Between 1920 and 1935 Mercedes was married to the painter Abram Poole, but she refused to be described as Mrs. Poole, remaining resolutely Mercedes de Acosta. Nor' did her marriage prevent her from pursuing various ladies. She even claimed to have taken a girlfriend with her on her honeymoon. She had remarkable success in this regard. Alice B. Toklas wrote of her, "A friend said to me one day—you can't dispose of Mercedes lightly—she has had the two most important women in US—Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich." Shortly before her death at the age of one hundred, "Dickie" Fellowes-Gordon, Elsa Maxwell's lifelong friend, recalled that Mercedes used to boast, "I can get any woman from any man,"and there is considerable evidence to support this claim. Truman Capote was one of those fascinated by Mercedes's sex life. "Truman thought up a game he called International Daisy Chain, the point of which was to link people sexually, using as few beds as possible," recalls the art historian John Richardson. "He used to say that Mercedes was the best card to hold. You could get to anyone—from Cardinal Spellman to the Duchess of Windsor."
Mercedes always dressed in either black or white, or a combi-nation of the two. She favored cloaks, and tricorn hats, and well-cut jackets. She operated with champagne, lilies, and caviar, and if necessary would fill a room with such delights, giving no thought to cost in the cause of seduction. She was variously fascinated by many famous and complicated women—the Italian diva with the tragic face, Eleonora Duse, whom she first saw passing in a gondola in Venice when she was eleven and who died in Pittsburgh and whose body she arranged to have lie in the Dominican Catholic Church on Lexington Avenue; the Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina; and Isadora Duncan.
Garbo's return had done nothing to alleviate Mercedes's depressions, and during a particularly acute bout she went out in her car with one of her maids, saying, "I wish to God a car would hit us and kill me." Her foolish wish was almost granted, and she was at that instant the victim of a serious accident, being propelled from the car and landing on her head. She found herself in Santa Monica Hospital and only just escaped permanent disfigurement. Dietrich telephoned from Paris and offered to pay Mercedes's expenses. Later Dietrich inquired, "How are my scars?" Mercedes recovered from her accident, though she needed consider-able plastic surgery on her face, often necessitating her going around with bandages on.
and Truman Capote on Garbo:
I'm afraid she will never be a satisfactory person, because she is so dissatisfied with herself and dissatisfied people can never be emotionally serious. They simply don't believe in anything- except their own limitations
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Ugh... math
Leibniz's mathematical investigations initially centered on the summation of infinite series. The concern with indivisibility and the infinitely small was linked in his mind to some fundamental, meta-physical truths about the nature of substance, matter, and mind. His intuition told him that the problem of how to make sense of the infinity of points on a line was an instance of the problem of how to make sense of the relation between indivisible, pointlike souls and the continuum of the material world. For roughly the same reason that no number of points could ever be strung together to make up a line, he believed that purely physical or material principles could not account for everything in the material world, and that therefore an incorporeal or "mental" principle- "substance"—was required to explain the unity and activity of phenomena. He called this complex of ideas "the labyrinth of the continuum." Pursuing these premises through one end of the labyrinth, he would discover calculus; off in the opposite direction, he would envision a world comprised of nothing but an infinite number of pointlike, immortal souls. All of Leibniz's mathematical achievements in later life, and much of his metaphysics as well, had their origin in the ideas conceived in Paris before he turned thirty.
Monday, December 07, 2015
Operation Shylock again
Really the novel is a collection of diatribes in multiple voices- each carried away with its own eloquence- here is George, the Palestinian friend of the narrator:
First—according to George's historical breakdown of the cycle of Jewish corruption—were the pre-Holocaust, postimmigration years of 1900 to 1939: a period of renouncing the Old Country for the New; of dealienization and naturalization, of extinguishing the memories of families and communities abandoned, of forgetting parents left to age and die without their most adventurous children to com-fort and console them—the feverish period of toiling to construct in America, and in English, a new life and identity as Jews. After this, the period of calculated amnesia, 1939 to 1945, the years of the immeas-urable catastrophe, when, with lightning speed, those families and communities from which the newly, incompletely Americanized Jews had voluntarily severed their strongest ties were quite literally oblit-erated by Hitler. The destruction of European Jewry registered as a cataclysmic shock on American Jews not only because of its sheer horror but also because this horror, viewed irrationally through the prism of their grief, seemed to them in some indefinable way ignited by them—yes, instigated by the wish to put an end to Jewish life in Europe that their massive emigration had embodied, as though be-tween the bestial destructiveness of Hitlerian anti-Semitism and their own passionate desire to be delivered from the humiliations of their
European imprisonment there had existed some horrible, unthink-able interrelationship, bordering on complicity. And a misgiving very similar, an undivulgeable self-denunciation perhaps even more omi-nous, could be imputed to the Zionists and their Zionism. For were the Zionists without contempt for Jewish life in Europe when they embarked for Palestine? Didn't the militants who pioneered the Jew-ish state feel an even more drastic revulsion for the Yiddish-speaking masses of the shtetl than did those practical-minded immigrants who'd managed their escape to America without the blight of an ideology like Ben-Gurion's? Admittedly, migration, and not mass mur-der, was the solution proposed by Zionism; nevertheless, disgust for their own origins these Zionists made manifest in a thousand ways, most tellingly in choosing as the official tongue of the Jewish state the language of the remote biblical past rather than the shaming European vulgate that issued from the mouths of their powerless forebears. So: Hitler's slaughter of all those millions whom these Jews had unwittingly abandoned to their fate, the destruction of the humiliat-ing culture whose future they had wanted no part of, the annihilation of the society that had compromised their virility and restricted their development—this left the unimperiled Jews of America as well as Israel's defiantly bold founding fathers with a legacy not only of grief but of inexpungible guilt so damning as to warp the Jewish soul for decades thereafter, if not for centuries to come. Following the catastrophe came the great period of postwar nor-malization, when the emergence of Israel as a haven for the surviving remnant of European Jewry coincided precisely with the advance of assimilation in America; the period of renewed energy and inspira-tion, when the Holocaust was itself still only dimly perceived by the public at large and before it had infested all of Jewish rhetoric; the years before the Holocaust had been commercialized by that name, when the most popular symbol for what had been endured by Euro-pean Jewry was a delightful adolescent up in the attic diligently doing her homework for her daddy and when the means for contemplating everything more horrible were still generally undiscovered or suppressed, when in Israel it would be years before a holiday was offi-cially proclaimed to commemorate the six million dead; the period when Jews everywhere wished to be known even to themselves for something more vitalizing than their victimization. In America it was the age of the nose job, the name change, the ebbing of the quota system, and the exaltations of suburban life, the dawn of the era of big corporate promotions, whopping Ivy League admissions, hedonis-tic holidays, and all manner of dwindling prohibitions—and of the emergence of a corps of surprisingly goylike Jewish children, dopey and confident and happy in ways that previous generations of anxious Jewish parents had never dared to imagine possible for their own. The pastoralization of the ghetto, George Ziad called it, the pasteur-ization of the faith. "Green lawns, white Jews—you wrote about it. You crystallized it in your first book That's what the hoopla was all about. 1959. The Jewish success story in its heyday, all new and thrilling and funny and fun. Liberated new Jews, normalized Jews, ridiculous and wonderful. The triumph of the untragic. Brenda Pa-timkin dethrones Anne Frank. Hot sex, fresh fruit, and Big Ten bas-ketball—who could imagine a happier ending for the Jewish people?" Then 1967: the Israeli victory in the Six Day War. And with this, the confirmation not of Jewish dealienization or of Jewish assimilation or of Jewish normalization but of Jewish might, the cynical institu-tionalization of the Holocaust begins. It is precisely here, with a Jew-ish military state gloating and triumphant, that it becomes official Jewish policy to remind the world, minute by minute, hour by hour, day in and day out, that the Jews were victims before they were conquerors and that they are conquerors only because they are vic-tims. This is the public-relations campaign cunningly devised by the terrorist Begin: to establish Israeli military expansionism as histori-cally just by joining it to the memory of Jewish victimization; to rationalize—as historical justice, as just retribution, as nothing more than self-defense—the gobbling up of the Occupied Territories and the driving of the Palestinians off their land once again. What justifies seizing every opportunity to extend Israel's boundaries? Auschwitz. What justifies bombing Beirut civilians? Auschwitz. What justifies smashing the bones of Palestinian children and blowing off the limbs of Arab mayors? Auschwitz. Dachau. Buchenwald. Belsen. Treblinka. Sobibor. Belsec. "Such falseness, Philip, such brutal, cynical insincer-ity! To keep the territories has for them one meaning and only one meaning: it is to display the physical prowess that made the conquest possible! To rule the territories is to exercise a prerogative hitherto denied—the experience of oppressing and victimizing, the experi-ence now of ruling others. Power-mad Jews is what they are, is all that they are, no different from the power-mad everywhere, except for the mythology of victimization that they use to justify their addic-tion to power and their victimizing of us. The famous joke has it exactly right: 'There's no business like Shoah business.' During the period of their normalization there was the innocent symbol of little Anne Frank, that was poignant enough. But now, in the era of their greatest armed might, now at the height of their insufferable arro-gance, now there are sixteen hours of Shoah with which to pulverize audiences all over the world, now there is 'Holocaust' on NBC once a week, starring as a Jew Meryl Streep! And the American Jewish leaders who come here, they know this Shoah business very well—they arrive here from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, these officials of the Jewish establishment, and to those few Israelis who still have some truthfulness in them and some self-respect, who still know how to utter something other than the propaganda and the lies, they say, `Don't tell me how the Palestinians are becoming accommodating. Don't tell me how the Palestinians have legitimate claims. Don't tell me how the Palestinians are oppressed and that an injustice has been done. Stop that immediately! I cannot raise money in America with that. Tell me about how we are threatened, tell me about terrorism, tell me about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust!' And this explains why there is the show trial of this stupid Ukrainian—to reinforce the cornerstone of Israeli power politics by bolstering the ideology of the victim. No, they will not stop describing themselves as victims and identifying themselves with the past. But it is not exactly as though the past has been ignored—the very existence of this state is evidence of that. By now surely this obsessive narrative of theirs has come to violate their sense of reality—it certainly violates ours. Don't tell us about their victimization! We are the last people in the world to understand that! Of course Ukrainian anti-Semitism is real. There are many causes that we all know, having to do with the role the Jews played there in the economic structure, with the cynical role as-signed to them by Stalin in the farm collectivization—all this is clear. But whether this stupid Ukrainian is Ivan the Terrible is not at all clear, it can't be clear after forty years, and so, if you have any honesty as a nation, any respect left at all for the law, you let him go. If you must have your vengeance, you send him back to the Ukraine and let the Russians deal with him—that should be satisfaction enough. But to try him here in the courtroom and over the radio and on the television and in the papers, this has only one purpose—a public-relations stunt a la the Holocaust-monger Begin and the gangster Shamir; public relations to justify Jewish might, to justify Jewish rule by perpetuating into the next one hundred millennia the image of the Jewish victim. But is public relations the purpose of a system of criminal justice? The criminal-justice system has a legal purpose, not a public-relations purpose. To educate the public? No, that's the pur-pose of an educational system. I repeat: Demjanjuk is here to main-tain the mythology that is this country's lifeblood. Because without the Holocaust, where are they? Who are they? It is through the Holo-caust that they sustain their connection to world Jewry, especially to privileged, secure American Jewry, with its exploitable guilt over being unimperiled and successful. Without the connection to world Jewry, where is their historical claim to the land? Nowhere! If they were to lose their custodianship of the Holocaust, if the mythology of the dispersion were to be exposed as a sham—what then? What happens when American Jews shed their guilt and come to their senses? What happens when American Jews realize that these people, with theirincredible arrogance, have taken on a mission and a mean-ing that is utterly preposterous, that is pure mythology? What hap-pens when they come to realize that they have been sold a bill of goods and that, far from being superior to Diaspora Jewry, these Zionists are inferior by every measure of civilization? What happens when American Jews discover that they have been duped, that they have constructed an allegiance to Israel on the basis of irrational guilt, of vengeful fantasies, above all, above all, based on the most naive delusions about the moral identity of this state? Because this state has no moral identity. It has forfeited its moral identity, if it ever had any to begin with. By relentlessly institutionalizing the Holocaust it has even forfeited its claim to the Holocaust! The state of Israel has drawn the last of its moral credit out of the bank of the dead six million—this is what they have done by breaking the hands of Arab children on the orders of their illustrious minister of defense. Even to world Jewry it will be clear: this is a state founded on force and maintained by force, a Machiavellian state that deals violently with the uprising of an oppressed people in an occupied territory, a Ma-chiavellian state in, admittedly, a Machiavellian world, but about as saintly as the Chicago Police Department. They have advertised this state for forty years as essential to the existence of Jewish culture, people, heritage; they have tried with all their cunning to advertise Israel as a no-choice reality when, in fact, it is an option, to be examined in terms of quality and value. And when you dare to examine it like this, what do you actually find? Arrogance! Arrogance! Arrogance! And beyond the arrogance? Nothing! And beyond the nothing—more arrogance! And now it is there for the whole world to see every night on television—a primitive capacity for sadistic violence that has finally put the lie to all their mythology! 'The Law of the Return'? As if any self-respecting civilized Jew would want to `return' to a place like this! 'The Ingathering of the Exiles'? As if 'exile' from Jewishness begins to describe the Jewish condition anywhere but here!
First—according to George's historical breakdown of the cycle of Jewish corruption—were the pre-Holocaust, postimmigration years of 1900 to 1939: a period of renouncing the Old Country for the New; of dealienization and naturalization, of extinguishing the memories of families and communities abandoned, of forgetting parents left to age and die without their most adventurous children to com-fort and console them—the feverish period of toiling to construct in America, and in English, a new life and identity as Jews. After this, the period of calculated amnesia, 1939 to 1945, the years of the immeas-urable catastrophe, when, with lightning speed, those families and communities from which the newly, incompletely Americanized Jews had voluntarily severed their strongest ties were quite literally oblit-erated by Hitler. The destruction of European Jewry registered as a cataclysmic shock on American Jews not only because of its sheer horror but also because this horror, viewed irrationally through the prism of their grief, seemed to them in some indefinable way ignited by them—yes, instigated by the wish to put an end to Jewish life in Europe that their massive emigration had embodied, as though be-tween the bestial destructiveness of Hitlerian anti-Semitism and their own passionate desire to be delivered from the humiliations of their
European imprisonment there had existed some horrible, unthink-able interrelationship, bordering on complicity. And a misgiving very similar, an undivulgeable self-denunciation perhaps even more omi-nous, could be imputed to the Zionists and their Zionism. For were the Zionists without contempt for Jewish life in Europe when they embarked for Palestine? Didn't the militants who pioneered the Jew-ish state feel an even more drastic revulsion for the Yiddish-speaking masses of the shtetl than did those practical-minded immigrants who'd managed their escape to America without the blight of an ideology like Ben-Gurion's? Admittedly, migration, and not mass mur-der, was the solution proposed by Zionism; nevertheless, disgust for their own origins these Zionists made manifest in a thousand ways, most tellingly in choosing as the official tongue of the Jewish state the language of the remote biblical past rather than the shaming European vulgate that issued from the mouths of their powerless forebears. So: Hitler's slaughter of all those millions whom these Jews had unwittingly abandoned to their fate, the destruction of the humiliat-ing culture whose future they had wanted no part of, the annihilation of the society that had compromised their virility and restricted their development—this left the unimperiled Jews of America as well as Israel's defiantly bold founding fathers with a legacy not only of grief but of inexpungible guilt so damning as to warp the Jewish soul for decades thereafter, if not for centuries to come. Following the catastrophe came the great period of postwar nor-malization, when the emergence of Israel as a haven for the surviving remnant of European Jewry coincided precisely with the advance of assimilation in America; the period of renewed energy and inspira-tion, when the Holocaust was itself still only dimly perceived by the public at large and before it had infested all of Jewish rhetoric; the years before the Holocaust had been commercialized by that name, when the most popular symbol for what had been endured by Euro-pean Jewry was a delightful adolescent up in the attic diligently doing her homework for her daddy and when the means for contemplating everything more horrible were still generally undiscovered or suppressed, when in Israel it would be years before a holiday was offi-cially proclaimed to commemorate the six million dead; the period when Jews everywhere wished to be known even to themselves for something more vitalizing than their victimization. In America it was the age of the nose job, the name change, the ebbing of the quota system, and the exaltations of suburban life, the dawn of the era of big corporate promotions, whopping Ivy League admissions, hedonis-tic holidays, and all manner of dwindling prohibitions—and of the emergence of a corps of surprisingly goylike Jewish children, dopey and confident and happy in ways that previous generations of anxious Jewish parents had never dared to imagine possible for their own. The pastoralization of the ghetto, George Ziad called it, the pasteur-ization of the faith. "Green lawns, white Jews—you wrote about it. You crystallized it in your first book That's what the hoopla was all about. 1959. The Jewish success story in its heyday, all new and thrilling and funny and fun. Liberated new Jews, normalized Jews, ridiculous and wonderful. The triumph of the untragic. Brenda Pa-timkin dethrones Anne Frank. Hot sex, fresh fruit, and Big Ten bas-ketball—who could imagine a happier ending for the Jewish people?" Then 1967: the Israeli victory in the Six Day War. And with this, the confirmation not of Jewish dealienization or of Jewish assimilation or of Jewish normalization but of Jewish might, the cynical institu-tionalization of the Holocaust begins. It is precisely here, with a Jew-ish military state gloating and triumphant, that it becomes official Jewish policy to remind the world, minute by minute, hour by hour, day in and day out, that the Jews were victims before they were conquerors and that they are conquerors only because they are vic-tims. This is the public-relations campaign cunningly devised by the terrorist Begin: to establish Israeli military expansionism as histori-cally just by joining it to the memory of Jewish victimization; to rationalize—as historical justice, as just retribution, as nothing more than self-defense—the gobbling up of the Occupied Territories and the driving of the Palestinians off their land once again. What justifies seizing every opportunity to extend Israel's boundaries? Auschwitz. What justifies bombing Beirut civilians? Auschwitz. What justifies smashing the bones of Palestinian children and blowing off the limbs of Arab mayors? Auschwitz. Dachau. Buchenwald. Belsen. Treblinka. Sobibor. Belsec. "Such falseness, Philip, such brutal, cynical insincer-ity! To keep the territories has for them one meaning and only one meaning: it is to display the physical prowess that made the conquest possible! To rule the territories is to exercise a prerogative hitherto denied—the experience of oppressing and victimizing, the experi-ence now of ruling others. Power-mad Jews is what they are, is all that they are, no different from the power-mad everywhere, except for the mythology of victimization that they use to justify their addic-tion to power and their victimizing of us. The famous joke has it exactly right: 'There's no business like Shoah business.' During the period of their normalization there was the innocent symbol of little Anne Frank, that was poignant enough. But now, in the era of their greatest armed might, now at the height of their insufferable arro-gance, now there are sixteen hours of Shoah with which to pulverize audiences all over the world, now there is 'Holocaust' on NBC once a week, starring as a Jew Meryl Streep! And the American Jewish leaders who come here, they know this Shoah business very well—they arrive here from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, these officials of the Jewish establishment, and to those few Israelis who still have some truthfulness in them and some self-respect, who still know how to utter something other than the propaganda and the lies, they say, `Don't tell me how the Palestinians are becoming accommodating. Don't tell me how the Palestinians have legitimate claims. Don't tell me how the Palestinians are oppressed and that an injustice has been done. Stop that immediately! I cannot raise money in America with that. Tell me about how we are threatened, tell me about terrorism, tell me about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust!' And this explains why there is the show trial of this stupid Ukrainian—to reinforce the cornerstone of Israeli power politics by bolstering the ideology of the victim. No, they will not stop describing themselves as victims and identifying themselves with the past. But it is not exactly as though the past has been ignored—the very existence of this state is evidence of that. By now surely this obsessive narrative of theirs has come to violate their sense of reality—it certainly violates ours. Don't tell us about their victimization! We are the last people in the world to understand that! Of course Ukrainian anti-Semitism is real. There are many causes that we all know, having to do with the role the Jews played there in the economic structure, with the cynical role as-signed to them by Stalin in the farm collectivization—all this is clear. But whether this stupid Ukrainian is Ivan the Terrible is not at all clear, it can't be clear after forty years, and so, if you have any honesty as a nation, any respect left at all for the law, you let him go. If you must have your vengeance, you send him back to the Ukraine and let the Russians deal with him—that should be satisfaction enough. But to try him here in the courtroom and over the radio and on the television and in the papers, this has only one purpose—a public-relations stunt a la the Holocaust-monger Begin and the gangster Shamir; public relations to justify Jewish might, to justify Jewish rule by perpetuating into the next one hundred millennia the image of the Jewish victim. But is public relations the purpose of a system of criminal justice? The criminal-justice system has a legal purpose, not a public-relations purpose. To educate the public? No, that's the pur-pose of an educational system. I repeat: Demjanjuk is here to main-tain the mythology that is this country's lifeblood. Because without the Holocaust, where are they? Who are they? It is through the Holo-caust that they sustain their connection to world Jewry, especially to privileged, secure American Jewry, with its exploitable guilt over being unimperiled and successful. Without the connection to world Jewry, where is their historical claim to the land? Nowhere! If they were to lose their custodianship of the Holocaust, if the mythology of the dispersion were to be exposed as a sham—what then? What happens when American Jews shed their guilt and come to their senses? What happens when American Jews realize that these people, with theirincredible arrogance, have taken on a mission and a mean-ing that is utterly preposterous, that is pure mythology? What hap-pens when they come to realize that they have been sold a bill of goods and that, far from being superior to Diaspora Jewry, these Zionists are inferior by every measure of civilization? What happens when American Jews discover that they have been duped, that they have constructed an allegiance to Israel on the basis of irrational guilt, of vengeful fantasies, above all, above all, based on the most naive delusions about the moral identity of this state? Because this state has no moral identity. It has forfeited its moral identity, if it ever had any to begin with. By relentlessly institutionalizing the Holocaust it has even forfeited its claim to the Holocaust! The state of Israel has drawn the last of its moral credit out of the bank of the dead six million—this is what they have done by breaking the hands of Arab children on the orders of their illustrious minister of defense. Even to world Jewry it will be clear: this is a state founded on force and maintained by force, a Machiavellian state that deals violently with the uprising of an oppressed people in an occupied territory, a Ma-chiavellian state in, admittedly, a Machiavellian world, but about as saintly as the Chicago Police Department. They have advertised this state for forty years as essential to the existence of Jewish culture, people, heritage; they have tried with all their cunning to advertise Israel as a no-choice reality when, in fact, it is an option, to be examined in terms of quality and value. And when you dare to examine it like this, what do you actually find? Arrogance! Arrogance! Arrogance! And beyond the arrogance? Nothing! And beyond the nothing—more arrogance! And now it is there for the whole world to see every night on television—a primitive capacity for sadistic violence that has finally put the lie to all their mythology! 'The Law of the Return'? As if any self-respecting civilized Jew would want to `return' to a place like this! 'The Ingathering of the Exiles'? As if 'exile' from Jewishness begins to describe the Jewish condition anywhere but here!
American Manhood by Rotundo
While middle-class ideas and experience took different forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, recent research has shown that there was far more to the history of Victorian sexuality than a reign of re-pression. The repressive reputation of the nineteenth century grew out of ide-ology more than behavior. Middle-class moralists preached the doctrine of sexual restraint from the pulpit, in the medical press, and on the lec-ture circuit. They started from the assumption that nature had endowed men with tremendous sexual passion while leaving women with little or perhaps with none at al1.27 Working from there, the preachers of purity urged manly self-control. They called not only for premarital chastity but for complete mastery of sexual feeling. One important step in this process was the suppression of masturba-tion. The missionaries for self-control insisted that this "solitary vice" would lead to the breakdown of intellect and the destruction of will, and thus to effeminacy, to insanity, and even to premature death.28 Even if he never touched a woman, a man's sexual desires could ruin him: he had to cut them off at the source to save his own body and soul. Clever men, concerned with the welfare of youth, invented tools to help young males tame their impulses. One such device, when worn by a man, would cause a bell to ring every time he got an erection.29 Even with such technical help, the individual male bore the burden of responsibility for suppressing his sexual desires. Sylvester Graham, one of the leading missionaries for self-control, declared that "LASCIVI-OUS DAY-DREAMS" amounted to "unchastity of thought." He warned that "this adultery of the mind, is the beginning of immeasurable evil to the human family." Such fantasies, by their very nature, were subject only to self-control. Graham and others like him set an immense task for men: to master their behavior by subduing their feelings and even by suppressing their daydreams. One historian has rightly called the ideal of the nineteenth-century sex advisers an "athlete of continence" who was constantly "testing his manliness in the fire of self-denial.'N This stringent code developed in the early nineteenth century, when the expansion of commerce lured young men away from the traditional values and communal vigilance of small towns. The ideology of sexual repression offered an alternative to the unchecked selfishness of the marketplace; it provided a sense of personal control and a form of moral discipline at a time when ethical chaos seemed imminent.3' This doc-trine of self-control hardened into a public orthodoxy once the migration
Love, Sex, and Courtship 121 from country to city became a steady, permanent flow. The twentieth-century view of nineteenth-century sexuality is based largely on that re-pressive Victorian orthodoxy. But historians have begun to uncover a different set of male sexual values. In fact, the very existence of the ideology of self-control—and the vehemence with which it was asserted—might have suggested long ago to historians that an opposite doctrine existed. The quiet, powerful opposition to the orthodoxy of self-denial came from an ethic of male aggression. Although this doctrine was rarely articulated on paper, it made its power felt in many ways. We can guess that such an ethos of sexual aggression existed at the start of the nineteenth century simply by look-ing at the premarital pregnancy rate. Between 1761 and 1800, roughly one American bride in three went to the altar pregnant. The rate for the next forty years dropped to one in four. Even with the rate in decline, it is clear that many young men were ready to engage in coitus before marriage. Presumably, some of those young men were from the Northern middle class. Another kind of evidence for the doctrine of sexual aggression comes from the testimony of those who opposed it. Many evangelicals com-plained of the widespread pressure on young men to experiment with sex before marriage, and a late-century American physician railed against fathers who tickled the penises of their baby sons into a state of erection to assure themselves that their sons were "robust." Purity advocates pointed out time and again that the ethos of sexual aggression had its roots in two widespread assumptions—that nature had endowed the male with an immense sexual appetite, and that it was necessary for him to satisfy that appetite. A physician who joined the purity movement of the late 1800s denounced "those among the males of our generation, who attribute to men an inherent natural need to gratify passions, claiming that the weaker sex understands it to be necessary to man's nature, and willingly tolerate lustful ante-nuptial and post-nuptial practices." Observations of a general tolerance and encouragement of male sexual aggression came from individuals in their private writing as well as from public advocates in books and speeches. MA.ud Rittenhouse, an Illi-nois woman, lamented in her diary that "boys are taught all their lives that purity is only for women (some women) and vice a necessity to them and 'natural.'" The assumption was widely held in nineteenth-century America that males had urgent sexual passions; the next logical step was the belief that it was natural and necessary for men to express those pas-sions. An assumption like this may not be quite the same thing as a moral imperative, but its effect on behavior (by discouraging opposition to male sexual expression) was probably much the same. It provided a basis in belief that encouraged aggressive sexuality in men.34 The existence of an ethic of sexual aggression is also consistent with the experience of males during boyhood. Boys certainly learned from each other that aggressive expression of impulse was appropriate male behavior. This vital lesson could easily be applied to sexual drives. Since boys often expressed their affectionate feelings toward each other through physical aggression, the experience of boy culture helped pre-pare a growing male to accept a code of sexual conduct that stressed the aggressive expression of impulse. There were no tracts that taught this ethic of assertive sexuality, and no preachers who urged its virtues, but its strength is clear by evidence and by inference. Middle-class men, in sum, were confronted by two ethics of sexual conduct, one urging the "natural" expression of aggressive impulses and the other demanding stringent self-control. Charles Rosenberg, who was the first historian to identify these conflicting codes, has observed that "few males were completely immune from the reality of both." 35 How did these two codes develop within the life of a young male? To what ex-tent did they conflict during boyhood? The evidence about the sex education of middle-class boys is thin, but there are enough fragments of data to permit a few informed guesses. A boy's exposure to contradictory sexual attitudes probably began at an early age. The rise of moral motherhood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must have focused women's attention on the nascent sexuality of their children.36 The masturbation phobia that gripped the middle class during the 1800s would have provided special encouragement for mothers to stop children from stimulating their own sexual pleasure. On the other hand, we have already seen that purity advocates complained of fathers who tickled their infant sons' penises into a state of erection to assure themselves of the next generation's virility. By the time a boy reached the age of six or seven, he was also subject to a constant and increasing influence from boy culture, which persistently stressed the expression of aggressive physical impulses. If this cursory sketch of boyhood sexual influences is correct, the forces of suppression and expression were already dividing up along gen-der lines during boyhood. As was so often the case in middle-class culture, "female" meant restriction and "male" meant release. Long before adult sexual feeling had surfaced, conflicting pressures—with strong overtones of gender—were building up around sexuality. Then puberty arrived and brought these emotions to the surface. A male youth encountered an intense barrage of sexual advice from ministers, purity crusaders, and an abundant advice literature. This barrage added public anxiety to the forces that already bore upon a young man's burgeoning sexuality. By the time such a young man approached his first romantic relationship, he had been assailed by pressures and counterpressures of great strength. Given the welter of feelings and the tangle of advice attached to sexu-ality, how did young men actually govern their sexual behavior? What happened when they were confronted by a real relationship with an ac-tual woman? Some simply ignored one line of sexual counsel and fol-lowed the other. This pattern was sufficiently common that "neat cate-gories of 'clean men' and libertines" seemed reasonable to thoughtful people. One man wrote about the kind of "boy who was not afraid to tri-fle with the most forward of girls," and who was thereby "esteemed above his years and almost [as] a man." These were the "libertines," the young men who ignored counsels of purity and responded to the social encouragement of aggressive male sexuality. The "clean men" defined themselves in contrast to the sexually active ones. These "athletes of continence" took pride in being "those who practiced [sex] not at all." They constructed barriers of self-denial which Daniel Webster referred to as "the restraints which youth, with infinite pains, imposes on its pas-sions." Young men who embodied the pure types of self-denial or sexual ag-gression were distinctly visible to their peers, but it may have been the exceptional nature of their behavior that made them stand out. Very lit-tle evidence survives to help us make judgments about the frequency of sexual activity among middle-class youth, or about what percentages of this group held various attitudes about sex. The limited testimony avail-able does suggest that the young man who heeded only one extreme of sexual counsel was exceptional. Most seemed to search for a way to obey one sexual ethic without violating the other. As they struggled with this conflict, young men developed different patterns of thought and behavior to help them abide by both codes at once. These strategies—for, unconsciously, they were strategies—were distinct but not mutually exclusive. Young men might use any or all of them, depending on their needs and inclinations. One of the ways in which male youth reconciled the conflicting codes of sexual behavior was by thinking of love in a way that drained its erotic content.
Love, Sex, and Courtship 121 from country to city became a steady, permanent flow. The twentieth-century view of nineteenth-century sexuality is based largely on that re-pressive Victorian orthodoxy. But historians have begun to uncover a different set of male sexual values. In fact, the very existence of the ideology of self-control—and the vehemence with which it was asserted—might have suggested long ago to historians that an opposite doctrine existed. The quiet, powerful opposition to the orthodoxy of self-denial came from an ethic of male aggression. Although this doctrine was rarely articulated on paper, it made its power felt in many ways. We can guess that such an ethos of sexual aggression existed at the start of the nineteenth century simply by look-ing at the premarital pregnancy rate. Between 1761 and 1800, roughly one American bride in three went to the altar pregnant. The rate for the next forty years dropped to one in four. Even with the rate in decline, it is clear that many young men were ready to engage in coitus before marriage. Presumably, some of those young men were from the Northern middle class. Another kind of evidence for the doctrine of sexual aggression comes from the testimony of those who opposed it. Many evangelicals com-plained of the widespread pressure on young men to experiment with sex before marriage, and a late-century American physician railed against fathers who tickled the penises of their baby sons into a state of erection to assure themselves that their sons were "robust." Purity advocates pointed out time and again that the ethos of sexual aggression had its roots in two widespread assumptions—that nature had endowed the male with an immense sexual appetite, and that it was necessary for him to satisfy that appetite. A physician who joined the purity movement of the late 1800s denounced "those among the males of our generation, who attribute to men an inherent natural need to gratify passions, claiming that the weaker sex understands it to be necessary to man's nature, and willingly tolerate lustful ante-nuptial and post-nuptial practices." Observations of a general tolerance and encouragement of male sexual aggression came from individuals in their private writing as well as from public advocates in books and speeches. MA.ud Rittenhouse, an Illi-nois woman, lamented in her diary that "boys are taught all their lives that purity is only for women (some women) and vice a necessity to them and 'natural.'" The assumption was widely held in nineteenth-century America that males had urgent sexual passions; the next logical step was the belief that it was natural and necessary for men to express those pas-sions. An assumption like this may not be quite the same thing as a moral imperative, but its effect on behavior (by discouraging opposition to male sexual expression) was probably much the same. It provided a basis in belief that encouraged aggressive sexuality in men.34 The existence of an ethic of sexual aggression is also consistent with the experience of males during boyhood. Boys certainly learned from each other that aggressive expression of impulse was appropriate male behavior. This vital lesson could easily be applied to sexual drives. Since boys often expressed their affectionate feelings toward each other through physical aggression, the experience of boy culture helped pre-pare a growing male to accept a code of sexual conduct that stressed the aggressive expression of impulse. There were no tracts that taught this ethic of assertive sexuality, and no preachers who urged its virtues, but its strength is clear by evidence and by inference. Middle-class men, in sum, were confronted by two ethics of sexual conduct, one urging the "natural" expression of aggressive impulses and the other demanding stringent self-control. Charles Rosenberg, who was the first historian to identify these conflicting codes, has observed that "few males were completely immune from the reality of both." 35 How did these two codes develop within the life of a young male? To what ex-tent did they conflict during boyhood? The evidence about the sex education of middle-class boys is thin, but there are enough fragments of data to permit a few informed guesses. A boy's exposure to contradictory sexual attitudes probably began at an early age. The rise of moral motherhood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must have focused women's attention on the nascent sexuality of their children.36 The masturbation phobia that gripped the middle class during the 1800s would have provided special encouragement for mothers to stop children from stimulating their own sexual pleasure. On the other hand, we have already seen that purity advocates complained of fathers who tickled their infant sons' penises into a state of erection to assure themselves of the next generation's virility. By the time a boy reached the age of six or seven, he was also subject to a constant and increasing influence from boy culture, which persistently stressed the expression of aggressive physical impulses. If this cursory sketch of boyhood sexual influences is correct, the forces of suppression and expression were already dividing up along gen-der lines during boyhood. As was so often the case in middle-class culture, "female" meant restriction and "male" meant release. Long before adult sexual feeling had surfaced, conflicting pressures—with strong overtones of gender—were building up around sexuality. Then puberty arrived and brought these emotions to the surface. A male youth encountered an intense barrage of sexual advice from ministers, purity crusaders, and an abundant advice literature. This barrage added public anxiety to the forces that already bore upon a young man's burgeoning sexuality. By the time such a young man approached his first romantic relationship, he had been assailed by pressures and counterpressures of great strength. Given the welter of feelings and the tangle of advice attached to sexu-ality, how did young men actually govern their sexual behavior? What happened when they were confronted by a real relationship with an ac-tual woman? Some simply ignored one line of sexual counsel and fol-lowed the other. This pattern was sufficiently common that "neat cate-gories of 'clean men' and libertines" seemed reasonable to thoughtful people. One man wrote about the kind of "boy who was not afraid to tri-fle with the most forward of girls," and who was thereby "esteemed above his years and almost [as] a man." These were the "libertines," the young men who ignored counsels of purity and responded to the social encouragement of aggressive male sexuality. The "clean men" defined themselves in contrast to the sexually active ones. These "athletes of continence" took pride in being "those who practiced [sex] not at all." They constructed barriers of self-denial which Daniel Webster referred to as "the restraints which youth, with infinite pains, imposes on its pas-sions." Young men who embodied the pure types of self-denial or sexual ag-gression were distinctly visible to their peers, but it may have been the exceptional nature of their behavior that made them stand out. Very lit-tle evidence survives to help us make judgments about the frequency of sexual activity among middle-class youth, or about what percentages of this group held various attitudes about sex. The limited testimony avail-able does suggest that the young man who heeded only one extreme of sexual counsel was exceptional. Most seemed to search for a way to obey one sexual ethic without violating the other. As they struggled with this conflict, young men developed different patterns of thought and behavior to help them abide by both codes at once. These strategies—for, unconsciously, they were strategies—were distinct but not mutually exclusive. Young men might use any or all of them, depending on their needs and inclinations. One of the ways in which male youth reconciled the conflicting codes of sexual behavior was by thinking of love in a way that drained its erotic content.
Saturday, December 05, 2015
Leibniz... the cad
The aspiration to promote the general good; the desire to be seen to promote the general good; the quest for truth; the yearning for recognition; the love of money and titles; competitive rivalry; and sheer, untrammeled curiosity—all of these impulses and others typically shuffled around in the background of whatever it was that Leibniz said he was doing at any one point in time. Behind some of his apparently selfish motives one may often discover some public-spirited ones; and the inverse, unfortunately, is also true. And yet, as one peels back each layer of purposivity to arrive at the next, the suspicion grows that the process will never end—that there is no self-consistent package of intentions that explains the complex totality of Leibniz's behavior. The truly disconcerting prospect is that, at the end of the day, one will find not a "mean" spirit, but no spirit at all. The alarming fact about Leibniz is not that he did not always tell the truth, but that he was, in a certain sense, constitutionally—or per-haps metaphysically—incapable of telling the truth. In his handling of his first contact with Spinoza, to cite the most pressing example, what we observe is not straightforward duplicity, but a much more com-plex phenomenon that deserves the name "multiplicity" that is, showing a variety of related but mutually incompatible faces, none of which seems to enjoy the privilege of being entirely "true" or entirely "false." From Leibniz's multidirectional correspondence on the subject of Spinoza, we may conclude neither that he was an anti-Spinozist intending to lure the sage of The Hague into a trap, nor that he was a crypto-Spinozist who concealed his true identity from his orthodox colleagues. Rather, he was—always to some degree, depending on the listener, the context, and the particular purposes in play a subtle and indeterminate mixture of both. As Lewis White Beck has said, he was "all things to all men"; but the price paid for such omnidexterity was that he was no one thing to everybody. Leibniz's apparent corelessness stands for a fundamental philosoph-ical problem, a quandary that reaches to the foundations of his system of philosophy. In the metaphysics he later presented to the world, Leibniz claimed that the one thing of which we can all be certain is the unity, permanence, immateriality, and absolute immunity to out-
side influence of the individual mind. In identifying the mind as a "monad"—the Greek word for "unity"—he positioned himself in direct opposition to Spinoza, whose allegedly materialist philosophy of mind he adamantly rejected. And yet, the philosopher who made the unity of the individual the fundamental principle of the universe was himself incomparably fragmented, multiplicitous, exposed to the influence of others, and impossible to pin down. How could a monad be so multifarious, not to say nefarious?
and on Paris...
Paris came of age in the seventeenth century. After stagnating through the Middle Ages, the city tripled in land area and doubled in population to half a million during the course of the Grand Siecle. Most of the growth took place in the second half of the century, after Louis XIV ascended the throne. Paris under the Sun King had the spirit of a boomtown: "Everything here is going from good to better, regardless of where one turns; Paris was never so fine or stately as today" gushed one of Leibniz's correspondents, the famous theater critic Samuel Chappuzeau. Dr. Martin Lister, an English traveler, said in 1698 that Paris was "a new City within this forty years." Voltaire later remarked "there is little that was not either re-established or created in [Louis XIV's} time." "Vanity," "opulence," and "elegance" are the words that recur most frequently in seventeenth-century travelers' descriptions of the French capital. Dr. Lister—his awe overwhelming any moral reservations—called Paris a "whirlpool of luxury" Aside from the new mansions, palaces, gardens, and plazas, visitors could feast their eyes on a flock of white swans, imported at considerable expense by Louis himself in order to bring grace and beauty to the slimy banks of the Seine. Among the most visible (and audible) signs of the new wealth were the carriages. In 1594, there were eight carriages in all Paris, according to one count. By the end of the seventeenth century, there were as many as twenty thousand. The new vehicles were icons of progress not just in number but in quality. Voltaire enthused that the glass windows and new suspension systems of modern carriages ren-dered the earlier models obsolete. Among "people of quality," the right kind of carriage became a coveted status symbol. The new test of eligibility for a marriageable male was: What kind of carriage does he drive? While the King thought of improving the city by means of swans, monuments, and other gestures redolent of the Middle Ages, his more forward-thinking deputies, led by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, began to look at the challenges of urban planning in a modern way. They dou-bled the number of public water fountains and refurbished the ailing sewers. To improve circulation on the city's congested streets, they invested heavily in pavement, and on the newly hardened thorough-fares they inaugurated a novel form of public transport: the public carriage, or omnibus. In the year before Leibniz's arrival, the municipal authorities also began installing street lamps, bringing light and security into the night. For perhaps the first time in the modern era, a cadre of professionals took a comprehensive approach to the matters of sanitation, water supply, transportation, security, health, education, and aesthetics.The historian Pierre Lavedan dates the start of the urban sciences from seventeenth-century Paris. Despite the signs of progress, there was no tidy escape from the Middle Ages. Henri Sauval, a chronicler of the times, said that, although no city was better paved than Paris, none was muddier. This was no ordinary mud: it was "black, stinking, of an intolerable odor to strangers," and easily detectible at a distance of ten miles. After every rain—and often, inexplicably, without any aid from the heav-ens at all—the malodorous mire would ooze up from the gutters and claim the city streets, paralyzing carriages and pedestrians alike. "It clings like the mud of Paris," was the common way of describing any-thing that frustrated all efforts at eradication. Paris stank, too, and not just on account of the high sulfur content of its inescapable mud. The pig farms, slaughterhouses, starch factories, and even ill-tended graveyards in the city center all contributed to the fumes. It cannot have helped that many Parisians were in the habit of emptying their chamber pots out the window—a practice as illegal as it was universal, for, as one police source complained, it occurred mainly at night "at a time when one cannot readily see from whence came the contravention." In the tumultuous streets of Paris in 1672, an omniscient historical observer might well have detected the silent forces at work that were setting the stage for a tremendous clash between the medieval world and the modern world, a conflict that would radically trans-form the context within which human experience would take place. Such forces, however, were not always in the forefront of conscious-ness at the time, not even among the new breed of itinerant diplomat-philosophers, who nonetheless must be numbered among the most important agents of change. Leibniz settled on the Left Bank, in the Faubourg St. Germain, home to the hard core of Paris's new class of theatergoers. During his four years in Paris, he lived in guesthouses of the sort patronized mainly by young men from abroad—businessmen, diplomats, stu-dents, and other people of quality in search of favor and fortune. The Hotel des Romains on the rue Ste. Margarite, the philosopher's resi-dence for about two years, had a reputation as a German colony.
Within his valise the twenty-six-year-old privy counselor of Mainz brought with him the ultraconfidential Egypt Plan. There, alas, the vaunted plan remained. Perhaps because he never received Leibniz's epic paper, Louis XIV had already opted to invade nearby Holland rather than faraway Egypt, having secured an alliance with the English monarch for the purpose. But Boineburg and Leibniz were not going to let such a dramatic change in political circumstances get in the way of their manifest destiny. The philosopher revised his paper so as to present the conquest of Egypt not as an alternative to the invasion of Holland, but as the logical next step: Holland was just the appetizer, Leibniz now claimed; only Egypt could satisfy the imperial hunger of France.
and back to Leibniz
It was one of those ages in which the men dressed far better than the women. Men of quality sported feathered hats, long jackets, silk cravats, ornamented vests, culottes or breeches ending at the knee and tied by a ribbon, silk stockings, leather boots, liberal doses of per-fume, and elaborate gauntlets truly worthy of being thrown down. In the early 1670s, just as Louis XIV began to lose his hair, wigs came into high fashion, and soon no head of any standing was complete without false curls extending to the shoulders or below. Leibniz delighted in the whole costume. He became recognizable for the exceptionally long, black wig that always warmed his prematurely bald dome. In the beguiling but treacherous salons of the city, the young German also learned his manners. Superficiality was prized, lightness in tone was de rigueur, and passionate disputes were taken as a sure mark of inferiority. Leibniz even adopted a characteristically Parisian tenor in his French. "I speak in Parisian, as you can see," he jokes with one correspondent. The philosopher's sparkling exterior, sadly, could not entirely mask the fact that his body fell somewhat short of the Olympian ideal. His limbs, we know from Eckhart, gyrated awkwardly whenever he moved. He had a protrusion on his head about the size of a quail's egg, and it may well be that he took to the luxurious coif as a means of hiding this deformity. Baron von Boineburg, who tended to be blunt at times, felt compelled to introduce his protege to the French foreign minister in somewhat apologetic terms: "He is a man who, despite his insignificant outward appearance, is in a position to per-form what he promises." Leibniz himself liked to tell a story about the time he visited a Paris bookshop and was received in a hostile way by the shop clerks, who judged from his appearance that he was unworthy of their attentions. Then, a well-known publisher and acquaintance walked in, greeted him, and spoke most favorably to the store owner of his intellectual prowess. The snooty clerks suddenly became very helpful, and the philosopher was left to ponder the fact that human beings attach such inordinate importance to the merely physical properties of individuals. From the only early portrait (made in 1680, when he was thirty-four) it seems that in this part of his life, at least, the smallish Leibniz was well fed. His second chin spreads generously under and around the first and joins seamlessly with the ruddy cheeks. The rest of his portraits, all dating from his late fifties on, however, indicate a thinning out with age—perhaps the consequence of later digestive troubles that reduced his diet chiefly to milk. Eckhart, who knew him in his last two decades, calls him "more lean than fat." Aside from noting its effect on others, Leibniz demonstrated remarkably little interest in his own corporeality. To judge from his writings, purely private sensations concerned him very little. He abhorred physical exertion and led a sedentary life. "He never sweats," he once wrote proudly of himself in the third person, blissfully unaware of the price he would have to pay in later years for such neglect. He was content to eat porridge.
Disappointingly, there is no convincing evidence that Leibniz ever shared his bed with any other human being.
side influence of the individual mind. In identifying the mind as a "monad"—the Greek word for "unity"—he positioned himself in direct opposition to Spinoza, whose allegedly materialist philosophy of mind he adamantly rejected. And yet, the philosopher who made the unity of the individual the fundamental principle of the universe was himself incomparably fragmented, multiplicitous, exposed to the influence of others, and impossible to pin down. How could a monad be so multifarious, not to say nefarious?
and on Paris...
Paris came of age in the seventeenth century. After stagnating through the Middle Ages, the city tripled in land area and doubled in population to half a million during the course of the Grand Siecle. Most of the growth took place in the second half of the century, after Louis XIV ascended the throne. Paris under the Sun King had the spirit of a boomtown: "Everything here is going from good to better, regardless of where one turns; Paris was never so fine or stately as today" gushed one of Leibniz's correspondents, the famous theater critic Samuel Chappuzeau. Dr. Martin Lister, an English traveler, said in 1698 that Paris was "a new City within this forty years." Voltaire later remarked "there is little that was not either re-established or created in [Louis XIV's} time." "Vanity," "opulence," and "elegance" are the words that recur most frequently in seventeenth-century travelers' descriptions of the French capital. Dr. Lister—his awe overwhelming any moral reservations—called Paris a "whirlpool of luxury" Aside from the new mansions, palaces, gardens, and plazas, visitors could feast their eyes on a flock of white swans, imported at considerable expense by Louis himself in order to bring grace and beauty to the slimy banks of the Seine. Among the most visible (and audible) signs of the new wealth were the carriages. In 1594, there were eight carriages in all Paris, according to one count. By the end of the seventeenth century, there were as many as twenty thousand. The new vehicles were icons of progress not just in number but in quality. Voltaire enthused that the glass windows and new suspension systems of modern carriages ren-dered the earlier models obsolete. Among "people of quality," the right kind of carriage became a coveted status symbol. The new test of eligibility for a marriageable male was: What kind of carriage does he drive? While the King thought of improving the city by means of swans, monuments, and other gestures redolent of the Middle Ages, his more forward-thinking deputies, led by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, began to look at the challenges of urban planning in a modern way. They dou-bled the number of public water fountains and refurbished the ailing sewers. To improve circulation on the city's congested streets, they invested heavily in pavement, and on the newly hardened thorough-fares they inaugurated a novel form of public transport: the public carriage, or omnibus. In the year before Leibniz's arrival, the municipal authorities also began installing street lamps, bringing light and security into the night. For perhaps the first time in the modern era, a cadre of professionals took a comprehensive approach to the matters of sanitation, water supply, transportation, security, health, education, and aesthetics.The historian Pierre Lavedan dates the start of the urban sciences from seventeenth-century Paris. Despite the signs of progress, there was no tidy escape from the Middle Ages. Henri Sauval, a chronicler of the times, said that, although no city was better paved than Paris, none was muddier. This was no ordinary mud: it was "black, stinking, of an intolerable odor to strangers," and easily detectible at a distance of ten miles. After every rain—and often, inexplicably, without any aid from the heav-ens at all—the malodorous mire would ooze up from the gutters and claim the city streets, paralyzing carriages and pedestrians alike. "It clings like the mud of Paris," was the common way of describing any-thing that frustrated all efforts at eradication. Paris stank, too, and not just on account of the high sulfur content of its inescapable mud. The pig farms, slaughterhouses, starch factories, and even ill-tended graveyards in the city center all contributed to the fumes. It cannot have helped that many Parisians were in the habit of emptying their chamber pots out the window—a practice as illegal as it was universal, for, as one police source complained, it occurred mainly at night "at a time when one cannot readily see from whence came the contravention." In the tumultuous streets of Paris in 1672, an omniscient historical observer might well have detected the silent forces at work that were setting the stage for a tremendous clash between the medieval world and the modern world, a conflict that would radically trans-form the context within which human experience would take place. Such forces, however, were not always in the forefront of conscious-ness at the time, not even among the new breed of itinerant diplomat-philosophers, who nonetheless must be numbered among the most important agents of change. Leibniz settled on the Left Bank, in the Faubourg St. Germain, home to the hard core of Paris's new class of theatergoers. During his four years in Paris, he lived in guesthouses of the sort patronized mainly by young men from abroad—businessmen, diplomats, stu-dents, and other people of quality in search of favor and fortune. The Hotel des Romains on the rue Ste. Margarite, the philosopher's resi-dence for about two years, had a reputation as a German colony.
Within his valise the twenty-six-year-old privy counselor of Mainz brought with him the ultraconfidential Egypt Plan. There, alas, the vaunted plan remained. Perhaps because he never received Leibniz's epic paper, Louis XIV had already opted to invade nearby Holland rather than faraway Egypt, having secured an alliance with the English monarch for the purpose. But Boineburg and Leibniz were not going to let such a dramatic change in political circumstances get in the way of their manifest destiny. The philosopher revised his paper so as to present the conquest of Egypt not as an alternative to the invasion of Holland, but as the logical next step: Holland was just the appetizer, Leibniz now claimed; only Egypt could satisfy the imperial hunger of France.
and back to Leibniz
It was one of those ages in which the men dressed far better than the women. Men of quality sported feathered hats, long jackets, silk cravats, ornamented vests, culottes or breeches ending at the knee and tied by a ribbon, silk stockings, leather boots, liberal doses of per-fume, and elaborate gauntlets truly worthy of being thrown down. In the early 1670s, just as Louis XIV began to lose his hair, wigs came into high fashion, and soon no head of any standing was complete without false curls extending to the shoulders or below. Leibniz delighted in the whole costume. He became recognizable for the exceptionally long, black wig that always warmed his prematurely bald dome. In the beguiling but treacherous salons of the city, the young German also learned his manners. Superficiality was prized, lightness in tone was de rigueur, and passionate disputes were taken as a sure mark of inferiority. Leibniz even adopted a characteristically Parisian tenor in his French. "I speak in Parisian, as you can see," he jokes with one correspondent. The philosopher's sparkling exterior, sadly, could not entirely mask the fact that his body fell somewhat short of the Olympian ideal. His limbs, we know from Eckhart, gyrated awkwardly whenever he moved. He had a protrusion on his head about the size of a quail's egg, and it may well be that he took to the luxurious coif as a means of hiding this deformity. Baron von Boineburg, who tended to be blunt at times, felt compelled to introduce his protege to the French foreign minister in somewhat apologetic terms: "He is a man who, despite his insignificant outward appearance, is in a position to per-form what he promises." Leibniz himself liked to tell a story about the time he visited a Paris bookshop and was received in a hostile way by the shop clerks, who judged from his appearance that he was unworthy of their attentions. Then, a well-known publisher and acquaintance walked in, greeted him, and spoke most favorably to the store owner of his intellectual prowess. The snooty clerks suddenly became very helpful, and the philosopher was left to ponder the fact that human beings attach such inordinate importance to the merely physical properties of individuals. From the only early portrait (made in 1680, when he was thirty-four) it seems that in this part of his life, at least, the smallish Leibniz was well fed. His second chin spreads generously under and around the first and joins seamlessly with the ruddy cheeks. The rest of his portraits, all dating from his late fifties on, however, indicate a thinning out with age—perhaps the consequence of later digestive troubles that reduced his diet chiefly to milk. Eckhart, who knew him in his last two decades, calls him "more lean than fat." Aside from noting its effect on others, Leibniz demonstrated remarkably little interest in his own corporeality. To judge from his writings, purely private sensations concerned him very little. He abhorred physical exertion and led a sedentary life. "He never sweats," he once wrote proudly of himself in the third person, blissfully unaware of the price he would have to pay in later years for such neglect. He was content to eat porridge.
Disappointingly, there is no convincing evidence that Leibniz ever shared his bed with any other human being.
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