JUNE 15, 2020 – At the Red Cabin we have a TV but only for watching movies the old-fashioned way—via DVDs. But soon after my wife bought a large antique cabinet with doors and mounted the TV inside, we got used to the cabinet and forgot all about the TV.
A year ago, though, we connected to the internet via a satellite dish mounted on the backside of our roof. The dish is unobtrusive; you can’t see it except from the middle of the wetlands beyond our cabin. The connection’s fine as long as snow doesn’t cover the dish, but on account of expense, we don’t allow streaming.
In other words, as much as we attempt to disconnect from the cacophonous world “back home,” we’ve reserved the means to cheat. Yesterday I pulled up the online version of The Times. Big mistake. The headlines told me all the news that was fit to know: “World Still Screwed Up.” Then there was Facebook. Bigger mistake. Memes and mean stuff, left and right, much from questionable sources, most from partisan ones.
I soon came to my senses. I mowed the yard, hiked in the woods, tended my white pine plantings, pulled out more sections of dock to install once wind and waves abate. To further my escape from reality, I tucked a history of the Renaissance under my arm, grabbed some chips and water and joined my wife for a reading session out on the front patio.
By that juncture I’d left those Times headlines and Facebook rants well behind. The susurrating trees around us, the heron that decided to visit our dock, the fish below the whitecaps rolling across the lake—all were oblivious to human dysfunctionality beyond this Garden of Eden. And comfortably seated in these surroundings, I too was oblivious to the anger, the noise, the hubris, the injustice, the ignorance, the inhumanity of humanity . . . until . . .
I read about Italy of the late 15th, early 16th centuries. To put it mildly and in today’s acronymic style, OMG!
When we think “Renaissance,” our go-to places are where any self-respecting American tourist would go—at least prior to Covid-19: Florence and the Uffizi; Rome and its Vatican Museums. But few of us would venture into the political history of the Italian city-states, the Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples, the Duchies of Milan and Modena, the Republics of Venice, Florence, Genoa, and Siena, not to mention powers farther afield. In that history, which produced some of the greatest art and architecture known to civilization (however white, male and Christian), the student discovers anger, cruelty, insanity, and skullduggery (not to mention plague) that would humble the worst our current age could put up in competition.
This revelatory study is reassuring. Not all is lost. Perhaps out of our current fuss will come a Re-Renaissance filled with the greatest accomplishments the world has ever seen until . . . after further anger, cruelty, etc., yet another Great Rebirth occurs? Or at the very least, a Re-Reformation.
(Blogger’s Note: The featured image is a segment of Raphael’s The School of Athens, a fresco of Stanze di Raffaello in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican, part of a larger commission by Pope Julius II (the “Warrior Pope”) and painted from 1509 to 1511.)
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
