Et in Arcadia ego

First edition

“Arcadia” is prefecture on the Peloponnesian peninsula in Greece. “Arcadia” has connoted the picture of a pastoral paradise since at least Roman times. “Arcadia” was the name given to Atlantic North America by Giovanni da Verrazanno, which by the 17th century had lost an ‘r’ and become “Acadia” and was applied to French colonies of maritime Canada. Arcadia is a play by Tom Stoppard, written in 1993 and revived last year.

In Stoppard’s play the landscape of Sidley Park, a country estate in Derbyshire, is a topic of conversation and its re-design in the early 19th century is an important element in the plot and also a symbolic dimension for the play’s discussion of reason and emotion, and the relationship between time and history. The action of the play is split in alternating scenes between 1809 and 1989. In 1809 landscape architect Richard Noakes attempts to convince Lady Croom to abandon the order of Classicism for the pastoral disorder of Romanticism. Lord Byron, who would eventually be regarded as a major Romantic poet, is a guest at the estate, there to visit his school chum Septimus Hodge, who is the tutor to Lady Croom’s brilliant daughter, Thomasina Coverly.

Production without landscape

In 1989 landscape historian Hannah Jarvis attempts to uncover the identity of the “hermit of Sidley Park,” who dwelt in a picturesque feature that was part of Noakes’ new design. Bernard Nightingale is a scholar looking to uncover the truth about a veiled period of Byron’s life. Much has changed in the intervening 180 years and yet many things are the same. Noakes landscape design is still there and so are the Coverlys. The mathematical genius of Thomasina Coverly—she is in the process of explaining chaos dynamics to her tutor when she dies at age 17—is inherited and passed down to Valentine Coverly, a mathematical biologist. Gus and Augustus Coverly are played by the same actor in the play, which dramatizes the continuity created by one family living in the same place for over two centuries.

It is telling that Thomasina is the one member of the Coverly family who approves of Noakes ideas for the landscape. She is the embodiment of progress, understanding concepts of physics decades before they were explicated and making lateral connections effortlessly between academic fields. Her understanding the inevitability of change through time, for all thing to decay and pass away, leads her to reject the geometric Classicism of Sidley Park’s Georgian landscape and Newtonian physics, neither of which acknowledges the arrow of time and its consequences. Stoppard is asking us to pay attention to what changes and what stays the same through time. Individual characters in the play die, but their essence lives on either genealogically in the case of the Coverly clan, or dynamically as the characters of 1989 act out human struggles that parallel those of the characters in 1809. Hodge is in hot water with poet Ezra Chater for writing a scathing review of his latest poem. Nightingale is on Jarvis’s bad side for penning a similarly negative review of her last book. But while Chater challenges Hodge to a duel, Jarvis actually agrees to cooperate with Nightingale (to a degree) in their overlapping scholarly pursuits.

Norfolk folly at Bawburgh Hall

The hermitage of Sidley Park, which comes under the general description of “a folly” in the picturesque landscape designs of the early 19th century, was meant to be a fake, like all the false Roman ruins that littered these Romantic works. One of the most affecting notes of the play is that Hodge, the resolute Classicist by training and Romantic by inclination and association, ends his life as a real hermit in the hermitage, vainly trying to apply the rules of Classical mathematics to the completion of the unfinished chaos equations left behind by Thomasina Coverly.

A Clean, Well Lighted Place

København

A European city: narrow masonry buildings on winding cobbled lanes, over which bicycles bump, along which tiny dun-colored cars are parked. The streets are interrupted by canals that no longer seem to serve any commercial purpose, but are undeniably picturesque. Into the pattern of the city are woven parks studded with personable trees and crisscrossed by walks and water.

When I visit I am returning to a familiar place, a city where I was student for a semester, a place where I was actually living on my own for the first time, separated from the intrusion of parental supervision and the improving ideas of a willful girlfriend. Away from the self-serving suggestions of others, following my own volition forward, struggling out of a cocoon.

It is October and the train has brought me from the business portion of my trip to the personal portion, to visit two old friends, the city and the man I met in this city a decade before: my co-conspirator, my correspondent, my traveling companion, my doppelgänger.

Like me he is a romantic (he thinks things are bad, but they could get better); like me he lives in his head (he is friendly, but many think him odd); like mine his first marriage is imperfect (his, unlike mine, still exists as my train pulls into the station).

It is 1992. He has not yet embraced the convenience of e-mail communication. We have kept in touch by letter and by a quasi-annual phone call on Christmas Day when he, several time zones ahead, has usually been quite potted. The greetings in train stations during the 1990s are therefore awkward and an immediate visit to a bar is, without discussion, the first sojourn.

Vesterbro

The walk toward a beverage reintroduces me to my other long-unseen friend, the city. We move through crowds of people who are preternaturally alone, past storefronts that offer goods in a dignified manner, through a built environment constructed with varied textures and painted with muted colors that glow at odd moments when the light is briefly right.

In October the clouds are like a gray fabric, in motion and yet seemingly permanently in place. In mid-afternoon the sun drops below them, lighting up the top halves of ocher buildings, while in the streets the shadows merely deepen. As they darken the vended flowers seem to come on like street lights, popping out of their pots and bundles in their places next to piles of fruit along the sidewalks.

In this city you are perhaps never out of sight of a floral presence that is either being offered for sale or has been purchased and put somewhere to bring light and focus to the space. When we arrive at the bar, order glasses of lager, and my friend lights his fifth cigarette of my visit, there is a pewter vase in the window to my left holding a single aster.

His wife does not join us; there are unspecified difficulties and tensions. In the United States we have democratized the legacy of Freud; everyone speaks of others’ inner lives in a vocabulary that is simply in the air, like sports metaphors and Yiddish. In this European country psychologizing is for the upper classes. My friend is from a small island and proud of his agrarian roots; he has disdain for narrative tropes that douse for hidden causes. The problem in his marriage is a nameless cloud; it will blow over or it will not.

Their apartment consists of two rooms and a bath. The kitchen is an alcove off the L-shaped space that is their dining and living area. The bed fills the shorter end of the L that extends toward the street. A curtain provides a modicum of privacy. After two days the curtain is not sufficient privacy.

Neither my friend nor his wife is employed. They have a lot of time and not much money. I am informed sheepishly that periodically his wife feels the need to simply hole up in the apartment with him, away from the demands of interaction with her other unemployed friends. My visit has coincided with one of those intervals and I must go for a walk. It is time for me to spend time with my other friend, the city.

My walking takes me to old haunts: bookstores, museums, cafés, park benches, streets that crystallize the personality of this place. It is overcast, windy, and damp; it is beautiful. I buy a pair of gloves. I sit, drink fresh beer and read. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had bothered to learn the language and dared to return here to live.

On the way back to the apartment at the end of the day I see what I have seen repeatedly through the day wherever I have gone: potted cyclamens huddled on either side of the doorways of fruit shops and florists, their downward looking blossoms quaking in the brisk breeze. Around the corner from the apartment I select a white-flowered plant.

Their heads are hanging down, dragging on cigarettes; they have been here all day. The cloud of smoke drifts around the room. I tell her that I have brought her something. Her face is more bewildered than surprised. I hold out the cyclamen. She smiles.