Bloggo Epiphanico: a late night/early morning revelation

How do you like Daylight Savings Time, or, to put it succinctly, DST? Dottore Gianni does not. After all what "daylight" does it save? It should more correctly be called "evening-light savings time" as that is when, at least at the beginning of DST's annual emergence, the light is saved. The morning light, which is essential to the good doctor's existence, is lost just as it was being gained. 

Sunrise (seems appropriate to my topic, sort of) from my hotel room in Ortigia, part of Siracusa, taken on my trip to Italy in March of 2012 - exactly two years ago!

The original loss may be merely one hour of one weekend, but its effect endures insidiously, at least for me and perhaps for other "morning people." I awaken early every morning, and take joy in those first hours. Never are they more pleasurable than when the sun begins to shine before 7 am. This year, after a few such blissful weeks, the morning light was switched off by the inventors of DST, and I loathe them for it! I know, I know (and so does my closest pal Dottore Gianni, from whose voice I have just shifted) that the light will greet me earlier each day, and when summer finally arrives it will precede my awakened self. I eagerly await that time! But for now, a week after the switch from EST to DST, I remain off-kilter, particularly in my sleep patterns, which are thoroughly and unpleasantly affected. 

Thus it happened that the other night I awoke a bit before 2 am (curse you, DST...and curse you, the "call of nature" too!) and could not get myself back to sleep. This kind of awakening occurs all too often to Dottore Gianni, perhaps due to a slight overindulgence in alcoholic spirits during the evening prior, and is usually irksome, accompanied by grumblings and a more than a bit of self-pity. But on some nights it dawns on me to pick up a good book - these days usually a Kindle - alphabet much enlarged for my eyes' sake - and on that night I did!

I had just finished reading a history of the U.S. (terrible, but at least it was long) and had just begun to RE-read a book I'd first come across close to 20 years ago, How the Irish Saved Civilization. Why this book? Well, in two months almost exactly I leave for twelve days in Ireland, and whenever Dottore Gianni travels abroad he does extensive research beforehand. This is just the first of several books he will utilize in the search for the perfect trip to Eire.

But, to the point! Thomas Cahill begins his book about how we were saved by the Irish by looking back at ancient Rome, and he makes some very acute observations about the Roman Republic and then Empire, about its relationship to ancient Greece, about Homer, and more importantly Virgil. He focuses on a few major figures of the late Empire, particularly on Augustine of Hippo, a rowdy, bibulous young yob who, through his readings of Virgil's Aeneid, of Plato and of St Paul converted himself into a fiercely intellectual (and in the end cruel and unforgiving) Christian.

For I too had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as the brilliant Aeneid of Virgil - in fact I had read each aloud, on three consecutive summers during my twenty-plus years as a professor. Surprised? Well, first I'm a nerd; second these are great reads; third, the first two at least were created in their written form from the spoken words performed by storytellers; and fourth, for me at least these epics best come alive when read aloud, even in the silence of my lonely room. 

Sidebar: For a number of summers I read aloud to myself. I used to read aloud for other people's edification, primarily as a reader of "Talking Books" for nearly ten years at the Library of Congress, narrating more than one hundred books. I also worked for two different private firms that produced "talking" books. Over the years my eyes have weakened and while at some point I realized that I could never narrate professionally again, I took pleasure in reading aloud simply for the sake of it, and for my own edification. Other titles I read in this fashion include Dante's Divine Comedy (all three books, in a verse translation by Dorothy Sayers), the Decameron, and the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala (a gift from one of my favorite former students, Jessica Martenson).

I fell under the spell of Cahill's engaging writing (which is about writing in part) and that night I found myself almost dizzy with delight at what I was reading and why I was reading, so much so that I set the Kindle aside for a bit, ruminated on what the author was going on about, and extrapolating from it. 

The rumination: I had just been reading Cahill on Homer, Virgil et al. As I lay a-bed a continuum presented itself, in my mind, from Homer to Virgil to St. Augustine, on down through centuries of writers, thinkers, philosophers all the way to Thomas Cahill and from him to little old Dottore Gianni. This notion made me positively glow with pride and happiness. And then I thought of a quote I used every year beginning my two-semester course in theatre history at Ithaca College, coincidentally written by the great scholar of Ancient Greece and Rome (serendipity!) Edith Hamilton. She was writing about education. She explains it much better than I could, so I'll let her own words explain it to you:

"It has always seemed strange to me that...so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up in the world of thought - that is to be educated."

Simple enough, yes? But to me profound, a reason to rejoice, which is why I started each academic year with that quote. I was of course aiming at students who get so bogged down in the world of academe with its many classes in a broad range of subjects that they can feel overwhelmed, and because of that, some of them can't (or won't) see the forest for the trees. "The pleasure of becoming an educated person..." aaahh... "The enormous interest it adds to life..." yes, of course, aaahh, again (once more with feeling)! Reading that quotation, I think, helped some of them to see the forest as well as the trees, to "get it" and take joy in the learning rather than seeing it not as a chore to be endured, but a labor of love.

Even more importantly, reading Cahill on the ancients, and then remembering Hamilton on education, in the middle of a night in which I couldn't sleep, a light came on - an inner light, nothing to do with DST, or my bedside reading light - that created the glow. 

I had an epiphany!

No, Giotto, not THAT Epiphany!

More like this:

but think, in bed - in pajamas...

or maybe this?

Again, imagine this in bed (with the bottle or not) - this was taken of me just a few years ago, if you think of the late 1970s as recent, that is...and please have a good look at the size of those horn rim glasses!

The other night I saw in a new light, something that I had known and actively advocated for many years: the vital importance of reading, education, becoming educated and remaining educated. So, nothing new for me, right? 

Wrong, at least in a sense. The epiphany came at a time when I find myself questioning why I retired, what I am doing now that I'm retired, what I "should" be doing as a retired old fart. It has often been troubling, a subject of concern for me. In this way this post is similar to another fairly recent post I published here, written in January 2014, called, in short form, "Why Travel?" Have a look if you like - it's really very good, at least according to Dottore Gianni (who is never wrong in these matters). That post too was about an epiphany of sorts, for whether you read the above post or not, most of you know for me international travel is as essential as education, that travel IS education. So the two go well together, n'est-ce pas?

As I look back, I see that much of my life has been a continuing search to be educated. I am rather well educated actually, having risen in the ranks of academe to the degree of Ph.D. But I have never been fully satisfied that I am REALLY educated, so I continue sometimes painfully but usually joyfully to strive for the true Education of Dottore Gianni/Dr Jack. Study in the academic world has certainly been a large part of the search, international travel has been a literal search and remains vital to the "project".

Well, last night I discovered (turned on the light, perhaps?) that revealed (however you want it put) that in fact I am doing exactly what I should be doing during my retirement! No need to work up a sweat about what I'm NOT doing, to worry it relentlessly. I'm not doing volunteer work, not teaching part time (as once I thought I might), not doing anything meaningful - except that I'm doing EVERYthing meaningful. I read voraciously every day,  I study every day, I learn every day.

EPIPHANY!

I am the perpetual student! Trofimov! If that's not all in life that Dottore Gianni has ever wanted, it is the most essential pursuit he's ever embarked upon. 

I wonder if this epiphany seems profound to anyone else at all except for me? Probably not, but what counts is that the light dawned on me, that I discovered it even if it took lying awake in the middle of a night. And that I now feel very much the better for it. My retirement is not for naught! Whew...

And that's my bloggo epiphanico. Dottore Gianni says, Cheers all, slainte, and ciao tutti!

I began this post with a photo of the sunrise, why not end with a sunset? Same trip, to Sicily, on the evening after I took the photo of the sunrise - from, it shouldn't surprise you, the other side of the bewitching isle of Ortigia