'An Aeon in the Consummate Mildness'

I still read to learn but mostly I read to amuse myself in a manner that is second nature. Amuse will bother some. It sounds trivial, like watching cartoons, but the word is variable and has mutated over time. Here’s the contemporary sense, as certified by the OED: “to excite the risible faculty or tickle the fancy of.” The definition itself is amusing. But there’s another sense, a charming one, and it’s closer to my usage in regard to reading books: “to cause (time) to pass pleasantly, to entertain agreeably; to ‘beguile,’ while away, enliven.” It’s a definition disagreeable only to the humorless and puritanical. By this time in my life I read selfishly, which means that most of my reading is rereading. The books I might consider reading have already passed successfully through my filters, like krill sucked into a whale, so when a reader in Missouri tells me she’s reading Gibbon, and she passes along a choice passage from Book 1, Chap. XI of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I’m amused:

“In every art [Gallienus] attempted his lively genius enabled him to succeed; and as his genius was destitute of judgment, he attempted every art except the important ones of war and government.  He was a master of several curious but useless sciences, a ready orator and an elegant poet, a skillful gardener, an excellent cook, and a most contemptible prince.”

We all know such people because we are such people – that is, contradictory. Gibbon’s Gallienus is a sort of multi-talented raconteur. He could do everything with charm and finesse except his job. As an acquaintance, he might prove amusing in the primary sense cited above. As an emperor he was a mediocre flop. The tension between the public and private worlds is one we all recognize. Private life, unabused by the deadly promptings of politics and war, is unspeakably precious, worth almost any sacrifice. Saul Bellow expresses it well in his nonfiction account of the 1975 visit he made to Israel, To Jerusalem and Back (1976). He peers out the door toward the Judean Desert and fancies he can hear Mount Zion. Bellow wonders why this is and suggests,“it must be that a world from which mystery has been extirpated makes your modern heart ache and increases suggestibility.” He takes a walk:     

“I enter a flagstoned court in the Greek quarter and see that it is covered by a grapevine. . . Light shimmers through the leaf cover. I want to go no farther that day. . . I am tempted to sit down and stay put for an aeon in the consummate mildness. . .. The origin of this desire is obvious—it comes from the contrast between politics and peace. The slightest return of beauty makes you aware how deep your social wounds are, how painful it is to think continually of nothing but aggression and defense, superpowers, diplomacy, war.”