Dr. Metablog

"Enough is as Good as a Feast" or Possibly Better

"Enough is as good as a feast" has become my very favorite proverb.

 

It's  a warning against crass consumerism, against materialism, against the excesses of capitalist acquisitiveness. Cold water in a jelly glass, it asserts, is as good as your $500 wine in crystal. As they used to gloss the proverb, no "avaricious scraping together that knows no bounds."  

 

But for a fully "mature" guy like me, the proverb carries not only a figurative but a plain literal instruction, i.e., "do yourself a favor, eat less." Enough is as good as a feast if a feast makes your stomach swell, makes you heavy-lidded and gassy and passive, and if you feel a heck of a lot better when you haul yourself away from the Table of Plenty long before you reach satiety.

 

I can remember, as a voracious adolescent, eating three large, overstuffed hamburgers at a single sitting -- the roll overflowing with tomatoes, onions, relish, ketchup, etc. Along with a bottomless bowl of fries. And craving more. Then as a vigorous young man, a good portion was two hamburgers. Nowadays, I go halves with a friend. Hold the fries.

 

When my grandmother dished up those glorious blintzes of my youth, eight was my number. Now my number is -- one. And I feel the better for it.

 

Digestion is slower and, I suppose, less efficient. And then there's the embarrassing fact that hamburgers and blintzes and everything else settles right in the enlarged belly, the "front porch."

 

So here's a proverb for this latter age: "enough is better than a feast." Much. 

 

By the way, I first encountered the proverb, believe it or not, as the title to William Wager's 1581 morality. And then in Latin in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, where, Sir Nathaniel and the pedant Holofernes come on stage having just completed, apparently, a more than substantial dinner. "Holofernes:  'Satis quod sufficit.'" Perhaps Holofernes paraphrases and simplifies Horace:   

 

Multa petentibus
Desunt multa.
Bene est, cui deus obtulit
Parca, quod satis est manu.

 

(Those who seek for much are left in want of much. Happy is he to whom God has given, with sparing hand, as much as is enough.) 

Greek and Latin Basketballese

Now that we've at last come to the NBA playoffs and are heading toward another Warriors-Cavaliers showdown, it's fitting that we reflect on basketball jargon, which is distinguished by its many colorful monosyllables: hoops, hops, bigs, stuff, slam, jam, slash, dish, board, glass, dunk, pick, screen, paint, lane, point, wing, trey, rim, post, trap, "D", roll, box, press, tip, swish, bank, brick, feed, stroke, hole, "J", rock, range.

But down-home slang is not basketball's only linguistic register. 

Curiously, roundball jargon exhibits a contrary tendency toward polysyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin. Some teams, for example, are said to be "physical." "Physical" (from Gr. physicos = nature) means, in basketballese, simply "rough" and does not imply that the other team plays either an ethereal or spiritual game. It used to be that a guard played on the "outside" and a center on the "inside"; nowadays they've become "perimeter" (Gr.) and "interior" (L.) players. A fast break has become "transition offense." A player doesn't drive to the basket; he "penetrates." Players no longer jump; they "elevate"; they don't block an opponent's shot, they "reject" it. In an odd linguistic development, a point guard no longer passes the ball; he "distributes" (Latin: distribuere, to allot) it. In its ordinary signification, to "distribute" a basketball would be to cut it into pieces like a loaf of bread and give each teammate a slice, but not so in the language of basketball. Only a few years ago, it was still possible to "switch" from guarding one man in order to guard another; now players "rotate." "Rotate," derived from "rota," the Latin word for wheel, properly means "to turn on an axis, to spin." A defender who did not switch but rotated would pirouette, and pirouetting would not be an effective defensive strategy. (A better classical upgrade for switch would be "revolve.") Even sillier than rotate: "rotate over" or "rotate around"-- a usage that evokes the grotesquerie of a big guy in a tutu pirouetting across the baseline -- a vision that is all the more picturesque now that traditional basketball shorts have been replaced by big ol' floppy bloomers. Just last night I heard a TV announcer declare that a seven-foot tall player had "a lot of verticality." (I suppose that if he fell to the floor he would have lots of "horizontality"). Players don't score; they "convert," as in, "they had a transition opportunity  but failed to convert." They don't push an opponent out of the way;  no, no, no, -- they create space (Latin: creant spatium). Although I am not a physicist, I suspect that space is something like matter, and can therefore neither be created nor destroyed. At least not created by power forwards, however potent they may be. How silly of me to object; neither the laws of physics nor the usual constraints of language are binding on punditor basketballensis. OK, game's on; let's see how well they play -- oops, sorry, how well they execute.   

"The Lost Chord"

Insomnia once again -- a nightly affliction, a family trait. Perhaps we lack a gene that lets others sleep from dusk to dawn. Have I noted here that I want my tombstone inscribed with the motto, just beneath my name and dates, "No More Insomnia, Forever."

During the wakeful nights, I've taken to listening to old-time radio. My favorite: WHRO out of Norfolk, Virginia. Last night, I heard some tenor from the 1920s (perhaps John McCormack) in a scratchy recording (tuba for bass) wail or warble "The Lost Chord"-- quite the 3 am treat it was. A flood of memories arose, because "The Lost Chord" was one of the songs that we learned during the PS 217 assembly back there in Flatbush in the 1950s. I recalled with some amusement that our determined "music specialist," Miss Georgia Keiselbach, a big lumbering woman with a trained contralto voice, tried gamely to inculcate an anguished mid-Victorian quasi religious parlor song into the minds of a roomful of fidgety 10-year-olds. Quite an experience. I was entranced by Sir Arthur Sullivan's melody, but I have to admit that the lyric was incomprehensible to me then and is still quite a challenge to this day.

So I investigated. Onto the internet, which, fortunately, works very well at 4 am.

The words to "The Lost Chord" are by Adelaide Anne Procter, after Tennyson apparently the most popular poet of her day, although I must confess that I had never heard of her even though I'm supposed to know something about nineteenth-century English literature.  

Here's Ms. Procter's fervid poem: 

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music 
Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight,
Like the close of an angel's psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexed meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

It may be that death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in Heav'n
I shall hear that grand Amen.

I'll paraphrase (even though I know that paraphrase is not a nice thing to do to a poem): in a reverie at the organ the poet experiences something grand that is aesthetic, transcendent, ineffable, and fleeting. The "lost chord divine" -- note the Miltonic deployment of adjectives -- stands for the hope or wish or belief that there is such a place as heaven and that it's a place where weariness, fever, pain, sorrow, perplexity, strife, and discord are superseded by the "infinite calm" and "perfect peace" of the "grand Amen."  A not unusual or extraordinary nineteenth-century sentiment where the hunt for the disappearing god was frequently mediated by art -- in this particular case by the art of music. 

As long as I'm reducing the poem to its paraphraseable meaning, I might also add that Procter, like many poets before and after her, has conflated religious and sexual longing. I derive this meaning, inaccessible to the roomful of quavering sopranos of which I was one, and very likely unsuspected by Miss Keiselbach herself, from the vocabulary of passion in which the poem is couched: "crimson," "touch," "lay" "love," "trembled."  And from the sentence, "It came from the soul of the organ,/  And entered into mine," where it might be argued, slightly frivolously, that any line of poetry that contains "came" "organ" and "entered" has got to be about a symbolic sexual encounter. Especially when the ambiguous word "mine" can denote either "my soul" or "my organ." So in this extravagant reading, in which it is once again clearly demonstrated that you can take the boy out of Brooklyn but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy, "The Lost Chord" is not only about the search for "perfect peace" but also for the perfect orgasm which will provide infinite calm to the poetess when she "dies" -- a word which is itself a Victorian euphemism for sexual climax. The lost chord is the big O (and I don't mean Oscar R.)

Just for fun of it let me also adduce a couple of sentences from the wikipedia article on Adelaide Anne Procter: "Modern critics argue that Procter's work is significant for what it reveals about how Victorian women otherwise repressed feelings." "One critic suggests that Procter may have been a lesbian and in love with Matilda Hays; other critics have called Procter's relationship with Hays 'emotionally intense.'" "Procter became engaged in 1858. The identity of Procter's fiancé remains unknown, and the proposed marriage never took place." "In 1851, Procter converted to Roman Catholicism." "Procter never married. She became unhealthy, possibly due to her charity work, and died of tuberculosis at the age of 38." I'll let my loyal readers connect the dots.  

"The Lost Chord" is a fine song and deserves to be revived. On YouTube, you can listen to a remarkably accomplished version by Enrico Caruso. Which you can access to at any time, even in the midst of a long insomniac night.