Melancholy has settled in at the Russo manse. Journalism won the Preakness, but Pimlico is now closed indefinitely for renovations—that is to say, destruction and new building on the site—and vaguely described efforts to spruce up the track’s down-at-the-heels neighborhood. Disinterested observers expect this to go about as well as any other urban renewal project in Baltimore. Wednesday saw preschool graduation, which yanked a crystalline bead or two from your humble correspondent’s gleaming orbs. It all goes so fast.
And Alasdair MacIntyre died Thursday. For most Catholics of my age and inclination, After Virtue is less a singular influence and more the water we swim in. I met MacIntyre once, at a conference almost fifteen years ago. I found his accent almost impenetrable and so derived little profit from his talk; the unforgettable moment for me came during the question and answer session. Some literal longhair stood up and said that he and his friend thought they had come up with a Scotist solution to the problem outlined in MacIntyre’s address. The man himself leaned very close to the microphone and said, shortly, “I very much doubt it,” and the auditorium burst into laughter at the smoking crater where the hirsute Scotist had once stood.
A friend showed me to the stage door where MacIntyre was making his exit, and I greeted him as he came out. Before I could speak another word, he said he was very sorry, but he had to go home, it was very late and his wife was waiting. Then he hustled off. So much for my brush with the academic firmament; rest in peace.
When your children are young and your heroes are old, time moves very quickly. The world changes every day. When your humble correspondent was himself younger than he is, in his school days, he had a somewhat sappy affinity for the gloomy archaic poet Mimnermus. As the massy heaps of white and silver cloud move across the sky over the fresh green of dogwoods and locust-trees, one of his surviving elegies comes unbidden to mind:
ἡμεῖς δ’, οἷά τε φύλλα φύει πολυάνθεμος ὥρη
ἔαρος, ὅτ’ αἶψ’ αὐγῆις αὔξεται ἠελίου,
τοῖς ἴκελοι πήχυιον ἐπὶ χρόνον ἄνθεσιν ἥβης
τερπόμεθα, πρὸς θεῶν εἰδότες οὔτε κακὸν
οὔτ’ ἀγαθόν· Κῆρες δὲ παρεστήκασι μέλαιναι,
ἡ μὲν ἔχουσα τέλος γήραος ἀργαλέου,
ἡ δ’ ἑτέρη θανάτοιο· μίνυνθα δὲ γίνεται ἥβης
καρπός, ὅσον τ’ ἐπὶ γῆν κίδναται ἠέλιος.
Looking to the gods for neither good nor bad, we rejoice in the time of our youth, like unto flowers when the many-blossomed hour of dawn brings forth their petals, and they grow by the rays of the sun. Yet dark fates stand before us, the one holding the extremity of grievous old age, and the other of death; the fruit of youth, which the sun spreads on the earth, comes into being but for a short time.
The world may change, but people don’t. The man is much the same as the boy. We’re all dying slowly, and in quiet times we feel it.
To be a journalist is to deal in ephemera. The writers of books leave behind three or four monuments like those of the ancient giants whose vast works dot the fields and little valleys of the world. Scribblers are more like snails: They leave a thin, silvery trail showing the progress of their lives from one side of the common pavement to the other. It gleams for an hour or a day, and is washed away by the rain. Nothing survives—except, if Plato is right about the immortality of the soul (and I’m just about convinced he is), the snail and perhaps his memories of where he has been and what has passed.
And what memories! Those little moments—a sunny day at a nearly empty track with your three-year-old daughter, with a breeze at your back and the distant drumroll of hooves making the final turn; smoking on the patio, listening to Beethoven’s Seventh, and watching the spring rain; black walnut’s perfume and its darkening stain under your fingernails; the wary look of a tired academic grandee trying to get home to bed—those are the moments that stick in your mind.
One of the finest racing correspondents ever born, Joe Palmer, wrote, “I am no noted lover of the horse, but of a way of life of which the horse was once, and in few favored places still is, a symbol—a way of charm and ease and grace and leisure. Grace and charm should perhaps not be tampered with at this late date but, at whatever risk of boasting, I am as good at ease and leisure as any man alive.” His collected works are no longer in print; the trail has been all but washed away. We may hope the snail somewhere remains, and remembers.
Incola ego sum in terra; non abscondas a me mandata tua: “I am a stranger on earth; O hide not thy commandments from me.” Or, as a more recent psalmist had it,
Ain’t nothing but a stranger in this world;
I’m nothing but a stranger in this world;
I got a home on high
In another land—
So far away.
In the meantime, there’s weeding to be done, and the children need lunch. These memories can’t wait.
