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If I say we have entered a new Romantic era, you may lick your chops and anticipate the arrival of great poetry and music. But hold on.

Nothing gets quite so romanticized as Romanticism. It all seems so — well — romantic. We get all fuzzy inside and think pretty thoughts. Romanticism means emotional music, beautiful paintings, expansive novels, and poetry of deep feeling.

Or so we think, forgetting that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called Romanticism a “disease.”

The surface of Romanticism may be attractive, but its larger implications are more complex. We should look deeper into what we mean by “Romanticism.”

Initially, it is a movement in art and literature from the end of the 18th century to the middle or latter years of the 19th century. It responded to the rationalism of the Age of Reason with a robust faith in emotion, intuition and all things natural. We now tend to think of Romanticism as a welcome relief from the artificiality of the aristocratic past and a plunge into the freedom of unbuttoned democracy. We read our Shelley and Keats, we listen to our Chopin and Berlioz and revel in the color of Turner and Delacroix. Romanticism was the ease of breathing after we have unlaced our corset or undone our necktie.

Yet, there is something adolescent about Romanticism, something not quite grown up. It is too concerned with the self and not enough with the community. There is at heart a great deal of wish fulfillment in it, and a soft pulpy core of nostalgia and worse, an unapologetic grandiosity. One cannot help think of Wagner and his Ring cycle explaining the world to his acolytes. Music of the Future, indeed.

I’m not writing to compose a philippic against a century of great art, but to consider the wider meanings of what we narrowly define as Romanticism.

Most importantly, one has to understand the pendulum swing from the various historical classicisms to the various historical romanticisms. Romanticism didn’t burst fully grown from the head of Beethoven’s Eroica, but rather recurs through history predictably. One age’s thoughtfulness is the next generation’s tired old pusillanimity. Then, that generation’s expansiveness is followed by the next and its judiciousness.

The classicism of Pericles’ Athens is followed by the energy of Hellenism. The dour stonework of the Romanesque is broken open by the lacy streams of light of the Gothic. The formality of Renaissance painting is blown away by the extravagance of the Baroque. Haydn is thrown overboard for Liszt, and later the tired sentimentality of the Victorians (the last gasping breaths of Romanticism) is replaced by the irony and classicism of Modernism. Back and forth. This is almost the respiration of cultural time; breathe in, breathe out. You could call it “cultural yoga.”

We tend to label the serene and balanced cultures as classical and the expansive and teetering ones as romantic. The labels are not important. Nietzsche called them Apollonian and Dionysian. William Blake personified them in his poems as reason and energy.

We are however misled if we simplify the two impulses as merely rationality vs. emotion. The twin poles of culture are much more than that.

Classicism tends to engage with society, the interactions of humans, the ascendency of laws instituted by men (and it is men who have instituted most of them and continue to do so — just look at Congress). AT its heart, it is a recognition of limits.

Romanticism, of whatever era it reveals itself, engages with the cosmos, with history, with those things larger than mere human institutions, with Nature with a capital “N.” Romanticism distrusts anything invented by humans alone, and surrenders to those forces mortals cannot control. Romanticism has no truck with limits.

These classical-romantic oppositions concern whether the artist is engaged with man as a social being, an individual set in a welter of humanity — or whether he is concerned with the individual against the background of nature or the cosmos.

Yet there is an egotism in the “me vs. the universe” formulation. It tends to glorify the individual as hero and disparage the community which makes life possible.

In the 18th Century, for instance, Alexander Pope wrote that “The proper study of mankind is man.” The novel, which investigates human activity in its social setting, came from the same century. Fielding and Defoe come from that century.

The succeeding century is concerned more with man in nature, or man in his loneliness, or fighting the gods and elements. One thinks of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound or Byron’s Manfred.

There are many more polarities to these movements in art and culture. One side privileges clarity, the other complexity. Just compare a Renaissance painting with a Baroque one. The classical Renaissance tends to line its subjects up across the canvas in a line, while the Baroque wants to draw us in to the depth of the painting from near to far. Renaissance paintings like to light things up evenly, so all corners can be seen clearly. The romanticised Baroque loves the great patches of light and dark, obscuring outlines and generally muddying up the works.

Look at this Last Supper by Andrea del Castagno. See how clear it all is.

But the Baroque painter Tintoretto had a different vision of the same biblical event. It is writhing, twisting out into deep space, with deep shadows and obscure happenings. The Renaissance liked stability and clarity; the Baroque, motion and confusion.

One side values unity, the other, diversity. One side values irony, the other sincerity. One side looks at the past with a skeptical eye, the other with nostalgia. One side sees the present as the happy result of progress, the other sees the present as a decline from a more natural and happier past. One side unabashedly embraces internationalism, the other, ethnic identity and nationalism. If this sounds familiar, think red and blue states.

One of the big shifts is between what I call “ethos” and “ego.”

That is, art that is meant to embody the beliefs of an age, thoughts and emotions that everyone is assumed to share — or art that is the personal expression of the individual making it.

We have so long taken it for granted that an artist is supposed to “express himself,” that we forget it has not always been so. Did Homer express his inner feelings in the Iliad? Or are those emotions he (or she) described the emotions he expected everyone would understand and share? He tells of what Achilles is feeling, or Ajax or Hector or Priam — and they are deep and profound emotions — but they give no clue to what Homer was feeling.

In music, Haydn’s symphonies were written about in his day as being powerfully emotional. Nowadays, we think of Haydn as a rather witty and cerebral composer. If we want emotion, we go to Beethoven or Schubert. You cannot listen to Schubert’s string quintet and not believe it expresses the deepest emotions that its composer was suffering at the time. It is his emotion. We may share it, but it is his.

The history of art pulsates with the shift from nationalistic to international styles, from that which is specific to an ethnic or identity group, and that which seeks to transcends those limitations.

In music, Bach imitated the national styles in his English and French suites and his Italian Concerto. The styles are distinct and identifiable.

But the Galant and Classical styles that replaced it vary little from country to country. Perhaps the Italian is a little lighter and the German a little more complex, but you can’t get simpler or more direct than Mozart.

Nationalism reasserted itself in the next century, so that you have whole schools of Czech music, French, Russian. In the early 20th Century, internationalism took charge once more and for a while, everybody was writing like Stravinsky.

The main architectural style of the first half of this century is even called “The International Style.” That style is now so passé as to be the butt of jokes.

The classical eras value rationality and clear thinking, while its mirror image values irrationality and chaos.

You’re ahead of me if you have recognized that much of what I am calling Romanticism is playing out in the world and in current politics as a new Romantic age.

Nationalism is reasserting its ugly head in Brexit, in Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin — and in Donald Trump and his followers.

The mistrust or outright disbelief in science is a recasting of Rousseau. Stephen Colbert invented the term “truthiness,” and nothing could be a better litmus test of Romanticism: The individual should be the arbiter of truth; if it feels true, we line up and salute. In a classical age, the judgments of society are taken as a prime value. Certainly, there are those who resist, but by and large, the consensus view is adopted.

The previous Romantic age had its Castle of Otranto and its Frankenstein. The current one has its Game of Thrones and its hobbits, and wizards and witches. The 19th Century looked to the Middle Ages with a nostalgia; the Postmodern 21st Century looks to a pre-civilized barbarian past (equally mythologized) with a vision for a post-apocalyptic future.

(Right-wing nostalgia is for a pre-immigrant, pre-feminist, pre-integration utopia that never actually existed. The good old days — before penicillin.)

This neo-barbarianism also shares with its 19th Century counterpart a glorification of violence, both criminal and battlefield — as the huge armies that contend in the Lord of the Rings films, to say nothing of the viciousness of Game of Thrones.

As we enter a new Romantic age around the world, one of dissociation, confusion and realignment, we need to recognize the darker side of Romanticism and not merely its decorative accoutrements.

We will have to accept some of those adages propounded in William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” And, “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Is this not the Taliban? The Brexiteers? The Republican Party? And those elements in academia who want cover their ears and yell “nyah-nyah-nyah” when faced with anything outside their orthodoxy?

Because it isn’t only on the right. The Noble Savage has come back to us as a new privileging of indigenous cultures over Western culture. The disparagement of European science, art, culture and philosophy as “hegemonic” and corrupt is just Rousseau coming back to bite us on the butt. (The West has plenty to answer for, but clitoridectomies are not routine in New Jersey. There is shame and blame found everywhere.)

And the political right has discovered “natural immunity” and fear of pharmaceuticals, while still thinking it OK to run Clorox up the kiester.

The last Age of Romanticism kicked off with the storming of the Bastille — a tactically meaningless act (only seven prisoners remained prison, four of them were forgers and another two were mentally ill) which inspired the French Revolution and all the bloodshed of Terror, but had enough symbolic significance to become the focus of France’s national holiday. We have our January 6, just as meaningless and perhaps just as symbolic. But perhaps that riot has more in common with a certain putsch in Munich.

The first time America entered a Romantic age, in the 19th century, it elected Andrew Jackson, arguably the most divisive president (outside the Civil War) before Donald Trump, and certainly the most cock-sure of himself and the truthiness he felt in his gut. Facts be damned. For many of us, Trump feels like the reincarnation of Jackson, and this era feels like the reemergence of a Romantic temperament, and we may need to rethink just how warm and cuddly that truly is.

This piece is updated, expanded and rewritten from an April 2017 essay for the Spirit of the Senses

All together now

October 19, 2021

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Janus-faced Declaration

July 4, 2021

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Going continental

January 4, 2016

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I am not watching Downton Abbey. I reached my quotient of British TV drama with Upstairs, Downstairs 40 years ago. Since then, it has been rehash on rehash, and I no longer feel any connection.

It is a widely held truism that American intelligentsia is divided between Anglophiles and Francophiles. The one portion watches Masterpiece Theatre on PBS and cannot get enough of Edwardian melodrama. They swoon over Merchant-Ivory films and generally rate Henry James as readable.

The other half reads Camus, loves Montaigne, adores Truffaut.

The one side grieved the death of Princess Di; the other the death of Claude Levi-Strauss.

It is a divide as solid as red-state, blue-state: In one corner, you have Sherlock Holmes, in the other, Inspector Maigret.

The English sleuth, cool, rational, friendless; the Frenchman, intuitive, patient, uxorious and with a small glass of pastis in one hand.

When the English talk of logic, you know a tweedy lecture is in the offing. When the French talk of logique, you know something as baroque as an 18-car pile-up will follow.

Just as psychologists can divide personalities into types: introvert vs. extrovert — so, too, can we divide Americans into those who identify with the island or the continent.

This is, of course, a divide entirely set amongst the reading, thinking public. Outside of the library, Americans are suspicious of anything foreign, and especially anything European.

Which is why Americans so much love to despise France. It is hard to understand this, given the history of our two countries, from the time of the American Revolution onwards.

“Cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” we say. Which shows how little we Americans understand about French history. Doesn’t exactly describe Napoleon or his army. And who was it, after all, who won the American Revolution for us? Ah, yes, Admiral de Grasse. And Lafayette was no monkey of any sort.

But back to the bookish Yankee: Perhaps this divide became palpable in 1789. Many Englishman at first applauded the French Revolution, but even most of them eventually grew horrified at the excesses of the Terror.

It left England with a slowly dwindling monarchy, and gave France a fresh, if confused start. It has never really comfortably settled, the current Republic being the Fifth, merely five decades old.

The English much earlier had their own paroxysm, but that one ended with the restoration of the monarchy, and an inbred conservatism that has lasted to this day, and I believe, is what so appeals to that brand of American college-educated reader who would rather watch The English Patient.

Or perhaps it is the British Protestant history vs. the lingering Catholicism of France. America is more at ease with the strict, moralistic Puritanism it inherited from its English forebears. There is something suspect about the theatrical exuberance of the Roman religion that is the cultural inheritance of even French atheists.

England says, No, or at least, Not Now. France says Yes, or at least Let’s Try. It is why English food is the butt of jokes, while French food is the world’s standard for gustation. The English do not believe they should enjoy their food.

For the English, anything of which you partake should be good for you, that is, make you a better person. For the French, it is the same with this difference: Something that excites the senses is good for you and does make you a better person.

The Puritan influence in America wishes to outlaw foie gras.

Well, I love foie gras. It is the most intense flavor I can remember eating, sunburst of umami, with the cloak of saccharine provided by the onion confiture and finally washed with an excellent fruity sauterne — not the cheap sugary drink Americans buy by that name.

Which means I fall into the camp of Francophiles. I love everything about the country, even their craziness.

I love that the French Revolution elevated reason above all other virtues, and proceeded to get all unreasonable about it. I love that they have a theory for everything, and will argue for an hour on a TV talk show, not about whether a speaker has his facts right, but whether he has his theory right. There is a kind of divine looniness in it all.

In contrast, the British can suck the life out of any proposition. While we can agree that Adam Smith was a genius, have you ever actually tried to read him? Or David Hume? Not bloody likely.

So, you can have your boiled joint and your suet pudding, I will always go for the cassoulet and the moules Normande. There is nothing better tasting than a properly prepared magret de canard. You can keep your English goose.

When I am in France, I feel at home in a way that is irrational. I do not speak the language; I can never dress as stylishly; I can barely read Le Monde or Figaro. But somehow the culture feels familiar. There is an easy fit, a comfortable tolerance, in the engineer’s sense, you have room to rattle around.

Even the landscape is home. The trees of Verdun, the mountains of the Vosges, the beaches of Normandy, the craggy peaks of the Massif Central, the caves of the Perigord, the waves of the Mediterranean, the 2,000 year history of Arles, the white hills of Aix.

And finally, and most importantly, the small, highway-ringed city of Paris, where the girl in the flower shop asks how your wife is doing when you pass in the afternoon and your wife is resting in the hotel room.

I find it all so inviting, so warm, friendly and comfortable. Paris is a city you can negotiate, where every corner — every one of its 20 arrondissements spiraling out from the Ile de la Cité — is as familiar as a classmate from school, and just as distinct.

It is the Berber faces, the Jews of the Marais, the Asians running the butcher shop, the Turks selling pizza, the line each morning and evening at the boulangerie for baguettes, the sculptured heads over the doors, the fountains, the public statues, the warren of roads changing names every few blocks. The squalid suburbs, the train stations, the Bois de Vincennes, the violinist echoing through the tunnels of the Metro, the fromage blanc at the Chinese restaurant, the old men playing pétanque in the flat dust of the Tuileries.

There is nothing wrong if you prefer London. If you like bad food and dirty streets, boring television and infuriating politeness.

À chacun ses goûts.

My wife and I have been to France many times and cannot wait to get back. I recently came across the diary I kept on our first trip there, in 2002 (I had visited much earlier — in 1966) and I will be sharing portions of it over the next several blog entries. I don’t know if I can persuade any of you to give up your Downton Abbey for the French version of Inspector Maigret (with Bruno Cremer), but perhaps I can suggest why we find the nation so compelling.

Death and “Marat”

January 20, 2014

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"The Death of Marat," by Jean-Louis David, 1793

“The Death of Marat,” by Jacques-Louis David, 1793

It was called, simply, “the Terror.”

It was probably the closest Western Europe ever came to the horrors of Rwanda — not just in body count, but as mere anarchy loosed upon the world.

It was the French Revolution, and from September 1793 to July 1794, nearly 2,000 people a month were beheaded in Paris, many for nothing more than being too tepid in support of the Revolution.

And in the middle of this bloody storm was painter Jacques-Louis David, who created the most famous painting of the Revolution, The Death of Marat, in 1793. It was a masterpiece of political propaganda.

But that is not all David did for the Revolution: That is not red paint on the artist’s hands. The painter personally signed at least 300 death warrants as a member of the Jacobin government’s Committee for General Security.

The painting, originally called Marat at His Last Breath, created a martyr of the revolution from a man who is more properly a war criminal. And it again raises the question of art’s moral responsibility.

Marat

The dead man in the painting, Jean-Paul Marat, was a journalist who called for thousands of heads to roll. “No, hundreds of thousands,” he wrote.

And on July 13, 1793 — the day before what is now Bastille Day — this greatest, most bloodthirsty exponent of the Terror was stabbed to death by a young woman.

“I killed one man to save a hundred thousand others,” she said.

She miscalculated. She had killed Jean-Paul Marat, but his death unleashed the worst of the Terror.

Jean-Paul Marat was not the kind of person you would think of if you wanted to create a hero.

He was a peculiar man, formerly a physician — some called him a quack — and at turns vicious and paranoid. He cut an unpossessing figure: Ugly, short, he suffered from a skin disease, likely a psoriatic arthritis, that left his face scarred: He called it “leprous.” To salve his discomfort, he conducted his daily business from a bathtub filled with cool water. On his head he wore a towel soaked in vinegar for relief. A board across the tub provided a desk.

Marat published a newspaper called Friend of the People, which harangued and incited. He lauded what he considered republican virtue and selflessness, and called for the death of anyone he considered a traitor: that is, anyone who didn’t agree with him. Patriotism and selfless devotion to the cause drove Marat.

James Gilray on The Terror

It went well beyond a call for the beheading of the aristocracy.

In fact, during the Terror, 70 percent of those killed were from the lower classes. People settled grudges by informing on their neighbors. An accusation was enough.

But for painter Jacques-Louis David, Marat became the perfect subject to deify when he was assassinated in the early months of the “Reign of Terror.”

“Charlotte Corday” by Paul Jacques Aime Baudry, 1860

His assassin, Charlotte Corday, then just 23, felt just as keen a patriotism as Marat. But for her, patriotic duty meant she must kill “the monster, Marat,” even if it meant her own death.

She came to Paris, bought a 6-inch kitchen knife, wrote a note explaining her actions and pinned it to the inside of her dress. In it she called Marat “the savage beast fattened on the blood of Frenchmen.” She also bought a new hat, a green one.

On the morning of July 13, 1793, she went to Marat’s apartment, armed and determined. She couldn’t get past Marat’s bodyguards. But she came back in the evening, slipped in behind some delivery men, flashed a phony list of the names of “traitors.” Marat showed interest, calling her to his tub.

Marat looked the list over and told her, “Don’t worry, in a few days I will have them all guillotined at Paris.”

She then pulled out the knife and stabbed him in the chest once, severing his aorta and puncturing a lung. A jet of blood sprayed the room. He died calling for help from his friends.

Four days later Corday was beheaded for her crime, and Marat was transformed into a patriotic martyr.

And David was just the man to do it. He had been the artist of the Revolution, creating images of republican virtue and the glorious past.

When the news of Marat’s death reached the National Convention, one delegate yelled out, “David, where are you? Take up your brush — there is yet one more painting for you to make.”

Cartoon of Marat as defender of the People and the Peoples’ rights

The propaganda machine went into high gear. A great public funeral was held — organized by David — streets were renamed for Marat, poems and songs were written. At least one new restaurant opened in the rue Saint-Honore called the Grand Marat.

“Indeed, Marat dead was perhaps more useful to the Jacobins than the unpredictable, choleric live politician,” wrote Simon Schama in Citizens, his history of the French Revolution.

A commission for a painting was voted and David began three months’ work on what would be seen as his masterpiece.

When it was finished, it was paraded around Paris like a Mexican santo, rallying the people to redouble their republican ardor and sharpen the cleansing edge of the guillotine’s blade.

Marat’s death mask

Thousands of cheap engravings were distributed, made from a death-mask portrait drawn by David. Marat’s eyes closed, his head tilted in death.

Copies of the painting were ordered from David and his atelier, to be sent to the other cities of France.

Instead of stopping the violence, as Corday had hoped, her act only worsened the Terror. The assassination now became a cause.

As for David, when the Terror ultimately collapsed and its architect, Maximilien Robespierre, was guillotined, the painter went to prison. At least he kept his head.

He was released after about a year in a general amnesty.

When Napoleon came to power, David became the imperial artist, glamorizing the First Consul as he had glamorized the Revolution. David was a political chameleon, a slippery eel. The artist was always looking for a “great man” to glorify, whether it was Marat or Napoleon.

“Napoleon in his study”

When Napoleon fell, David went into exile in Belgium, where he died in 1825.

His great painting had a similar fate: It was withdrawn from the public shortly after the fall of Robespierre and sent back to the artist’s studio, where it remained, unexhibited till well after David’s death.

Finally, in 1848, republican sentiment arose once more in France and Marat came out of storage. The poet Charles Baudelaire saw it and wrote a famous encomium, which raised public awareness of the masterpiece once more. The painting became canonized.

Today, the most recognized souvenir of Marat’s life and death is the painting David made to immortalize the journalist.

It is powerful: “David weaponizes art,” said one museum curator.

David’s painting is hugely original, mixing an almost journalistic sense of the here and now with familiar iconographic symbols, like the hanging arm of Michelangelo’s Pieta, turning the dying journalist into a Christ figure.

That isn’t just a conceit: The subconscious reading of the painting can’t help seeing the echoes of earlier, religious paintings. David was able to mythologize current events and give them depth and power.

“If there’s ever a picture that would make you want to die for a cause, it is Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat,” historian Simon Schama says in his TV series The Power of Art. “That’s what makes it so dangerous — hidden from view for so many years. I’m not sure how I feel about this painting, except deeply conflicted. You can’t doubt that it’s a solid-gold masterpiece, but that’s to separate it from the appalling moment of its creation, the French Revolution.

“If ever a work of art says that beauty can be lethal, it’s Jacques-Louis David’s Marat.”

David has turned the paranoid fanatic into a saint of the revolution. He had also made what some have called the first “modern” painting: spare, direct, almost abstract in its design.

But the image raises a question: Can great art be made for evil reasons?

The question is not merely academic. These questions have come up many times in the past: Can Leni Riefenstahl be a great filmmaker if the films she made glorify Hitler? Can D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation really be one of the most important films ever made if its heroes are the Ku Klux Klan?

And what about Westerns? Are our heroes cowboys? Or do we acknowledge our own genocide? What was once the patriotic foundation myth of our nation now embarrasses any thoughtful American. The once-famous Battle of Wounded Knee has now become the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

So, what do we make of art when we question the artist’s motives?

There are some who believe composer Aaron Copland’s music can’t be any good because of his lefty political leanings. And the take people have on Shostakovich often depends on whether they see him as a Soviet apologist or a secret dissident.

The art of Englishman Damien Hirst horrifies some people, because he may use dead animals, pickled in formaldehyde, as part of his art. His shows bring out the picketers.

Wagner cannot be played in Israel because of his anti-Semitism and because Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer. Where can we draw the line on this?

Do we ban politically injurious art, the way many would ban the use of Nazi medical research?

“Execution of Robespierre” detail

“I can appreciate pure ‘art for art’s sake,’ ” says artist Anne Coe, whose paintings are never politically neutral.

Coe is an ardent environmentalist and lover of animals, and her paintings promote her views.

“But to me, the really knock-your-socks-off art has a little more,” she says. “It has ideas behind it. I think art is insipid without some sort of idea in it.”

And David’s art is all about ideas.

“David is the artiste engage par exellence,” says Mary Morton, associate curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “He gave himself completely to politics.”

The subject of the painting, she points out, is not so much Marat the man but the virtues of republican self-sacrifice.

“David’s art is very didactic,” Morton says. “It is about civic responsibility.”

And perhaps we are removed enough from the events of 1793 that we can see in David’s painting the idea rather than the man — the spirit of democracy instead of the call for blood.

“What is that line between propaganda posters, like ‘Uncle Sam Wants You,’ and the David painting, or the paintings of religious martyrs?” Coe asks.

“Does some art lead to evil things? That is the risk you take in a society that says everything is relative.”

There is no single answer to the question; you have to take each case individually and weigh it in your own conscience.

“I listen to Wagner. I love Wagner,” Coe says. “You can’t have an answer.”

The measure of humankind

March 18, 2013

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Don’t get me wrong: I believe America should adopt the metric system. There is no good reason for us to go our own way in a world where otherwise a single system of weights and measures works fine for everyone else. America’s failure to metrify costs us a good deal of money in international trade, despite the “soft metrification” that goes on under our noses. (Two-liter Coke, anyone?)

But when it comes to the arguments for adoption, I demur. No, the metric system is not “more logical” than the so-called English system. And in many ways, it simply fails the test for logic, at least if by logic you mean usefulness.

I admit that when it comes to particle physics and engineering, the fact that you can do a good deal of your math by simply moving a decimal point has a lot in its favor. For the very large and the very small: for astrophysicists and nano-technologists, the 10-based metric system is the logical choice.

But I resent the patronizing tone so many pedants take toward the older system, as if it made no sense at all — when in fact, it makes a great deal of sense. There is a logic to the English system, and one that makes our lives easier — and more human.

Just start with the thermometer. When Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer in 1714, he devised his system of measuring temperature in very human terms. Zero degrees was a cold as he make brine before it froze, and 100 degrees was (he was a little off) body temperature.

And using the Fahrenheit thermometer, when it is 0 degrees F, you know it is cold, and when it hits 100 in the shade, you know you’re hot.

The Celsius, or centigrade system that is used in metric nations, is based on the boiling and freezing points of fresh water. Sounds logical, perhaps, but I’m not water, I’m human. Why should it be considered logical to base your thermometer on water?

Anders Celsius

To make it all just a little more goofy, when Anders Celsius devised his centigrade system, he put the boiling point of water at 0 degrees, and the freezing point at 100 degrees. Yes, that’s right. That was later reversed to the standard Centigrade (now called Celsius) scale.

The scale, however, is just not geared to the human experience. Is ”in the 30s” in Celsius comfortable or not? In the constricted Celsius scale, the difference from 30 to 39 degrees is the difference between a warm springtime comfort and sweltering summer heat: It spans 86 F to 102 F. In Fahrenheit, it means something to say that the temperature is in the 80s. In Celsius, you don’t know whether to bring a sweater or a bathing suit.

The range of comfort-index for Fahrenheit runs from 0-100. That’s the “centigrade” — or hundred degrees — that counts. That same range in Celsius runs from approximately minus 18 to 38 degrees C. Numbers that do not relate to human experience in any meaningful way.

And it is human experience that is behind other units of measurement in the English system. And the logic behind most of it is found in the ratio of doubles and halves.

If we start with a body part, like a foot or a knuckle, we wind up with length measurements such as the foot or inch. There are 12 inches in a foot, and the division into 12 makes it easy for a carpenter to half that length, or to take a half or quarter inch, or for that matter, a 32nd of an inch.

Yes, you can divide a meter into tenths, but how often do you need a tenth of something, or ten times something, compared to how often you half or double, say, a recipe. Doubling and halving works for things in everyday life.

Sometimes it looks as if there is no logic to the English measuring system, but that is usually because some former measurement has simply dropped out of common usage.

Take liquid measurement. Two cups make a pint; two pints make a quart, but four quarts make a gallon. That seems discontinuous, but there is a missing piece: The pottle. Two quarts make a pottle, two pottles make a gallon.

In fact, the system begins, just as distance, with the human body: the mouthful, which is (or was, when it was used) ½ ounce. (The same was also called a tablespoonful.)

Two mouthfuls (or 2 Tbs) equal a pony; two ponies equal a jack; two jacks a gill, and so forth, doubling through the cup (8 ounces or 16 mouthfuls), pint, quart, pottle, gallon, peck, kenning, bushel, strike, coomb, hogshead and butt. You remember Shakespeare’s “butt of malmsey” from Richard III, the final resting place of the Duke of Clarence? That would be 128 gallons of sweet Madeira wine, surely enough to pickle the offending traitor quite comfortably.

It is true that when you look at the many weights and measures in common usage in England from the time of the Norman invasion till the adoption of the metric system, there is a lot of overlap, discrepancy and contradiction. Some doubles and halves are based on units of 12, like the foot, others on units of 16, like the pound.

Then you’ve got fathoms, chains, furlongs, drams, grains and scruples. There is no question but the old system could use a bit of regularization. It’s just that decimalization isn’t a very practical answer, at least for ordinary people in everyday situations.

For that, we have doubles and halves. Every time you half a decimal number, you add to its complexity: .5, .25, .125, .0625, etc. For cooking, metric units are a pain in the butt, with no malmsey to compensate.

So, to those who say that decimalization is more “logical,” I say, you are stuck in a provincialism. There are more things in heaven and earth, as they say, and more than one way of logic.

And if I wanted to reverse the direction of the calumny visited upon the old system, all I need to is remind you of the great comedy of the creation of the metric system. It came from a people so blinded by a desire to be “rational,” they came flat up against common sense and the wheels of creation.

It was the “Age of Reason,” and it devolved into bloodshed, terror and ideology. It was the French Revolution, and the revolutionaries were so convinced they had the handle on truth, they were willing to let heads roll like marbles on the schoolyard ground.

One of their reforms was that of weights and measures. It was a preoccupation of the 18th century.

International commerce was expanding exponentially and keeping contracts straight was a problem when the seller was dealing in 12 oz. pounds and the buyer was expecting 16 oz. pounds.

There were some reasonable people: Thomas Jefferson came up with a plan that used a metal pendulum. Since the period of a pendulum’s swing depends on its length, he figured a bar that took exactly one second to swing back and forth would be a dependable standard, with repeatable results. It was an elegant solution. He even suggested calling this new unit a “meter.”

But in France, in the middle of the muddle of the French Revolution, and all its insanity — with an attempt to make the whole world rational — including 10-hour days and 10-day weeks — they came up with their own meter.

In the middle of war with Prussia and Austria, the French revolutionary government hired three surveyors to map the quadrant of the earth from the North Pole to the Equator through Paris. These surveyors were arrested more than once, and by both sides, as suspected spies, as they wandered the war-torn countryside with their transits.

They then decided to take one ten-millionth of that measured distance and call it a meter.

Whenever someone tells me how sensible the metric system is, I laugh, because its origin is as loony as it gets.

Take that 10-hour day, with its 100-minute hours and 100-second minutes. OK. But how about a 10-day week, and a 10 month year? Doesn’t quite match up with the motions of the celestial bodies. Do we repeal the solar year?

When the 10-month year (compromised with 3-week months) didn’t add up to the proper number of days, they capitulated to a 12 month year, with months of three 10-day weeks, leaving the year a little short. The interval between the “logical” calendar and the irrational heavens, was filled with a national religious ceremony celebrating the triumph of Reason. Parades and ceremonies to the goddess of reason were held.

They also tried to make priesthood in the Catholic Church an elective office.

You simply cannot impose regularity on an irregular universe, and doubles and halves works at the higher mathematical principle of ratios, not of arbitrary measurements. The great cathedrals were built by geometers, working in ratios, not in arithmeticians, working with rulers and yardsticks.

The graces of living come in ratios, not uniformities. Like music: It is the ratios of notes that make rhythm, not their exact durations.

So, is 10 the most logical base? Just imagine music on the metric system. No quarter notes, no eighth notes. Only whole notes, tenth notes and hundredth notes. Talk about white people not having a sense of rhythm.

—Richard Nilsen

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