Leverkusen

Congrats to Leverkusen for clinching the club’s first Bundesliga title, in the sixth-to-last round of matches, with a five-zero rout of Bremen. After the fourth and fifth goals the fans stormed the field and had to be shooed back to the stands. My brothers and I are especially pleased for the starting left-back, our compatriot, the esmeraldeño Piero Hincapié. He almost scored what would have been the title-clinching goal, but Bremen’s goalie made a heroic save (pointlessly, as it turned out).

Xabi Alonso is the sport’s managerial celebrity du jour. Indeed, this team reminded me of the 2010 Spaniards who, in game after game, would keep opponents pinned back and then eke out a winning goal in the dying minutes (although this match was more like the blowout final of the 2012 Euros).

Borders; World Cup prospects; a bargain; a first mowing

Samuel has been asking me to (a) “write” (i.e., draw) countries, (b) write down their names, and (c) “write” any “connecting” (bordering) countries. Not so bad when the country is Ireland or Spain; pretty taxing when it’s Russia. Or France, which is much more than just Metropolitan France.

Some facts:

Because France magically borders countries in Europe and (via its Guiana) South America, every World Cup winner but one – England – is part of an unbroken chain of land-adjacent World Cup winners.

Habilitate the sea borders, and England joins the chain.

All the finalists also form an unbroken land-or-sea-adjacent chain. (Sweden and Germany share sea borders, as do Italy and Croatia.)

So do all the semifinalists but South Korea. (Russia/​USSR borders Poland by land and the USA by sea; Serbia/​Yugoslavia touches Bulgaria, which touches Turkey; and Morocco, Africa’s sole top-four finisher, borders Spain.)

The moral: If your country is several steps away from the chain – if you’re in, e.g., Malaysia, Australia, or Subsaharan Africa – you won’t get to the last stages, not for a good while anyway. India probably is too far removed as well. Sure, only China lies between it and Russia, just as only one country (North Korea) lies between top-four-finisher South Korea and Russia, but goodness, you’d have to slog over the Himalayas and through Tibet and Siberia and over all of European Russia and make the leap to Kaliningrad just to get as close to the center as Poland, which last played a semifinal in 1982.

These are my profound thoughts this evening.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Our next-door neighbor, Mike, buys stuff in abandoned storage units and sells it at flea markets and garage sales. Today, he sold to me, for $2, a copy of Janson’s History of Art, which I’d been pining after for decades. I never could bring myself to order that beast of a book through the post.

It may not be the wordiest volume I’ll ever read, but it’ll probably be the heaviest.

I looked at the pictures with Samuel. I left him alone with the book for two minutes, and he started to color in it. He was bitter when I removed it to a high shelf.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I mowed for the first time this year and am now sore.

Mitfords, pt. 8; body-text fonts, pt. 26: Dante; effects of nuclear attack

N. Mitford’s seventh novel, The Blessing (1951), is about an Englishwoman who moves to France with her promiscuous French husband and their son (and their son’s English, xenophobic nanny, who once was the Englishwoman’s nanny).

France-Britain comparison had been creeping into Mitford’s previous novels and here is “on at full blast.” Mitford lived her last years in France.

The dedication is to Evelyn Waugh.

My reading copy is The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford: nearly 1,000 large pages set in teeny-tiny Dante (a font with pleasing apostrophes). What follows is a rather atypical passage for Mitford, since the main speaker is from the USA. The setting is a dinner party. The New Worlders want to talk global politics; the Old Worlders want to forget warring and get back to bedroom politics.

– let me finish –

what they ought to do in the case of atomic explosion, such explosion is robbed of half, or one-third, its terrors.’

‘Thank you, Charlie,’ said Mr Dexter. ‘I for one feel a lot easier in my mind. There is nothing so dangerous as a policy of lassair-aller, and I am very glad that the great American public, if I may say so, M. de Valhubert, without offending your feelings, is not hiding its head in the sand, but is looking the Bomb squarely in the eye.’

(“Heck” – par. 3 – is not an expletive but a British-conceived U.S. diminutive of “Hector.”)

This is hardly my favorite N. Mitford passage. But it goes nicely with this remarkable essay in the Daily Mail, also read by me today, which gives “macabre minute-by-minute detail” about what would happen during a nuclear attack. (Hat tip: Leiter.)

Sobering stuff, even if flanked by links to articles about celebrities, conjoined twins, sea monsters, and UFOs.

Eclipses

Karin has had a cold all week; the boys have been sick even longer. I caught it two days ago. My dad has been watching the Final Four with us; he has a cold, too.

I’ve been ill during many NCAA tournaments. I’m used to watching with blankets and medicine and tea. It must have something to do with the time of year.

My neighbors have been mowing their lawns. It’s warm enough, and our grass certainly is long enough, but I’m just not up to doing it.

And now, the business on everyone’s mind: Monday’s eclipse.

Karin had talked of traveling to Indianapolis, into the path of totality. Bad idea, she decided. The highway will be crammed.

As for me, the memory of the 2017 event is fresh. It was a time of joy and solidarity on the IUSB campus. All too brief. The recollection literally pains me; it makes me squint.

Eclipses are better to study, or to read about, or to imagine, than to view. I recently came across one in King Solomon’s Mines; it was the usual rot about science-minded explorers displaying their “magic” in front of savages. It should be noted, however, that the idea of carrying eclipse-mania through “exotic” lands has a basis in the actual history of science.

Yesterday, I read this in Herodotus (Robin Waterfield, trans.):

The war lasted for five years and although plenty of battles went the Medes’ way, just as many went the Lydians’ way too. They even once fought a kind of night battle. In the sixth year, when neither side had a clear advantage over the other in the war, an engagement took place and it so happened that in the battle day suddenly became night. Thales of Miletus had predicted this loss of daylight to the Ionians by establishing in advance that it would happen within the limits of the year in which it did in fact happen. When the Lydians and the Medes saw that night had replaced day, they did not just stop fighting; both sides also more actively wanted an end to the war. Peace between them was brokered by Syennesis of Cilicia and Labynetus of Babylon, who were anxious that the two sides should enter into a formal peace treaty and arranged for there to be mutual ties of marriage between them. That is, they decided that Allyates should give his daughter Aryenis in marriage to Cyaxeres’ son Astyages, on the grounds that strong treaties tend not to last in the absence of strong ties. These people formalize their treaties in the same way the Greeks do, with the extra feature that when they cut into the skin of their arms, each party licks the other’s blood.

Here is the famous picture of my family observing an eclipse in Esmeraldas (perhaps in 1991). David is shooting it with a machine gun.

R.I.P. Jonathan Bennett

A distinguished philosopher. More: A servant to philosophy. I wonder how many students have been helped by the website he curated during his retirement. It hosts “versions of some classics of early modern philosophy, and a few from the 19th century, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought.”

He wrote, among other things, a classic historical study – Kant’s Analytic (1966) – and a classic article, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn” (journal version here) which contrasts Huck’s conscience with Heinrich Himmler’s and Jonathan Edwards’s. He especially abhorred Edwards’s doctrine of hell. (To put it mildly: this doctrine sits poorly with my having titled this blog entry “R.I.P.”) (Bennett: “I am afraid that I shall be doing an injustice to Edwards’ many virtues, and to his great intellectual energy and inventiveness; for my concern is only with the worst thing about him – namely his morality, which was worse than Himmler’s.”)

He and his wife took their own lives: she, apparently without assistance, in 2014; he “through Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program.”

Browsing his writings, I found this review of The Shorter Pepys; it ends with a quotation from the diarist about dreaming … and death.