04/08/2020
Pandemic, Dread, and Boccaccio’s Decameron
In this episode, professor Robert Harrison reflects on the ways in which the present Coronavirus pandemic gives new resonance to Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death of 1348. This monologue was recorded from Robert’s home. It will be followed in a day or two by the recording of […]
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To all you listeners of entitled opinions, this is your host Robert Harris and coming to you from Stanford, California
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KZSU is closed down as studios for the spring along with the rest of Stanford University
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So I'm recording this show from my own home with the help of Bitoria Molno from her own apartment
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Because like most of you out there, we're doing our best to shelter in place
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During these trist days of the COVID-19 pandemic
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I've stocked up on the basic necessities
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Red wine whiskey rum
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Her mood absent white wine
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Sherry gin and lord even brandy in case that too should prove necessary to roll the afternoons forward
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Whatever helps to move the afternoon along is an essential necessity of these days of exposure to the quiet
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Nilation of the nothing as height of your might have put it
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Only spirit can domesticate the annihilation of the nothing make us more at home in it
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In almost every email I've received in the past weeks
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People keep referring to the strange times we're going through
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Strange is a generic word with as many declentions as there are individuals who use it
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The word strange hangs out there in a kind of void without determining content
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Each one of us undergoes the strangeness in our own idiosyncratic ways
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The strangeness passes into the first person singular and takes on a personal complexion of its own
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Thus it reverberates differently in me than in you and differently in you than anyone else
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Yet we all feel a version of it
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We might not be able to express the specifics of it yet we share and comment the incommunigability or partial incommunigability of it
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Sure, the strangeness has something to do with the occlusion of the future
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No one knows what lies ahead. No one sees beyond the fog
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No one can say with the future holds and store
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How much will have been lost altered, disfigured or reconfigured by the time we get to the other side of this pandemic
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I'm talking about the future of the polity of the economy
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Of our social and political institutions as well as of the way one's own personal fate will be inflicted by the world to come
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Stanford has sent home all of its undergraduates, but most of its graduate students have stayed put in their graduate housing residences
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For a graduate student, it's a temporary residence not a home
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More like a halfway house on the way to some uncertain future home
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The Stanford campus has been in the throes of a lot of new construction lately
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especially new graduate housing
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Corey Dansero is a graduate student in modern thought and literature
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Who was remarking to me the other day that everywhere you go on campus
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You see all these abandoned construction machines
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All projects have come to a halt
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And that goes for the university as a whole
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Despite attempts to preserve the appearance that is getting on with business as usual
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Well, it's not getting on with business as usual not really
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Zoom is not a classroom
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Nor a campus nor a community of students and teachers
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In some
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Stanford these days is an abandoned machine
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A machine of learning and research
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At least that's the impression Corey gets when he wanders around the campus
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And by his own admission the landscape is forcing him to ask himself
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What it means to be an intellectual when you no longer are a part of the university's machinery
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How do I define my intellectual identity and vocation independently of the institution?
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Good question
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But where can one go with it?
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The question I mean is there any clarity at the end of that road?
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Can one be an intellectual independently of the institutional machinery of the university
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of the media or of the publishing industry?
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Most publishing has been brought to a screeching halt by the way
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In short, can one be an intellectual in one's own head only?
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That remains an open unsettling questions
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And it's not the only one
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A lot of graduate students I'm sure especially in the humanities are wondering whether the online teaching
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They've been thrust into is the future of the profession
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And if so will there be any jobs left for them?
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The cost-cutting opportunities of online teaching will become a temptation
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That many universities will have real difficulty resisting
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For universities these days are ruled by accountants and technocrats
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I hate to say it, but that's true
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Even university presidents are ruled by their accountants
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La Chijon félégér, Napoleon de Clerc
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Money is what makes wars
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And he knew what he was talking about
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So the question floats in the air
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What kind of realignment of teaching resources awaits us
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As a graduate student earning a doctoral degree
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Do I have a future along the lines I've envisioned until now?
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If not, what is the alternative?
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This too is a question that resounds in your first person singular
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Machines abandoned, offices abandoned
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Is this what workers around the world signed up for?
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The obligation to turn the home space into a workplace
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Where before one was an asylum from the other and bicevorsa
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Will the public sphere including the workplace ever return from its flight into the private sphere?
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And then there are medical anxieties and uncertainties
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What will I do if one of my loved ones?
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Mother, spouse, sister
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Comes down with the dreaded virus in a worst-case scenario
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Will I ever see him or her again after they're carted off?
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Or will I find myself in front of a coffin somewhere down the line when all this is over?
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Is that a human way to lose someone?
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What will I do if I come down with it?
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Am I ready to die? I've long thought I was, but am I ready to die this way?
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Isolated in a hospital on a respirator?
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Not really.
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Thrain gone, said non-flexor
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Day after day the strangeness persists and spreads as the world recoils and falls away
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When the world withdraws it leaves behind this scary void that we have in mind when we use the word strange
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Existentials and calls the mood associated with world withdrawal, anxiety, anguish, or abandoned
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Trumpal sad calls it nausea
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The German term for is angst or dread
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Most of us I suspect have felt the whiff of dread in these strange days
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Like a bat wing brushing against our forehead
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And why not quote comrade Martin Heidegger here since he's the one who most decisively goes to the heart of this poor mood of existential dread
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When dread comes over us, he writes, I quote
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"All things and we ourselves sink into indifference
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This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance
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Rather in this very receding things turn toward us
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The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in dread
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oppresses us
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We can't get a hold on things
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In the slipping away of beings only this no hold on things comes over us
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And remains we hover in dread
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Dread leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole
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And we ourselves we who are in being slip away from ourselves in the midst of beings
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Pure design is all that is still there
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End quote
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What does Heidegger mean by dazine?
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Let's let him speak for himself. I quote again, dazine means being held out into the nothing
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In ordinary times dread may come over us once in a while
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Maybe once or twice a year, maybe once a decade or maybe never, but it doesn't last for long
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A few minutes or a few hours at the most
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Yet in these strange times it persists for days on end
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And as we lose our grip on the world, we spend more and more time in our own heads
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Until our selfhood also starts to slip away from us along with all the rest
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Because we're not meant to live inside our own heads for too long and when we do, we discover just how
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Insubstantial the ego itself is when it's world deprived
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And then you realize that there's nothing you can do to constitute or reconstitute a world by yourself
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You are in need of others
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The world is always a world we share in common when it falls away
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It is only community. However, large or small
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That has the power to re-found the world and regenerate the social and institutional bonds that lie at its foundations
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And this brings me to the topic of today's unusual show
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One of only a handful that will be able to air this spring season unfortunately
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That topic is Giovanni Volcachos masterpiece the Decamora
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This work was written in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death of 1348
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Which killed off for perhaps one half of Europe's population
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The one knows for sure
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But up to 200 million people might have perished in all of Eurasia between 1347 and 1350
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During the worldwide pandemic
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The majority opinion is that the Black Death was caused by bubonic plague
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Namely that it was a bacteria-based pestilence
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That originated in the east and spread westward on the rats and fleas that infested trade ships
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The minority opinion believes instead that the Black Death was not bacterial but viral in nature
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One way or another are the people at the time were convinced, rightly or wrongly
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That the pestilence was spread through the air and through human contact
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Hence most places instituted the strictest measures of sheltering in place and enforced quarantine
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In the introduction to the Decamaran, Volcachos gives a famous clinical description of the plague
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Its symptoms, its lethal, physiological devastation
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The morbidity rate was as high as 80% of those infected
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And the total collapse of the social order and family bonds which resulted from the disease
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He described in vivid detail how in the once flourishing city of Florence
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Civic order degenerated into anarchy
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How the level one's neighbor turned into dread of one's neighbor
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Now represented the threat of contagion
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How the law of kinship gave way to every man for himself
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Many family members fleeing from their infected loved ones
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Leaving them to face their death agonies alone and without saccharine
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And how?
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Where there was once courtesy and decorum, it was now crime and delivery
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We're not there yet, but we can recognize our intimations of inhuman mortality
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In book catchers introduction
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With the onset of the coronavirus
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I've been asked by several people whether I would discuss the Decamaran and its contemporary
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relevance in some public venue
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I was intending to do so on entitled opinions
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But then KCSU announced that the studios were closing down
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So a couple of weeks ago, I offered to hold an online discussion
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A book catchers introduction for our Italianist faculty and graduate students, a small community
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Then we decided we would open it up to members of the greater Stanford community and on Sunday March 29
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I let a zoom discussion of book catchers preface and introduction to the camera
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Online discussion is not my kind of thing. It's hyperfer radio as a medium by far
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But it came off quite well even I will admit that
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People were encouraged to read the preface and introduction in advance
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And unfortunately we neglected to record that session
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Otherwise we would have aired it for you
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But what I'm proposing for you here is a discussion along the same lines as the one I conducted on March 29
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Let me also mention that by popular demand, I offered a second session
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On a few select stories of the decameral this past Sunday April 5th
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That session we do have a recording of and we will be posting it very soon after this show
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So I'm going to take a quick musical break here
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Take this as an opportunity to pause your recording
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And maybe read the preface and introduction to the decamaran
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Since that will make it easier for you to follow the drip of some of my upcoming comments
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There's a free and pretty decent Gutenberg e-book version of the decamaran online
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So feel free to read these sections before continuing or just go on with the show. It's your call
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Let me begin this second part of today's show by remarking that our situation today is in some ways similar to the one
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bookcatcher describes in his introduction and in other ways is quite different.
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The foreign team world of bookcatcher was in freefall collapse, and we're not there yet far from it.
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And yet there is a kind of demoralization that we all feel.
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And that word that bookcatcher uses recurrently in his intro that Italian word "noia," which means anxiety,
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or on-re-and-dread.
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I've talked about that.
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And the way in which it resounds in all of us in its own way for us today.
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And what we find is that the people who have survived the plague so far in the introduction are all suffering from a more virulent strain of the dread that we all feel today to one degree or another.
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And also, I'd like to mention another correspondence between what's happening in the pandemic of today and in the Black Death of 1347/48.
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And that is the fact that in both cases it seems like the pestilence originated in the East and the maybe it's way westward.
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Of course, the bookcatcher would be extremely conscious of the medieval notion of a translaxium impar, translation of empire by translation is meant the idea that empire travels from east to west in its natural course.
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And this was an important notion for Dante, for example, about a providential understanding of history.
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And subscribe to the notion that world empire begins in Asia.
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It makes its way there to Troy and then from Troy moves over to Rome.
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Of course, from Dante's Christian point of view, Rome was the ultimate culmination and fulfillment of the movement of empire, the westward movement of empire.
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A century's later, the philosopher Hegel would of course say that the Odyssey of the world spirit doesn't end in Rome, but that it has a further chapter and it goes even further west into the Nordic dramatic countries.
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And there it has its fulfillment, but we all know that the story didn't end there either.
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There was a further migration westward where at least western history moves to the eastern seaboard of the United States into Latin America.
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And from there clearly made its way westward across the continental United States to the western edge of the western world out here in California, which is where we're coming to you from any further west than California and the Pacific coast, we start moving east.
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So this notion of a westward movement of empire and the westward movement of the plague is something that will catch us plays on in this introduction in very subtle ways.
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It's not our concern so much as the response of the ten young floor and teens who decide to remove themselves from the deadly pestilence that's raging within the walls of Florence and to take some time off in a beautiful country setting in the hills around Florence.
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And it's here in these garden settings that the Lea Dabriyata, or Farabrigade as a book I'll call it.
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They'll spend two weeks exactly two weeks engaged in conversation, leisurely walks, dancing, merry making, and above all storytelling.
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And all the while they take care not to transgress the proper codes of behavior or compromise the Deneatat or dignity of the ladies.
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There could be more antithetical to the horrors of a pestilence Florence than the idyllic garden settings in which the 100 tales of the decameral are told by the brigade members, prove themselves number ten.
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Now the brigade's decision to recover a measure of psychics sanity by leaving the city is what I would call an immune response to the pestilence.
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Now all living organisms have a biological immune system and its purpose is to police the border or boundaries between one's own and the foreign such that a foreign invasion is met with a robust immunological response.
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And as I speak many of the world's medical professionals these days are scrambling to understand how the coronavirus interacts with our human immune systems, why some people are more resistant to the virus than others, and so on.
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But human beings are not only biological organisms, we're social beings who congregate in communities and polities, so we also have a social immune system, or what we might call our co-emmunities.
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And that's a term I borrow from our friend Peter Sloderdek, co-emmunity, co-emmunity, which would have a social as well as a symbolic dimension.
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Cooperation, solidarity, cognitive reality, collegiality, compassion, these are all forms of social co-emmunity.
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And on the symbolic level, co-emmunity takes the form of shared world views of communal values, of shared religious faiths and practices.
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So in both countries introduction, we find that the seven women who get together in the Church of Santa Maria, November, downtown Florence enact an immune response of their own to the civic disease that is destroying the social fabric of their world.
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Along with the three men who will join them, they take it upon themselves as a brigade to reconstitute a social order among themselves.
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Where every member of the brigade assumes the responsibility to enhance the pleasure of being together.
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Over a two-week period, by following the rules they lay out to live together as a kind of ideal community.
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Or let's say it's the ideal of community that guides them in the way they go about organizing their activities and democratically sharing responsibilities.
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Now the reason that this is an immune response rather than a mere escape from reality is because of the Brigatus emphasis on social organization, mutual respect, and the deliberate effort to re-found the bonds of fellowship that have all but disappeared from the reality they put at arms like.
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There's a difference between taking distance from reality and escaping it.
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And it's a crucial difference.
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The brigade's escapade might be a flight from reality.
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Yet their determination to follow an almost ideal code of sociability during their soldier is a direct response to the collapse of the social order in Florence.
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In that respect, their flight is wholly justified.
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And when I use that word justified, I'm alluding here to a remarkable essay by Hannah Addent called "Men in Dark Times" where she writes, "flight from the world in dark times of infatence can always be justified as long as reality is not ignored but is acknowledged as the thing that must be escaped."
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The plague's reality may recede into the background of the decamaran once the storytelling begins.
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But after such a decisive framing by Bokacha, a framing that no one can forget, that reality is never ignored but is directly and indirectly responded to.
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Now the most important form the brigades immune response takes in the decamaran is that of storytelling.
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During the two weeks the young Florentine spend in the countryside, their activity consists primarily of narrating tales to one another.
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They take turns being queens and kings and each one tells one story a day for a total of 100 stories and all.
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And through this means Bokacha may situate literature on the margins of reality yet in his world telling a good story is one of the supreme social virtues.
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And I think that Bokacha understood something quite precious, namely that nothing enhances human relations and the bonds of community more than the mastery of the art of narrative.
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Stories provide a form of social pleasure even when they are read or nowadays seen in the solitude of one's private chambers.
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Nowadays we mostly outsource storytelling the movies and television series, but throughout human history almost everyone was an active storyteller to one degree or another you had to be.
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In fact human culture has its origin in stories and its ongoing history is one of endless storytelling.
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Where would we be without stories, without the art of recounting them, without their narrative organization of events and their structuring of time.
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If you ask me where I'm from or what happened at the party last night or why my friend is so upset, I can hardly answer you without telling a little story.
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It is formal as well as informal modes storytelling is one of the most basic forms of human interaction of all.
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The fabric of life itself is woven into and by stories so much so that the quality of human conversation depends to a great extent on our mastery of the art of narrative.
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This art is something we either bring or fail to bring to bear day in and day out on our relations with others.
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And beyond their power to delight or maybe this is part of their delight stories we affirm in exemplary, dramatic or allegorical modes, the values that bind societies together.
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That book attribute storytelling as part of an ethic of neighborly love is quite clear from the preface to the decamaran.
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There he declares that of all the moral virtues the most important by far is gratitude.
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He then goes on to present the decamaran to his reader as an active gratitude for the generosity, shown to him in the past by various friends in his time of lead and distress.
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And of course the hundred stories of the decamaran are told in a time of distress.
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Well, capture dedicates his books specifically to women or they're the ones who are most in need of the kind of diversion and pleasure that literature can provide.
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Women he says are not as fortunate as men when it comes to finding relief for their sorrows or distraction from their own need.
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Countless sources of destruction, quoting, they can always walk abroad see and hear many things go fouling hunting, fishing, riding and gambling or attend to their business affairs.
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It's typical of vocabulary or to subsume business affairs under the rubric of diversion.
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While women are all too often quoting again, forced to follow the wind, spanses and dictates of their fathers, mothers, brothers and husbands so that they spend most of their time cooped up within the narrow confines of their room.
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So in that sense women in low-conscious time were in a kind of constant quarantine, the way we are temporarily here today.
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In any case in this dedication to such women, the decamaran presumes to offer them the temporary solace and pleasure that the brigade itself finds in the gardens outside of the city.
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Now I must claiming nor is what capture claiming that stories alter reality any more than the garden settings in which these stories are told to.
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Yet by offering asylum from reality, both stories and gardens answer very real human needs, one of which is precisely the need to gain from time to time a distance from reality.
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We can take the measure of vocato's art of storytelling by comparing it with some of his sources.
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Consider the nobelina.
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The nobelina was a late 13th century collection of 100 short vignettes, 100 vignettes like the decamaran's 100 stories.
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That offered itself to the reader as a bouquet of beautiful flowers, quoting the nobelina in the pro, let us record here some flowers of speech of elegant manners elegant reposts elegant deeds elegant generosity and elegant loves.
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So story 89 of the nobelina was not an important source for vocato, but it certainly was a source was well aware of and a few of the stories repress some of the vignettes of the nobelina and a case in point is story 89 of the nobelina which is typical of the letters emphasis on punchline and rip our tea.
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Here's the whole vignette, a group of nights were dining one night in a great floor in team house and there was a courtier present was a great speaker.
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After they had finished eating he began recounting a story that went on and on.
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A young man of the house who was serving and perhaps had not had his bill called out to him by name and said, where were told to do this story did not tell you all of it.
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And he answered and why not and he answered because he did not tell you how it ends.
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All right, that's charming enough I suppose, but vocato rewrites this in the first novella of day six.
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And the prescribed theme of day six is that the story tellers quote tell of those who on being provoked by some verbal pleasantry have returned like for like, or who by a prompt retort or
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or shrew maneuver have avoided danger, discomfort or rigidity.
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So here's what cat shows expanded version of the novella in a vignette.
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As many of you will know either through direct personal acquaintance or through hearsay.
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Another while ago they're lived in our city a lady of silver tongue and gentle breeding whose excellence was such that she deserves to be mentioned by name.
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She was called my donna oreita and she was the white but misset jade speed.
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One day finding herself in the countryside like ourselves and proceeding from place to place by way of recreation with a party of nights and ladies whom she had entertained to a meal in her house earlier that day.
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One of the nights turned to her and perhaps because they were having to travel a long way on foot to the place they all desire to reach he said.
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I don't know it that if you like I shall take you riding along a goodly stretch of our journey by telling you one of the finest tales in the world.
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Sire replied the lady I beseech you most earnestly to do so and I shall look upon it as a great favor.
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Whereupon this worthy night whose sword play was doubtless on a par with his storytelling began to recite his tale which in itself was indeed excellent.
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But by constantly repeating the same phrases and recapitulating sections of the plot and every so often declaring that he had made a mess of that bit and regularly confusing the names of the characters you ruined it completely.
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Moreover his motive delivery was totally out of keeping with the characters and the incidents he was describing so that it was painful from my don't know that to listen to.
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She began to perspire freely and her heart missed several beats as though she had fallen ill and was about to give up the ghost.
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And in the end when she could endure it no longer having perceived that the night had tied himself inextricably and nuts she said to him in affable tones.
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Sir you have taken me riding on a horse that trots very jerkily pray be good enough to set me down.
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The night was apparently far more capable of taking a hint of telling a tale saw the joke and took it in the cheerful spirits leaving aside the story he had begun and so in that the handle.
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Return his attention to telling her tales quite another sort.
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So there you have it where the novelino tale offers the reader a single flower of with.
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Ocatros version opens onto a little garden as it were.
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To begin with it introduces a gender dynamic.
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That's not in the original a gender dynamic that gives a holy different kind of punch to my donna ore at this we party which sparkles both in its elegance and its tact.
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The metaphoric of horseback riding a rise naturally from the scene.
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Ladies and nights along and fatiguing walk in the country so forth.
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The specifics of the night's mangling of this tale are catalogued and what amounts to a kind of negative manifesto of narrative style.
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As the reader is directly drawn into the discomfort and exasperation that the flailing performance induces in my donna ore at that.
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The discrete sexual connotations of horseback riding in the tale also serves to establish an overt parallel.
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Between the ineptitude of storytelling and the ineptitude of love.
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In some while it too culminates in a rip our tea.
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There is a density to this reworking that involves for more than a punchline.
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It articulates an aesthetic of storytelling on the one hand.
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And like all the stories of day six a discrete social ethics on the end.
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From one point of view. The analogy between horseback riding and storytelling is simply a clever figure of speech that gives my donna ore at the opportunity.
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Through prompt retort.
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To extricate yourself from an uncomfortable situation with an elegant metaphor.
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While at the same time rescuing her interlocutor without an offending.
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But there's more to it than that because horsemanship.
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In fact, as a long traditional association with views to or virtue.
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Understood as the mastery and control of recalcitrant forces.
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| 00:41:55.140 |
This association we trace all the way back to Plato's famous allegory in the feeder's dialogue.
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Where the virtuous soul is compared to a chariot here.
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We succeed in keeping his two horses. The black steade and the white steade.
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One is an allegory at the will and desire. The other is a reason.
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And this virtuous soul is a chariot here who manages to keep these two horses on a straight path.
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As they naturally tend to pull in different directions.
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So by comparing the night's bad narrative style to bad horsemanship.
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Bocaccio is in effect.
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Staking out an ethical and not merely aesthetic claim for good story.
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In a very discreet way to be sure.
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But nevertheless quite unmistakable.
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And this is part of Bocaccio's larger ethics of what I would call his civic humanism.
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Or let's call it civil humanism.
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Sensitive humanism has a different connotation for those scholars of the Renaissance.
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But in general, we could say that Bocaccio was not a moralist.
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He was not a reformer or would be profit.
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He was not especially preoccupied by human depravity or man's prospects for salvation.
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He did not like his predecessor, Dante Horang, his reader from any self-directed pulpit of moral, political or religious convictions.
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And if the ethical claims for the decamaran, which he lays out in his preface are finally extremely modest.
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Namely, the claims that the author hopes through his stories to offer diversion and consolation to those in need of one or the other.
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Or both.
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If these are modest claims, it's because the human condition itself is a modest one.
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The plague can attest to that much.
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To be human means to be vulnerable to misfortune and disaster.
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| 00:44:10.140 |
It means periodically to find oneself in need of help, comfort, distraction or edification.
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Our condition is for the most part an affair of the everyday, not of the heroic.
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And our minimal ethical responsibility to our neighbor, according to no conscious humanism, consists not in showing him or her the way to redemption.
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When in helping him or her get through the day.
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This help.
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This ethic of helping your neighbor get through the day takes many modest forms, not the least of which is rendering the sphere of social interaction more pleasurable through which the quorum storytelling, fellowship, conversation, courtesy and sociability.
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To add to the pleasure rather than the misery of life.
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That is the first principle of book out your humanism.
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And that's not the triumphalist humanism of later eras, which saw a man in his self-reliance as the glory of all creation.
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But the civil humanism of neighborly love.
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And that's why it's not by chance that book out your begins the decamour.
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With the word "umana" or "human".
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The very first sentence in the preface says "umana goes a very compassionate, idiot, feet."
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It is human to have compassion for those in distress.
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And this, the human compassion for those in distress and the discrete social virtue of storytelling,
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I can't think of a more appropriate ethic to our own time.
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I want to remind our listeners that in a day or two, we're going to be posting the recording of a Zoom discussion that I led on April 5th this past Sunday,
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in which a number of our colleagues from the Italian Department of Graduate Students and Faculty,
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as well as other members from the Stanford community joined us in a discussion, a follow up discussion actually of book outures to camera on.
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Everyone was encouraged to read the following stories from day two, story five, day three, stories one in ten, day four, story five, day five, story nine.
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And if you have a chance to read these stories before you tune into the next show, I think that it'll enable you to follow it more closely, but knowing that those stories is not an absolute precondition for understanding what we're going to be talking about when we hear that show for you next time.
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So, this is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions, hope you enjoyed our first episode of book outures to camera on and is pertinent to our own time of pandemic.
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There will be a follow up and we'll see what comes up after that. Take care, bye bye.
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