53. The Periodic Table - chapter 1 - Argon - cont. + Adolf Loos

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March 21, 2015

chapter 1 - continued

p6 Grandmother Bimba was very beautiful, wore a boa of ostrich feathers, and was a baroness. She and her entire family had been made barons by Napoleon, because they had lent him money...

p8 [I’m going to skip the very interesting passages about the language, a jargon “...consisting for the most part of Hebrew roots with Piedmontese endings and inflections.” used “when speaking about goyim in the presence of goyim; or also, to reply boldly with insults and curses that are not to be understood, against the regime of restriction and oppression which they (the goyim) had established.”]

I am only going to relate one of his family stories because it reminds me of Marcel’s aunt in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time,

p16 Remotest of all, portentously inert, wrapped in a thick shroud of legend and the incredible, fossilized in his quality as an uncle, was Barbabramin of Chieri, the uncle of my maternal grandmother. When still young he was already rich, having bought from aristocrats of the place numerous farms between Chieri and the Asti region; relying on the inheritance they would receive from him, his relations squandered their wealth on banquets, balls, and trips to Paris. Now it happened that his mother, Aunt Milca (the Queen) fell sick, and after much argument with her husband was led to agree to hire a haverta, that is a maid, which she had flatly refused to do until then: in fact, quite prescient, she did not want women around the house. Punctually, Barbabramin was overcome with love for this haverta, probably the first female less than saintly whom he had an opportunity to get close to.

Now this reminds me of Adrian in Doctor Faustus and his Esmeralda.

Her name has not been handed down, but instead a few attributes. She was opulent and beautiful and possessed splendid khlaviod (“breasts”): the term is unknown in classic Hebrew, where, however, khalav means “milk,”) She was of course a goya, was insolent, and did not know how to read or write; but she was an excellent cook. She was a peasant, ‘na ponalta, and went barefoot in the house. But this is exactly what my uncle fell in love with: her ankles, her straightforward speech, and the dishes she cooked. He did not say anything to the girl but told his father and mother that he intended to marry her; his parents went wild with rage and my uncle took to his bed. He stayed there for twenty-two years.

p17 As to what Uncle Bramin did during those years, there are divergent accounts. There is no doubt that for a good part he slept and gambled them away; it is known for certain that he went to pot economically because “he did not clip the coupons” of the treasury bonds, and because he had entrusted the administration of the farms to a mamser (“bastard”), who had sold them for a song to a front man of his; in line with Aunt Milca’s premonition, my uncle thus dragged the whole family into ruin, and to this day they bewail the consequences.

It is also said that he read and studied and that, considered at last knowledgeable and just, received at his bedside delegations of Chieri notables and settled disputes; it is also said that the path to that same bed was not unknown to that same haverta, and that at least during the first years my uncle's voluntary seclusion was interrupted by nocturnal sorties to go and play billiards in the cafe below. But at any rate he stayed in bed for almost a quarter of a century, and when Aunt Milca and Uncle Solomon died he married the goya and took her into his bed definitively, because he was by now so weak that his legs no longer held him up. He died poor but rich in years and fame and in the peace of the spirit in 1883.

Argon (Ar 18)

"The name "argon" is derived from the Greek word αργον, neuter singular form of αργος meaning "lazy" or "inactive", as a reference to the fact that the element undergoes almost no chemical reactions. The complete octet (eight electrons) in the outer atomic shell makes argon stable and resistant to bonding with other elements..." Argon... was suspected to be present in air by Henry Cavendish in 1785 but was not isolated until 1894 by Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Ramsay at University College London in an experiment in which they removed all of the oxygen, carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen from a sample of clean air.^[14][15][16]  They had determined that nitrogen produced from chemical compounds was one-half percent lighter than nitrogen from the atmosphere. The difference seemed insignificant, but it was important enough to attract their attention for many months. They concluded that there was another gas in the air mixed in with the nitrogen.^[17] Argon was also encountered in 1882 through independent research of H. F. Newall and W. N. Hartley. Each observed new lines in the color spectrum of air but were unable to identify the element responsible for the lines. Argon became the first member of the noble gases to be discovered. " -Wiki

Today we use argon in light bulbs and in double-pane windows and in fire suppression systems and think nothing about it.

So was this taking to your bed reaction of Aunt Léonie and Uncle Bramin a common thing in the 19th century? Bramin must have been living with his parents at a pretty advanced age since he died "rich in years" after twenty-five years in repose. I would guess he must have been at least 55 at the beginning of the story and probably older. Wouldn't a normal person, with money, have responded by moving out rather than by digging in? I'm thinking you can't blame all this on the huerta, that there was a pre-existing condition and that, like Léonie's health condition, the argument with his parents was merely the pretext for a life of seclusion that was for some reason natural to these two. (I'm also assuming that there was an actual "Aunt Léonie" and that Proust didn't totally invent the character.)

Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos is (arguably) the most significant architect -- and even the most significant Adolf -- of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet I imagine few people who have not taken architecture classes have ever heard of him. I was thinking of him today while riding the bus and noticing buildings stripped of trim and decoration, after his example but without his style. A minimalist building -- and Loos was the point of origin for minimalist architecture -- is harder to do well than a conventionally trimmed out building.

House design by Loos from 1927

I was riding through San Francisco’s Richmond District -- which is full of the dullest of conventional buildings. These buildings annoy me in their own way, but buildings with the most basic of vinyl windows flush with stucco rendered walls (without any trim at all) are even worse. Loos would have used more interesting windows or would have recessed the window instead of leaving them flush with the surface. I suspect (and hope) these building were designed by greedy developers and not by architects. Often the proportions of the windows are wrong as well.

Corbusier's Chapel at Ronchamp. 1954

Like Nietzsche, Loos has much to answer for; if you can hold someone responsible for the misdeeds of their disciples and descendants. To be fair, Le Corbusier’s Chapel at Ronchamp and his buildings at Chandigarh are also the descendants of Loos’s architecture -- just to name a few well known examples. I chose Le Corbusier at random, but he is really the perfect example. If you attended the École des Beaux-Arts and learned the basic rules of architecture there you could, by simply following the rules, design visually pleasing buildings. But, after Loos, and following Modernist commandments, it took genius to create beautiful buildings. Even Le Corbusier designed horrendous things -- though to the best of my knowledge he didn’t build any of them. And even Mies van der Rohe (famous for saying that "Less is more") found it necessary to break the rules at times. One of my architecture professors recounted the story of Mies being asked why he added unnecessary vertical I-beams on the exterior of his Lake Shore Drive building in Chicago, to which Mies answered, “Because it looked better that way.” Or so I recall. 

I-beams going on.

Lake Shore Drive building. 1951

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