Home is where we start from. That’s why different things appear perfectly natural to different folk. For much of the Near East it is not democracy that is natural but the milet system of the old Ottoman Empire, where no one had votes, but each minority was responsible for itself under an Islamic umbrella. For me it is the English countryside before the Great War, the Old England of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.
For most middle-aged Americans I suppose it is, for better or worse, the Eisenhower era: the wonders of modern science, Detroit dragons, and America as Top Nation forever more. No one now (apart, apparently, from Mr. Rumsfeld) thinks the world is, or ought to be, as simple as it seemed then in the black-and-white pages of Time magazine. Many of us never thought it was.
Ask your pets what their world looks like. Your cat knows your neighborhood quite as well as you do, but what he has marked on his mental map is entirely different. Poor Kit Smart wondered at the wisdom of cats and they put him in Bedlam. You see a crack in the neighbor’s siding. Your cat sees the Gate of Mouse and watches with the full-bore attention of Ernest Hemingway gazing at the gate through which the bull will enter the arena to meet its matador.
Your dog, too, he has a consciousness that makes intelligent distinctions mostly on the basis of smell—a sense most humans (except, of course, connoisseurs of wine) are well on the way to losing. I have seen a pack of beagles follow the trail of a hare through a mink farm without faltering. This is a serious feat of discrimination, since aroma algebra teaches us that mink equals skunk squared. How much we must be missing. One wonders what gave the animals in that Sinhalese nature reserve early warning of last December’s tsunami, so that they made their way inland and escaped the deadly waves.
In the ancient world, it was the Stoic philosophers who were the great exponents of the notion that there is a hidden sympathy that links all physical phenomena. If the Stoics had known about Tokyo and Texas, they would certainly have asserted that a butterfly clapping its wings in the air over the Japanese capital could cause a tornado over Austin. Even spiritual things were exquisitely refined matter, and so were subtly and physically linked. The soul was like gold to airy thinness beat; the whole round earth was every way bound with golden chains too fine for human sight.
It was these connections that made things beautiful. If each person and thing lived in accordance with its own nature, it would become perfectly adapted to its environment, indeed, to the entire universe of which it was a part. Beauty could be discerned wherever things were well-proportioned to one another, above all when they displayed a mathematical symmetry, like the colonnaded frontage of a Greek temple.
Just such a Stoic combination came my way the other evening. It involved a crumbly English cheese called Blue Shropshire (like Stilton, but golden instead of white) and a 2002 Vouvray (costing little more than $12) called Masbon, which is French for “good estate,” though I guess it is simply the name of the shipper. (The experience would probably have been as good, just different, with many another cheese, perhaps best with Wensleydale, that crumbly white poetry from the Yorkshire Dales, home of James Herriot, the horsedoctor and raconteur.) For a vehicle there was good crusty bread; ideal would have been Bath Oliver Biscuits, as eaten with hard-boiled eggs by Dan and Una in Kipling’s Puck.
Vouvray is a white wine from the Loire Valley, southwest of Paris. It is made from the Chenin Blanc grape, which means that it is somewhat sweet; (“off-dry” is the pundit’s word). 2002 was a fine hot year but this wine is not oversweet; it has the characteristic Vouvray edge. One bottle had an aftertaste I was personally not keen on (a little like a McIntosh apple), but this was well-masked by the Blue Shropshire cheese.
Looking for the link that made this wine and cheese such a successful combination required serious research—that is to say, repeated, careful consumption. In the end I decided the connection consisted in a concatenation of creaminess. Nothing excessive, you understand—nothing in excess was a common Stoic motto—but a gentle connection catalyzed by the consumer. As Charles Williams wrote—it is National Poetry Month—“How good the universe can be, what now?”