Biltmore)
The room’s attendant, who was lovely, told me many of the rarer books are kept on the third floor of the house, which is climate-controlled. The hallway where this part of the collection is displayed is darker, so it was harder to make out titles — also, my companion was looking a little rebellious — but I was taken by one shelf of books by Andrew Lang, including The Blue Fairy Book, Green Fairy Book, Yellow Fairy Book, Violet Fairy Book, The Animal Story Book, and The Book of Dreams and Ghosts.
The estate offers a number of specialty tours, and I wish they’d start a Library Tour, where you’d get to romp around the library beyond the cordon as well as handle some of the books, to look at the illustrations, read a little, and maybe huff at the bindings when the curator was discreetly turned away.

It’s been a busy week with an unexpected flurry of deadlines. Lowell has a bad cold and looks and sounds like a mournful frog. The nice thing: We’re playing hooky this morning. A friend gave us passes to Biltmore Estate, the French chateau that George Vanderbilt chose to build in Asheville. How unlikely it was that Vanderbilt would build here — in some remote mountain town, only newly reachable by train, far from friends and family — never occurred to me until I was researching Henry James’ and Edith Wharton’s stays at the estate for an article I wrote several years back. Here is James in a letter to Wharton:

We are 2,500 feet in the air; the cold, the climate, is well nigh all the ‘company’ in the strange, colossal heart-breaking house; & the desolation & discomfort of the whole thing — whole scene — are, in spite of the mitigating millions everywhere expressed, indescribable. … It’s, in effect, like a gorgeous practical joke — but at one’s own expense, after all, if one has to live in solitude in these league-long marble halls.

When I first moved here and knew hardly anyone, I spent a lot of time mooning around the estate, although tellingly the part I feel most at home in is the servants quarters, which are very simple and airy and remind me of my grandparents’ farm. Today I’m looking forward to visiting the library (duh) and exploring the grounds, although I imagine they’re a little stark and wind-swept this time of year. The estate was Frederick Law Olmsted’s last great project, and this will be my first time visiting since reading a couple books by and about him.

“Lady Waters was quick to detect situations that did not exist. Living comfortably in Rutland Gate with her second husband, Sir Robert, she enlarged her own life into ripples of apprehension on everybody’s behalf. Upon meeting, her very remarkable eyes sought one’s own for those first intimations of crisis she was all tuned up to receive; she entered one’s house on a current that set the furniture bobbing; at Rutland Gate destiny shadowed her tea-table. Her smallest clock struck portentously, her telephone trilled from the heart, her dinner-gong boomed a warning. When she performed introductions, drama’s whole precedent made the encounter momentous. … Only Sir Robert, who spent much of his time at his club, remained unaware of this atmosphere.”
Elizabeth Bowen, To the North

• Two early stories by Nabokov at The Atlantic: “Cloud, Castle, Lake” and “The Aurelian.”
• Kathryn Hughes writes an entertaining account of her attempts to “knock off” a Mills & Boon romance novel in the ’80s:

This ambition to write a Mills & Boon ran round the magazine like a craze, the kind of thing that used to happen at school when everyone suddenly decided to dab their pulse points with musk oil or carry their books in a BOAC bag. And, just as at school, we all pretended that we were hardly aware that other people might have had the same idea. I’m pretty certain that there was a briefing pack we all sent off for: Mills & Boon has always been democratically alert to the ambition of its readers to become writers.

See also.