Living next to Water

Also: Reconstructing Roman frescos, against mediocre classics, recreating “Egyptian blue,” Victorian flowers, and more.

Saint-Prex, Switzerland. Image via Wikimedia Common.

Good morning from a small town on the coast of Lake Geneva, where I am working on this email. It is already hot here. I have closed the shutters to try to keep the apartment cool (we don’t have air conditioning), but this doesn’t always work. If the temperature climbs too high, the only way to cool off—at least temporarily—is to go for a quick dip in the lake.

Everyone talks about Switzerland’s mountains, but I love its lakes. I was raised within sight of the Puget Sound and would vacation at my grandparents’ lake cabin in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. There is something about living close to a large body of water that just feels right.

Peter Hitchens, I think, would agree. He writes about the beauty of the sea in The Lamp: “Nothing really beats a sea voyage for sheer adventure and spirit. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited would be half the book it is if some of its central events had not taken place aboard a giant liner in an Atlantic storm. I have been across those colossal, lonely deeps twice in Cunarders, and there is a strong feeling of being slightly outside normal time and very much in communion with all those who have steamed or sailed the same way in the past. I will never forget making my first American landfall one evening, glimpsing Cape Race, Newfoundland, in the yellow light of a September sunset, and feeling I had never really been to America before, however many times I had flown there and back. And while I would never wish to be seasick again, I am very glad I have been. An Englishman who has never been seasick cannot really understand how it is we have remained so free for so long. The sea is very hard to cross, and harder still if anyone is trying to make the voyage uncomfortable for you. As the one hundred seventh Psalm points out, ‘They that go down to the sea in ships: and occupy their business in great waters; These men see the works of the Lord: and his wonders in the deep. For at his word the stormy wind ariseth: which lifteth up the waves thereof. They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep: their soul melteth away because of the trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man: and are at their wit’s end.’ It pleases me to think that Saint Paul knew those words and may have had them in mind as he was washed up so perilously on the shores of Malta, island of my birth.”

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In other news, Alan Jacobs reviews a new book on the philosophy of Terrence Malick:

Few filmmakers have inspired as much philosophical and theological commentary as Terrence Malick. He was, for a short time, a professional philosopher, but even if that fact were unknown, his films would still quite obviously provide a wealth of images, events, and experiences that invite philosophical or theological reflection. I have read most of these philosophical and theological treatments of Malick’s work, and they tend to have two things in common. First, they typically exhibit a deep knowledge of and enthusiasm for his work; but second—and here we run into problems—they tend to treat the films as a repository of helpful philosophical or theological illustrations. That is, Malick’s films are treated as an ancillary collection of material that allows professors of theology or philosophy to make arguments they could have made without reference to Malick’s films. All the movie stuff just makes those points more vivid.

Because this tendency has been unfortunately widespread, I am greatly delighted by the publication of Martin Woessner’s new book, Terrence Malick and the Examined Life. Woessner is, in my experience anyway, the first academic writing about Malick to take fully seriously the possibility that Malick’s films are themselves philosophical projects—unique philosophical projects whose value cannot be replicated by the conventional discourse of academic philosophy or theology and cannot fully be translated into any terms other than their own.

Peter Tonguette looks for his mother’s Lutheran catechism:

My mother was brought up in confessional Lutheranism, and despite losing the habit of churchgoing after marrying my wonderful but religiously indifferent father, she never forsook her private faith or the books that bespoke it: the Bible, the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal, the Lutheran Book of Prayer, and Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism—the last of which was the book for which I was so eagerly, even desperately, searching not long ago.

In every house in which we lived, I had made note of the presence of these volumes. They were tokens of her religious heritage, one that I, not having been brought up in the church, mostly stood outside of. My mother unfailingly kept her hymnal near her piano, where it would be meaningfully and regularly put to use, but when my father was alive, she generally kept the Bible and catechism in a neat stack in their closet—not because she did not value them but because they were far too important to her to carelessly (or, worse, boastfully) display . . . In the nearly two years since my mother died in September 2023, though, I was unable to find her well-worn copy of Luther’s Small Catechism. The matter had become rather urgent since I had, not long after her death, joined the Lutheran Church myself.

Scientists recreate ancient Egypt’s famous blue pigment: “The earliest-known artificial pigment, so-called ‘Egyptian blue’ was created by heating malachite, quartz sand, and other materials at 1,500 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit in a process later adopted by the Romans, but was largely forgotten by the time of the Renaissance. Now, a team of researchers has concocted not one but a dozen recipes for the prized dye.”

Rebecca Morelle and Alison Francis write about reconstructing Roman frescos: “Archaeologists have pieced together thousands of fragments of 2,000-year-old wall plaster to reveal remarkable frescoes that decorated a luxurious Roman villa. The shattered plaster was discovered in 2021 at a site in central London that's being redeveloped, but it's taken until now to reconstruct this colossal jigsaw puzzle. The frescoes are from at least 20 walls of the building, with beautifully painted details of musical instruments, birds, flowers and fruit.”