0914

September 14, 2022

In bed at @10:30, up at 5:30, 3 or 4 pss, 3 glasses of red.  Some high back pain again on awakening.  Stayed up later than normal watching the first part of an interesting lecture on YouTube by Christopher Rothko on his father's color field (and earlier) paintings  -"Mark Rothko and the Inner World."  One of Mark Rothko's quotes reminded me of Niebuhr: ". . .  the fear of death and pain and frustration seems the most constant binder between human beings and we know that a common enemy is a much better coalescer of energies . . . than is a common positive end."

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    I took a photo of the salvage job on Woman in a Black Hat.  I'm not nuts about the painting but I like the photo of it

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    Ed Yong has an article in the current atlantic.com titled "What Makes Brain Fog So Unforgiving." "And despite its nebulous name, brain fog is not an umbrella term for every possible mental problem. At its core, Hellmuth said, it is almost always a disorder of “executive function”—the set of mental abilities that includes focusing attention, holding information in mind, and blocking out distractions. These skills are so foundational that when they crumble, much of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses. Anything involving concentration, multitasking, and planning—that is, almost everything important—becomes absurdly arduous. “It raises what are unconscious processes for healthy people to the level of conscious decision making,” Fiona Robertson, a writer based in Aberdeen, Scotland, told me."  Hmm . . . seems like premature aging, some form of dementia.  [I had to read this sentence in the article 3 times: "For example, Hellmuth noted that in her field of cognitive neurology, “virtually all the infrastructure and teaching” centers on degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, in which rogue proteins afflict elderly brains."  Reason: first 2 times I read the word 'centers' as a noun, rather than as a verb.]  Frightening article.

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    I see in the New Yorker that Jean-Luc Godard died in an assisted suicide in Switzerland.  His lawyer told the NYT that Godard had "multiple disabling pathologies" at age 91.  At about the same time, Lindsey Graham was announcing plans to introduce legislation to ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks, except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.  I wonder what Graham would say about Godard's decision that he had lived long enough (or probably too long.)  "Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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    Also read a book review in yesterday's NYT of CATHOLICISM: A Global History From the French Revolution to Pope Francis, by John T. McGreevy.  According to the reviewer, McGreevy explains "how the epic struggle between reformists and traditionalists has led us to the present moment in the Roman Catholic Church."  I suspect I would very much like to read the book but at 528 pages, probably not in the cards, requiring focused 'attention, holding information in mind, and blocking out distractions.'

    The reviewer cites another NYT article "Deep in Vatican Archives, Scholar Discovers Flabbergasting Secrets" about David Kertzer's research on Pious XII.  More Niebuhr stuff: 

"Mr. Kertzer makes the case that Pius XII’s overriding dread of Communism, his belief that the Axis powers would win the war, and his desire to protect the church’s interests all motivated him to avoid offending Hitler and Mussolini, whose ambassadors had worked to put him on the throne. The pope was also worried, the book shows, that opposing the Führer would alienate millions of German Catholics."

And a reminder of my first visit to Rome, with Mike Hogan,in 1995:

"On Oct. 16, 1943, Nazis rounded up more than a thousand of them throughout the city, including hundreds in the Jewish ghetto . . . .For two days the Germans held the Jews in a military college near the Vatican, checking to see who was baptized or had Catholic spouses.“They didn’t want to offend the pope,” Mr. Kertzer said. His book shows that Pius XII’s top aides only interceded with the German ambassador to free “non-Aryan Catholics.” About 250 were released. More than a thousand were murdered in Auschwitz.  In a nearby street, Mr. Kertzer bent down by one of the brass cobblestones memorializing the victims. Above him loomed the Tempio Maggiore, the Great Synagogue of Rome."

I remember standing on the lungotevere across the Tiber from the Great Synagogue reading a plaque on a wall commemorating the assembly of the Jews there in 1943 for shipment to Auschwitz.  Looking over my left shoulder I saw the Great Synagogue and the Ghetto; over my right shoulder, I saw one of the portals into Vatican City.  A striking experience, the gathering of the Jews for murder within eyesight, a stone's throw from the Vatican.  It hit me then, it hits me to remember it now,  27 years later.

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