Nostalgia

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Decameron (1353)

  When one turns to the stories themselves, the unreality or artificiality of the frame becomes even more apparent. For although they, too, are exquisitely constructed literary artefacts, their events unfold within the orbit of common human experience, and they positively swarm with individuals who, however extraordinary or outrageous the situations in which they may have their being, are almost always convincing in purely psychological terms. This palpable contrast between the characters of the frame and the characters of the stories is only marginally due to differences (which in any case are relatively slight) in the manner of their presentation. The chief reason for the contrast lies elsewhere, in the fact that the lieta brigata inhabits an unreal world, the world of the artist as distinct from the world of man, and its members are, collectively, the personified abstractions of certain cherished ideals, doubtless associated in the mind of the author with the courtly Neapolitan society in which he had spent the years of his adolescence and early manhood, and to which in later life he was wont to look back with a profound sense of nostalgia. Whatever the frame’s personal overtones, it is clear that the society it depicts is aristocratic and élitist, and that the culture and refinement it embodies are far removed from the practical, workaday world with which Boccaccio is largely concerned in the novelle. This tonal antithesis between the world of the storytellers and the world of the narratives serves to highlight their separate, contrasting realities. But what the two worlds have in common is their persistent emphasis on the role of intelligence in human affairs. Of the eight days to which a single narrative topic is assigned, three are devoted specifically to stories concerned with quickness of wit or resourcefulness. The topic for the Sixth Day is ‘those who, on being provoked by some verbal pleasantry, have returned like for like, or who, by a prompt retort or shrewd manoeuvre, have avoided danger, discomfort or ridicule’. The tricks played by women upon their husbands form the subject-matter of the Seventh Day, whilst the Eighth Day is given over to tales about ‘tricks that people in general, men and women alike, are forever playing upon one another’. This last topic is one which could cover a large number of the remaining stories in the Decameron, and tales of verbal pleasantries are by no means confined to the Sixth Day, so that, viewed in its entirety, the Decameron is abundantly stocked with illustrations of human ingenuity.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As for the actual design of the Decameron, there are many other significant pointers in the earlier works. One instance is the passage in the Fiammetta in which the narrator/protagonist reminisces nostalgically about excursions undertaken with her young Neapolitan fellow-patricians to Baiae, a location with strong classical associations where the remains of the ancient Roman Baths of Venus, the Terme di Venere, are still in evidence. There the hotter part of the day would be devoted, by the ladies themselves or in the company of young men (o le donne per sé, o mescolate co’ giovani), to amorous discussions (amorosi ragionamenti), with music and dancing and singing as their other diversions. And similar scenes are portrayed, both in the Amorosa visione and in one of the author’s best-known sonnets, beginning Intorn’ad una fonte, in un pratello di verdi erbette pieno e di bei fiori, sedeano tre angliolette, i loro amori forse narrando.7 The choice of verb here (narrando) would seem to be significant, but more importantly the passage is a good example of a recurrent leitmotif in Boccaccio’s work: the locus amœnus inhabited by nymph-like maidens who talk of love. And it was perhaps inevitable that just such a setting should eventually form the backdrop to the hundred tales. All that was lacking was a suitable pretext to lend an air of realism to the circumstances in which the stories were claimed to have been told and, from this point of view, the public calamity of 1348 was for Boccaccio an event that had a positive aspect. For it enabled him not only to make it seem entirely natural that the stories were told in the way he pretends, but to apply his considerable descriptive and rhetorical skills to the structurally vital account of the plague and the ruinous social upheaval it produced, both in Florence and elsewhere in Europe. Following the practice he had adopted earlier in the Filocolo, the Filostrato and the Teseida, Boccaccio gave his collection of tales a Greek title, meaning ‘Ten Days’ and referring to the ten separate days within a period of two weeks during which the stories were supposed to have been told. The tradition of hellenizing titles, which originated with Virgil, is associated with the epic, and the Decameron is often characterized as the epic of the Florentine merchant class, which, by the middle of the fourteenth century, had asserted itself as the dominant social force of medieval Italy. But more specifically, the title of Boccaccio’s vernacular masterpiece is modelled upon a work of a very different kind, written a thousand years earlier by St Ambrose: the series of commentaries on Old Testament narratives known as the Hexaemeron. The contrast in subject matter between the two works could hardly be more pronounced, and it lends to the title of Boccaccio’s book a subtle irony, almost certainly intentional in origin.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  part of Boccaccio’s mission to dispel the Pope’s understandable mistrust by offering a binding undertaking to provide five armed galleys and 500 helmeted soldiers as an escort for his journey from Avignon to Rome. So successfully did he accomplish his mission that when Urban V did return to Rome on 16 October 1367, after a temporary stay of four months in Viterbo, it was Boccaccio himself who, in November, was sent to convey Florence’s congratulations on his safe deliverance from what historians would thenceforth refer to as the papacy’s ‘Babylonian Captivity’, the term originally used to describe the seventy years that the Jews were captives in Babylon. Urban in fact returned in September 1370 to Avignon, where shortly afterwards he died, and it was left to his successor, Gregory XI, to effect the definitive end to the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ with his transfer of the papal court to Rome in January 1377. In addition to his two official missions to Urban V, Boccaccio undertook several other journeys in the last decade or so of his life. In the winter of 1361–2 he had returned for the last time to Ravenna under the shadow of some kind of personal misfortune, the nature of which is unknown. In March 1367 he set out from Florence for Venice in the hope of a further encounter with Petrarch, but the two men never met, as Petrarch was detained by illness in Pavia. Although Boccaccio was warmly received by the poet’s daughter, Francesca, who invited him to stay in her father’s house on the Riva degli Schiavoni, he lodged in fact with a Florentine acquaintance, Francesco Allegri, returning to Tuscany towards the end of June 1367. During the following winter he supervised preparations in Florence for the defence of the city against a threatened invasion by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, which never materialized. In July 1368 he met Petrarch for what was to be the last time, in Padua, whence he paid a further visit to Venice before returning to Tuscany in the early part of November of that year. In the winter of 1370–71 Boccaccio was once again, and for the last time, in the Kingdom of Naples, where he was more warmly received and entertained than at any time since his youthful sojourn there had come to an end in 1341. Of the numerous invitations he received to make his permanent home in Naples, none can have given him greater cause for satisfaction than the one he received from Queen Joanna herself. But he refused them all, on the grounds that he had already declined Petrarch’s pressing invitation to settle in Venice. Petrarch had now retired to the restful solitude of the Euganean hills, and it was with his example in mind that Boccaccio returned to Certaldo in the spring of 1371. There he carried out his final revisions of several of his Latin works, having already completed his sixteen Latin eclogues, Buccolicum carmen, between 1367 and 1369.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Oh, yes, a very strange company indeed if one analysed it for this or that stigma. Why, the grades were so numerous and so fine that they often defied the most careful observation. The timbre of a voice, the build of an ankle, the texture of a hand, a movement, a gesture—since few were as pronounced as Stephen Gordon, unless it were Wanda, the Polish painter. She, poor soul, never knew how to dress for the best. If she dressed like a woman she looked like a man, if she dressed like a man she looked like a woman! 2 And their love affairs, how strange, how bewildering—how difficult to classify degrees of attraction. For not always would they attract their own kind, very often they attracted quite ordinary people. Thus Pat’s Arabella had suddenly married, having wearied of Grigg as of her predecessor. Rumour had it that she was now blatantly happy at the prospect of shortly becoming a mother. And then there was Jamie’s friend Barbara, a wisp of a girl very faithful and loving, but all woman as far as one could detect, with a woman’s clinging dependence on Jamie. These two had been lovers from the days of their childhood, from the days when away in their Highland village the stronger child had protected the weaker at school or at play with their boisterous companions. They had grown up together like two wind-swept saplings on their bleak Scottish hill-side so starved of sunshine. For warmth and protection they had leaned to each other, until with the spring, at the time of mating, their branches had quietly intertwined. That was how it had been, the entwining of saplings, very simple, and to them very dear, having nothing mysterious or strange about it except inasmuch as all love is mysterious. To themselves they had seemed like the other lovers for whom dawns were brighter and twilights more tender. Hand in hand they had strolled down the village street, pausing to listen to the piper at evening. And something in that sorrowful, outlandish music would arouse the musical soul in Jamie, so that great chords would surge up through her brain, very different indeed from the wails of the piper, yet born of the same mystic Highland nature. Happy days; happy evenings when the glow of the summer lingered for hours above the grim hills, lingered on long after the flickering lamps had been lit in the cottage windows of Beedles. The piper would at last decide to go home, but they two would wander away to the moorland, there to lie down for a space side by side among the short, springy turf and the heather. Children they had been, having small skill in words, or in life, or in love itself for that matter.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then more boldly: ‘Do you happen to be related to Sir Philip Gordon of Morton Hall, who died—it must be about two years ago—from some accident? I believe a tree fell—’ ‘Oh, yes, I’m his daughter,’ said Stephen. He nodded and smiled: ‘Of course, of course, you couldn’t be anything but his daughter.’ ‘You knew my father?’ she inquired, in surprise. ‘Very well, Miss Gordon, when your father was young. In those days Sir Philip was a customer of mine. I sold him his first pearl studs while he was at Oxford, and at least four scarf pins—a bit of a dandy Sir Philip was up at Oxford. But what may interest you is the fact that I made your mother’s engagement ring for him; a large half-hoop of very fine diamonds—’ ‘Did you make that ring? ’ ‘I did, Miss Gordon. I remember quite well his showing me a miniature of Lady Anna—I remember his words. He said: “She’s so pure that only the purest stones are fit to touch her finger.” You see, he’d known me ever since he was at Eton, that’s why he spoke of your mother to me—I felt deeply honoured. Ah, yes—dear, dear—your father was young then and very much in love. . . .’ She said suddenly: ‘Is this pearl as pure as those diamonds?’ And he answered: ‘It’s without a blemish.’ Then she found her cheque book and he gave her his pen with which to write out the very large cheque. ‘Wouldn’t you like some reference?’ she inquired, as she glanced at the sum for which he must trust her. But at this he laughed: ‘Your face is your reference, if I may be allowed to say so, Miss Gordon.’ They shook hands because he had known her father, and she left the shop with the ring in her pocket. As she walked down the street she was lost in thought, so that if people stared she no longer noticed. In her ears kept sounding those words from the past, those words of her father’s when long, long ago he too had been a young lover: ‘She’s so pure that only the purest stones are fit to touch her finger.’ CHAPTER 12 1 N o one questioned at Morton; they spoke very little. Even Anna forbore to question her daughter, checked by something that she saw in the girl’s pale face. But alone with her husband she gave way to her misgivings, to her deep disappointment: ‘It’s heart-breaking, Philip. What’s happened? They seemed so devoted to each other. Will you ask the child? Surely one of us ought to—’ Sir Philip said quietly: ‘I think Stephen will tell me.’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As for the actual design of the Decameron, there are many other significant pointers in the earlier works. One instance is the passage in the Fiammetta in which the narrator/protagonist reminisces nostalgically about excursions undertaken with her young Neapolitan fellow-patricians to Baiae, a location with strong classical associations where the remains of the ancient Roman Baths of Venus, the Terme di Venere, are still in evidence. There the hotter part of the day would be devoted, by the ladies themselves or in the company of young men (o le donne per sé, o mescolate co’ giovani), to amorous discussions (amorosi ragionamenti), with music and dancing and singing as their other diversions. And similar scenes are portrayed, both in the Amorosa visione and in one of the author’s best-known sonnets, beginning Intorn’ad una fonte, in un pratello di verdi erbette pieno e di bei fiori, sedeano tre angliolette, i loro amori forse narrando.7 The choice of verb here (narrando) would seem to be significant, but more importantly the passage is a good example of a recurrent leitmotif in Boccaccio’s work: the locus amœnus inhabited by nymph-like maidens who talk of love. And it was perhaps inevitable that just such a setting should eventually form the backdrop to the hundred tales. All that was lacking was a suitable pretext to lend an air of realism to the circumstances in which the stories were claimed to have been told and, from this point of view, the public calamity of 1348 was for Boccaccio an event that had a positive aspect. For it enabled him not only to make it seem entirely natural that the stories were told in the way he pretends, but to apply his considerable descriptive and rhetorical skills to the structurally vital account of the plague and the ruinous social upheaval it produced, both in Florence and elsewhere in Europe. Following the practice he had adopted earlier in the Filocolo, the Filostrato and the Teseida, Boccaccio gave his collection of tales a Greek title, meaning ‘Ten Days’ and referring to the ten separate days within a period of two weeks during which the stories were supposed to have been told. The tradition of hellenizing titles, which originated with Virgil, is associated with the epic, and the Decameron is often characterized as the epic of the Florentine merchant class, which, by the middle of the fourteenth century, had asserted itself as the dominant social force of medieval Italy. But more specifically, the title of Boccaccio’s vernacular masterpiece is modelled upon a work of a very different kind, written a thousand years earlier by St Ambrose: the series of commentaries on Old Testament narratives known as the Hexaemeron. The contrast in subject matter between the two works could hardly be more pronounced, and it lends to the title of Boccaccio’s book a subtle irony, almost certainly intentional in origin.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Somehow I managed to remove them without toppling her makeshift pyramid of books, mail, and notepads on the nightstand. She applied a coat of pink lipstick, just a shade deeper than her turban, and pancaked her face. “Rupert will be here soon.” She gave me her freshened smile. “Now what was that about your women authors deck?” “You’ll have your own card! You’ll be like the queen of spades!” “Except I’d have to be the queen of hearts!” She grinned, her gums showing more than usual. It made her look like a nine-year-old who hadn’t grown into her teeth yet. For a moment time shifted and we were both little girls playing with our deck of women authors, revering them, and imagining what it would be like to be one of them. She said, “I do hope they add George Sand to the deck. I’ve always wanted to be in her company, you know.” Her words echoed what she’d told our first class of International College students, when she still looked healthy, before the chemo had drained her. She’d been discussing with the students the obstacles Aurore Dupin had faced as a woman writer in the nineteenth century, why she’d assumed the male pseudonym of George Sand and worn britches. Anaïs described how Sand had outraged the public by openly taking lovers such as composer Frédéric Chopin, and, more discreetly (it was rumored), her friend Marie Dorval. “It would have been wonderful to live in Sand’s time,” Anaïs had exclaimed, “when friends had to travel long distances by carriage to visit, so would stay at each other’s houses for weeks on end, putting on plays and entertainment. There was time and opportunity for real intimacy between friends then.” I’d wanted to ask her what she meant by real intimacy between friends. I needed to know if she had ever loved a woman like George Sand with Marie Dorval. My wound from Philip’s betrayal was still so fresh, and my distrust of men so jagged, that I had been wondering if I should change my sexuality to loving women. Anaïs was my model in so many ways, and if she’d known a woman’s love, I believed she could show me the way. When we’d ushered the last of the students out and I stood alone with Anaïs in the entry hall, I found the courage to say, “Anaïs, have you ever had an affair with a woman?” Her Mona Lisa smile contradicted her answer. “No.” I didn’t know whether to believe her, given her proclivity for deception. She’d looked in my eyes and said gently, “Why do you ask?” “I want to know everything about you. I was sure from reading the Paris diaries, that you and June—” She was slowly shaking her head no. “No? But the way you wrote—” “I wanted that with June, but she denied me,” she said plaintively.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The oldest of the men who are present, Ascalion, is unanimously elected King of the company. But Ascalion, claiming to have spent his life in the service of Mars rather than of Venus, declines the honour and bestows it instead on Fiammetta, whom he crowns with a garland of laurel. The initial suggestion that the company should spend the hotter part of the day in discussing various questions of love comes from Fiammetta, using much the same argument as the one Pampinea will use in the Decameron to persuade her companions to engage in storytelling. In each case, the object of the exercise is to gain profit and amusement from time that would otherwise be spent in idle pursuits. Likewise, the formulas used to introduce the questioni in the Filocolo are often similar to those that preface the novelle in the Decameron. Two of the thirteen questioni involve the recounting of stories that Boccaccio later refines and inserts into the Decameron itself (X, 4 and X, 5). But whereas the Decameron is distinctively Florentine, the background to the Filocolo is decidedly Neapolitan, or Parthenopean, as the author, in his determination to classicize his text, prefers to describe it. The available information about Boccaccio’s sojourn in Naples – by common consent the most crucial period of his career – is in fact remarkably sparse compared to the wealth of accessible documentary material relating to his later life in Florence and elsewhere. Opinions differ concerning the precise date of his return from Naples to Florence, but in all probability it was during the winter of 1340–41. This is because on the one hand he declares in his commentary on Dante’s Commedia that he was not in Florence during the plague of 1340, whilst on the other hand he does not seem to have been in Naples during the early spring of 1341, when Petrarch visited the city en route to Rome, in April of that year, for his coronation as poet laureate. Boccaccio’s return to Florence was at all events dictated by a combination of political and economic factors. The traditional ties of friendship between the Florentine commune and the Angevin monarchy had come under considerable strain, partly because of King Robert’s refusal to support the Florentines in their protracted wars against Lucca, and partly, also, because the dependence of the Angevins on Florentine bankers had by that time dwindled to comparative insignificance. Boccaccio’s father had already left Naples after breaking off his connection with the Bardi company in or around October 1338, and some of Boccaccio’s biographers have suggested, without any real evidence, that his own return to Florence was an inevitable consequence of his father’s bankruptcy. A more probable explanation is that far-reaching changes in Neapolitan foreign and economic policy had impaired his social links with the Angevin court and raised the spectre of insecurity, though there may well have been some more pressing reason for his reluctant departure.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  as you once told me yourself, your city is full of pompous talk and cowardly deeds, the servant not of a thousand laws, but of as many opinions as there are people in it, bristling with arms, at war both at home and abroad, teeming with greedy, proud, and envious people, and full of countless anxieties: all of which things are ill-suited to your own temperament. As for the city you are preparing to leave, I know that you acknowledge it to be contented, peaceful, flourishing, liberal, and subject to a single ruler: and these things, if I know you at all, are greatly to your liking. 2 Despite its studied rhetorical structure and its possible literary antecedents, such as Dante’s contemptuous description of his native Florence in canto XV of Inferno, the passage could well reflect the author’s private thoughts and feelings in the years immediately following his return to Tuscany. Living in the house of his widowed father, in a city far more deeply engrossed in commerce and high finance than the pursuit of culture and scholarship, a city torn by internal disputes and at war with the neighbouring state of Lucca, he must indeed have looked back with nostalgia to the refined, tranquil and orderly aristocratic milieu in which he had spent the thirteen years of his adolescence and early manhood. His discontent with life in Florence may be glimpsed, also, in the closing paragraph of the first of Boccaccio’s ‘Florentine’ works, Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, popularly known as the Ameto from the name of its main character. It probably dates from 1341–2, and in the last paragraph the author dedicates the book to a friend of long standing, Niccolò di Bartolo del Buono, asking him to accept ‘this rose, born amid the thorns of my adversity, which the beauty of Florence plucked by force from the unyielding brambles as I lay in the depths of despondency’. 3 The Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine is a prose narrative interspersed with a number of poems, and in the last of these the author complains about ‘the dark, silent, melancholy house’ which harbours him against

• From The Decameron (1353)

  There is one final point to note about the Decameron’s second plane of reality – the world of the narrators – and that is the passage in the introductory section to the Ninth Day, where the ten young people, returning from their morning walk, are described in terms that almost seem to foreshadow the figures as well as the spirit of a Botticelli painting of the Renaissance: They were all wreathed in fronds of oak, and their hands were full of fragrant herbs or flowers, so that if anyone had encountered them, he would only have been able to say: ‘either these people will not be vanquished by death, or they will welcome it with joy.’ 23 What is implied here is that in their pastoral retreat, the band of storytellers figure forth a state of pre-lapsarian innocence, at one with the paradisal world they inhabit. That impression is reinforced at numerous other points in the frame, where the author is at pains to stress the absolute propriety of their proceedings and relationships, whatever may be said about the material of their narratives. Like all good allegories, the world of Boccaccio’s ten narrators can be interpreted in many different ways, but its dominant characteristics are its pristine candour and absence of guile. III. THE WORLD OF THE NARRATIVES In the popular imagination the Decameron is regarded first and foremost as a collection of tales concerned mainly with the ingenious stratagems adopted by wives and the religious to achieve the gratification of their sexual desires. In both cases, an act of infidelity is involved, on the one hand to matrimonial vows, on the other to the vow of celibacy. The hypocrisy of the clergy and the wantonness of women were the two favourite targets of the medieval satirist, and it is not therefore surprising that these two themes should occupy a prominent position in a work which, however strongly it anticipates the ethos and spirit of the Renaissance, is rooted so firmly in medieval culture. Yet when one considers the Decameron as a whole, one cannot fail to be impressed by the extraordinary range of its subject matter, and by the consequent impossibility of fitting it into any single descriptive category. Whilst it is true that it is well stocked with tales of adulterous wives, and in fact one whole day, the seventh, is devoted exclusively to variations on that topic, there is also a large number of stories in which the virtues of conjugal fidelity are prominently displayed and roundly extolled, a good example being the tale of Messer Torello and his wife, Adalieta (X, 9). That is not to say that Boccaccio was more attached to conventional Christian morality than is popularly thought, as recent criticism, especially in America, has tended to assert, or that some kind of apologia is required for his apparent condoning of sexual promiscuity.

• From The World of Biblical Israel (2013)

  15 • Verses 1–3a of Lamentations 1 give us a vision of a destroyed city and its inhabitants. Jerusalem has become a widow, a princess reduced to a vassal. • In verse 7 of this chapter, we see again a reference to remembering: “Jerusalem remembers in the days of her affliction and wandering, all the precious things that were hers in the days of old.” Exile as the Context for Scriptural Formation • Why did a military conquest and deportation cause the Judeans to record and preserve their history in writing and pass it down from generation to generation? • First and foremost, the Bible tells a story, one that’s organized into a simple chronology. o The story starts “in the beginning” with the creation of the world; it moves forward in time to the appearance of Israel as a family under the patriarch Jacob, who is renamed Israel. Then, we have the emergence of Israel as a nation of twelve tribes united, who conquer the Promised Land of Canaan. We move forward in time to the establishment of Israel as a kingdom, its conquest and deportation, and finally, the resettlement of the land. o This same history, however, could be told paying special attention to the contexts within which individual stories were written, compiled, edited, and retold. In this case, the exilic experience becomes a filter for which national stories are preserved and how they are presented. The crisis of exile posed questions. And the Judeans worked through those questions in part by recording their history, the history of who they had been when they were in their land. • Psalm 137’s question, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” is really a way of asking: How can we pass on or preserve a sense of identity in our children while we are in a foreign land? The context of exile posed questions, and it is possible to 16 Lecture 2: By the Rivers of Babylon—Exile view the Bible as an effort to formulate answers to some of these exilic questions. • If we examine the Bible in this way, the neat, linear timeline is replaced by a messier kind of diagram. But this messier version is likely much better for understanding what life was like in ancient Israel. o In the center of the diagram is the exilic period, beginning in 597 and lasting until around 538, when some Judean exiles began returning to their homeland. o In this period, Judeans began to reach back into their past to make sense of their present situation. Our diagram shows arrows going backward in time, representing an effort to retrieve and preserve history in order to retell it for children born in exile. “Timeline” of Biblical Text Development The Crisis of Exile 597–538 B.C.E. Ezekiel Second Isaiah (40–55) Book of Proverbs Historical and Prophetic Books Moses and the Law of Exod.–Deut. Patriarchal Narratives Gen. 12–50 Patriarchal Narratives Gen. 12–50 Book of Job Ecclesiastes

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The language of Robert’s court being French, the influence of French culture was all-pervasive. The ‘six wasted years’ of Boccaccio’s apprenticeship as a minor banking official were wasted only in the sense that they temporarily prevented him from pursuing the career as a scholar and poet for which he had always considered himself instinctively suited from early childhood. The Neapolitan branch of the Bardi bank was situated in the Ruga Cambiorum (‘Exchange Street’), in a quarter of the city that offered him the opportunity of daily contact with various aspects and personalities of a dynamic business and commercial world that is reflected in much of his later writing, in particular in many of the stories of the Decameron . His duties would have taken him regularly, for instance, through those areas of the city that he describes in such graphic detail in the famous story of Andreuccio of Perugia (II, 5). As a bank teller and bank messenger, he had regular dealings with a broad cross-section of the trading and seafaring classes that constituted the core of a thriving commercial society in what was regarded as one of the most important centres of economic activity in medieval Europe. At the same time, because of his father’s high standing with the Angevin court, the young Boccaccio was enabled to mix freely with the Neapolitan nobility. Many years afterwards, in a letter written to a friend in 1363, he recalled with deep nostalgia this period of his life when he had entertained in splendid style and with true Florentine hospitality the sons of the aristocracy, who ‘were not ashamed to come and visit me in my house’. He was thus familiar with the life-style of a sophisticated courtly society, and his keen observation of the refined manners and sentiments of that milieu is reflected in many of his writings. The world of the storytellers in the Decameron , for all its heightened, ‘literary’ and deliberately unreal quality, is an idealized image of a society in which Boccaccio himself participated, albeit as a foreigner and an outsider, during the formative years of his life in Naples. Even more important from the point of view of his future development as a writer were the numerous contacts he established in those years with the outstanding scholars and men of letters who had been attracted to Naples by the renown of its learned sovereign and patron of literature and the arts. Among those who guided and encouraged Boccaccio in his innate vocation for the study and practice of poetry was Paolo da Perugia, the curator of the Royal Library, with its rich collection of material in the areas of philosophy, mythology, medicine and theology. Paolo’s encyclopaedic compendium of ancient myths, the Collectiones , was specifically acknowledged by Boccaccio as the inspiring force for his own immensely influential Latin work on the same subject, Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Gentile Gods ), composed towards the end of his life.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In his embrace He held me, and in all his thoughts I held high place. My eyes with love inflamed him And all my time I spent, Which flew by all so lightly, In tender blandishment. But now I am forsaken; From me, alas, he’s taken. ‘And now there came before me A youth all proud and vain Though noble reputation Gave him a valiant name. He took me, and false fancies, Alas for me! Made him a jealous gaoler: Gone liberty! And I, who came to earth To bring mankind delight Learned to despair, almost, Gone all my mirth! ‘I curse my wretched fate When I agreed To change to wedding clothes From widow’s weeds. Though they were dark, perhaps, My life was fair; but now I live a weary life, With far less honour, too. Oh cursed wedding-tie! Before I took those vows That brought me to this pass Would God had let me die! ‘Oh, sweetest love, with whom I once was so content! From where you stand, with Him To whom our souls are sent, Ah, spare some pity for me For I cannot remove Your memory which burns me With all the pain of love! Ah, pray that I may soon return To those sweet climes for which I yearn!’ Here Lauretta ended her song, to which all had listened raptly and construed in different ways. There were those who took it, in the Milanese fashion, 4 to imply that a good fat pig was better than a comely wench. But others gave it a loftier, more subtle and truer meaning, which this is not the moment to expound. The king then called for lighted torches to be set at regular intervals amongst the lawns and flowerbeds, and at his behest, Lauretta’s song was followed by many others until every star that had risen was beginning its descent, when, thinking it time for them all to retire, he bade them goodnight and sent them away to their various rooms. Here ends the Third Day of the Decameron

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As with the seven young ladies, a key attribute of the three young men whose company they enlist is their intelligence, as seen in Pampinea’s remarks on first catching sight of the trio: ‘See how Fortune favours us right from the beginning, in setting before us three young men of courage and intelligence [discreti giovani e valorosi] , who will readily act as our guides and servants if we are not too proud to accept them.’ The reference to Fortune is significant, coming immediately after the initial description of the three young men, in which the author lays special emphasis on the strength of their affection for three of the ladies present. Implicit within this description is the concept, central to the poetry of the dolce stil novo , of the ennobling effects of love, for the trio are characterized as young men in whom neither the horrors of the times nor the loss of friends or relatives nor concern for their own safety has dampened the flames of love, much less extinguished them completely. Thus, as in the Prologue, we once again find the deliberate juxtaposition of the Decameron’s three central themes: Love, Fortune, Intelligence. In the course of his harrowing description of the plague and its disastrous effects on the traditions and institutions of Florentine society, 54 Boccaccio repeatedly directs attention to the chaos and disorder brought by the Black Death to the city he nostalgically recalls as the most noble of any in Italy ( ‘oltre ad ogni altra italica nobilissima’ ), and he deplores the breakdown of those moral and legal restraints which had contributed to the city’s cultural and social pre-eminence. He stresses that in the face of the misery and affliction occasioned by the plague all respect for the laws of God and of man had broken down and been extinguished, and that consequently everyone was free to behave as he pleased. The departure from generally accepted rules and standards of behaviour is graphically illustrated in two passages referring to women. In the first, Boccaccio writes that whenever a woman was taken ill, she raised no objection, no matter how gracious or beautiful or gently bred she might be, to being attended by a male servant, and that she had no scruples about showing him every part of her body as freely as she would have displayed it to a woman. This practice, he goes on to suggest in a slightly flippant aside, was responsible for a subsequent decline in the sexual morals of those women who were fortunate enough to recover. But if chastity waned, so too did the compassion ordinarily associated with the feminine ideal.

• From Trash (1988)

  “Assbackwards,” Aunt Alma was proud to be the first to tell me, and it showed in the excitement in her voice. “Your mama was unconscious for three days after you were born. She’d been fast asleep in the back of your Uncle Lucius’s car when they hit that Pontiac right outside the airbase. Your mama went right through the windshield and bounced off the other car. When she woke up three days later, you were already out and named, and all she had was a little scar on her forehead to show what had happened. It was a miracle like they talk about in Bible school, and I know there’s something your mama’s meant to do because of it.” “Oh yeah.” Mama shrugged when I asked her about it. “An’t no doubt I’m meant for greater things—bigger biscuits, thicker gravy. What else could God want for someone like me, huh?” She pulled her mouth so tight I could see her teeth pushing her upper lip, but then she looked into my face and let her air out slowly. “Your aunt is always laying things to God’s hand that he wouldn’t have interest in doing anyway. What’s true is that there was a car accident and you got named before I could say much about it. Ask your aunt why you’re named after her, why don’t you?” On my stepfather’s birthday I always think of my mother. She sits with her coffee and cigarettes, watches the sun come up before she must leave for work. My mama lives with my stepfather still, though she spent most of my childhood swearing that as soon as she had us up and grown, she’d leave him flat. Instead, we left, my sister and I, and on my stepfather’s birthday we neither send presents nor visit. The thing we do—as my sister has told me and as I have told her—is think about Mama. At any moment of the day we know what she will be doing, where she will be, and what she will probably be talking about. We know, not only because her days are as set and predictable as the schedule by which she does the laundry, we know in our bodies. Our mother’s body is with us in its details. She is recreated in each of us; strength of bone and the skin curling over the thick flesh the women of our family have always worn.

• From Trash (1988)

  I nod, scratch chigger bites on my ankles, unable to relax to pissing in the weeds, hoping that trailer comes back and pays for more than the plumbing. She married late, Cousin Temple did, married late and well—a steady boy, one of those Roberts from Asheville, a lean, freckled, still boy, as steady as she was and as quiet, a good son who loved his mother and never ran around like the other boys all the other cousins married early. Temple rolls a little hair between two fingers and turns her red-tan face up into the sun slanting past the porch beams. This house, yard, dirt road, myrtle trees, kudzu holding the screens on the windows—none of it would stand up to a northern winter, a Yankee tax assessor, or an estate sale. But it puts Temple outside them, a property owner, something none of the rest of the family can imagine becoming. Temple has been an outsider all her life, though living on her own since her mama left her with her own mother when Temple was barely seven—a quiet red-faced seven as she is now a quiet red-faced woman whose hair shows gray where it lies close to her skull. “You were a bean when you were a girl,” Temple tells me, “a string bean, and your sister was a butter bean. Your mama was a stretch of stringy pork, and together you didn’t make a decent Sunday dinner.” When Temple laughs, her head goes back. Her long red hair shakes out, and all the gray she has so skillfully tried to hide flakes loose and flashes at me silver and white. “Temple,” I tell her, “you’re finally getting old.” “Bullshit,” she flares. “And apple butter. I’m just more woman than the men in this town can handle. And I’ve more left to me than most people get to start out.” Then she smiles, oh she smiles! The skin around her mouth that’s aged so dry and tight flushes and fills like the grin on a mewling baby. But her teeth slip loose, and her hand flies up to hide the wolf grin. “Goddamn,” she sighs. Her daughter doesn’t look up. Temple’s hand caresses her porch, strokes the soft, worn wood like the lover she barely remembers. “It an’t Robert, you know, but it is, I’d swear. All I have of him anyway. Nights, I seem to hear him breathing, but it’s the walls. They sweat so, they smell just the way he did. And I got to where I don’t care if I’m crazy. I talk to this house like it was him.” Somehow it is. There was an army insurance policy, a thousand-dollar burial, and a four-thousand-dollar mortgage, plus two more for the plumbing which never worked anyway. In the North, it would have bought nothing: in Asheville only a little more: but out here off Old Henderson Road in 1959 it was an estate for three orphans and a redheaded woman suddenly going gray.

• From Trash (1988)

  For some reason, Yankees got strange sentimental notions about Mississippi.” “They’re strange about other things, too,” Mama would throw in. “They think they can ask you personal questions just ’cause you served them a cup of coffee.” Some salesman once asked her where she got her hose with the black thread sewed up the back and Mama hadn’t forgiven him yet. But the thing everyone told me and told me again was that you just couldn’t trust yourself with them. Nobody bet on Yankee tips, they might leave anything. Once someone even left a New York City subway token. Mama thought it a curiosity but not the equivalent of real money. Another one ordered one cup of coffee to go and twenty packs of sugar. “They made road liquor out of it,” Mabel said. “Just add an ounce of vodka and set it down by the engine exhaust for a month or so. It’ll cook up into a bitter poison that’ll knock you cross-eyed.” It sounded dangerous to me, but Mabel didn’t think so. “Not that I would drink it,” she’d say, “but I wouldn’t fault a man who did.” They stole napkins, not one or two but a boxful at a time. Before we switched to sugar packets, they’d come in, unfold two or three napkins, open them like diapers, and fill them up with sugar before they left. Then they might take the knife and spoon to go with it. Once I watched a man take out a stack of napkins I was sure he was going to walk off with. But instead he sat there for thirty minutes making notes on them, then balled them all up and threw them away when he left. My mama was scandalized by that. “And right over there on the shelf is a notebook selling for ten cents. What’s wrong with these people?” “They’re living in the movies,” Mabel whispered, looking back toward the counter. “Yeah, Bette Davis movies,” I added. “I don’t know about the movies.” Harriet put her hand on Mama’s shoulder. “But they don’t live in the real world with the rest of us.” “No,” Mama said, “they don’t.” I take a bite of cherry tomato and hear Mama’s voice again. No, she says. “No,” I say. I tuck my blouse into my skirt and shift in my shoes. If I close my eyes, I can see Mabel’s brightly rouged cheekbones, Harriet’s pitted skin, and my mama’s shadowed brown eyes. When I go home tonight I’ll write her about this party and imagine how she’ll laugh about it all. The woman who was talking to me has gone off across the room to the other bar. People are giving up nibbling and going on to more serious eating.

• From Trash (1988)

  And I’ve more left to me than most people get to start out.” Then she smiles, oh she smiles! The skin around her mouth that’s aged so dry and tight flushes and fills like the grin on a mewling baby. But her teeth slip loose, and her hand flies up to hide the wolf grin. “Goddamn,” she sighs. Her daughter doesn’t look up. Temple’s hand caresses her porch, strokes the soft, worn wood like the lover she barely remembers. “It an’t Robert, you know, but it is, I’d swear. All I have of him anyway. Nights, I seem to hear him breathing, but it’s the walls. They sweat so, they smell just the way he did. And I got to where I don’t care if I’m crazy. I talk to this house like it was him.” Somehow it is. There was an army insurance policy, a thousand-dollar burial, and a four-thousand-dollar mortgage, plus two more for the plumbing which never worked anyway. In the North, it would have bought nothing: in Asheville only a little more: but out here off Old Henderson Road in 1959 it was an estate for three orphans and a redheaded woman suddenly going gray. “Lupus,” she says. “It was lupus.” An old story I have heard many times these twenty-five years. Temple scratches herself, and spits, angry now as she was angry then. “Damn doctors, damn hospitals, never said what else. Lupus, you know, kills slow, takes a long time—years. But Robert, Lord, Robert sank into that bed. He died so fast. Weeks seemed like no time. He just melted away.” Maryat stirs her hairpins. Claire brings a pitcher of tea to the door. I wipe my mouth again, saying nothing, watching the sweat shine on Temple’s cheeks. When I was a child and slept in her bed, I would lie awake and watch the line—eyelids to cheekbones to mouth. Never touched it, never once reached out to touch her cheekbone, though I dreamed of pulling her into my neck, sucking her throat, and licking her eyes. Now I curl my fingers around my hipbones, hug myself, and don’t quite reach out to her trembling hands. “You never saw the store, did you?” Little flecks of broken wood grain pull up under Temple’s fingernails. “Your mama wouldn’t bring you girls around. Hell, your mama thought you girls were meant to be special, wasn’t gonna carry you around to no honky-tonk roadhouse.” She reaches for me, touching my sun-warmed thigh. “But it wasn’t like that, not really. The store was across from the high school and clean as a dried peach pit. Scrubbed hollow, hell, I scrubbed me raw. We had pinball machines, and a candy counter, Coke coolers, chip racks, and billiards. No liquor ’cept for Robert’s beer in the back cooler. “But we lost it, of course. We lost everything.” Temple pauses, pulls at her tea and frowns. “Hard to remember all that, hard times and craziness.

• From Trash (1988)

  In college it was seven cups of coffee a day after a breakfast of dry-roasted nuts and Coca-Cola. Too much gray meat and reheated potatoes led me to develop a taste for peanut butter with honey, coleslaw with raisins, and pale, sad vegetables that never disturbed anything at all. When I started throwing up before classes, my roommate fed me fat pink pills her doctor had given her. My stomach shrank to a stone in my belly. I lived on pink pills, coffee, and Dexedrine until I could go home and use hot biscuits to scoop up cold tomato soup at my mama’s table. The biscuits dripped memories as well as butter: Uncle Lucius rolling in at dawn, eating a big breakfast with us all, and stealing mama’s tools when he left: or Aunt Panama at the door with her six daughters, screaming, That bastard’s made me pregnant again just to get a son, and wanting butter beans with sliced tomatoes before she would calm down. Cold chicken in a towel meant Aunt Alma was staying over, cooking her usual six birds at a time raising eleven kids I never learned how to cook for less than fifteen. Red dye stains on the sink were a sure sign Reese was dating some new boy, baking him a Red Velvet Cake my stepfather would want for himself. “It’s good to watch you eat,” my mama smiled at me, around her loose teeth. “It’s just so good to watch you eat.” She packed up a batch of her biscuits when I got ready to leave, stuffed them with cheese and fatback. On the bus going back to school I’d hug them to my belly, using their bulk to remind me who I was. When the government hired me to be a clerk for the Social Security Administration, I was sent to Miami Beach, where they put me up in a crumbling old hotel right on the water while teaching me all the regulations. The instructors took turns taking us out to dinner. Mr. McCollum took an interest in me, told me Miami Beach had the best food in the world, bought me an order of Oysters Rockefeller one night, and medallions of veal with wine sauce the next. If he was gonna pay for it, I would eat it, but it was all like food seen on a movie screen. It had the shape and shine of luxury but tasted like nothing at all. But I fell in love with Wolfe’s Cafeteria and got up early every morning to walk there and eat their Danish stuffed with cream cheese and raisins. “The best sweet biscuit in Miami,” I told the counterman. “Nu? Was zags die?” He grinned at the woman beside me, her face wrinkling up as she blushed and smiled at me. “Mneh,” she laughed. I didn’t understand a word but I nodded anyway.

• From Trash (1988)

  “Assbackwards,” Aunt Alma was proud to be the first to tell me, and it showed in the excitement in her voice. “Your mama was unconscious for three days after you were born. She’d been fast asleep in the back of your Uncle Lucius’s car when they hit that Pontiac right outside the airbase. Your mama went right through the windshield and bounced off the other car. When she woke up three days later, you were already out and named, and all she had was a little scar on her forehead to show what had happened. It was a miracle like they talk about in Bible school, and I know there’s something your mama’s meant to do because of it.” “Oh yeah.” Mama shrugged when I asked her about it. “An’t no doubt I’m meant for greater things—bigger biscuits, thicker gravy. What else could God want for someone like me, huh?” She pulled her mouth so tight I could see her teeth pushing her upper lip, but then she looked into my face and let her air out slowly. “Your aunt is always laying things to God’s hand that he wouldn’t have interest in doing anyway. What’s true is that there was a car accident and you got named before I could say much about it. Ask your aunt why you’re named after her, why don’t you?” On my stepfather’s birthday I always think of my mother. She sits with her coffee and cigarettes, watches the sun come up before she must leave for work. My mama lives with my stepfather still, though she spent most of my childhood swearing that as soon as she had us up and grown, she’d leave him flat. Instead, we left, my sister and I, and on my stepfather’s birthday we neither send presents nor visit. The thing we do—as my sister has told me and as I have told her—is think about Mama. At any moment of the day we know what she will be doing, where she will be, and what she will probably be talking about. We know, not only because her days are as set and predictable as the schedule by which she does the laundry, we know in our bodies. Our mother’s body is with us in its details. She is recreated in each of us; strength of bone and the skin curling over the thick flesh the women of our family have always worn.