I was nominated for this award by tuttacronaca on 28 January 2013. “Versatile” is a word people have often used to describe me. I have taught many subjects. I therefore became a “versatile” teacher. As for my students, if I mentioned Montaigne and Montesquieu when teaching Pascal, they thought I was “jumping around.” I wasn’t. All three wrote about the relativity of laws.
I thank tuttacronaca most sincerely. He is an extremely versatile blogger. In fact so are most of my readers. They read my posts despite the diversity of subjects. Diversity was Jean de La Fontaine‘s motto.
Choosing nominees is not easy. For instance, two of my nominees for the Versatile Blogger could have been Sunshine award nominees. And two of my Sunshine Award nominees could have been Versatile Blogger nominees. But most of my Sunshine award nominees are versatile bloggers and vice versa.
Nominating a WordPress colleague for an award is a way of telling that colleague that I enjoy his or her posts. I simply wish I could have nominated more of my WordPress colleagues.
There are rules
I apologize. I forgot to provide the rules.
First, you must link back to me. You may do this by writing a comment when you receive this post.
Second, You must reveal seven facts about yourself.
In my opinion, we should pay more attention to the education of little children.
Facts are essential, but my main goal as a teacher was to encourage students to widen their horizon and see the many facets of subjects we were discussing.
Living in France had a permanent influence on the manner I dress, cook, live and think.
I have had fine friendships with exceptional men.
I fear extremists.
I am a pianist and an artist, which may demonstrate versatility.
My chief cause is peace.
I love you all.
composer: Joseph Haydn (31 March 1732 – 31 May 1809)
piece: Serenade
I was nominated for this award by tuttacronaca on 28 January 2013. “Versatile” is a word people have often used to describe me. I have taught many subjects. I therefore became a “versatile” teacher. As for my students, if I mentioned Montaigne and Montesquieu when teaching Pascal, they thought I was “jumping around.” I wasn’t. All three wrote about the relativity of laws.
I thank tuttacronaca most sincerely. He is an extremely versatile blogger. In fact so are most of my readers. They read my posts despite the diversity of subjects. Diversity was Jean de La Fontaine motto.
Choosing nominees is not easy. For instance, two of my nominees for the Versatile Blogger could have been Sunshine award nominees. And two of my Sunshine Award nominees could have been Versatile Blogger nominees. But most of my Sunshine award nominees are versatile bloggers and vice versa.
Nominating a WordPress colleague for an award is a way of telling that colleague that I enjoy his or her posts. I simply wish I could have nominated more of my WordPress colleagues.
In my opinion, we should pay more attention to the education of little children.
Facts are essential, but my main goal as a teacher was to encourage students to widen their horizon and see the many facets of subjects we were discussing.
Living in France had a permanent influence on the manner I dress, cook, live and think.
I have had fine friendships with exceptional men.
I fear extremists.
I am a pianist and an artist, which may demonstrate versatility.
My chief cause is peace.
I love you all.
composer: Joseph Haydn (31 March 1732 – 31 May 1809)
piece: Serenade
As you know, Rameau was inspired to write Les Indes galantes after watching Amerindians dance. However, after the Prologue, Rameau’s Indes galantes features
a gracious Turk, “un Turc généreux”
Incas from Peru, and
Persians ((Flowers – Persian Feast), “Les Fleurs – Fête persane”
In fact, only the final of the four acts is linked directly to Amerindians. Moreover, that fourth entrée was composed later than the first three acts. It is called
New Act – Les Sauvages (written [Louis Fuzelier] and composed [Rameau] a little later)
Needless to say, this piqued my curiosity. I also noticed the frequent use of the word “nations” in the music literature of the time, beginning with the reign of Louis XIV or as of Lully. Rameau was Lully’s successor.
For instance, Marin Marais wrote a Suitte d’un goût [taste] étranger [foreign] in 1717, performed by Jorgi Savall who has been restoring music of the 17th and 18th century. Jorgi Savall provided the music for the film Tous les matins du monde (Every morning in the world). Why say du monde (of the world)?
Savall’s ensemble, called the Concert desnations, has also recorded music by Rameau. It could be that the word had a slightly different connotation, that it simply meant “d’un goût étranger” as in Marin Marais‘s Suitte d’un goût étranger. For six months Marin Marais was a student of Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe whose story is told in Tous les matins du monde.
Sifting through the music of François Couperin (10 November 1668 – 11 September 1733), I noted that François Couperin[i] wrote a piece entitled Les Nations. I doubt that in the 17th- and 18th century France, the word nation had the same meaning as it does today. It may have encompassed a wider territory that our current nations. Moreover, Amerindians consisted of nations.
In an earlier post, I mentioned that the Byzantine Empire had fallen into the hands of the Turks in the middle of the fifteenth century. As a result, Byzantine scholars (Greek culture) fled to Western Europe prompting a Renaissance, the Renaissance. However, if, on the one hand, the fall of the Byzantine Empire had a great impact on Western Europe, the revival of Greek culture, on the other hand, citizens of the now huge Ottoman Empire travelled north creating a taste for all things oriental, but also threatening European cities.
The Orient was not new to Europeans but Orientalism reached an apex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Orientalism in fashion became known as “turquerie” and, in its early days, “turquerie” included Persia, which may confer a degree of unity to Les Indes galantes’s various entrées. Matters did not change until the publication, in 1721, of Montesquieu‘s Persian Letters (Lettres persanes).
Persian Ambassadors at the Court of Louis XIV, studio of Antoine Coypel, c. 1715
(please click on the picture to enlarge it)
Montesquieu‘s[i]Persian Letters were written after the visit, at the court of France, of ambassador Mohammed Reza Beg or Mehemet Riza Beg. In 1715, the year Louis XIV died, he was visited by Persian ambassador Mohammed Riza Beg who established an embassy in Marseilles. Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes were written and published after the ambassador and his entourage spent several months at the court of Louis XIV.
Turqueries à la Molière and Lully
However, the word “turquerie” has two meanings. The first, as we have seen, is orientalism. However, in Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme, a “turquerie” is a play-within-a-play that fools Monsieur Jourdain, the senex iratus of the comedy, who is rich but untitled, into thinking he has been conferred a title, that of mamamouchi. Cléonte, the young man who wishes to marry Lucile, who loves him, then asks for her hand in marriage dressed as the son of the Sultan of Turkey. She resists until Cléonte succeeds in letting her know that he is wearing a disguise. (Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Act V, Scene 5)
Louis XIV was very fond of turqueries. The music was composed by Jean Baptiste Lully (Giovanni Battista Lulli; 28 November 1632 – 22 March 1687). But the comedy was written by Molière (1622- 1673), one of France’s foremost dramatists ever.
« Le roi veut un ballet, et qu’il y ait une turquerie plaisante ; au poète, au musicien, aux danseurs de bâtir là-dessus un divertissement qui plaise au roi… »
“The king wants a ballet, and wants it to have a pleasant turquerie; the poet, the musician and the dancers must therefore build from this ballet and turquerie entertainment that will please the king…”[ii]
Added to the turquerie, the fifth and final act of theBourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-be Gentleman), is the Ballets des Nations. It features Gascons, people from Gascony, Spaniards and Italians as well as a blend of persons from different classes. So the idea of nation surfaces again.
In short, both the Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) and Rameau’s Indes galantes are turqueries and illustrate the two kinds of turqueries, Orientalism and a deceitful play-within-a-play. Each may in fact combine elements of both turqueries.
In his writings about the human condition, LesPensées or Thoughts, French scientist, inventor and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), positioned mankind between the infinitely large and the infinitely small (Pensées, 199-72*). He wrote that compared to the universe, humans are infinitely small. However, compared to a microscopic mite he called un ciron, humans are infinitely large.
Infinity is a central concept in Pascal’s Weltanschauung or world view. One of his Pensées, perhaps the most poetical, expresses fear of the infinite. He writes that “[he] fears the eternal silence of space infinite” (my translation): “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (201-206).
That Pascal should have been in awe of space infinite is not altogether surprising. The main discovery of the Renaissance, the sixteenth century mainly, may well have been planet Earth’s place in the Universe. Until Copernicus (1473-1543), possibly earlier, planet Earth was looked upon as the centre of the Universe.
But Copernicus placed the Sun at the centre of the universe, a concept called heliocentrism. Later, Galileo Galilei (1564-1652) also observed that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Such was not the thinking of the Church, so Galileo had to recant on his observation for fear of facing an untimely and painful death.
Although Pascal was a scientist, the Pensées have little to do with science. They have a spiritual dimension. In this regard, Pascal’s thoughts on the two infinites resemble his definition of man’s duality. Although humans are mortals, misère, they can think and know, therefore, they are miserable. We are mere reeds, but we think: le roseau pensant (the thinking reed). Hence our grandeur or nobility.The fact that humans know they are mortals constitute a redeeming feature. We are neither beasts nor angels.
I have already spoken of Pascal’s symmetrical thinking: la misère/la grandeur and must note it again. Pascal discussed our duality, the humaine condition and also does it in his cosmology, thereby giving us, once again, a redeeming half. Without the infinitely small, the infinitely large would engulf humankind. So, as I used to tell my students, it was nice of Pascal to bring us back, and down, to Earth.
However, I regret the fact that we did not devote sufficient time to the infinites. We associate relativity with Einstein, but long before Einstein relativity was also a humanistic concept. Pascal’s two infinites are a most eloquent expression of relativity. For instance, not unlike Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Pascal states that what is an error on one side of the Pyrenees, is truth on the other side of same Pyrenees: “Vérité au-deça [this side] des Pyrénées, erreur au-delà.”
This is the case with justice and jurisprudence. An act may legal in one land and illegal in another land. So there is arbitrariness about justice, a thought which led to Montesquieu’s (1689-1755) De l’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit [as opposed to the letter] of the Laws). Montesquieu will be discussed in a future blog.
For the time being, all I wish to reflect on is that as Christopher Colombus sailed towards India, Galileo and Pascal were exploring space and Montaigne and Pascal were pondering relativity
I was nominated for this award by tuttacronaca on 28 January 2013. “Versatile” is a word people have often used to describe me. I have taught many subjects. I therefore became a “versatile” teacher. As for my students, if I mentioned Montaigne and Montesquieu when teaching Pascal, they thought I was “jumping around.” I wasn’t. All three wrote about the relativity of laws.
