Elaphe obsoleta obsoleta
Bull Hill, Mt. Toby Reservation, dry hemlock and white oak forest.

Titus Petronius Niger, the man scholarly consensus seems to agree is the author of the scandalous, fragmentary narrative of debaucherous and decadent abandon known as the Satyricon, was a consul in Nero’s senate in AD 62; subsequently, he became something akin to Nero’s personal social director, granted the unofficial title “Arbiter of Elegance”. Tacitus, in his Annals, describes Petronius as a man who treated idleness as his profession, “one who made luxury a fine art”. “In the end,” says Tacitus, “Nero’s jaded appetite regarded nothing as enjoyable or refined unless Petronius had given sanction to it.”

In AD 66, after a rival poisoned Nero’s affections against him, Petronius made effort to flee Rome, was thwarted, and so decided to preempt his likely torture and execution with suicide. He threw an extravagant dinner party, during which he opened his veins and bled himself slowly to death to the accompaniment of feasting, wine, music, satiric poetry, and pithy conversation.

There’s a dude who stuck to his principles.

I think I’ve been aware of Petronius as a historical figure for a while, but had until not so very long ago considered him among the ranks of Machiavelli, the Marquis de Sade, and Nero himself: egomaniacal pretend intellectuals championing amorality for no other purpose than to further their own fame—the people who brought us Charles Manson.

I have to admit, though, that hedonism, at least in a watered-down form, has gained a certain abstract appeal for me. Pseudopagan pantheism does seem to lend itself to a philosophy of pleasure. And the ideas involved do have a great deal of practical relevance for me, if not necessarily as a human being, then as a writer. What with the centaurs and all.

So I’ve been reading the Satyricon—in a used Penguin Classics edition, translated by J.P. Sullivan, which is a lot of fun in that it couches all the homoerotic innuendo and hypermasculine grandstanding in the terms of stiff-upper-lip 20th century British slang. And it really is a pleasure. The characters are actually quite reasonable people, even wise, in their approach to their debaucheries. As a window on the culture and period, it’s utterly fascinating, an unplumbable resource. And the parallels with modern culture—and by extension, with human culture across geography and era, whenever a society has passed its peak—are just astounding. For example, certain passages—street chases and a vicious love triangle between two men and a boy—remind me very much of the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. The wealth of pithy witticisms evoke Oscar Wilde, the party scenes Rabelais. Even the scene structure and pacing seem to prophesy a good few thousand years into the future.

All these parallels with later stuff are so numerous and engrossing, it took me awhile to realize that the Satyricon also looks a lot like a prose reinterpretation of the epic poetry form. There are nested stories, comparisons to the exploits of gods and legendary heroes, and points at which the narrative is temporarily arrested for a long soliloquy on aesthetics or philosophy—though, in the case of the Satyricon, such soliloquies are as likely to be about the etiquette of sharing a nubile youth among a roomful of older men as about the death of art.

In short, I highly recommend it to anybody with the capacity for patience and detachment necessary to look past all the gorging and fondling and see the Satyricon for the solid gold it is. If you appreciate the centaurs, I think you’ll be as fascinated by it as I am.

To close, a piece of ageless wisdom on the plight of the struggling writer from Eumolpus, the Satyricon’s sexpot poet:

‘No doubt about it. If a man sets his face against every temptation and starts off on the straight and narrow, he’s immediately hated because of his different ways. No one can approve of conduct different from his own. And secondly, those who are interested in piling up money don’t want anything else in life regarded as better than what they have themselves. So lovers of literature are sneered at by whatever means possible to show that they too are inferior to wealth.’

Fiddleheads are actually the immature young curled-up tops of Ostrich fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris, so-called because the fronds look like ostrich feathers when full-grown.

I found these on the Long Trail ridge in central Vermont at about 2,500 feet elevation, in rocky soil among hemlock, beech and gray birch. They are 2 to 4 inches high, and the fiddle part is about 1 inch in diameter. They grow inside a fibrous brown casing, which you’re supposed to submerge in water and scrub off before eating. I tried some as they were, picked right from the trailside (which apparently you’re not supposed to do—carcinogens bah) and they were quite tasty, like a lemony spinach, though the brown stuff made them somewhat scratchy going down. I also had some for dinner the other night, steamed, then sauteed in butter and garlic. After cooking they lose some of the citrus flavor and become nuttier.

If you’re going to pick fiddleheads for eating, by the way, los eeenternets inform me that it’s best for the plants if you only pick 2 or 3 fiddles from each, so as not to damage the population for the future. You can see in my picture that there are five little fiddles in a bunch—apparently, underground they all come from one plant. I picked two, the tallest ones, and left the others alone.

Nancy Kress had an interesting blog post the other day about her actual moment-by-moment process of constructing a paragraph: hashing out a couple of sentences, then shoving off the ones that come out of chronological order, cutting the excess words, fixing the sentence structure so it feels natural/fresh, fixing the language so it feels appropriate to the character and setting. A lot of what she says is pretty universal—which I think is one of the things that makes her such a great teacher of writing. She can point out the nose on your face, and somehow it comes across as a revelation, because you’ve never looked at it in quite that way.

Another of Nancy Kress’s great strengths is her economy of language, how she can build a subtle, complex story out of so little.

Thinking about this as I go along with my own writing, it occurs to me there’s one element of this sort of in-the-trenches prose styling that she hasn’t touched upon—possibly because there just is no way to codify it. It can be a painful thing to think about for those of us aspiring writers reading every how-to book we can get our hands on, hoping to someday write as well as Nancy Kress, but there’s always going to be a part of the writing process that’s ineffable, that can’t be fully grasped by rational means. There are too many words and too many subjects, too many unplumbable depths for the mere mind to fathom. Call it the unconscious, the minor deity of inspiration, or pure, dumb randomization, but at some point, you’re going to be hammering away at a sentence, and out will come something astonishing. Call that thing “turn of phrase”.

It’s hard to identify that thing in other people’s work, just because no matter how effortless and flawless a phrase or sentence seems, there’s no way to know the author didn’t agonize over it for hours, going through dozens of word choice options until they found the perfect one. The feeling I get when I come across such a phrasing, however, is unmistakable. And at that point, it doesn’t matter to me whether it came to the author in a flash of divine comprehension or not. Because even if I can’t pinpoint and identify the processes by which such a flash can occur (and if I could, I contend that the writing of fiction would cease to be art and become something soulless and mechanical), I can still train myself, by identifying that flash in the work of others, to recognize it when it comes forth from my own hands. And then, through everything I have managed to learn about the craft of fiction by studying the work and the teachings of masters, I can nudge and tweak and twist the rest of the sentence and paragraph and page to fit around it, carve away and slough off surplus until it stands out like it should.

This is why I keep seeking out great prose stylists in spite of the frustrating fact that whatever powers they possess may never be mine.

“A good strategist concentrates on what he can change,” says the divinely-touched sculptress to the brooding, crippled, chess-playing boy in Vandana Singh’s “The Room on the Roof”, which I happened to be reading over breakfast when this notion came upon me. That’s a wonderful line, and one of those truths of the human condition that are, for me, what writing is all about. But it’s not the line that stopped me in my tracks.

But sometimes a hopeless melancholy possessed her, and she thought the rain would never end, and that she and her brother and parents would never be happy or free, that beyond one wall there were others, an infinite concentricity of walls. Up in Aparna’s room every evening, she felt joy and yearning like a fever. and underneath it the fear that all she had gained was temporary, that one day the sculptress would leave them and the magic would go out of their lives. Sometimes she caught herself holding her breath, waiting for the change.