fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Sunday Afternoon By The Fire

A gray, wet winter's day with Dante, Janaček, the Madonna, and Patrick Leigh Fermor

Look who is watching over me this dreary Sunday afternoon from my mantel. Julie gave me that bust of Dante, created by Kevin Lindholm, the art teacher at Sequitur Classical Academy, where she also teachers, and our two younger kids study. It was designed by Kevin, who generated it out of a 3D printer. Turns out that Mud House Art, the nonprofit publishing house started by the guys who launched Sequitur, just started offering 3D-printed busts in a variety of forms. For now, you can get them of Dante, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and St. Augustine. More are coming in 2019.

In the background is a terracotta image of the Madonna of San Luca, an iconic Bolognese image, a gift of my hosts in Bologna this year. And Julie brought me purple tulips — my favorite flower in my favorite tulip color. What a cozy house I have today. I’ve been sick with a rotten cold all week, so there’s nothing to do but burrow in by the fire and read. I’m not complaining; it’s just about perfect in here at the moment. The room is aglow from lamps, hot coals in the hearth, and the white pinpricks of light on the Christmas tree. I’m drinking a mug of milky chai. My elderly black Schnauzer dozes on the couch next to me. Janaček’s piano works are on the stereo, and I’m traveling with the best companion ever, Patrick Leigh Fermor, on his hike across Europe:

Friends, I cannot recommend this travel memoir, A Time Of Gifts, strongly enough. It’s one of my favorite books of all time. I keep loaning my copy out to people, and forgetting who has it. Julie and the kids gave me a replacement copy for Christmas. It’s just the thing for the fireside on a gray and wet Sunday in winter. Here is Leigh Fermor arriving at the Rhine Valley town of Bingen on Christmas Eve, 1934. He is 18 years old, and walking across the continent, headed to Constantinople:

The only customer, I unslung my rucksack in a little Gasthof. Standing on charis, the innkeeper’s pretty daughters, who were aged from five to fifteen, were helping their father decorate a Christmas tree; hanging witch-balls, looping tinsel, fixing candles to the branches, and crowning the tip with a wonderful star. They asked me to help and when it was almost done, their father, a tall, thoughtful-looking man, uncorked a slim bottle from the Rüdesheim vineyard just over the river. We drank it together and had nearly finished a second by the time the last touches to the tree were complete. Then the family assembled round it and sang. The candles were the only light and the solemn and charming ceremony was made memorable by the candle-lit faces of the girls — and by their beautiful and clear voices. I was rather surprised that they didn’t sing Stille Nacht: it had been much in the air the last few days; but it is a Lutheran hymn and I think this bank of the Rhine was mostly Catholic. Two of the carols they sang have stuck in my memory: O Du Heilige and Es ist ein Ros entsprungen; both were entrancing, and especially the second, which, they told me, was very old. In the end I went to church with them and stayed the night. When all the inhabitants of Bingen were exchanging greetings with each other outside the church in the small hours, a few flakes began falling. Next morning the household embraced each other, shook hands again and wished every one a happy Christmas. The smallest of the daughters gave me a tangerine and a packet of cigarettes wrapped beautifully in tinsel and silver paper. I wished I’d had something to hand her, neatly done up in holly-patterned ribbon — I thought later of my aluminium pencil-case containing a new Venus or Royal Sovereign wound in tissue paper, but too late. The time of gifts.

One of you readers put me onto this book five years ago. I’ve blogged on it before. Here’s something I wrote back when it was fresh to me; I compared it to eating a “complex and rich Black Forest cake.” Here he is very early in the journey, in the southern Netherlands:

It was dark when I was close enough to see that the tower, and the town of Dordrecht which gathered at its foot, lay on the other bank of a wide river. I had missed the bridge; but a ferry set me down on the other shore soon after dark. Under the jackdaws of the belfry, a busy amphibian town expanded; it was built of weathered brick and topped by joined gables and crowsteps and snow-laden tiles and fragmented by canals and re-knit by bridges. A multitude of anchored barges loaded with timber formed a flimsy extension of the quays and rocked from end to end when bow-waves from passing vessels stirred them. After supper in a waterfront far, I fell asleep among the beer mugs and when I woke, I couldn’t think where I was. Who were these bargees in peaked caps and jerseys and sea-boots? They were playing a sort of whist in a haze of cheroot-smoke and the dog-eared cards they smacked down were adorned with goblets and swords and staves; the queens wore spiked crowns and the kings and the knaves were slashed and ostrich-plumed like François I and the Emperor Maximilian. My eyes must have closed again, for in the end someone woke me and led me upstairs like a sleep-walker and showed me into a bedroom with a low and slanting ceiling and an eiderdown like a giant meringue. I was soon under it. I noticed an oleograph of Queen Wilhelmina at the bed’s head and a print of the Synod of Dort at the foot before I blew the candle out.

The clip-clop of clogs on the cobblestones — a puzzling sound until I looked out of the window — woke me in the morning. The kind old landlady of the place accepted payment for my dinner but none for the room: they had seen I was tired and taken me under their wing. This was the first marvellous instance of a kindness and hospitality that was to occur again and again on these travels.

A time of gifts indeed. I hope your Sunday is as comforting as mine has been — though I hope you have not been stricken by cold and flu. Verily, I am the Hunter S. Thompson of over-the-counter cold remedies, so if you need something, holler.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now