Blogging in Plague Time: For My Students

When I take students to Vienna, we always begin our visit with a quick walking tour of the city, partly to orient ourselves, and partly to keep everyone awake on that first afternoon. Among the sights we see is the Plague Column, pictured above in a 1742 engraving by Georg Christoph Kriegl. This remarkable piece of Baroque sculpture, which employs trinitarian motifs to unite political and religious imagery, was erected after one of the last great waves of the plague swept through Vienna in 1679. Emperor Leopold I commissioned it to remember the epidemic and give thanks for the city's salvation.

This seemed like an appropriate image for the first post of this new blog, which I am starting for my students at Houghton College as they have all left to go home in the wake of our own current epidemic. I hope that you students will find this a helpful way to maintain a sense of connection to me and to Houghton during the weeks ahead, when our relationship will be online rather than in person. The posts are likely to be fairly random, and I claim no great significance for them. I will write about whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment. So don't expect much! But it will help us keep in touch.

It seemed appropriate that the psalm in church this morning--which of course I had to hear via livestream--was the 23rd: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

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Chinese Painting

The Wall Street Journal has been running some interesting articles under the heading of "The Staying Inside Guide," offering suggestions for artistic or cultural resources to view online during the pandemic. Yesterday I came across an interesting one entitled "Immersive Painted Worlds," on Chinese painting, about which I know virtually nothing. (The article may be behind a subscription firewall.) The article has an impressive number of links to various things online, and I watched the first couple, a pair of 15-minute videos from a former BBC program called "The Culture Show," which together form an episode on "The Art of Chinese Painting." I thought they were quite interesting. The first episode introduced me to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , which I had never heard of before. Located in the Gobi Desert, they contain a wealth of wall paintings and statues that are well over 1000 years old and were unknown to the outside world for cen...

Paris Cafes Open Again

Now this is good news: I just read in the Times that cafés in Paris are once again able to open for outdoor service . I've never even been to Paris, but that is still a welcome sign. I have written before--it probably deserves another reflection sometime--that this lockdown has not been a big deal for me. I worry about the college, and naturally I'm not thrilled about a salary cut forced by the college's losses. But in terms of my day-to-day life, the lockdown is more or less irrelevant. It makes grocery shopping more of a pain, and it keeps me away from my office, but otherwise interferes with little that I want to do. But the thing that I do miss is the opportunity to get to Europe once in a while. I had to cancel a planned trip to Germany with students over Easter. And this very morning, as it happens, I was supposed to arrive in Poland for a conference of the Austrian Studies Association. Alas, those trips were not to be. And ...

Dursli

Back to Gotthelf! I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink. Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ). This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor. But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution. Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...

Plague Time

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