Tired of reading about Trump and Putin? Grab a coffee, sit back and take a look at this Romanov art: “For many Romanov exiles—hounded, stripped of their wealth, living under the constant fear of further reprisals—art became, in part, a coping mechanism. Later, as the memory of the massacre gave way in its immediacy, new generations of Romanovs took to art for reasons not so different from the rest of us: to meditate, to understand, and to express. Over the twentieth century, the Romanovs produced a vast artistic trove that few are aware of, since most of their creative output was meant for family consumption. Because the family was scattered around the world by the events of the revolution, that collection is currently dispersed among private archives, family albums, basements, under-the-bed boxes and, in rarer cases, museums and galleries. When studied as a whole—in as much as its fragmented nature affords—two persistent themes emerge. One is the Romanovs’ intense, penetrating view of nature. For centuries, nature exploration has been a favorite Romanov family pastime. In those inimitable Russian forests, mountains, and steppe, they found aesthetic pleasure, refuge, and, at times, salvation.”
Umberto Eco’s last essays: “In the liquid society, new if dubious sources of authority bid for our attention, offering their own sensationalized versions of historical truth. Eco has always been fascinated by the ‘eternal conspiracy syndrome,’ the persistent popularity of shocking tales that purport to reveal the secret powers—be they Masons, Rothschilds, or members of the Bavarian Illuminati—who are said to control world events.”
The forgotten painter of sky and air: “Peter Lanyon was forty-six years old when he died from injuries sustained while crash-landing his glider in a field in Devon in August 1964. The paintings he had completed that summer were some of his boldest works – bright strata of colours and flight paths traced across abstracted backgrounds. His work was selling in America to private collectors and public collections. There were invitations to teach abroad, public mural commissions and lectures for the British Council. And then, suddenly, it was all over. ‘Lanyon, why is it you’re earlier away?’ the poet W S Graham demanded of his friend in the elegy ‘The Thermal Stair’.”
Why are forest fires in Portugal more damaging than before? There are more forests thanks in part to António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist government and improved pulping techniques: “At the time of Salazar’s birth, in the late nineteenth century, less than 10 percent of Portugal was forested. The government at the time encouraged landowners to plant pines. When Salazar came to power, he did the same. The emphasis began to shift to eucalyptus in the Fifties, when a Portuguese milling company perfected a technique for pulping the tree to make paper. By the time the Estado Novo fell, 30 percent of the country was forest, and that portion was far greater in the pinhal interior. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the national figure was 40 percent. There had always been wildfires, but there had also been farms and peasants to contain them. The farm plots served as firebreaks, and the peasants cleared the forest underbrush, spotted fires early, and smothered small blazes before they had a chance to grow. Only in the Seventies did it become commonplace for wildfires to burn more than 5,000 acres per year. By the Eighties, they were burning about 180,000; by the Nineties, more than 250,000.”
Since we’re on the topic of Portugal, why not read a short history of elusive Lisbon: “Paris, Venice, Montevideo, Cape Town, Hobart. There are cities, like fado, that pluck at the gut. In my personal half dozen, having also lived there, Lisbon ranks high. ‘What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold,’ gasped Byron’s Childe Harold. Two centuries on, Portugal’s capital remains Queen of the Sea. Yet beyond a sombrely sentimental gift to entrance, the character of Lisbon is elusive.”
Alan Jacobs gives up on baseball.
Essay of the Day:
In National Affairs, Mary Eberstadt revisits James Q. Wilson’s “two nations” speech:
“Almost two decades before J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and 15 years before Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, James Q. Wilson, one of the most eminent social scientists of the 20th century, identified the root of America’s fracturing in the dissolution of the family. Wilson, professor of government at Harvard, professor emeritus at UCLA, and a former head of the American Political Science Association, received the American Enterprise Institute’s 1997 Francis Boyer Award at the think tank’s annual dinner. He used the opportunity to introduce a new line of sociological argument: what he called ‘the two nations’ of America.
“The image of ‘two nations,’ Wilson explained, harked back to an 1845 novel by Benjamin Disraeli, the future prime minister of Great Britain. These were the separate, non-intersecting worlds of rich and poor. Between these two nations Disraeli described, there was ‘no intercourse and no sympathy’ — they were ‘as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were…inhabitants of different planets.’
“More than a century and a half later, Wilson argued, the United States had also become ‘two nations,’ but the dividing line was no longer one of income or social class. Instead, it had become all about the family — specifically, whether one hailed from a broken or intact home. ‘It is not money,’ he observed, but the family that is the foundation of public life. As it has become weaker, every structure built upon that foundation has become weaker.’”
Photos: Volcanic eruptions and lightning
Poem: William Logan, “Days of Coal”
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