entry
Feb.
2003
The worldwide
hodge–podging of holidays is careening right
along in Naples. They dress up for Halloween, are
already asking me what time they should be over for
Thanksgiving dinner later this year, and I fully
expect Robert E. Lee's birthday and St. Patrick's Day
to wind up on the calendar sooner or later. Yes,
little Confederate Leprechauns will someday take their
rightful place —right next to Barbie— in the
traditional Neapolitan representation of the Nativity,
the presepe.
Today, St. Valentine's
Day, is another one of those holidays that no one around
here used to celebrate. At least Valentine is not a
foreign import. He, indeed, was a priest in Rome during
the reign of Claudius II Gothicus in the third century.
He was beheaded, they say, on February 14, not just for
refusing to give up his faith, but for refusing to stop
performing Christian marriage rites in an age when
Christianity was still a covert faith. Until 1969, the
day was a feast day in the Roman Catholic calendar; now,
however, the secularization is complete. Paraphernalia
of St. Valentine's Day is evident in all the shops in
Naples: stylized bouquets with heart–shaped candies in
place of flowers, €50 heart-shaped boxes of chocolates,
cards, little teddy-bears with the words "Ti amo"
("I love you") embossed on them, and a special newspaper
insert bearing paid–for personal declarations of love.
There was also an article about the commercialization of
holidays.
There is some bad news
about Valentine's Day: the heart is not an accurate
metaphor for the emotion we associate with this day.
Love is really controlled by the thalamus, an "ovoid
mass of nuclei" in the brain. There is, however, good
news: If you are in love, it doesn't really matter, and,
anyway, it's much easier to make a paper cut-out of a
heart than it is of an ovoid mass of nuclei and finding
even a bad rhyme for "thalamus" would just about put the
Hallmark people out of business. (No, don't bother. I've
been trying for days. So far, I have come up with: "I
hope there's nothing with my gal/pal amiss; won't you be
my thalamus.")
It would be nice to
believe that the day of Lovers is named for Valentine
because he died doing what Lovers do best. Alas, that
is not the case. We associate lovers with his day
because of early groups of English bird watchers. Even
back in prehistoric times, they were a race of bird
fanciers. They would stand around the Sceptered Isle
in their bowlers and loin cloths peering through the
liquid sunshine at Red or Periwinkle Breasted or
Crested Warblers or Throckmortons. They noticed that
birds took their mates on or about this date. By the
time of Chaucer, it was well established. He recounts
in his delightful A Parliament of Fowls, how
all the birds come together on Valentine's Day and
discuss which of them is the best mate. Does love soar
like an eagle? Strut like a peacock? Is it a turkey?
Or is it simply quack, quack, waddle over there and
get it done as quickly as possible? In any event, says
Chaucer:
Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.
Whatever love is, it
is the most besung of human emotions. Read the words
of one known in the 19th-century in America as "The
Great Agnostic," Robert Ingersoll, someone who was
honest enough to say that he didn't know about certain
things, but who knew that…
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