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The Fourteenth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend

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The Fourteenth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend

The Fourteenth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend: HMM WEEKLY PREMIUM for April 16, 2019

Good morning! Welcome to the latest edition of the SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Hmm Weekly Premium Newsletter, distributed exclusively to our paying members, supporters, and patrons. Thank you very, very much for your interest and support. If you're feeling even more generous of spirit, please share this message with your uninitiated or laggard friends, so that they too can take the opportunity to join us, and please spread the word about HMM DAILY DOT COM any way you see fit.


LAST WEEK ON HMM DAILY

Max Dubler

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THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNEW IT

Christophe Petit Tesson, Pool via AP


By accident, last night, I found myself on the Île de la Cité, contemplating the ruins of the Notre Dame Cathedral:

There had been twin towers in front, but one of these had been sliced down the side. On them, and on the whole facade, were carvings in stone, and from roofs and angles stone figures of monstrous animals probed the quiet air. It was a cathedral, I guessed, and it looked bigger even than the great cathedral in Winchester, which I had always believed was the biggest building in the world. The huge wooden door stood open, tilted on its hinges and rotting. Part of the roof of the nave had fallen in, and one could see up past the pillars and buttresses to the sky. We did not go inside: I think none of us wanted to disturb its crumbling silence.

It was storytime and I was reading The White Mountains, by John Christopher, to the seven-year-old. I had not thought about The White Mountains for years and years, and then suddenly I'd remembered it and realized that it might be just right for him. I thought everyone had read it but my wife had never heard of it. It's the first book of a trilogy—extended to a four-book set with a prequel after I'd read it, Amazon tells me—about a post-apocalyptic, de-industrialized Earth, in which humans have been conquered and are ruled over, by force and through mind-control caps (called Caps) grafted to their skulls, by a mysterious population of gigantic ambulatory mechanical tripods (known as the Tripods). The protagonist is 13, one year shy of coming of age and being Capped, and he decides to flee his home in England and make his way to the Alps, where there is supposedly a refuge from the Tripods. The plot moves fast and there are good descriptions of food, and so far it's all going over well.

Last night the hero and his companions reached the unimaginably immense abandoned remains of Paris, where hundred-year-old trees had sprung up on the empty boulevards between the crumbling buildings. Rereading the book after decades away, I realized that this may have been my first literary experience of the post-apocalypse—or the second, if the desolate arrival of the Pevensie children at the abandoned Cair Paravel at the beginning of Prince Caspian counts.

Nuclear war, back then, was a logical potential outcome of ongoing and active national policy, so the idea of Paris (or Baltimore, at nearest point of reference) becoming a lost city seemed well within reach. Not within reach of me, personally; the apocalypse before the post-apocalypse would surely take care of that. Still, the atmosphere took hold on the imagination: the silence and overgrowth, the shops of rotting and meaningless merchandise, the doubly enchanted lonesomeness down inside the preserved Metro, with a train still standing in the station. It was frightening but congenial, too; in place of the horror of imaging the world going on without oneself, there was the almost-comforting idea of a world going on without everyone else.


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Nineteen Folktales: A Series

Illustration by Jim Cooke


13. The Servant's Fine Clothes

A nobleman who was devoted to fine clothing died suddenly of a plague. His manservant was sent to gather and burn his master's garments, but seeing the luxurious silk and linen, the wool spun as soft as cotton, the servant was overcome by desire for them. Making a bundle of the choicest items, he concealed it in the woods where he had gone to do the burning. A few days later, when he received his wages from the heirs, he slipped away to the woods again, dressed himself in a particularly handsome suit of green embroidered with silver threads, and set off down the road.

After three days' journey, he judged it safe to try his luck at another noble's mansion. At the sight of his clothes, the guard opened the gate to him at once, and he was received into the house without question. He had studied his master's manners well, and appeared in every respect a fellow gentleman. He feasted with the lord and flirted with his daughters, and two days later left them all charmed and eager to hear from him again.

A week after that, the plague was in their house. But the manservant, now clad in scarlet with an orange lining, had traveled on, to dazzle and amuse a new household, eating his fill of the fattest geese and telling fanciful stories of his late employer's travels, with himself in the master's role. Again he departed with his hosts' admiration and affection; again the plague struck when he had departed. Dressed in sky blue, with high and gleaming white leather boots, he was drinking a baron's oldest wine and taking part in the newest dances.

And so he went on from manor to manor, in his marvelous clothes, with warm welcome before him and death trailing behind. His lustrous waistcoats grew snug around his belly from the constant feasting. This continued for weeks, until, dropping in on a viscount, he found himself face to face with a lordly traveler every bit as prettily arrayed as he was. The other eyed his coat of lavender, slashed with lemon yellow, and frowned. "I have seen this fabric and this stitching," he said, "in my own tailor's workshop, and nowhere else. But I have not known him to sew for you."

The servant, having dulled his prudence through the easy living, could not summon a reply, and was found out. The viscount's men stripped him of the finery and clad him in a coarse hempen shirt. Then they thrashed him within an inch of his life, and dumped him in a ditch outside the mansion's gates.

"Thus you are paid for abusing hospitality and standing above your station," they said. "We had welcomed the clothes, not the man." So the clothes were kept in the household. And within a week, though the man had barely been among them, the plague struck there too.


***

A MUSICAL INTERLUDE


Hmm Daily's 11-year-old transit blogger called up the video of this performance on YouTube, having gone to see it live last month when his school watched the Ecstatic Music Festival. It is the string quartet ETHEL, covering the song "Valedictorian" by Dan Friel. It has less than 20 views as of this writing, some or most of which are repeat views from this household, and there are probably more than 20 people who would enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZmYIwK78kQ


(The electronic original version is also quite good.)

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RECIPES

We present here for your continued delectation four recipes for sandwiches, hand-picked from The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich, published in 1909 and now in the public domain.

EGG AND OLIVE SANDWICH
Chop five hard-boiled eggs very fine. Stone and chop fifteen large olives and mix with the egg, moisten all with three tablespoonfuls of melted butter, season with salt and pepper, and mix to a moist paste. Spread on this slices of lightly buttered white bread. Put two slices together and garnish with an olive.

FRENCH SANDWICH
To one pint of cold cooked fish, add two hard-boiled eggs chopped fine, two teaspoonfuls of capers, and a little mayonnaise to moisten. Mix and spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, cover with another slice, and cut in strips. Add a sprinkling of finely chopped cress to the top of each sandwich; rub the yolk of a hard-boiled egg through a sieve and chop the white very fine. Add a sprinkling of the yolk to the cress on half the number of sandwiches, adding the white to the other half. Then arrange them in groups of twos, one of each color on the serving plate. Any cold meat may be used instead of the fish.

SARDELLEN PASTE SANDWICH
Wash, bone, and skin one-half pound of sardellen and mash to a paste. Rub together the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs and one teaspoonful of butter until smooth, then add the sardellen paste. Mix and spread on small squares of buttered toast. Serve with an olive.

TOMATO AND ONION SANDWICH
Mix in a bowl some tomato catsup, season with pepper and salt and a pinch of sugar, add a little finely chopped onion, mix and place between thin slices of buttered white bread, with a crisp lettuce leaf between.


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