More Millicent

Hi. We’re in one of the reading rooms in the Millicent Library in Fairhaven Massachusetts here. When I see the facility with which artists used to be able to depict cloth hanging over the human frame, I sometimes think that we’re going backwards, instead of forwards, in the art world. They call that a “drapery study,” and this is a really fine one. Modern art looks like cave paintings compared to this, at least to me.

I’d love to tell you who the painting is about, and who painted it, but I can’t. The public computer is directly below it, and a young fellow, dressed like Alan Iverson, was sitting there and downloading pornography or bomb recipes or stock quotes or al qaeda instructions or My Little Pony trivia questions or something, and didn’t like me looking over his shoulder.

And so I left him, and the lovely lady seated over him, to their mysterious pursuits.

Let’s Cross The Street

If you think H.H. Rogers ran out of money after one magnificent building or two, you’re sadly mistaken. When you’re a Standard Oil board member, during a period when the income tax rate was zero, you can lay your hands on money the way Gomez Addams used to in the old black and white TV show: The Addams Family. You just wander around your big mansion and open up any drawer and pull out wads of cash. I don’t know if H.H. Rogers pulled lit cigars out of his pockets too, or went wild when his wife spoke French, but he apparently loved his daughter the same way Gomez loved little Wednesday.

Old Hell Hound Rogers had a lot of money, but I bet he would have traded every bit of it to get his daughter Millicent back when she died, only seventeen years old, of a heart ailment. Right across the street from that magnificent dustcatcher of a Unitarian Church we’ve been talking about this week, he also built the most sublime little confection of a building, and named it after his lost little girl, because she said once that she loved libraries.

I am always touched when someone tries to deal with the loss of a loved one by commemorating them in the most beautiful manner possible; there seems to be a trend recently towards simply using loss and tragedy as a sort of club to leverage a kind of pity and influence out of your fellow man. Millicent’s family laid the cornerstone for the Millicent Library in a private ceremony, alone with their tragedy, and so left only the pleasantest public memory of the source of their woe for the world to keep. One wonders about the ability of any monument to soften such a blow to the interested parties.

That’s Dante glaring at you from the front wall of the building. Forgive him, he’s been through hell. The library is a little bit of heaven though, so all in all, he comes out ahead.

Here’s another picture of the outside:

Fairhaven is still a sleepy little place, and the library has suffered from the best kind of neglect- no one’s got the urge to staple a huge hideous addition on it, they’ve simply kept the original in good repair. I’m sure aluminum siding and gold shag carpeting or something equally fooolish was considered for it somewhere along the line, but H.H. Rogers is a long time in the cold, cold, ground, and there’s no money in the town budget to wreck it, and so it stays the way it was built, more or less.

We love going there. There’s all kinds of interesting things in there besides the books, and when all else fails, you can just walk around and gawk at the place itself.

We remember his daughter kindly, for he surely did.

Gettin’ Medieval On Your… Unitarianism

Oh geez he’s maundering on about a church he doesn’t attend again.

Why, yes. Yes I am. And I might write a bit, and wax poetic, all the while trying to distract you from the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room with us all –I don’t have a decent overall picture of this church.

“I got distracted, ” My older son says. He’s in the sixth grade, and if you send him to do something -anything- it’s best if there are no butterflies or open books or glowing screens of any kind along his route, if you expect to see him anytime soon. His old man’ s no different. I got distracted by the trees and forgot the forest.

I’d send you to the website for the church, but their pictures are worse still. They portray, but do not capture, if you get my meaning. What the hell, here it is: Fairhaven Memorial Unitarian Church.

Unitarians are not doctrinaire folks. I read one of their sermons. It was about exchanging fruitcakes at the holidays. The minister is British apparently, and she is surprised we don’t like to eat them. She does like to eat them. She notices that some people give fruitcakes they were given as gifts to others as gifts . She says she does not because she likes to eat them. She says perhaps others re-gift them because they do not like to eat them. But she does. It’s a sort of Seinfeld routine, without any jokes.

Then they’re supposed to write something bad on a scrap of paper. Someone collects the scraps of paper, and they burn them. The mysteries of Unitariarism to me are profound.

The appearance of their rituals and the appearance of the building in which they celebrate them are at odds, visually. There seems to be a yearning for fellowship and not much else in the congregation, and the church looks like you might wanna burn a few heretics at the stake or flog the odd hunchback in front of it.

Gothic Revival was all based on the work, more or less, of two very influential men: Pugin, and Ruskin. Pugin is the driving architectural force behind Westminster in London, the prototypical example of gothic architecture. Ruskin identified the genesis of all gothic revival architecture as the Doges Palace in Venice. Anybody that knows what the Bridge of Sighs in Venice was for knows that this apogee of ecclesiasticalism melded to the city state wasn’t talking to people about fruitcakes when questioning them in the Doges Palace. And the romantic notion of visually reviving this primitive piety through modern riffs on architecture gave us the look of it, without the reality.

It’s OK by me there’s no Savanorola preaching inside this church, or being burned outside it either. But it occurs to me that something should be going on in there. There sure are a lot of marvelous things going on outside.

I Don’t Like Politics

I avoid them assiduously here. Hell, I have no idea what this blog is about, what with the furniture, and the boats, and the children, and the music, and the wandering around hereabouts with a camera. But it ain’t about politics. Politics is poison when it enters the home. It’s a civic duty. It belongs in public life. It’s fouling your own nest to drag it into your house.

I was at a small fete last week. The weather was perfect, the company was pleasant, the assorted children frolicked together all afternoon in the gentle sun and the cool shade without ever a tear being shed. The food was good, and simple, and made right before us and served by the same hand that prepared it. We adults chatted of many things and we coalesced in numerous cliques of various sizes and compositions to do that chatting. Since we are not all in each other’s company often, there is a lot to talk about, and much that seems fresh to report as well as to hear.

No one got the urge, not even once, to talk politics.

Why would we? Nothing is settled by political prattle. Points scored in debate are always subtracted from the bonhomie column kept elsewhere. Politics to normal people is treated like what it is: an intrusion into our lives, something that keeps us from what is more important, and what is amusing. Politics is a lawn to be mowed, not a game to be played on it. And the people that involve themselves in it, generally, are either dry as dust, or nasty, or sometimes loony.

I’ll bet you every adult at that party votes in every election. I know they are intelligent and thoughtful people. I bet, if pushed, they could give you a sober rundown, factually coherent throughout, of the condition of the local, state, and national polity. And I doubt very much that all the levers pulled in those booths are the same ones for every participant. But I also bet you there’s one aspect of the proceedings where we all share the exact same outlook, and simply gauge the likely effectiveness of one political party or candidate over another: we’re all looking for the politics that will intrude into these personal scenes the least, or who will allow the smallest intrusions by others — whether simply to annoy us, or to kill us.

I am deeply suspicious, and perhaps you should be too, of anyone that wishes politics to have enough prominence to be mentioned at a garden party. We do not, after all, throw these parties at the Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Got Buttress?

If you turn slightly to the right after taking the picture I posted yesterday, this is what you see. That, ladies and gents, is a real live flying buttress. The building is the Unitarian Memorial Church in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Fairhaven has a population of about 15,000 persons. But we’ve got Chartres quality buttresses. I wonder if many people appreciate that.

I doubt it. The church is little used, from what I can gather. There never seems to be any activity there when we’re around, and the only persons we ever saw exit that magnificent pile of stone came out of there the day we took this picture, and they were young men wearing flip-flops. The person that paid to have this elaborate and substantial building built, probably saw it as a manifestation of a substantial strain of thought and piety.

In the long run, he was wrong.

I’m grateful for the flying buttresses, just the same.