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from: Alexander Star
to: Jim Holt

Hummingbirds and Hands Full of Breasts

Posted Thursday, May 9, 2002, at 12:59 PM ET

Who are these people?

Dear Jim,

I think that your otherwise impressive scholarship rests on a false premise. Berlin did not attribute the fox and the hedgehog to Archilochus, the ancient Greek poet. Rather, he attributed the saying to Archilochus colubris, the ruby-throated hummingbird. This bird seeks to attract mates with daring U-shaped dives accompanied by an unusually loud rustling of wings and a great deal of "vocal chittering" about Isaiah Berlin. Rather like the courtship behavior of most intellectuals.

As an unemployed writer, you must surely take a good deal of interest in this fall's outpouring of books to review. Among the more welcome titles is The Caffeine Advantage, in which the authors detail the many "positive and life-changing effects of strategic caffeine use." They contend that "[f]ar from causing anxiety, caffeine can actually relieve stress and boredom, facilitate meditation and creativity, and can even help increase male fertility."

Is there any defense that the disgraced priests of the Catholic Church can give? Certainly not. But in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, the 17th-century encyclopedist Pierre Bayle ironically suggested one line of argument. It appears in an entry on the "Mammilarians," an Anabaptist Dutch sect whose members broke away from a congregation in Haarlem because they believed that young men should be able to touch the breasts of their fiancees before marriage without fear of excommunication. In this entry, Bayle goes on to recount the self-defense of a priest who was caught with his hand on the breast of one of his female students while she was praying. "I see very clearly, my child, that you are still very far from perfection," the priest said. "Humbly acknowledge your failings. Ask God for forgiveness for your having paid so little attention to the mysteries on which you ought to have been meditating. If you had bestowed all the necessary attention to these matters, you would not have been aware of what was happening around your bosom. But you were so little detached from the senses, so little preoccupied with the divine, that it did not take you a moment to realize that I touched you. … May this make you ashamed, my Child." Bayle later comments, "I only report these things to show that there is no subject to which the conversation of reputable people does not sometimes descend."

Til soon,
Alex

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Alexander Star
to: Jim Holt

Hummingbirds and Hands Full of Breasts

Posted Thursday, May 9, 2002, at 12:59 PM ET
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Jim Holt writes the "Egghead" column for Slate. He also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. Alexander Star is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. This fall, he will begin editing the "Ideas" section of the Boston Globe.
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