'The Things Which Can Make Life Enjoyable'

On Saturday I paid my first visit to Half-Price Books since before the start of the lockdown, which seems like a small lifetime ago. I joined other masked, socially distanced customers on the sidewalk in front of the store. A masked woman in jeans and a Half-Price Books t-shirt, a sort of benign bouncer, let us in singly as other customers walked out. The shoppers inside were sparse and pickings, as usual, were slim. I found a hardcover edition of an old favorite, Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919; trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, 1996), in which the Dutch historian (1872-1945) examines life in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and the Netherlands. Huizinga sees the period not as a proto-Renaissance but as a maturation, a flowering, of the commonly misunderstood Middle Ages. He writes:

“The great divide in the perception of the beauty of life comes much more between the Renaissance and the modern period than between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The turnabout occurs at the point where art and life begin to diverge. It is the point where art begins to be no longer in the midst of life, as a noble part of the joy of life itself, but outside of life as something to be highly venerated, as something to turn to in moments of edification or rest.”

Huizinga joined the faculty at Leiden University in 1915. The Nazis held him in detention for two months in 1942. After his release he was forbidden to return to his position as professor of history at Leiden. He died three months before the German surrender. In The Autumn of the Middle Ages he writes:

''The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices, gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses.''