The Summa Theologica doesn’t have that many odd and charming moments, but certainly one of them is when Aquinas – taking a break from questions like “Whether There is Only One Aeviternity”, “Whether Goodness Has the Aspect of a Final Cause”, and “Whether the Separated Soul Understands Separate Substances” – decides to tackle the question, “Whether Pain and Sorrow Can Be Assuaged By Sleep and Baths.” At last, relevance in a philosopher. He begins, as always, with the plausibility of his opponents’ position:
“It would seem that sleep and baths do not assuage sorrow. For sorrow is in the soul, whereas sleep and baths regard the body. Therefore, they do not conduce to the assuaging of sorrow.”
Which, since Aquinas begins with it, we know must be incorrect. And he refutes it, contending instead that sorrow is a kind of disorder in the body’s motion and circulation, and pleasures, by having a good effect on the heart, dispel sorrow:
I answer that sorrow, by reason of its specific nature, is repugnant to the vital movement of the body. And consequently, whatever restores the bodily nature to its due state of vital movement, is opposed to sorrow and assuages it. Moreover, such remedies, from the very fact that they bring nature back to its normal state, are causes of pleasure, for this is precisely in what pleasure consists… Therefore since every pleasure assuages sorrow, sorrow is assuaged by suchlike bodily remedies.
He was the doctor angelicus indeed, I thought as I looked at my toes in the bath at the Lord Baltimore Hotel. I leaned over and took a sip of Bluecoat gin, which I had picked up at the Philadelphia Distilling Company on my way down I-95 a few days earlier – more on the gin later – and I looked at my watch. I had been in the tub forty-five minutes. This wasn’t the worst way to spend a Sunday evening. I could feel the blues dissolving from my body, becoming just a faint blue-green tint in the deep hot water. Lava me, Domine, ab omni iniquitate mea.
The breakfast room at the Lord Baltimore.
It’s the extremes I like: sometimes I think I can’t feel anything without them. The previous time I had tried to take a shower in my cabin I had to wash my hair with soap because I had left the shampoo in my bathroom overnight (where it had frozen solid). When it gets very cold at my cabin, there’s no way to keep the bathroom warm at night. The bathroom was added after the rest of the cabin was built, and was not built to the same standards (in particular it lacks insulation). I didn’t really mind: I just appreciated a little bit more how effective shampoo really is at making hair feel nice. But I will admit that this winter has seemed a bit more vexing, for some reason or other, than many others. I had hoped to work at the local maple syrup farm, but they hadn’t wanted me back; I had just about starved myself through the winter to make my money stretch and give me time to write; time to write just meant staring at the inside of my brain-case for long winter stretches; my generator became the latest addition to the long list of mechanical things in my life that didn’t really work anymore and probably needed to be replaced. Most nights in the winter, I had read and written by candlelight, and I could feel the strain in my eyes. And it had been cold and snowy, and lonely. So how in the world did I end up at the Lord Baltimore hotel on a Sunday night, hundreds of miles from my cabin, hundreds of miles away from my truck, working my way through a glass of fancy gin?
Earlier that day I was in a car with four other New York Latinists, riding through what was becoming a terrible winter storm. Temperatures had been in the single digits the night before – highly unusual for Maryland – but warmer, wet coastal air was filtering in. The storm had begun as snow. Now it was raining, but the rain was hitting the frozen ground and freezing. We saw a car ahead of us begin skidding, then go right off the road, down into the median, and eventually come to a halt up against the guard rail. It would probably have to be towed out. We saw six more cars which had similarly skidded off the road and were now abandoned. One was also upside down. The atmosphere in the car was tense and stressful. It was obvious that we could die at any moment, and for no particularly good reason: we all wanted to get home within the next few hours, but none of us were willing to risk our lives for so meager a goal. But even so, stopping on the side of the highway, while it might have been safest, was wildly inconvenient. We were going to make it to some reasonable destination, even if that meant some danger.
Baltimore ended up being that reasonable destination, and in particular, Baltimore’s Penn Station. There we ate lunch and discussed our alternatives. There were winter storm warnings up the entire East Coast. We were not going to drive out of this storm: in fact it would probably worsen as we drove north. Driving was not safe but the car was going to have to get back to New York somehow. Everyone had to be back at work the next day except for me. So I suggested what seemed the most rational: I would stay with the car in Baltimore, either with a friend or at a hotel, and everyone else could get on the next train for New York. Then Jason, one of our number, found a last-minute deal for me at the Lord Baltimore Hotel: a corner room, with commanding views and a king-sized bed, for $75. And it had a bathtub. Just then I got a text from a friend who I thought might put me up. The roads are bad, she said. Stay at a hotel, we really can’t even come to get you. The decision was made.
So everyone else got on the train, while I took my bag out of the car and walked along Charles Street into the center of Baltimore. It was raining in just about the most gloomy way imaginable. Raining and then freezing on the ground. I knew only three things about Baltimore, but I was able to use one immediately: “Wow. Baltimore really was a good place for Edgar Allan Poe to die.”
There’s a motif in the travel writing of Paul Theroux – who is a very entertaining travel writer, by the way – which goes like this: someone tells Theroux, “Oh, don’t go to town x. It’s boring, awful. Go to y instead.” Theroux then buys a ticket for town x – utterly disregarding the advice he had been given – and finds it completely nice. How does this relate to Baltimore? Well, I knew three things about Baltimore: 1) Poe died there, randomly, no one knew why he was there, they found him in a gutter and they stuffed him into a grave and that was the end of Edgar Allan Poe 2) there’s like three nice blocks by the harbor, go there, there’s an aquarium and a baseball stadium 3) otherwise don’t visit Baltimore, it’s like The Wire everywhere, people sit out on old couches in the middle of housing projects in the dead of winter selling drugs to each other all day. So now I was walking along Charles Street – I had never heard of this street – and on both sides was the University of Baltimore. I had never heard of the University of Baltimore. But it was pretty nice. Cute undergraduates in knit caps were walking around, and it didn’t look anything at all like The Wire.
The street was climbing a hill, and something looking like Trafalgar Square appeared to be at the top of the hill. Was this possible? Maybe it was just the mistiness and raininess and miserableness and an incipient fever, but in the misty horribleness I saw a vision of Lord Nelson standing on a very big pillar. And then I got to the top of the hill, and it wasn’t Lord Nelson, but George Washington. And it was a lot smaller than Trafalgar Square, but actually a lot nicer and I wasn’t terrified of getting squished by a lorry. No pigeons either. Maybe it was just the wretched weather. I wouldn’t think it would be very good for a pigeon to let ice cover their wings. There was an equestrian statue of another Revolutionary chap, whose first and last names I have forgotten but his middle name was Eager. All over this statue were dripping icicles, and I felt it made for a dramatic image, but I had forgotten my camera.
There were some fine buildings all around the area, which looked pretty in a London terrible-weather kind of way. I walked past one and on its doors it said, “Open and Free to All.” I said to myself, “This is the place for me then.” It was the Walters Art Museum. But I said to myself: first let me go find my hotel and drop my bag off at least. (Why did I think I needed my unabridged Latin dictionary and a computer and a bottle of gin for a single night in a hotel? Two of the heavy three would have gotten me through the night, I think.)
I was passed as I walked by a older man riding one of those old-person carts. My father always wanted one of those, so I always think of him when I see them. This man told me, apropos of nothing, that he was rushing to feed the birds, he was worried about them, he was late and in this weather they couldn’t find anything to eat. So I guess there were pigeons around here. He sped on ahead of me.
So I got to the hotel, checked in, and went to my room. Actually, it was more complicated than that, because of course they didn’t have my booking, and then matching the rate ended up being tricky, etc., but that is just the story of my life – nothing electrical or mechanical ever seems to quite work. I got to my room eventually. Next to my room was a poster, which read, “Google Image Search ‘Baltimore The Wire.’” It featured, I presume, the top images from such a Google search. And there were those drug dealers, dealing drugs all day to each other on that couch in the projects.
Once in my room, I looked up the Walters Art Museum, and found out it was closed Mondays and Tuesdays. This meant I had to go now. So back out I went, into the atrocious weather.
It really was atrocious. Since the precipitation was still falling, the sidewalks were not clear, and I saw two people fall on the pavement. I went as quickly as I could, given the circumstances, and got to the museum by four-thirty. The welcoming sign I had passed by earlier reflected the nature of the institution: no ticket required, no button, no sticker, I just walked in and the guard smiled at me as I went by. I was in a luscious marble courtyard, covered over with glass and lined with marble and bronze statues. I had a half hour. I could go left, straight, or right. I went left, despite the unpromising name, into the “Dutch Cabinet Rooms.”
I was afraid this was going to be like those rooms at the Met which seem to contain nothing but dressers. “The Harry B. and Jennifer G. Rubinstein Dressers Wing.” I had a vision of rows of Dutch cabinets, lined up in their woody massiveness, in rooms so valueless and boring they didn’t even need security guards. The first room was kind of like that; and then, as it so happened, I stepped the most interesting room in the United States.
It was a long room, perhaps sixty feet long, and a shade over twenty wide; and it was chock-full of things, composed with great art but accepting none of today’s standard museum categories, like the mansion of some half-mad 19th-century melancholic nobleman. In fact it was straight out of Poe: could have been put together with Poe in mind, in fact. 16th and 17th century paintings everywhere, portraits, landscapes, historical paintings, of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata; and then all kinds of curiosities, a stuffed alligator, sand dollars used as medallions, fossilized fish, a “theater of insects,” African masks, a statue of Buddha, the upper jaw of a walrus; on the walls were ludicrous and fascinating and terrifying juxtapositions, a madonna and child next to a massive moosehead trophy, a stuffed turkey sitting atop a cabinet of Mesoamerican phallic statues, a Boschlike Last Judgement suspended above a mummified Egyptian child. The Bosch painting – I believe not a real Bosch, but by a follower (the room lacked labels, and the plastic cards in the corners were incomplete) – was one of the most fascinating in the room, and in general, the paintings seemed to be selected for interest rather than beauty. In the painting weird anthropoid frogs and insects and wolves alternately tortured and served the humans left on earth, and angels and devils battled over each individual human body. Nearby was a painting of the Vision of Saint Anthony, terrifying for its combination of apocalyptic hatred and quotidian life in a little Dutch mill-village.
But everything in the room was weird and interesting. There were cicadas with seven-inch wingspans. A stretched skin of a flying squirrel. Very large pufferfish. A cabinet of tiny sculptures called “the Hapsburg Curiosities.” An alligator skull decorated with porcupine quills. A leopard skin over the window. A model of a 1625 perpetual motion machine. Busts, sculptures, anatomical models of the human body, monkey skulls, shark jaws, even boring objects like coins looked weird and interesting in this context. Indeed, everything gained from the startling juxtaposition. All our lives we’ve seen art against a backdrop of white or gray sheetrock, as if fresh from Home Depot. This was a new way to look at objects.
The guard came up to me and told me the Museum was closing, but I vowed to come back. I hadn’t gotten out of the second room.
I returned to the miserable icestorm and walked to a large nearby church, where I saw mass being performed by a cardinal in America’s oldest cathedral. When mass was finished I went to a nice pizza place and had a perfectly satisfactory pizza – getting one sized for two people and eating it all. As the last of it went down I began thinking to myself that it was about time to get back to the hotel. Mass, dinner, a long hot bath and an even longer night of sleep: maybe I should write a devotional book dedicated to St. Thomas. This was a Christianity we all could get along with. I could call it the Imitatio Thomae. Thomas was notoriously so fat they couldn’t get him out of his bedroom when he died, so they buried him there (okay this might be apocryphal but everyone agrees he was large).
By the time I got back to the hotel, my coat was wet, my pants were wet, and my hat had become a cold wet sponge. It felt great to get to my room, take off my wet boots and clothes, and turn the tap and run the bath. But then I thought: this could be improved. I picked up the phone and called down to the front desk.
“Front desk.”
“Hi there. Do you have any bubblebath?”
The woman at the desk chuckled. “Bubblebath? No, I’m afraid we don’t.”
Sigh. What was a Lord Baltimore Hotel without bubblebath? What would Aquinas think?
“The best thing I could recommend,” she continued, “is there’s a Duane Reade two blocks down.” I got the address from her and thanked her.
I looked at my wet coat and boots and my cold sponge hat. I didn’t want to go out. But I hadn’t had a bubblebath in – how long? Ten years? Fifteen years? I couldn’t remember. I didn’t get many chances. I put on my boots and coat and went out.
It was dark now. It wasn’t two blocks, it was three, but really even within one block the neighborhood seemed to change. The crowds had left the streets; every business was closed, there were no lights but the devilish orange streetlights, and the atmosphere was palpably frightful. This truly was gloom: the weather was cold, dark, slippery, inhospitable and awful, everything wet and everything freezing. Yet in overhang after overhang, black men – no women – stood alone in the darkness. Many of them – most of them – were wearing garbage bags for winter coats.
I arrived at Duane Reade, but it was closed. I took another block home in order to take a circular route back, and actually found a Walgreens by doing this, but it was closed too. But really I was thinking of how many homeless men – or what else were they? – were on the streets.
One of my earliest memories is the time I first saw a homeless man. I must have been three or four, and my mother was taking me into the city (I grew up in Queens). We got onto a crowded F train, and every seat was taken except two which were next to a large homeless black man. His eyes were closed and he was moaning oddly. I can remember the white grizzle against his dark brown face, and the way his legs were spread revealing all the stains in the crotch of his green pants. He smelled like stale urine.
We were standing right over the untaken seats. I asked my mom, with my child’s inability to discreetly handle something incomprehensible, why no one was sitting next to that man. I don’t remember her answering me at all satisfactorily, and I determined I was going to sit, if no one else was. So I began climbing up into the seat when an older black woman leaned forward and touched me, saying, in a sweet voice I have not forgotten more than thirty-five years later, “Oh no, honey, don’t sit there, he’s sick. Don’t sit there honey.” To this day, the feeling of incomprehension I felt while there has never left me. If we really stopped and thought about how horrible it is that some human beings are buying hundred-thousand dollar dresses and their fifteenth mansion and have forty cars, while others are living under bridges, pushing around shopping carts filled with trash, and wearing garbage bags to keep off the rain on winter nights, I don’t think we could endure our country for a single day. I’ve lived with it in my face my whole life, and I’ve never grown hardened to it.
Waiting for the elevator in the hotel I sighed. My trip through the streets had changed my thoughts. The hotel seemed lonely now, even ghostly. Of course like all these old hotels someone out there thinks the place is haunted. UFO Digest (don’t ask) offered the following bits of paranormality from the hotel’s 1921 Guest Book:
I came to stay two weeks. I never left. It was fascinating. It was exciting. – Rose Bisasky
Dear Folks, We’re having a big time. I’m not tired at all now. We were surely dead the first of the week, though – from postcard depicting the Lord Baltimore hotel, dated April 3, 1921.
We never asked (for guests to limit their stay to 5 days) in the old days. Or if we did, it was because we hoped the answer would be that they intended to stay forever. – Sanford Core, Assistant Manager in charge of reservations.
I didn’t see any ghosts; just images of the men out on the streets wearing garbage bags that night while the rain froze on the grave of Poe and the billion-dollar ballfield at Camden Yards.
And there I was, back in my room, with no bubble bath in hand. I put some shampoo in the tub while it was filling, but all it did was make the water slick. It wasn’t meant to be.
But I did have my Lewis and Short with me, and while the water was running I took some time to solidify my grasp on some Latin words I had learned over the weekend. A cos – plural cotes – is a whetstone. A canthus is a tire (while an acanthus is a plant). I also poured myself a glass of gin.
Ah, that gin! There was another story. Later this week the Catskill Native Plant Society is hosting a lecture about the botanists John and William Bartram, and as part of the event we planned to mix up some “health tonicks” using a recipe written in William Bartram’s hand which was found just a few years ago on a piece of paper in one of his books. To do this we needed a bottle of the botanical mixture, which was brewed up for Bartram’s Gardens by the Philadelphia Distilling Company. So I stopped off at the distillery on the way down to the Biduum, and managed to get a tour of the facility as well as engage in botanical talk with the chief distiller there (who had a beard just as good and long as you might have guessed). He was looking for a good source of berries from a certain prunus species, but as the plant is not a native I didn’t have any leads for him. But we had a good chat about Bartram’s Bitters, their Bluecoat Gin, and their Absinthe, which I got to sample and which was superb. I picked up a bottle of gin (which was cheaper than the Absinthe), and I have to say I did enjoy it: it had a smooth but woodsy flavor not at all like the rocket-fuel stuff my father used to drink. Gin, I learned, is really a vodka, infused primarily with Juniper.
So in the tub I went, to soak away the bad thoughts. Almost forty now, and most of what I’ve done on earth is teach people, plant things, and learn stuff. It’s not the worst way to spend one’s time, but then I walk down a street in Baltimore and I feel this burning inside, that I’ve done nothing, that too much of my life is this Imitatio Thomae, thinking and reasoning and writing it down, and not enough Imitatio Christi. But tonight I would just be who I was. I wanted to review that Thomas passage – I wanted to send it to the person curating the readings for our next Latin immersion week. I opened the passage on my computer. Then I put some Sibelius on – those transcendent opening bars of the Sixth – and just soaked myself in it all. It had been a long, cold winter, but I promised myself, after a good soak and a good sleep, that I’d be ready for spring, I’d work, I’d try to be better. And that for tonight I would just revel in the pleasure that the past seven years without running water or easily available electricity have prepared for me. For a long time I had lived without much of anything being abundant or easy to get. And the result was that it all felt precious.
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