June 21, 2007

• Lavransdatter and Learning

  Buried in the end notes of Thomas Cahill’s Mysteries of the Middle Ages:

  There is no single work that gives one a more intense and extensive understanding of the Middle Ages than Sigrid Undset’s astonishing three-volume novel Kristin Lavransdatter, set in Norway in the first half of the fourteenth century and covering the life of one woman from birth to death.  It has recently been republished (1997-2000) by Penguin in a much improved translation by Tiina Nunnally.  If an interested reader were to undertake but one more study of things medieval, Undset is your woman.  Her other medieval novels, The Master of Hestviken, a tetralogy and Gunnar’s Daughter, are almost as masterful.

  

  

  This is the kind of thing which delights me on several levels.  When anyone enthuses about a book I love, I am ready to curl up into a ball and start purring.  When other books are mentioned in the same breath, I mark them on my ever expanding list of books to read.  But it is a particularly sharp jab of joy to learn something and soon after see a reference to it and recognize it. “Hey! We’ve just met!”  I’ve written about this synthesis here and here.

  The process of learning can be compared to Velcro strips.  The loops of new information need little hooks to connect with.  This is a great reason to read a broad scope of material.  Every thing you learn is a new growth of little Velcro hooks that will snag some idea floating around.  In the absence of hooks, of connections, whatever you are learning won’t stick to you. 

  I had the most hilarious Velcro moment while reading this sentence in Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages, originally written in Dutch in 1919.  

  “Beneath the medieval-satirical dress here is fully formed the mood of a Watteau and of the Pierrot cult, only without moonlight.” 

  A month ago I would have read that sentence, shook my head and shrugged in ignorance.  Pierrot cult, without moonlight?  However, I’ve been listening to Professor Robert Greenberg’s How to Listen To and Understand Great Music, where he explained and played several portions of Arnold Schönberg’s 1912 composition Pierrot Lunaire [Moonstruck Pierrot].  Pierrot, a clown figure from French Pantomime, shows up in the music, poetry and art of the early twentieth century.  Europeans understand the connotations of Pierrot in the same way that we know what Uncle Sam or John Doe means.  Who knew there’d be a connection between such disparate studies?

    
  Pablo Picasso’s Pierrot

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