David Lowenthal "Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory"

"Medical respectability spread the disease (of nostalgia) from provincial soldiers and newly transplanted countryfolk to the educated elite. Philippe Pinel limned the symptoms about 1800: 'a sad, melancholy appearance, a bemused look,... an indifference toward everything;... the near impossibility of getting out of bed, and obstinate silence, the rejection of food and drink; emaciation, marasmus and death.' Another physician found that in 'cadavers of patients who had died of this disease..the lungs adhered tight to the pleura of the thorax [and] that the tissue of the  'lobe' was thickened and purulent. Victims of nostalgia in face died because of meningitis, gastroenteritis, and tuberculosis, but because everyone believed nostalgia fatal, it so became. No cure was found. The nineteenth century transformed nostalgia from a geographical disease into a sociological complaint. Its early victims had been countryfolk lost in the anonymity of army or metropolis. Their desire to return was literal, oriented toward closed, familiar environments. As local ties dissolved, nostalgia became a generalized sense of loss, focused less on the locality than on the remembered childhood."

Those O'Connells, O'Connors, O'Callaghans, O'Donoghues--all the Gaels-- were one...with the very landscape itself...To run off the family names was to call to vision certain districts--hills, rivers and plains; while contrariwise, to recollect the place-names in certain regions was to remember the ancient tribes and their memorable  deeds. How different it was with the Planters round about them. For them, all that Gaelic background of myth, literature and history had no existence...The landscape they looked upon was indeed but rocks stones and trees"

Daniel Corkery quoted by Lowenthal

someday i'd like to do a history of pseudo epidemiology....

science is secretly very unlike itself.

who's coming ???

For many families in the province of Québec, sugar time is like an annual pilgrimage. It is a time to revisit the foundations of our heritage and its values, to meet with family and friends eating, singing and dancing to songs and music transmitted from generation to generation. In a way it is a return to our roots reminding us of who we are and what we have been through. It is a cheerful period when on a Sunday afternoon you forget your troubles, appointments, deal signings and phone messages to return.

furness arts library at penn

THE GOTHIC

Rouen Cathedral (French: Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen)

         

John Ruskin:

"For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.”

I believe somewhere John Ruskin asserted that a building does not reach its pinnacle of aesthetic beauty until about 500 years of age.

Courbet, Le Chateau De Chillon (The Castle Of Chillon)

i’ve perfected the art and science of belgian waffle making…

you must separate the egg whites, beat them hard, and then fold them into the batter to make the waffles extra crisp and yummy.