TNY weekend reader: strange but true
(image: carolita johnson)
I’ll never forget the first time I read Descartes’ “Discours de la Méthode.†He claimed to have had an epiphany after climbing into an oven (and not the “Hey, I’m in an oven!” kind of epiphany). Having grown up in Queens, where the only oven I’d ever seen was about two square feet big, I took him for a liar. An oven? Was he, as an Italian woman once said to a friend of mine, “pushing my leg?” I was obliged to suspend my disbelief to continue reading and prepare my homework. (It turned out ovens used to be quite roomy in Descartes’ day!) Anthony Gottlieb, in “Think again,” clears away any cobwebs that may have accumulated since the first time you read (or read about) Descartes, and goes even further to explain how you arrived at the popular misconceptions his Discours is prey to: Descartes did not do for the individual what Galileo did for the sun. Not on purpose, anyway.
Also unforgettable is Bill Buford’s “Talking Turkey,” wherein you will fall in love with the man who learned to talk with the animals (not just turkeys, but field mice too, to the chagrin of his turkeys), but your heart will be broken by the fate of Turkey Boy, which remains unspoken at the end and which I take to mean that he tasted very good with cranberry sauce and yams. It’s not online, but Matt Dellinger interviews Bill in “Calls of the Wild,” on the Hard Drive.
Anyone who was ever enamored of the fact that the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” and Homer’s “Iliad” were once purely oral tradition will quickly become engrossed in William Dalrymple’s “Homer in India,” and wish they had half the memory capacity of the illiterate farmers capable of reciting for eight hours a day for a month till the epic encased in their memory is finally unrolled completely. And then rolled back up again, perhaps never more to be recited, since the tradition is dying along with the humans that live them. Not online.
November 18th, 2006 at 8:04 am
Some ovens were very large. An example is seen in Gillray’s engraving showing Napoleon baking up a new batch of monarchs. One of my great grandfathers was born in Romania during the Russo-turkish wars. He never knew which side, but one side felt the village had aided the other side and attempted destroy it and kill the inhabitants. There were huge brick and clay common ovens outdoor. Evidently his mother had time to hide him in one of the ovens before she was killed. When the villagers who had escaped returned they found him. He said his mother could have hid in the oven with him, and he always wondered why she hadn’t.
November 18th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Yes, now that I’ve grown up and travelled a bit and seen a thing or two, I understand how big an oven could be in those times!
I’m guessing your great-grandfather’s mother had the instinct to stash away her son and then use herself as a decoy to direct attention away from where he was hidden. That’s what I would have done if I felt the villagers were determined enough to look everywhere, as it would have given a slightly higher chance of survival to the hidden son. Maybe that thought would have made her son understand that her action was not just courageous and unselfish, but also very rational and calculated.
November 18th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
On the subject of ovens and death, when I was a boy a common method of suicide was to put your head in the oven. At the time, I had no understanding of the poisonous nature of cooking gas (as it was then – not anymore), so I assumed that the suiciders lit the oven and achieved death by burning their head off. It seemed like a rather slow and painful way to go.
Did I just say “achieved death”? I must be drunk. Time for bed…