formality and a theatricality wholly in boy, I worked in myfather'sstore, where has created twenty-three books, sixteen appropriate to Cohen's casual, intimate he sold records," Glass recently told The of which belong to a genre that he has, if language. The effect is comical, sadly— Guardian. "I listened to a lot of music not made, then re-made: books that tell in the same way that Steve Allen used and liked nearly all of it. People forgot to a story about how buildings are made. to get cheap laughs bystanding at a po tell me that some stuff was better than Beginning with Cathedral, an accident dium and reciting rock-song lyrics in others." Musical egalitarianism is one that became a classic—and whose mak stentorial tones. thing, indiscrimination another; and ing became the subject of a book of its In multiple ways, then, Bookof Long someone seems to have forgotten to tell own, Building the Book Cathedral—he ingyearns in vain. "When I was a young Philip Glass the difference. ♦ has proceeded from the ancient world through the Middle Ages to the Renais sance, the industrial revolution, and the twentieth century, though not in se Peter N.Miller quence.(Howhe chosehissubjects isone of the fascinating questions not raised TO AWAKEN THE DEAD in the current exhibition.) When Macaulay draws buildings, he The uncanny achievement ofDavidMacaulay. tells the story of places. And so his sec ond work, City (1974), walksus through author: in abandoning himself to curios the origins and life of a Roman provin What makes a writer a ity,he shows that he stillhas the child in cial "new" city, from the occasion of its children's book writer"? him. And in abandoning ourselves to his creation—a devastating flood—through This is a deep question, love of curiosity, we show that we also the selection of a site, its surveying, the much deeper in fact remain children in this way—or at least laying out of roads and aqueducts and than asking what makes can suspend adultness long enough to walls, to the life of the city: its markets, a "children's book." Those of us who have follow Macaulay wherever he leads. mills, shops, government and sacred worked our way through David Mac Curiosity is a rather ambiguous vir buildings, and private homes. With his aulay's best-selling "information books," tue. Though we now take it for granted, attention to history—to change over which account for 3.5 million of his the fact is that from antiquity until time—and to material history in par 4 million sales, have often puzzled over some time in the seventeenth century ticular, he may remind us of no one the Library of Congress Cataloguing in curiosity was associated with what we more than Piranesi, a prior generation's Publication Data that clas think of as "vanity"—self- architect-guide to the ancient world's indulgent, pointless, and materiality. Mill (1983), just as charac sifies these books as "ju % venile literature." Building more than a little disrep teristically, is more than just a Baedeker DAVID MA CA UL A Y: the cathedral of Amiens, utable. Telescopic and mi to the mill towns of the THE ART OF croscopic investigation in nineteenth century. It is also an attempt the pyramid of Cheops, DRAWING Pompeii, a Welsh , a ARCHITECTURE the seventeenth century to view architecture through a prism Spanish Renaissance car began to change all that, that helps us to see it as an affair not avel, an Ottoman mosque, so that "curiosity" came only of art, but also of technology, geol a nineteenth-century to refer to both the object ogy, hydrology, sociology,and econom New England mill, or a twentieth- studied ("a curiosity") and the human ics. Where the mill was built, when it was century skyscraper is surely not child's drive to do the studying ("a curious per built, by whom it was built, what it did play. This always seemed to me like a son"), and both could be celebrated as to the physical environment, and how it librarian's bad joke. worthwhile and even admirable. But shaped the human one: these questions No longer. A visitor to the exhibition as the early modern polymath was dis are as central to Macaulay as the "how" devoted to 's creative placed at the top of the intellectual food question, as in "How did it work?" process at the National Building Mu chain by the expert, curiosity, too, was Ship (1993), more than any of Macaul seum is confronted right from the start soon displaced by "expertise." And so ay's other books, works at both ends with Macaulay's own words wholeheart nowadays it is only with children and of time's arrow: its first part narrates edly identifying his practice with that in the realm of children that pure, un a marine salvage operation in the Ca of curiosity: "The key behind all of the bridled, unprogrammed curiosity—if ribbean, while the second part unfolds books I do, particularly with the infor it's programmed, is it really curious?— the building of that same vessel five mation books, there's a sense of curiosity. is still licit. Education tends to drum hundred years earlier in Seville. If the I've always had it and I've always been it out of most people by the time they former is done with Macaulay's char willing to keep asking questions until reach university. acteristically analytical style, in the lat I understood the larger picture." Who Macaulay, now sixty, was born in Eng ter he adopts an archaizing graphical among us still possesses this faith in cu land but earned a B.A. in and visual approach— riosity? Children. So maybe it is in this architecture from the with color—that sets it off waythat David Macaulay is a children's Rhode Island School of as belonging to a different Design. He worked as an time and place. Macaulay Peter N. Miller is professor and chair of interior designer and high always lavishes enormous academicprograms at the Bard Graduate school art teacher before attention on the details § Center and editor of Momigliano and becoming an instructor of the everyday material | Antiquarianism: Foundationsof the at RISD, where he re life of the past. For the § Modern Cultural Sciences (University mains on the faculty. Be salvage artist, no detail is < of Toronto Press). tween then and now he too trivial: and so we learn

The New Republic January 30, 2008 33 about privies, bakeries, baths, tools, and Ligorio—arguably the most influen engravings by Stradanus, the "Nova techniques. tial interpreter of antiquity of the High Reperta." But they lie also behind the The show in Washington includes sec Renaissance—used his skills as a drafts unequalled book of Agostino tions devoted to the role of "Perspec man, and his understanding of how Romelli, one of the most lavishly illus tive," "Structure," and "Imagination" in buildings were built, to "restore" many trated of all early modern printed books, the drawings that it so generously exhib damaged ancient structures on paper, but actually only one of many produced its. But it begins by walking us through in his drawings. And in the eighteenth at the end of the sixteenth century that a single project from beginning to end: century, none was more famous than was devoted to this subject. This connec Mosque, published in 2003. We can leaf Piranesi for his ability to join practical tion between how things once worked through a blown-up facsimile of Mac knowledge and expressive technique to and how they now worked helps us un aulay's sketchbook, full of reading notes, recreate ancient Roman buildings and derstand that the antiquary and the engi quick sketches, and comments. Then the processes that built them. neer could be the same person: the laws there are the on-location photographs, We do not usually link antiquarian- of nature did not change just because home videos, and maps. And finally the ism and engineering, though they were the ancient world collapsed. In this line layers of progressively more finished joined at the hip for most of the fif- of work, past practice was a guide to fu drawings that culminate in the ture performance. The exhi beautiful published work. In all bition in Washington pays no this Macaulay resembles rather attention to Macaulay's aston strikingly the itinerant Euro ishing revision of the classic— pean artist of past centuries and classically off-putting—Tfie who packed his kit and headed Way Things Work, originally a to Italy (usually) and Greece German product of the early (sometimes). Then, too, the en 1960s. But there is this obvious counter with the past served as connection between his forays a stimulus for current projects. into historical reconstruction Trained, like his predeces and into the reconstruction of sors, as an architect, Macaulay modern . Once we has always expressed his seem are aware of it, the whole arc ingly limitless curiosity in draw of Macaulay's career begins to ing. As he explained in 1991, come into focus. everyone should draw, because "the better we see, the more in II. evitable curiosity becomes. The European antiquarian Lack of curiosity is the first tradition was marked by step towards visual illiteracy— its attentiveness to visual and by that I mean not really evidence and its developing seeing what is going on around skills for exploiting it. Compar us." With this idea that draw ison with the other great anti ing is seeing and seeing is un quarian tradition, that of China, derstanding (not believing), makes this clear. In China, Macaulay locates himself in an antiquarianism remained the old and vital strand of Europe's domain of the textual scholar historical enlightenment. For until the arrival ofWestern "ar architectural drawing has been, chaeology" at the beginning of since the European Renais the twentieth century. But re sance, a key tool of discovery. constructing the past required We might think immediately of From Castle, 1977 more than an ability to read Brunelleschi and Donatello in words on a page, it required also Rome drawing ruins, but we need to re teenth and sixteenth centuries, just as an ability to take the words on a page member that Brunelleschi, at least, was we do not tend to connect antiquarian- and transform them into three dimen drawing architectural ruins, and that ism with astronomy, though they were sions—or at least two that represented the fruit of his drawing was a radically inseparable for much of the seventeenth three. Architects, artisans, and artists new design for the dome of the cathe century. But the fact is that these same were the ones who possessed, and honed, dral in Florence in 1436. That his solu antiquarianizing architects and design this skill. It was not by chance that Pope tion for the Duomo was non-classical ers also built buildings, so they had to Julius II appointed Raphael his prefect only strengthens the point: drawing master the realities of engineering and of antiquities. We think of Raphael for taught Brunelleschi not to imitate old physical principles. Piranesi even de his paintings, but it was as chief papal solutions but to see new ones. votes one of his most fascinating plates archaeologist that he issued a report on Nowhere is drawing a more obvious to a rendering of building tools designed the state of the city that is still read four mode of exploring how things work by Brunelleschi. centuries later. than in Leonardo's notebooks. And of The way things worked fascinated If we had to identify the talent that course no one could deny Leonardo at sixteenth-century scholars. The new in made this possible, we would come least honorable mention as the world's ventions and new discoveries, such as quickly to imagination. Brunelleschi, most curious man. In the sixteenth printing, gunpowder, and silk-weaving, Leonardo, Raphael, Ligorio, Piranesi— century, the Neapolitan architect Pirro provoked the extraordinary series of and David Macaulay—all look at extant

34 January 30, 2008 The New Republic teenth centuryeventhoughhecouldnot structures and see through them, or (1979), a wickedlyintelligent satire of explodethemso that their workings are archaeology and the cult of the block read them, through the Renaissance of classical antiquity, up through our own laid bare. In the exhibition, Macaulay's buster museum show. Imagining a "Usa" use of "Imagination" is flagged—but it is buried beneath a cloud of third-class various neo-classical and neo-gothic re vivals. Indeed, one could argue that the also misunderstood. For it is identified mail and pollutants in 1985, the story withfantasy or caprice, when it should takes place in 4022, when Howard Car urge to reconstructthe pastalmost de be seen as the Siamese twin of learned son (read: ) stumbles fines the period from the Renaissance reconstruction. And so a 1982 lithograph upona buried motel complex (the Toot to the present. Why is reconstruction of Macaulay'sthat depicts a Piranesian- 'nc'mon). The rest of the book is a hilari so important? Why do we find it at al looking prison is provocatively labeled ous case of mistaken identity and a bril most all times and all places? These are "Veduta dellastazione grandcentral" We liant meditation on how so much of what complex questions, but perhaps a close are supposed to admire Macaulay's abil we take to be archaeological "truth" ac look at Macaulay can help. Can we un ityto transpose imaginatively the eigh tually follows from our leadingassump derstand whyat leastthis onepersonhas devoted the better part of his career to teenth and the twentieth centuries, the tions. Wrongheaded imagination winds dark-shadowed monumental hall and up treatinga television console as a great reconstruction? His answer: curiosity. Or, as Aristotle put it twenty-four centuries the stairways to nowhere. altar, a bathtub as a sarcophagus, a toi But the most interesting imagination let bowl as a sacred urn, a toilet seat as ago: "All human beings want to know." Yes, but. How much detail is enough, is the kind that is harnessed to memory, a sacred collar, and a toilet bowl brush the faculty that is always taken as anti as a holy watercenser. (The secondhalf and how much is too much? There is thetical to creativity. When Renaissance of the book, sending up Thomas Hov- more here than curiositycan accountfor, philologists pored over texts, when Re ing's Met and the then-nascent museum even if we resist qualifyingit as "mere." naissance architects clambered over the reproduction industry, isrequired read From Aristotle we may turn to Nietz sche. In his lectures on the study of the torsos of ancient buildings, they were ingfor students ofmuseum studies.) constantly forced to leapacross lacunae, ancient world, delivered at Basel in the bridge gaps, and repair open wounds. III. summer of 1871 with his friend Jacob Burckhardt in the audience, he observed What enabled them to do this was not But if imagination and recon imagination-as-free-creation, but imag struction go together, however that in the antiquarian literature of the ination-as-learned-envisioning. It was gingerly, it is the prevalence ofthe seventeenth century he discerned a imagination nursed by historical famil reconstructive tendency that demands "longing," aSehnsucht, to reconstruct the iarity that enabled architect-scholars explanation. Antiquarian urges mark past. Whence this longing? Nietzsche suchas Ligorio or architect-artists such the period from Petrarch, who collected does not tell us. But he hints at some as Piranesi to restore broken monu ancient Greek manuscripts in the four thing chthonic, perhaps akin to those ments. When Piranesi shows us how the Romans built big, he sometimes cuts through the buildings, letting his trained mind's eye gowhere those ofothershad never gone before. Even more, when he depicts building practices he cannot DIVIDED BY FAITH DIVIDED have seen, he relies on what he knew as a scholar the Romans actually did, and BY FAITH what he knew as an architect had to have RELIGIOUS CONFLICT AND THE happened. The productofthis"imagina PRACTICE OF TOLERATION IN tion" is the depiction of historical ma chines in use and materials in motion EARLY MODERN EUROPE unequalled until our own time—until BENJAMIN J. KAPLAN the work of David Macaulay. Of course, imagination is also peril ous.It works byspanningtwosolidand As religious violence flares around the world, discrete realities with an intuited or in we are confronted withan acute dilemma: Can ferred causation. And one man's intu people coexist in peace when their basic beliefs ition is another's fabrication. Not for •are irreconcilable? Benjamin Kaplan responds nothing have Ligorio's achievements as by taking us back to-early modern Europe, a scholar been marked by an asterisk for ' when the issueof religious toleration wasno forgery, or Piranesi been remembered less pressing than it istoday. as the artist of the "Carcerid'invenzione" ("invented prisons," or, archly, "prisons Divided by Faith begins in the wake of the of invention") rather than as a student of Protestant Reformation, when the unity of architectural history. Scholars seem to western Christendom was shattered, and takes have had a hard time accepting the legit us on a panoramic tour ofEurope's religious imacy oflearned imagination, especially landscape—and itsdeep fault lines—ov when it is expressedin a visualform. next three centuries. The almost dialectical relationship : neivin

36 January 30, 2008 The New Republic Investigations into the principles & But what was added in the second edi tion, with resurrection now projected for workings of various Mechanical Ma tion of the book, publishedten yearslater, an entire species. But while a virtual-re chines brought to light during the was a whole new chapter on the Digital ality past might actually be more com capture, domestication & subsequent Domain. This, subtitled "the Last Mam prehensive and seductive than anything employment of the Great Wooly Mam moth," puts the issue of extinction and Cyriac of Ancona could have imagined, moth, being wholly free from the con reconstruction at the center of the nar this particular gap between imagination fusion of Common Sense. As observed rative. The lonely mammoth warily ap and reconstruction seems the most un and recorded during my travels for the proaches "Bill's gates" and listens to bridgeable. Discovering that he couldn't illumination of future generations and his blousy talk of the future, though he very well get his trunk around a virtual- the general advantage of all Mankind." "could only dwell on the past." Lured in reality playmate, the mammoth has a In the second edition the publishers by the promise of companionship, the tantrum and stalks away, leavingallthese saved eight pages by suppressing this mammoth is measured, stuck, prodded, questions up in the air. extended homage to enlightenment nat and ultimately made the beneficiary (or ural philosophy, but at the cost of mak victim) of a virtual-realityencounter with esurrection may seem more ing the presence of those mammoths the long longed-for female mammoth. meaningful as we age, like the quite puzzling. This is the ultimate form of reconstruc R mammoth, and lose contact with

Arthur Englander's Back in School Dear Mrs Masters, as you probably know, we've learned-trust Duncan Chu to findout, of course- almost half our Fifth Grade Class is Jewish—not that Arthur Englander'slate parents a majority were Hasidic Jews but lots, withouteven counting our teacher (Arthurwasthe boywho killedthat peacock, but MissHusband,who's getting married (next June) to youwouldn'tpunishhim,even though we voted a gentile husband\ unanimously -thathas to change more than her name, doesn't it? to expel him from the FifthGrade), and when we Well,youroffice records must showwho'sreally went to see hisAunt, she showed us a photo Jewish and who's not, of Arthur, age six, and forsome of us who just happento be wearing glovesand whirlinga bigwhite rooster Jewish,those records might be the only sure forkapparot... No one knewwhere he hadgone indication of after What Happened, our race or faith or whatever makes us Jews, but yousaidhe we shouldhelp him"findhimself" and therefore different from the other kids if he came back to ParkSchool, and of course (no one really knows). the police found him Butthisweek our Rabbi told usthisweirdthing: right away.Mrs Masters, we think Arthur he saysthere are Jews—mostly in Hasidic believedhe hadto slaughterthat poorpeacock congregations and for hiskapparot— they're mostly in Brooklyn-who perform (between he got itallmixed upwith vampire movies Rosh Hashanaand Yom Kippur) this ritual and that's what he meantwhen he screamed called pekkarot—no, he hadto do it that's backward, the Hebrew word iskapparot— right. Christine Rath saysthat'showreligions work. duringwhich Believers swing a livechicken Evenwhen we've forgotten what they mean high overtheir heads: we do what we think thiswhirlingismeant to transfer the Hasid's arethe samethingspeople havealways done. sins to the chicken, which is then sacrificed. Butwe forget.Or we change. And Christine's Rabbi Abraham noteven Jewishl said about 50,000 chickens are used Andthen Duncan Chu saidthat religions die inceremonies allover Brooklyn— once they're proved to be true. Andthat Science is that's a lot of birds the tombstone of dead to get slaughtered(after being whirled),and most religions.And Duncan's not Jewish either. windupinsomeone's pot. Not everyone whirls But DavidStashower is,so he had to chickens, there are some tell what his father Orthodox Believerswhowhirlmoney instead— thinks: thatScientistsnowsaythe samething Maimonideshimself once called kapparot asRabbis, butwithoutcapitalletters. a pagan practice Arthur Englander that shouldbe abandoned, but our Rabbisays paid noattention to what anyone hadsaid, it'sgoing stronginBrooklyn andcan't be stopped. but now most of us want him back in Fifth Grade Now Mrs Masters, with all the others.

RICHARD HOWARD

The New Republic January 30, 2008 37 what we were as children. But children gratis.) Looking at Macaulay's draw zenly chosen "To the Past—Farewell" as understand renewal in their own way, ings, one remembers that the World the epigram for one of his books, but and with it also the reality of loss. Wal Trade Center was once young and bold, neither his work, nor that of the anti ter Benjamin beautifully described child needing neither to be reconstructed nor quaries who preceded him, nor the ma hood as"thedivining rod ofmelancholy." imagined, the vexed subject neither of terial remains of the past that they all The real children's book writer, then, is curiosity nor melancholy. But Ovid was study, can escape the gravitational pull theone whocan bring the ever-renewing right: tempus edax rerum—time de of time, which is the one iron law of all curiosity of children together with the stroys all. Macaulay may once have bra things human. «• native melancholy of children. Anti quarians, too, picking their way amid the flotsam and jetsam of the shipwreck of antiquity, might have been inspired Ruth Franklin and imaginative, as well as diligent, but they also could never escape from their SCANDALE FRANCAISE knowledge that time was the destroyer of all."We but feel our way to err" is how The nasty truth about a new literary heroine. Childe Harold described his own stint in Rome. DAVID GOLDER harrowing circumstances of its compo Macaulay lives in these four dimen THE BALL sition, it is hard to imagine that it would sions of antiquarianism: curiosity, imag SNOW IN AUTUMN have been published in this country at ination, reconstruction, melancholy. But THE COURILOF AFFAIR all. (How large is the American market what makes his work so powerful is that By Irene Nemirovsky for minor literary classics in translation?) he never forgets the fifth dimension of Translated by Sandra Smith As it happened, there was little chance the "philosophical" antiquary: time. On (Everyman's Library, 340 pp.,$25) of readers coming to Suite Francaise the last page of Castle, he shows us not without having already heard about the theperfect, finished building whosestory FIRE IN THE BLOOD novel's dramatic recovery. They might he has told over the previous seventy- ByIrene Nemirovsky have seen the news report in TheNew seven pages, but the roofless hulk on Translated by Sandra Smith York Times upon the publication of Suite its moonlit promontory—as he himself (Alfred A. Knopf,138 pp., $22) Francaise in France in 2004, headlined would haveseen it before beginning the "Holocaust Victim's Novel Finds a Read book. In this way he acknowledges the IRENE NEMIROVSKY: ership at Last," or any of the book's lauda phantom quality of what he attempts— HER LIFE AND WORKS tory reviews in the English and American that his reconstruction is confined, in By Jonathan Weiss press, some of which went so far as to the end, to pen and ink and what it can (Stanford University Press, link Nemirovsky, a French-Russian Jew evoke in the minds of men. 195 pp., $24.95) who had published a number of popu Macaulay has even made the unreal lar society novels during the 1920s and ity of his reconstructions the subject of I. 1930s, with writers of the Holocaust such an entire book, called Unbuilding (1980). The writer: a Jew who had as Elie Wiesel and Jerzy Kosinski. Its ostensible theme—the somewhat pre fled to the French countryside If any reader still managed to pick up posterous tale of an oil sheik buying the seeking refuge from occupied Suite Francaise without knowing that and shipping it Paris, eventually deported to the book's author died at Auschwitz, he piece by piece to Saudi Arabia—allows Auschwitz, where she would or she would have learned it in the sec him to walk us through mid twentieth- die in a typhus epidemic soon after her ond sentence of the jacket copy. And century skyscraper construction. But the arrival. The book: scribbled in minus the novel's handsome editorial appara idea of making the (once) tallest building cule letters, so as to conserve paper tus includes Nemirovsky's notes "on the on the planet disappear surely resonated and ink, in a leather-bound journal that situation in France" and a selection of with someone whose other projects in would be carried into hiding by the correspondence, including her husband's volved calling the monumental back into writer's eldest daughter. She would sur desperate letters to friends on her behalf existence. vive the war and keep it as a memento after her arrest. The implication is clear: Perhaps nowhere is this no-man's- ofher mother, once a well-known novel Suite Francaise, aside from its literary land between reconstruction and imag ist, daring to read its contents onlysixty value, is to be regarded as an authentic, ination, curiosity and melancholy better years later. As we all now know, she dis even numinous document miraculously drawn than in the loosely traced form covered it to be a novel, or rather the salvaged from the ashes of the great ca of the Twin Towers that appears in the first two linked novellas of an unfin tastrophe, as poignant and as prophetic deep background of seven different de ished project, portraying life in occu as the diary of Anne Frank, to which it pictions of the Empire State Building in pied France almost in real time. With has been frequently, and nonsensically, Unbuilding. In Macaulay's vision, that a history like this, how could Irene compared. In the words of one reporter, hazy hatching of the distant and nearly Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise not have the novelis "aclassic Holocauststory ... disembodied World Trade Center seems been the sleeper hit of the decade? by an author who would not live to see already to foreshadow its violent de- Suite Francaise, it must be said, is a her work published." materialization, as if already much less fine novel. It is charmingly written, its The truth is, this was spin. Worse, it solid that the other buildings around it. moments of gentle humor are balanced was a fraud. The fraud could be per (In the story, the "Saudi" oil baron in by sharp ironies, its characters are ex petrated because very few readers in fact wins over skeptical New Yorkersby pertly sketched. But had it not been cer our day know anything about Irene offering to pull down the Twin Towers, tified by its tumultuous origins, by the Nemirovsky. Though she published

38 January 30, 2008 The New Republic