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| ISBN-13: | 9781582430355 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 07/30/1999 |
| Pages: | 136 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
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Chapter One
A BASKET OF SUMMER FRUIT
Between the gathering of food and its consumption there is an interval when it is on display. To this arrangement of eggs on the sideboard, as may be, brought in from the henhouse (in Tuscany in the time of Horace, in the South Carolina of my childhood, in Yorkshire, in Normandy), apples and pears from the orchard, a string of fish from the river, a brace of partridges flecked with blood, a basket of squash and beans from the garden, the Dutch gave the name still life around the middle of the seventeenth century. A. P. A. Vorenkamp tells us in his history of Dutch still life that the word comes from the jargon of painters: leven, "alive," for drawings made from a model. A vrouwenleven was a female model, and one who, from time to time, while posing, needed to move; a stillleven--fruit, flowers, or fish--remained still. This was a general term, used by painters and dealers. People who fancied still life for their walls, of whom there were more in Renaissance Netherlands than at any other time in history, used such designations as ontbijt, breakfast or snack; banket, by which the Dutch mean not only our banquet but a copious array of pastries; or the sumptuous pronkstillleven, an ostentatious table such as Chaucer gives the Franklin, who was "Epicurus owene sone":
His breed, his-ale, was alweys after oon;
A bettre envyned man was nowher noon.
Withoute bake mete was nevere his hous,
Of fissh and flessh, and that so plentevous,
It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke,
Of alle deyntees that men koude thynke.
After the sondry sesons of the yeer,
So chaunged he his mete and his soper.
Ful many a fat partrich hadde he in muwe,
And many a breem and many a luce in stewe.
Wo was his cook but if his sauce were
Poynaunt and sharp, and redy al his geere.
His table dormant in his halle alway
Stood redy covered al the longe day.
The pronkstillleven, as we shall see, can be used to voluptuous ends, as by Keats in "The Eve of St. Agnes," or to joyous ones, as with Dickens's Christmas feasts, or comic ones, as with the grand spreads laid out by Thomas Love Peacock's epicurean squires and eccentrics, or to elaborately symbolic ends, as with Joyce in "The Dead" or Edgar Allan Poe--with another kind of pronkstillleven, of philosophical and poetic emblems such as we find in Holbein's Ambassadors and Durer's Melencolia. Epicurean, let us note, has its own history as a kind of table fare. Historically it should mean the simple meal of a philosopher of admirable restraint: an actual meal of Epicurus comes down to us--goat cheese, plain bread, and a pitcher of cold spring water--equaled, perhaps, by Milton's heroic late-night refreshment of a pipe of tobacco and a glass of cold water. But "Epicurean" turned into the sense the Arabic word from which his name derives still has, bikouros (especially used by Moroccans of the Anglican clergy), high living and rich eating.
Still life begins in history at two points, in Egypt and in Israel, establishing two themes that will persist in unbroken tradition until our time.
Primitive peoples feed their dead. In the most ancient of graves we find dishes and cruses. From the earliest times that we know of in Egypt, food was given by pious offspring to their deceased parents: the ka, or soul, could eat. Its hieroglyph is that prehistoric and lasting gesture of praise, uplifted arms. And when, after a long time, there was no more family to feed actual food to an ancestor, there was a picture of a meal painted on the tomb wall, and the ka could survive on that until the coming forth by day of Osiris, when time will stop, and the righteous dwell forever in the eternal July of the redeemed Egypt.
That, it seems to me, is the real root of still life--an utterly primitive and archaic feeling that a picture of food has some sustenance. Something close to this idea must have been behind the neolithic cave paintings, which almost invariably depict animals. All the theories make sense: that these animal images were drawn in the earth's womb to enhance fertility; that the image was identified magically with the animal, and that to slay the image would ensure slaying the animal; or a more engaging theory, that the images were restorations of slain animals, an offering to some god of a replacement of a part of his creation that we, to stay alive, have had to kill and eat.
Whatever the truth of picturing food, the reasoning will have transmuted, culture by culture, over the millennia. Franz Kafka tells us this parable:
Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what
was in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over
again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and becomes a
part of the ceremony.
In the study of still life, we must be prepared for leopards that have become a part of the ceremony. Still life persists for four thousand years, and deserves study for that alone. The portrait arises and falls away, or is forbidden, or loses significance (as in our times). Landscape is intermittent--we rarely find it even in descriptions. Pausanias described Greece without a single view of meadow or wood, riverbank or mountain. All the genres of painting except still life are discontinuous, and only the lyric poem, or song, can claim so ancient a part of our culture among the expressive arts.
The other beginning of still life, as a subject, is in the Book of Amos. A prophet of the eighth century B.C., Amos was a contemporary of Jeroboam the Second (783-741), after whose reign the kingdom of Israel fell into confusion and collapse. Amos, a dresser of sycamore trees and a shepherd, was given a vision by God. At Amos 8:1-2,
Thus hath the lord GOD shewed unto me, and beholde, a basket
of summer fruit. And he said, Amos, what seest thou?
And I sayde: a basket of summer fruit. Then said the LORD
unto me, The ende is come upon my people of Israel; I will
not again pass by them any more.
The King James translators put as their rubric in the margin: "By a basket of summer fruit, it is shewed the propinquitie of Israel's end."
Vanitas vanitatem and memento mori: a still life becomes a symbol of what we shall have taken from us, though at the moment it is a sign of God's goodness and the bounty of nature.
"Hear this," said Amos, "O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail, saying, When will the new Moone be gone, that we may sell corne? and the Sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes ...?"
To the vision of the basket of summer fruit the Lord adds one of Himself upon a wall made by a plumb line, with a plumb line in His hand.
And the LORD said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I
sayd, a plumbline. Then sayd the Lord, Behold, I will set a
plumbline in the midst of my people Israel, I will not again
pass by them any more. And the high places of Isaac shall be
desolate, and the Sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste: and
I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.
Plumb line, anakk; grief, anaqah. Summer fruit, qayits, an ending, qaits. We shall see that the still life likes puns and double meanings, as in Amos's rhetoric.
If greed, rapacity, and selfishness are the opposite of the grace of a basket of summer fruit, Amos gives us one of the most beautiful of hyperboles at the end of his book, where he describes what might be, if two walk together and be agreed, and man and God walk together.
Behold, the daies come, saith the LORD, that the plowman
shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him that
soweth seede, and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and
all the hills shall melt. And I will bring againe the captivitie of
my people of Israel; and they shall build the waste cities and
inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the
wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit
of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall
no more be pulled up out of their land, which I have given
them, saith the LORD thy God.
That is, the basket will again be full of summer fruit. We can see that basket--filled with apples, pears, and figs--in Roman mosaics when the empire was at its most orderly and majestic; we can see it in the great renaissance of still life in the Netherlands after the expulsion of the Spanish and while the Dutch were refining the art of living to a high degree. We can see it in nineteenth-century American painting as a celebration of the land's goodness.
Still life is a minor art, and one with a residue of didacticism that will never bleach out; a homely art. From the artist's point of view, it has always served as a contemplative form useful for working out ideas, color schemes, opinions. It has the same relation to larger, more ambitious paintings as the sonnet to the long poem. Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Hopkins--the sonnet is their study book and their confessional, their meditative form. It is easy to see that still life has been a kind of recreation, a jeu d'esprit, for painters. Manet painting a bunch of asparagus is a man on holiday, like Rossini and Mozart having fun writing comic songs, or Picasso doodling on a tablecloth.
We must not, however, imagine that still life is inconsequential or trivial. Composers work out ideas in string quartets--Beethoven's and Bartok's experimental forms for discovering what can be done with harmonies and tempi--that have become masterpieces. There are artists like Chardin and Braque for whom still life was their major form of expression, as there are poets who have excelled only in the sonnet and the short lyric.
That the kinship of still life with still life down through history is greater than that of landscape with landscape, or portrait with portrait, lies at the center of its mystery. A Roman landscape in mosaic on the wall of a villa, with its archaic placement of trees and figures, its total lack of perspective, is a vision radically different from a medieval landscape with its toy charm and fidgety business (the woodcutter paying no attention to David carrying off Goliath's head; a fisherman in his boat in the river equally indifferent), or a Poussin, or a description by Proust of the meadows around Balbec. But a Roman mosaic of a basket of apples and pears, as in the Vatican's tessellated floor, is wonderfully like baskets of apples and pears of all ages. There is the same nakedness of presentation, the same mute hope of and confidence in the clarity of the subject, a tacitness so deep that we may never get to the bottom of it.
Reiteration is a privilege of still life denied many other modes. Turner's landscapes and interiors begin and end with Turner, not because genius does not repeat but because Turner's time, its spirit and perspectives in history, cannot repeat itself. Turner's wave of time was strong, percussive, and grand, but it was short. Still life belongs in the slow sinews of a great swell that began with the cultivation of wheat and the fermentation of wine, bread and wine being two of its permanent images. It is an art that is symbiotic with civilization. We must suppose that man in his most primitive state ate like a beast, selfishly and when he could.
Claude Levi-Strauss in his tetralogy Les Mythologies argues that in preparing food for communal consumption, by cooking, by symbolic understanding of the ritualness of eating, and by the evolution of table manners, we crossed over from the wild to the tame, from nature to culture. Certainly the placing of food on an altar to do honor to a god, which is one of the instigations of all still life, is an obvious passage from savagery to civilization, which the Bible locates at the beginning of time already differentiated into the hunter's and the farmer's sacrifice.
In Christ's ministry the table figures as a versatile symbol throughout the Gospels, from the wedding feast of the first miracle to the Last Supper, the bread and wine of which became fixed in European still life, along with other Christian symbols, such as the apple and the pear, which would not go away in the most gaudy Dutch still lifes, or in cubist still lifes, where, on the contrary, they asserted themselves with new vigor.
"Still life" first comes into English in Dryden and Graham's translation (1695) of Dufresnoys's De Arte Graphica, or The Art of Painting: "His peculiar happiness is expressing all sorts of Animals, Fruit, Flowers and the Still-Life." By 1701 the meaning seems to have narrowed in English to mean trompe l'oeil, and in 1762 we find Horace Walpole looking down his nose and writing, "He painted still-life, oranges and lemons, plate, damask curtains, cloths of gold, and that medley of familiar objects that strike the ignorant vulgar," from which we gather that the knowing had become bored with the Dutch pronkstillleven. In the third century B.C., by the way, there is a mime of Herondas in which he satirizes pretentious women for admiring the life-likeness of paintings without understanding a great deal of what they were about:
That naked boy there, look, I could pinch him
And leave a welt. His warm flesh is so bright
that it shimmers like sunlight on water.
And his silver fire tongs; wouldn't Myllos
send his eyes out in stalks in wonderment,
or Lamprion's son Pataikiskos try
to steal them! For they are indeed that real!
The ox, the herd, and the girl who's with them,
the hook-nosed man with his hair sticking up,
they are as real as in everyday life.
If I weren't a lady, I might scream
at the sight of that convincing big ox
watching us out of the side of his big eye.
Here is a sixth-century B.C. Greek table, described in an elegy by Xenophanes of Colophon:
The floor is clean, and all our hands, and the cups.
A slave puts garlands of flowers on our heads,
another passes around myrrh in a flat dish, for perfume.
The mixing bowl and a jar of wine as sweet as honey
and smelling of flowers sits in our midst.
The room is scented with frankincense, and the springwater
for the wine is cold, fresh and pure.
Loaves of bread seem golden, and there is honey and cheese.
There is a bouquet of flowers on the altar in the center.
Xenophanes goes on to say that the meal begins with songs, prayers, and a libation. The prayer is that we might be just to all men. Conversation at a meal, he says, should be light and decent, with no long accounts of books you have read.
We have kept that sense of clean hands and tableware, we have kept the flowers in the middle of the table, and we have kept the sense of a meal as a social gathering with conversation. Still life has concomitantly guided the table as a civilizing occasion.
Greek poetry is rich in still lifes, as was their painting, as we know from the anecdote of the bird that tried to eat Apelles' cherries. Here is a poem to dedicate objects placed on an altar:
His green garden's twytined digging fork,
the curved sickle that pruned and weeded,
the comfortable old coat he wore in the rain,
and his raw oxhide waterproof boots,
the stick with which he set the cabbage sprouts
in long straight rows in rich black loam,
the hoe that chopped the runnels that kept
the garden green all the dry summer long,
for you, Gardener Priapos, the gardener Potamon,
whom you favored, places on your altar.
Another:
To Priapos, god of gardens and friend to travelers,
Damon the farmer laid on this altar,
with a prayer that his trees and body be hale
of limb for yet awhile, a pomegranate glossy bright,
a skippet of figs dried in the sun,
a cluster of grapes, half red, half green,
a mellow quince, a walnut splitting from its husk,
a cucumber wrapped in flowers and leaves,
and a jar of olives golden ripe.
Claude Monet's The Luncheon of 1868 (in the Stadelsche Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main) shows a sunny room in Argenteuil, of which we can see some ten feet of floor space, a wall with window in foreshortened perspective on the left, a far wall with linen closet (and a maid getting something from it) and a table on which there are two books with the look of novels, an oil lamp, and a top hat. A round dinner table fills the center of the painting, and two people are seated on its far side: Monet's first wife Camille and his infant son Jean in bib and tucker, wielding a spoon as if he means to ring chimes on his plate. His doll lies discarded under a chair on the lower left of the canvas, and his round hat hangs on the corner of the chair back. On the table, reading from left to right, we see a baguette of bread, a large bowl of green salad, cruets of oil and vinegar, a plate of white grapes, a bowl of jelly, a platter of crudites, a bottle of red wine, and a carafe of water. On Camille's plate is an egg in an egg cup, and there is a second egg on her plate. Monet's plate is charged the same, except for a heel of the loaf added, and a folded copy of Le Figaro. He has not arrived, and his cane- bottomed chair is pulled back.
Let us study the design. If we make two axes, at right angles, one from us to the back wall, and one across the table, we find that we have connected egg with egg, the heel of bread with a glass of wine. Other lines passing through the same point connect son's hat with top hat, newspaper with novels, oil cruet with oil lamp, loaf of bread with bottle of wine, and so on, until we see that the still life on the table is arranged so that the radii of a superimposed circle connect objects that are kin to each other in the traditional manner of still-life composition. We detect a system of derivatives. The wine derives from the grapes, son from mother. A sewing basket on the extra chair is a source for little Jean's clothes. We are even shown more tablecloths in the linen closet. Before we make so obvious an observation as that the food so beautifully displayed is the nourishment of their life, let us notice that Monet is always sharply aware of sources and derivations: that is his great underlying theme. The floormat is straw; the chairs are bamboo with plaited cane seats, the sewing basket is wicker; the bread is from that accomplished grass, wheat, to which the Mediterranean people all attributed man's transition from hunter to farmer, and thence to cities and civilization. The painting at its most abstract thus changes from being a charming tonal study of domestic life to one in which the artist has traced lines to this focus. The Parisian newspaper and novels announce lines of transport to this country farmhouse; the top hat and rubber ball, Madame's locket and the silverware indicate craftsmen and shops that supply this household.
Once Monet had reached maturity, he displayed a fascination with roads and paths, like Pissarro and Cezanne, and indeed all the great Impressionists. Highways, whether rail or carriage or footpath, are the one subject that the Impressionists were never very far from. Was it because roads for the first time in European history all became safe and used by everybody? Was it a new awareness of mobility? Monet's Gare St-Lazare takes on a new light when we notice all these roads, even if we know that it is the station where one takes the train from Paris to Giverny. And in his full maturity, and on into old age, Monet devoted himself to two subjects--his lily pond, a diversion of the river Epte across the road from his house at Giverny, and the haystacks in the field adjacent. Add to this the Epte itself, with its lines of poplars, and you have all of late Monet in an acre of French countryside, so dull and ordinary that no photographer would waste a frame of film on it, and so bland that today one passes it in an automobile with no awareness that here is the original of some of the most beautiful landscapes in all of art.
Europe, Braudel tells us, was all marshlands and forest when men began to clear it for agriculture. Hundreds of years went into draining marshes to make land on which wheat would grow. Two of Monet's most persistent subjects thus leap into relief--the lily pond, which is a marsh, and the haystacks. And the river Epte is a drainage system into the Seine and on into the sea. All of Monet's painting thus becomes a study of the interaction of man and the earth, and of all the processes of light and water. His other concerns are complementary: the beauty of women and children, the beauty of flowers, and the mutations of weather. Only Thoreau was as assiduous an inspector of snowstorms and meadows.
The very first daguerreotype is a still life. For it, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre assembled, in 1837, an assortment of plaster casts and other objects on a tabletop. Daguerre had begun experiments in photography with its inventor, Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, who, in 1826, eleven years before, had made a photograph of a courtyard that needed all of a day's sunlight for its exposure. Its dreary starkness and illogical shadows are not so much a picture of space as one of time--shadows and naked light on walls that would return in the still lifes of Giorgio De Chirico and the plays of Samuel Beckett.
Daguerre was a painter, stage designer, and operator of the Diorama, a grandiose display of large paintings under dramatic lighting that attempted to fuse illusion and perception--in a way that would lead to our moving pictures on large screens.
In this first photographic still life we have, from left to right (forgetting the lateral reversal of daguerreotype), an empty bowl, a plaster bas-relief of Da Vinci's head of a warrior copied from the silverpoint in the British Museum, a wicker flask hanging by a string from the wall, a framed print of two clothed figures embracing in greeting or farewell, a plaster ram's head, two plaster winged heads of angels, a shallow round box, and a paper knife. Beside the table and leaning against it is a plaster bouquet of flowers and leaves.
The textures are rich, the play of light and shadow Rembrandtesque. An analysis of its iconography will show that all the objects are traditional props, as if photography had nothing new to bring to the art of still life. To see where still life was flourishing at this time, we must turn to prose description in narrative.
In July 1845, Hugh Miller, the forty-three-year-old Scottish geologist and editor of the Free Kirk newspaper The Witness, took his annual holiday, as always a geological expedition, on the yacht Betsey, which was a floating outlaw church. Its captain, the Rev. Mr. Swanson, and his first mate John Stewart, together with Stewart's companion, "a powerful-looking, handsome young man, with broad bare breast," were the full complement of the crew. With the immemorial stalwartness of Scottish pluck, whether in dodging the British customs patrol or preaching the Gospel, the Betsey sailed from congregation to congregation in the Hebrides to offer sermons in English or Gaelic, or if necessary in both.
Miller, one of the most popular Victorian writers, was also one of the finest prose stylists in English. His Old Red Sandstone inspired Long-fellow's "Hymn of Life," and a phrase from his Testimony of the Rocks--"a day of dappled seaborne clouds"--drifts through the mind of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man just before his encounter with a girl wading in the shallows. The phrase encodes a fall of Icarus, or Lucifer, if we know Miller's text, where he is thinking of Milton's fall of Mulciber
thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star.
Early in his account of this voyage of the Betsey, Hugh Miller describes the cabin:
A well-thumbed chart of the Western Islands lay across an
equally well-thumbed volume of Henry's "Commentary."
There was a Polyglot and a spy-glass in one corner, and a
copy of Calvin's "Institutes" with the latest edition of "The
Coaster's Sailing Directions" in another; while in an adjoining
stateroom, nearly large enough to accommodate an armchair,
if the chair could have but contrived to get into it, I
caught a glimpse of my friend's printing press and his case of
types, canopied overhead by the blue ancient of the vessel,
bearing, in stately six-inch letters of white bunting, the legend
"FREE CHURCH YACHT." A door opened, which communicated
with the forecastle, and John Stewart, stooping very much, to
accommodate himself to the low-roofed passage, thrust in a
plate of fresh herrings, splendidly toasted, to give substantiality
and relish to our tea. The little rude forecastle, a considerably
smaller apartment than the cabin, was all aglow with the
bright fire in the coppers, itself invisible; we could see the
chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, and
John Stewart's companion ... in his shirt sleeves, squatted
full in from of the blaze, like the household goblin described
by Milton, or the "Christmas Present" of Dickens.
To this rich still life there is later added "a fragment of rock ... charged with Liassic fossils," brought to the yacht by a Mr. Elder with a note saying that "the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trap immediately above the village mill; and further, to call my attention to a house near the middle of the village [of Tobermory], built of a mouldering red sandstone, which had been found in situ in digging the foundations" [Miller 1858: 26-27].
We think of Joseph Wright of Derby because of the gleam of firelight on copper, and because the charm of Miller's description avoids any effect of prettiness. As in a Holbein, books, maps, and scientific instruments are integral to the subject. Henry's biblical commentary and Calvin's Institutes are clearly meant by Miller to be symbolic in their arrangement with sea charts and a spyglass: we detect the hand of Bunyan. Durer might have placed these symbols just so if he had wished to link emblems of the soul's pilgrimage to God with those of wayfarers preaching the Gospel among rocky islands in a treacherous sea.
The plate of fish completes this picture of Christian endeavor, though completion is not Miller's end: he chimes and echoes. To the real fish he adds a fossil, stating the theme and problem of all his books, his times, and the theme of his life, for the fossil is 190 million years old and requires us to read the Bible in an understanding other than literal.
Milton's household goblin, in "L'Allegro":
To earn his Cream-bowl, duly set,
When in one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy Flail hath thresh'd the Corn
That ten day-labourers could not end;
Then lies him down the Lubber Fiend,
And, stretch'd out all the Chimney's length,
Basks at the fire his hairy strength;
And Crop-full out of doors he flings
Ere the first Cock his Matin rings. [106-114]
Miller's mate's friend on the Betsey by the fire in the coppers is also aligned with the Spirit of Christmas Present at Bob Cratchit's, with its humble cheer and frugal repast. Did the chain cable hanging from the hatchway to the floor recall Marley's ghost hung with chains, and thus add an allusion to Dickens? To play Dupin further: Miller exercised considerable ingenuity in harmonizing Genesis and geology, and the anguish it caused him led to his suicide in 1856, after he endured pitiful illusions of being followed and found himself confusing the sequence of mundane events so that he could not remember from one minute to the next what he had done or where he had been.
Miller's vision of geology followed that of Agassiz and others: creation had happened over and over for millions of years, each creation destroyed in time by a worldwide catastrophe that Miller saw in the fossil record. The strange Silurian creatures of the Old Red Sandstone had all died in fear, fleeing the obliteration of the Calvinist god who had made such monsters, a world of tropical forests of ferns, and a perpetual fog of steam, and then negated all this blind fertility with total devastation, only to begin again with new monsters, all but brainless reptiles slithering through swamps of slime, until in this, the creation we inhabit, the rational creature man was made in the image of his maker.
On the same page as Miller's still life of the Betsey's congenial cabin, he tells of the surviving pieces of the Spanish ship Florida, part of the Great Armada that was wrecked by one of God's catastrophes, and with the same dip of ink he remarks on the melancholy look of Tobermory, a town that did not grow but was built all at once, "as Frankenstein made his man."
The fossil from the lower Jurassic, driftwood washed up from the Invincible Armada, a suffering Ghost from Dickens: Miller's still life begins to display a transparency through which we can see a Calvinist suspicion of well-being as the mask of disaster to come, if not now, surely in all too short a while--and we may not be prepared. Let us imagine that Matthew Henry's great commentary (which George Whitefield read through four times, on his knees, in the six folio volumes of 1710, the inspiration of Cowper's hymns, part of the furniture of every Protestant parsonage for 280 years, and still in print) is open to the book of Amos, at chapter eight, verses 1-2, with which this chapter began. "The approach of ... [Israel's] threatened ruin," Henry wrote, is represented by the basket of summer fruit that Amos saw in vision.
He saw a basket of summer fruit gathered and ready to be
eaten, which signified 1. That they were ripe for destruction,
that they lay ready to be eaten up, 2. That the year of God's
patience was drawing toward a conclusion; it was autumn
with them. 3. Those we call summer fruits will not keep till
winter, must be used immediately, and [are] the emblem of
this people, that had nothing consistent in them.... It signifies
that the end has come upon my people Israel. What was
said in Chapter eight is here repeated as God's determined
resolution, "I will not again pass by them anymore."
Translate that into Gaelic, make a sermon of it for a people, some of whom have never seen a tree, who live out of the ocean and from oats persuaded to grow out of rock, and add to it Miller's study of these rocks and their record of creation after creation, each matured in eons and then destroyed, and the charming array of fish and Calvin's Institutes and the polyglot Bible and the instruments of navigation in the Betsey's forecastle figure in the long tradition of still life as the peculiarly equivocal symbolism of tragedy implicit in all beauty.
Table of Contents
| A Remark Beforehand | ix |
| I A Basket of Summer Fruit | 1 |
| II The Head as Fate | 25 |
| III Apple and Pear | 53 |
| IV Metaphysical Light in Turin | 79 |
| Notes | 111 |
| Bibliography | 113 |