the gay science

Thanks to printing, books are published everywhere; this is why, with the moderns, those are so numerous who, not content to know one or two authors, have an erudition which depends upon abundant, varied, and almost infinite reading. And finally we have universities, which are institutions organized in view of the study of all kinds of sciences and arts, thanks to which intelligence, esprit and language are carried to their perfection. And in almost all these studies a single end is aimed at today: the truth. To the point that if I undertook to make a speech in praise of the truth, I would deserve the fact that one would respond to me, with stupor: But who has ever thought to dispraise it? - Vico.

Foucault revivied Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the cultural causes and consequences of the Will to Truth in the sixties; the diagnosis has rapidly penetrated to every sphere of the discourses devoted to the social sciences, and to the humanities. One hundred fifty years before Nietzsche, Vico was expressing his own discomfort with truth as the ‘single end’ of study, for reasons that reappear in Nietzsche’s account. It is a protest, on Vico’s part, that is almost wholly prophetic – for though, as Fontenelle wrote, the new mechanical ingenuity was appearing under the very noses of the poets and philosophers, in trades and shops, without the poets and the philosophers being aware of it, certainly the great European metropoles – London, Paris, Naples – had not yet been wholly caught up in the great transformation that instituted monetized commodity markets and industry on a mass scale, the concomitants of the artificial paradise. Fontenelle, Nietzsche justly wrote in a passage in The gay science (a Viconian book), ‘grew after death” – ‘Those small, bold words over moral things, that Fontenelle threw out in his immortal eloges, seemed to his time to be paradoxes and games of a not inoffensive wit; even the highest judges of taste and reason didn’t see anything else in them – yes, including Fontenelle himself, perhaps. Now something unbelievable has happened: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game becomes serious! And we read these dialogues with another feeling than that with which Voltaire and Helvetius read them, and lift their progenitor into another and highter rank of intellects, as these did – justly? Unjustly?”

Vico’s examination of the “method” of the ancients versus the moderns is, on its face, an examination of the most modern of methods, that of science- as we find it in Descartes – with the ancients. But there is another face of his essay. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to look at what Vico says about printing. Remember that Vico, in the smallest of parentheses in his autobiography, tells us that his father owned a bookshop. Remember that the great encounter in Vico’s life – with the Bishop of Ischia – occurred in another bookshop (Michelet mistranslates this as a ‘library”), where Vico seemed to charm the Bishop with his knowledge of canon law, and his latin. Vico’s autobiography mentions several incidences concerning finding books, which was of course the bookseller’s trade. LI could, if you like, find something a bit Oedipal, then, in Vico’s remarks about printing, and the preference for the quill – for copying.
At the same time, it is important to note the conjunction of the intellectual and the material here. Vico sees that matter is a matter of routine.
A long citation, and then to bed.

In fact, when books were written by hand, the copyists, in order to make their labors worth the pain, only transcribed authors who had a well established reputation, and, as they sold their copies dearly, the amateurs were sometimes constrained to copy them with their own hand. What admirable profit one takes from this kind of exercise! We better meditate a text that we write, and chiefly that we write in calmness, without precipitation, peacefully, and in always following the order. Thus is established between us and the authors not a tie of superficial acquaintance, but a long habit by which we finish purely and simply by identifying with them. It is for this reason that the bad authors, when one copied them by hand, knew disfavor, and the goood saw their works diffused for the great benefit of all. Bacon made proof of more cleverness than good sense when he remarked that, in the influx of barbarians, the authors with the most weight sank to the bottom, while the light ones swam on the surface. In all genres, the most important, the best authors have come down to us, thanks to writing, and if this or that author has disappeared, one must attribute it to chance. When I question my memory (I wrote this when I was still not an old man) I perceive that I have seen writers who enjoyed while alive such glory that their works had been printed twelve times or more, and who are now disdained and even held in contempt. Others, remaining too long in obscurity and indifference, now see their name celebrated by a change in circumstance by the greatest experts.”

Vico and the failure of the revolution of 1799

The Gnostic historian, like the universal historian, has a strong sense of epochs – which, as Bossuet pointed out in his essay on universal history, are stopping points, still moments that frame a sequence. They are in history and not in history. They are signaled by royal deaths, falls of empires, the rising of the son of god from the clutches of death, etc. Instead of the grand events that punctuate the march of universal history, however, the gnostic’s epochs happen in corner conversations, or in a glance at a sign in a window, or in the lyrics of a popular song. Herzen had a nose for these things – in his writing, one finds moments in which suddenly, the forces at dialectical play, usually disguised in a thousand blind intentions, suddenly become naked and twofold, under a harsh and unforgiving stage light. In his beautiful essay on Owen, the proto-socialist English radical, Herzen reports on a conversation Owen had with Gentz, in Herzen’s words, “the literary sycophant of Metternich”, who said to him, about his scheme for a socialist utopia at New Lanark:

“Suppose you had been successful, what would have been the outcome of it?”
“It’s very simple,’ Owen answered. ‘The outcome would have been that every man would have had enough to eat, would have been properly clothed, and would have been given a sensible education.”
“But that’s just what we don’t want,’ observed the Cicero of the Congress of Vienna. Gentz was frank, if nothing else.”

In one sense, this has a satisfying Voltarian sound – in the struggle of the ancients and the moderns, the ancients – representing the ancien regime – want to impose poverty and ignorance on the masses to uphold their hierarchy, and the moderns want to burst through these tired integuments, made of superstition and irrationality, to produce dignity and culture for every man – plus dinner.

In another sense, though, dinner and high culture are not really correlates. Herzen, in his letters to Turgenev, emphasized this point. Raymond Williams, in contrasting Burke and Cobbett in Culture and Society, makes the point that judging our usual political dualities (left or right, ancien regime or modernity) under the Enlightenment program is a more difficult game than it seems when we approach the matter simply by letting certain books talk. The books talk and talk, a cartoon bubble forms, and it fills with theory. Meanwhile, cartoon bubbles were everywhere coming out of the mouths of speculators in drained Fenland and alehouse keepers, lazzaroni and dairy maids. The moderns were of course busy imposing the benefits of a beneficient system on the people, and tearing up the texture of popular belief, for good and ill. This is really a post about Vico and his consideration of the competition between the ancients and the moderns, or rather, as is the way of LI, a flirtation with a topic that always seems to recede from out of the clumsy grasp of my paragraphs, but I want to get to him via these nineteenth century anecdotes – and, for instance, via his radical/conservative reader, Vincenzo Cuoco, who, in exile from the collapse of the revolutionary Parthenopean Republic of Naples, looked back at the mistakes of the Jacobins of 1799 and stressed their disconnect from the people. Cuoco’s history – about which I will have more to say later – has often been linked to the reaction in Europe – to Burke, or to Gentz. About the leader of the Jacobins, the Neapolitan radical Pagano, for instance, Cucio writes:

You wouldn’t say that the families of the Serras, the Colonnes, and of the Pignatellis were obscure, or that Pagano, Cirillo, Conforti were men without a name, but they had a name among the wise who do not make revolutions, and they were unknown to the people, without whom they are not made, because they were too superior. Paggio, the head of the Lazzaroni of the market, was without doubt a contemptible man in all respects, yet however it was Paggio and not Pagano who was loved by the people – the people who always insult those who are above their intelligence.”

But what looks like a standard, Gentzian account of the mob is, in fact, a more subtle critique of the men of theory who do not come out of the crowd – and who, out of an ignorance deriving from that part of knowledge that William James named acquaintance, are all the more ready to reduce all knowledge to what is demonstrable and can be driven to the sole standard of the true or the false. A standard that requires the atomization of culture to a vast mass of independent decision pairs.

But I’ll leave Cuoco and start with Vico – in the next post.

Vico and l'esprit geometrique

In the preface to his translation of Vico’s Le Méthode des études de notre temps, Alain Pons notices that Vico, in contrast to his opponent Descartes, recognizes the distinct cognitive and cultural and philosophical status of childhood and youth.

“. It is doubtlessly in their respective attitude to childhood that best reveals the depths that separate Vico from Descartes. Descartes could not console himself from the fact that “we have all been children before being men, from which it is almost impossible that our judgments are as pure and solid as they could have been, if we had had the entire use of our reason from the instant of our birth and had never been led but by it. The Research of the Truth is even more explicit: “One of the principle causes why we have so much pain in knowing” is that, with the child, “the best comes last, which is understanding”, and that before this, for years, we remain given to the senses, “which see nothing beyond the most vulgar and common of things,” to our natural inclination, which is “completely corrupted”, and to “impertinent nurses”. Vico, on the contrary, could be defined as the philosopher of childhood, of the world of the child as the childhood of the world. From his first inaugural discourse, he declares to the students, “Quivis vestrum puer maximo praelusit philosopho” – every child is the prelude to a great philosopher, because in him is spontaneously amassed a treasury of theoretical and practical wisdom that the speculative knowledge would have to “explain”, to deploy rationally. The child is not infans, he speaks, one must know how to listen to him. Vico reports, in the De Constantia philologiae, the phrase of one of his sons: My heart is always talking to me, and what a lot of things it tells me!” “

Pons is right to elevate the child – that evidence that maturity is, itself, but a phase – to the emblem of what Vico saw as the cultural decadence spread by the geometric spirit. He wrote his small tract on method at almost the same time Fontenelle was writing his on the utility of mathematics. It is a good contrast, since Fontenelle was resolutely on the side of the moderns, and Vico wanted to have his say about this quarrel. LI sees him as one of the primogenitive advocates of the imagination – leading the power of ingenium against a fundamental shift in the human limit. A shift that leads us, in the 19th century, into the building of the artificial paradise.

Pons quotes a letter Vico wrote to a friend concerning the education of the young man of his time: “It [Cartesianism] has filled their heads, Vico will say in a letter of 1729, “with such great words as ‘demonstrations’, ‘evidences’, ‘demonstrated truths’, thus preparing them to enter in a world of men who are composed of lines, of numbers, and of algebraic signs.”

That is our world now, of course, and we are ruled by those men.

Seeing the forest

I’m sorry for not blogging for a week, but I am overwhelmed with work and love at the moment.

However, I want to make a post continuing my forest thematic – or obsession.
In Language and Sensibility in the seventeenth century (1975), Pierre Dumonceaux points out that even as the French government rationalized its operations under Louis XIV, the texts of that rationalization were shot through with irrationality. Take, for instance, Colbert’s radical reconstruction of the system of forest maintenance. His order of 1669 not only contains prescriptions concerning the cutting and use of trees, according to a new categorization that recognized different kinds of timber trees and their biological life cycle, but it also contained this sentence: Défendons à toutes personnes de charmer our brûler les arbres, ni d’en enlever l’écorce, sous peine de punition corporelle.” Dumonceaux remarks: “In this phrase, the three terms charmer, brûler, enlever are situated on the same semantic level; each time, it is a purely natural action, punished in the same fashion, the crime being of the same nature. Besides, a commentary for water and forest masters of the 18th century makes not the least allusion to sorcery or to the memory of sorcery, it declares, simply, that it is a grave crime committed with the intent to make the tree perish, and to be able, subsequently, to appropriate it as dead wood. Basically, that use of “charmer” rejoins those which will be studied further on under the general name of invisible metaphors.”

That the invisible and the charm are linked here with the utmost rational blindness to their subliminal provinence is, well, charming – as though the Derridean demon were unloosed, here, quietly, and all unawares, to wreck the careful linearity that so confidently beckons us to what we will study ‘further on’ – plus loin. As if the charm, or witchcraft, had no economic effect or motive at all. But what if what is happening here is not just the instance of an invisible metaphor, but an instance of invisible metaphorization, a retrospective projection of rationality upon a document that carries a rather damning and to-be-explained term for an offense that, as Dumonceaux himself concedes, might have once occurred in a more superstitious era. A rationality shored up by a lacuna in a commentary from the 18th century, a charm – the charm of bureaucratic rationality – against the charm.

In a footnote, Dumonceaux refers to a certain maitre des eaux et forets, Lafontaine – but in his capacity as a poet. In Le gageur de trois commeres, a story taken from Bocaccio, a valet, who wishes to inspire in the husband the belief that a pear tree in their yard is ‘charmed’ – that is, that certain visions occur under it – in order to make love to the wife under the pear tree at his ease, with the husband looking on, thinking that he is not seeing what he is seeing.

Under the auspices of cuckoldry, the tree is disenchanted. Or, rather, there is a thematic of deceit – as though charms were the tools of scoundrels or, in the Enlightenment critique, of priests to deceive the populace – that shows its face here. With the promise that we do see what we see, every tree and branch, in the forest.

The woods

If I wereeeee kinggg of the foreeeesssst

A post that I will expand later:

The Europeans were amazed that Indians seemed to have no rules to limit the persons who could hunt. They believed that there was no order among the savage nations, and that a sing of this was that all males could hunt regardless of station. In Europe, of course, hunting had long been a militarized zone between the notables and the obscure – the rustic could not, legally, hunt. But such laws were as good as their enforcement, which was often ad hoc, and always corruptible.

My sense of the numerous small, seemingly discrete shifts in attitude and use that made the world, or nature, an object of use for “man” is not backgrounded by a nostalgic attitude attached to medieval common lands or the like. It is backgrounded, mostly, by the dream of Carpenter Shih, and similar moments in which the tears and breaks in the historical picture – in the canvas we think we know – let in unexepected lights, a steady small time dazzle. The knowledge that the intellectual history of the pre-modern is found as much in the thick underbrush of superstition, story and custom, protests to authority, letters, drawings, songs, as in philosophy or the writings of the Great Tradition.

When Marx saw that the forest laws around Koln were changing due to the pressure generated not within the state, but of powerful economic actors, he had the insight that this was a clue – a clue in a forest, a very Maerchen clue – to the changes wrought by the system of capitalism.

A similar change in forest customs swept through France in 1669, when Colbert reformed the laws on Eaux et Forets.

La Fontaine’s father had made his fortune, such as it was, as the superintendent of Eaux et Forets in Château-Thierry. Between the time of Francis I and King Louis XIV, the system of the masters of the forest – which rewarded the masters with a portion of the chopped down timber, as well as other lucrative rights – and regulations that had allowed for clearcutting regardless of the nature of the forest – had brought the forests of France into a sad state. Colbert, Louis’s minister, wanted oaks for the navy and reorganized the system. In this reorganization, communities and peasants lost out – as did the old, Falstaffian core of masters of the waters and woods. La Fontaine was one of them. By this time he was in his father’s post as Master of the waters and woods. In this position, he received a severe letter from Colbert on August 7, 1666, asking for an account of the wood being taken out of the wood for fuel and the ‘infinity of malversations’ happening in the forest. The tone was peremptory, and showed no sense at all that La Fontaine was anything more than a lazy, stupid, wayward servant of the King. And on all accounts, La Fontaine sold wood and took his share without much regard for the forest. Plus, like a good poet, he was perpetually on the run from creditors.
TBC

Travelling through the republic of wolves: Dom Juan and Little Red Riding Hood

Contra Deleuze, I am more interested in the tree than the rhizome, the tree that my ape ancestors climbed, and that my hominid ancestors, in Europe, worshipped, chopped down, feared when there was a mass of them stretching for hundreds of miles across the country, and went across the globe to encounter, Paul Bunyan axe in hand, on the shores of the New World. I myself, as a boy, was an ardent climber of trees. The bark that would come away, the ants you would find, the life of the thing, hiding in the top branches. I like to think that the way I misread the story of Fontenelle in the forested park at Mésangère is a deeper sign of the times: that Fontenelle, in explaining to Madame de la Mésangère the orbits of the planets, carved their figures into her beech trees. Not rhetorical figures.

Of course, the tenuous connection of friendship and family, the linking of one Rouennais to another, doesn’t quite explain or justify my sense that l’esprit geometrique and the Perrault’s tales, or the tale of Beauty and the Beast, form a dialectically joined complex.

And what are those tales? I want to go deeper in the woods with this question. Those who pursue literature, or intellectual history, seem to be going down a different track from those who pursue folklore, or ethnography. I like it when those tracks merge, or when you can’t tell if they have or not.

Jean Perrot makes a case, in his essay, L’appropriation et le jeu avec le conte, ou pourquoi
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge? that Perrault’s tale was overdetermined not only in being a mixture of the servant or peasant’s old tale and the courtly overlay, but, Perrot claims, also as a sort of suggestion that arose from Perrault’s rivalry with, and admiration for, La Fontaine. The latter was Boileau’s friend and thus would have been Perrault’s enemy, theoretically, in the battle between the ancients and the moders. Perrot’s case rests on a reading of the extraordinary travel letters that La Fontaine sent his wife in 1663, when he accompanied her uncle, Jacques Jennart, into internal exile in Limoge.

Perrot points to a parallel – a possible appropriation – between certain features of those letters and Perrault’s tale, which was published in 1697. The letters are Perrot’s third “tableaux”, pictures of situations that are not proofs, but suggestions. For Perrot, like Perrault’s heroine, does go down a trail of suggestions:

“Accompanying the uncle of his wife, exiled in Limousin, La Fontaine exhibits his impressions of the journey to his spouse in letters dated from 25 August to 19 September 1663. Significantly, he is going to cross the landscapes of Nivernais, the same in which Paul Delarue has gathered the popular version of Little Red Riding Hood. His confidences, which are far from being confessions and which participate more in the exchanges between Valmont and Merteuil, allow us to see a pronounced taste for the observation of pretty women. In the first letter he writes: “The tell us, among other marvels, that many of the first rank bourgeois women in Limousin wear capes of a dried rose color with hoods of black velour. If I find someone of those capes which cover a pretty head, I could amuse myself in passing, and solely for the sake of curiosity.”

Before I go further into Perrot’s comparison, let me present my own parti pris: I think the letters Perrot cites are much more likely connected to Moliere’s Dom Juan, which was first put on in 1665. As Perrot makes clear, the letters were written to be circulated among La Fontaine’s friends, which would certainly include Moliere and people in his circle. Perrot’s claim I think is a bit tenuous, hanging on that hood. And yet I like the idea that at the source of both Dom Juan and at least part of Little Red Riding Hood stands perhaps the finest, and surely the slyest, French poet of the 17th century.

To go forward, then, a bit with Perrot’s citation of the letters. The letters are written in a prose that often breaks into rhyme. In the first one, La Fontaine praises the woods of a property near Clamart where they stopped to rest, “with the darkness of a ten centuries old forest”. This wood, though, seems to have been very cultivated, and formed part of a landscape with a garden. Going through the alley in the woods, La Fontaine is filled with rococo visions of fauns, and of Pan – a domesticated savagery. The next letter, however, gives us a contrast – for here La Fontaine describes going through the valley of Tréfou. In the coach was a countess, La Fontaine, Jacques Jennart, another woman, and presumably some servants:

I can’t think about that valley of Trefou without trembling,
It is a dangerous passage too,
A site for thieves, for ambushes and to hide
On the left a woods, a mountain on the right side
Between the two
A path very narrow
The mountain is covered
with boulders like those
of our little Domaine.

Even though we were all humans in the coach, we climbed out, in order to relieve the horses. As long as we were on the road, I only talked about the usefulness of war: in effect, if it produces robbers, it occupies them too, which is of great benefit to the entire world – and particularly for me, who naturally feared to meet them. They say that they swarm in the woods we were passing through – this isn’t good. Really, they should burn it down.

Republic of wolves, asylum of brigands
Do you really have to exist in this world?
You favor the evil
By your thick, deep shadows
They cut the throats of he who Themis, or gain,
Or the sightseeing impulse, makes journey from his soil!”

Later, La Fontaine’s party passes into Estampes, which has been sacked in the wars of the Fronde and is still burnt out, although they find lodging. The next day they go through Beauce, and this happens:

“boring countryside, and which, outside of the inclination that I had to sleep, furnished us with a very pretty subject. In order not to go to sleep, we put an argument on the carpet: our countess was the cause, for she is of the Religion, and showed us a book of du Moulin; M. de Chateauneuf (this was the name of the footman) took it up, and told her that her religion was worthless for several reasons. First, Luther had I don’t know how many bastards, the Hugeuenots never go to mass: at last he advised her to convert, if she didn’t want to go to hell: for purgatory was not made for gentlefolk like her. The woman from Poitiers then began on the scripture, and asked for the passage in which Purgatory is mentioned. While all this was going on, the Notary was singing and Mr. Jannart and I were drowsing.”

Finally, there is this passage, which Perrot cites to find a parallel with the wolf in Perrault, and which I will cite for my own purposes – a passage much further on, in the letter written when they were approaching Limoges. Perrault tells his wife about the inn they enjoyed at Bellac:

‘Nothing pleased me as much as the daughter of the innkeeper, a pretty enough young person. I teased her about her coiffure: it was some kind of hood with ear flaps, the cutest thing with a border of gold ribbon about three inches wide. The poor girl, thinking that she was showing off, when to find immediately her ceremonial hood to show me. Once you pass Cavigny, they speak only quasi-French; however, that girl understood me without trying too hard. … As mean as was our niche, I allowed myself a very sweet night. My sleep was not interrupted by dreams as it usually is: however, if Morpheus had brought me the daughter of the innkeeper, I don’t think that I would have sent her back; but he didn’t do it, and so I passed.”

In my hasty researches, I have found nobody who has remarked upon the many elements here that find themselves in Moliere’s Dom Juan. There is, first, the marvelous girl who speaks quasi-French, much like the peasant speech in the play; there is the entrance into a dark forest, a republic of wolves; there is the dispute between the servant and the master – or in this case mistress – about religion. And there is the curious twist in the play, where Dom Juan and Sganarellle are violating a code even more sacred then marriage by fleeing a duel - this is the motivation for the trip through the woods. And yet, in the woods, when they come upon some robbers, Dom Juan shows extraordinary courage. Similarly, the trembling La Fontaine is, after all, accompanying a man in disgrace and writing letters about it that he knows will be read in the highest circles.

I have the highest regard for that play of Moliere’s – higher than most people. La Fontaine and Moliere both frequented circles in which libertine notions – Gassendi’s philosophy, and Epicurus’ – circulated. It is easy for me to believe that Moliere hid some jokes in this play, jokes that La Fontaine would discern. That, twenty years later, Perrault would recall those red hoods – that is, I think, a little harder to swallow. But it does make sense that the Red Riding Hood, La Fontaine, and Dom Juan would be joined together in traversing the wood of the Republic of Wolves. Which gets me, at last, to the woods.

natural kinds and the seven ages of man

In Jacques’ speech in As you like it, he delivers this well known commentary on the seven ages of man:

Jaq All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players
140 They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms
Then the whining school boy with his satchel
And shining morning face creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eye brow. Then a soldier
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard
150 Jealous in honour sudden and quick in quarrel
Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly with good capon lined
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon.
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side. His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide 160 For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice
Turning again toward childish treble pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth sans eyes sans taste sans every thing.

The speech has, of course, long ago passed into cliché – and yet if one reads it closely again, it revives in the mind, because it really is brilliantly constructed and creates, in amazingly few words, a panorama reflecting the deep beliefs of the early modern bourgeoisie. It does all this by taking a then common age typology, although not the only one: the ‘seven ages of man.’ One notices that the criteria by which each age is individuated is taken from both nature and the social. In a sense, it is exactly in this form that we classify the negative and positive emotions. The seven ages are not what philosophers would call natural kinds – in that the classificatory scheme that separates and defines one age from another is not generated by ‘natural’ characteristics within the age taxon, but is defined – except in the very beginning and at the end - by characteristics external to the taxon. That externality is what gives the speech its striking and busy visuality – it is as if Jacques were pointing to various tableau vivant. But this externality also insinuates itself into the tableau, reminding us always that it is a tableau of “players”, who are minimally defined by their entrance and exit. This is even true of the infant “Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms”. It is, of course, easier to understand the other theatrical dimension of the other players, because one has the sense that age is represented by the player with an appropriately theatrical consciousness. And that player’s consciousness – which begins at the low level of mewling – ascends, as the tableau succeed one another, to become more and more prominent and frozen, until it returns to the infant’s state of pure play – when the player, an old man, is almost consumed entirely in the thing he plays entirely. It is in this way that the history is strange, or estranging, and eventful without being particularly full of events. The events, too, have their entrances and exits.

The seven ages conception was in competition with other divisions of the life cycle – such as the Three ages – but all responded to the logic of allegory. If there were seven ages, they had to correspond to the seven planets. If there were four, they had to correspond to the four humors. And so on. A conceptual motive articulated itself in this world of allegory: that the world was a unity. It was, every bit of it, created by God.

Yet how much did this unity, this allegorical system, penetrate into the pragmatic age classifications of everyday life? Jacques ‘schoolboy’ was not, of course, recognizable in every household in the Europe of the seventeenth century. The rustic clown, the serf, the lowskilled urban artisan didn’t necessarily go to school at all. To reconfigure the types to represent the clowns would not have been very hard – but did the clowns think in terms of these ages? Shakespeare’s contemporary, Henry Cuffe, in The Differences of The Ages of Mans Life (1607) noted that Aristotle setteth down three ages, each of which is characterized by an endogenous, natural property having to do with our human ‘juices’ – for we are indeed, in this view, trees full of sap, or withered. There’s the green age, man-age, and old-age, in this schema. “For such is the nature and disposition of our body, that by the continual combat and interchangeable dominon of the ever-jarring elements it often changeth its primary constitution.” [Quoted in Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and masculinity, 74) Cuffe was of Bacon’s school, in looking to nature as the root of all things, but nature did include the planets and their evident effects. Thus, he did not finally accept Aristotle’s schema, but came up with one of his own.

I’d contend that the natural kinds of ages do not determine, except at the margins, social age classification – which is indisputable as regards such elements of our natural constitution as, for instance, sex, which is ringed about legally by a tangle of age premises that have little to do with the humors, or planets, or hormones, and much to do with something called consent. It is for this reason that ages have a certain poetry, one which reaches through the entire strange and eventful history of the course of life and shapes such seemingly non-poetic practices as housebuilding and medicine.

Here’s a recommendation from Ficino, writing in the 15th century, in his De Vita:

“Immediately after the age of seventy and sometimes after sixty- three, since the moisture has gradually dried up, the tree of the human body often decays. Then for the first time this human tree must be moistened by a human, youthful liquid in order that it may revive. Therefore choose a young girl who is healthy, beautiful, cheerful, and temperate, and when you are hungry and the Moon is waxing, suck her milk; immediately eat a little powder of sweet fennel properly mixed with sugar. … Careful physicians strive to cure those whom a long bout of hectic fever has consumed, with the liquid of human blood which has distilled at the fire in the practice of sublimation. What then prevents us from sometimes also refreshing by this drink those who have already been in a way consumed by old age? There is a common and ancient opinion that certain prophetic old women who are popularly called "screech-owls" suck the blood of infants as a means, insofar as they can, of growing young again.1 Why shouldn't our old people, Why shouldn't our old people, namely those who have no [other] recourse, likewise suck the blood of a youth? a youth, I say, who is willing, healthy, happy, and temperate, whose blood is of the best but perhaps too abundant. They will suck, therefore, like leeches, an ounce or two from a scarcely-opened vein of the left arm…”

This kind of recipe opens a vein of speculation in the puzzled reader. What is being restored, here? As the relation between youth and age is one of the great polarities of the happiness culture within whose mad triumph we stumble on the roads from the artificial paradise today, the social fact of age classifications and relations has to be a great part of the story of modernity.