I cannot remember to which Facebook friend I owe my introduction to Kirstin Valdez Quade’s reimagining of St. Christina the Astonishing. Published in The New Yorker, Quade’s longform story incorporates text from Christina’s thirteenth-century vita into a first-person narrative from the mouth of one of Christina’s sisters, covering many of the events recorded of Christina: her miraculous levitation; her report of having visited purgatory; her eccentric avoidance of people who carried the stench of sin; her extreme penances; the accusations of madness and possession; and, ultimately, her entrance of a convent.
Quade takes the outlines of Christina’s story and her penchant for “astonishing” behavior and weaves a disturbing tale. I was reminded of The Toast’s epic transformation of “The Velveteen Rabbit” into a horror short—except that while The Toast keeps tongue firmly implanted in cheek, Quade appears to have intended her smackdown of Christina seriously.
John Milton’s pair of longish poems, L’Allegro
and Il Penseroso,
are a beautiful depiction of mood.The
first joyful and the second meditative, sad, and even grim, they show the world—in
large part, the world of nature—through the lens of two mental states which in
their extremity might almost be called proto-Romantic.They are also the source of a few phrases
that the wide reader might recognize: “to trip the light fantastic” derives
from the following pair of lines:
Come
and trip it as you go,
On
the light fantastick toe …
… which hail, not surprisingly, from L’Allegro.
For many years I had known of the poems, but not known
much about their reception or what effect they had on subsequent artists—until one
afternoon when, working on one writing project or another, the baroque music
blaring from my husband’s speaker system set a synapse firing in my brain.What was
that line? I asked myself.Fortunately, in songs lines are generally repeated; the tenor gave it
again:
Come and trip it as you go,
On the light fantastick toe …
“What is this?!!” I demanded out loud.
It was George Frideric Handel.Yes, that
Handel, whose other accomplishments apparently include the composition of a “pastoral
ode” entitled L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed
il Moderato and, you guessed it, inspired by Milton’s poems.I highly recommend the piece.You can hear the light fantastic toe around 10:50. (Full libretto here.)
Handel: L’Allegro, il
Penseroso ed il Moderato, Gardiner,
At
the urging of one of Handel’s librettists, Charles Jennens, Milton’s two poems,
L’Allegro and il Penseroso, were arranged by James Harris, interleaving them to
create dramatic tension between the personified characters of Milton’s poems (L’Allegro
or the “Joyful man” and il Penseroso or the “Contemplative man”). The first two
movements consist of this dramatic dialog between Milton’s poems. In an attempt
to unite the two poems into a singular “moral design”, at Handel’s request, Jennens
added a new poem, “il Moderato”, to create a third movement. The popular
concluding aria and chorus, “As Steals the Morn” is adapted from Shakespeare’s Tempest, V.i.65–68.
Oh, Handel.How
very Aristotelian of you, to demand the addition of a moderate man!Poor Milton is probably turning over in his
grave, much like the librettist for Messiah,
who (the story is possibly apocryphal, but too good not to repeat) complained
that Handel had destroyed the poetry with his music.
When I wrote my last post here some days ago, I did not expect it to be particularly controversial. The point seemed straightforward: that it was healthy for people to take personal responsibility for actions done in their free time; specifically, that even seemingly neutral things like entertainment promote increased virtue or stagnation (and, as C.S. Lewis reminds us through the mouth of Screwtape, in the spiritual life stagnation meansgoing downhill).
But the popularity ofGame of Thronesis such that its trees rather overshadowed the aforementioned forest; and the post, though not designed to cast shade (pun intended) on fans of the show (who number such respectable Catholics as Ross Douthat), did have the aura of a minor condemnation.
