- a region of southern Greece
- a mythological place of rustic innocence and pastoral pleasure: paradise, utopia, Eden, Shangri-La, nirvana
- a metaphor for an ideal but unattainable world
“Et in Arcadia Ego”
I missed the beginning and then saw only scattered episodes of Brideshead Revisited, the popular 1982 British series. Hooked and wanting more, I turned to Evelyn Waugh’s novel. “Et in Arcadia Ego” is the title of Book One, in which Charles Ryder describes an idyllic time with Sebastian Flyte during their Oxford youth, a picnic under some elms, a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey, “on a cloudless day in June when the ditches were white with fool’s‑parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer.”
The phrase sounds like a lighthearted affirmation, loosely, “Here I am in Arcadia,” but it contains a menacing prophecy. In Virgil’s first-century BCE Arcadian Ecologues, the “I” is believed to represent death. Even in paradise, death is present. It’s reiterated in the titles of two 17th-century paintings. Poussin’s depicts a group of shepherds in front of a tomb with the words engraved on it, representing the voice of the entombed. The other, an earlier painting by Guercino, displays a skull, an explicit symbol of death. In Brideshead Revisited, a skull in Charles Ryder’s Oxford dorm room foretells tragedy. “Et in Arcadia ego” reminds us that paradise comes with a caveat, like the anonymous phone calls received by the old folks in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori: “Remember you must die.”
Charles’s idyll is short-lived; misfortune ensues. He narrates the story from 20 years later, now an army officer billeted to Brideshead, the estate occupied by the military during World War II. Dour and disillusioned, he describes himself as “homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless,” emotionally dead as he looks back on the brief Arcadian days with Sebastian.
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Arcadia exists today as a geographic region in the Peloponnese peninsula of modern-day Greece. Dating to antiquity, its early inhabitants were one of the oldest Greek tribes. Walled off by tall mountain ranges, the area’s inaccessibility may have led to the lore that grew around it. In Greek mythology, Arcadia was an unspoiled paradise and the home of Pan, god of the forest, its name taken from Arcas, son of Zeus and Callisto. A checkered paradise, as classicists tell of Arcadia’s dark and dangerous areas, bubbling swamps and human-eating vultures, that the gods intended for punishing humans who wandered too deep into the wilderness. Pan, too, is suspect. God of music and song as well as the forest and the wild, he was a satyr, lustful and drunken, known to assault women. Which makes me wonder—whose paradise?
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Arcadia on page and stage
I don’t fully understand Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, but I remain intrigued after seeing, then reading it. A drawing room comedy complete with casual adultery, a deadly duel at dawn, and dark undertones, Stoppard originally titled the play Et in Arcadia Ego to contrast the ideal with a foretelling of death (the title change dictated by box office concerns). The timeline shifts between the early 19th and late 20th century, with different characters inhabiting each, but taking place in the same country house in the English midlands.
In the earlier period, Thomasina, a precocious teenager, and Septimus, her tutor, explore mathematics and physics, specifically chaos theory, the second law of thermodynamics, and fractal geometry (think snowflakes or crystals). Both overtly and in subtext, woven through the lives of and relationships among the players, we’re introduced to dichotomies of science and art, rational and romantic, order and disorder. While I can’t comprehend the metaphysics, what I come away with is an elegiac sense of the passage of time, of connection and loss. The concurrent stories are bridged with artifacts of the earlier time coming to the attention of the contemporary characters. Letters and papers shed light on the house’s previous occupants and reveal their secrets. The past illuminates the present; a continuity emerges.
Long before Evelyn Waugh and Tom Stoppard, there was Sir Philip Sidney, whose epic Arcadia was published in 1590. During the Renaissance, painters, writers, and musicians invoked Arcadia as a symbol of a lost world, better and more beautiful than anything known to civilization. Sidney’s tragicomic pastoral romance, replete with shepherds, courtiers, and fair maidens, was written in three volumes over several years, later revised and expanded into five books and published posthumously. Shakespeare based the story of Gloucester and his sons in King Lear on an episode in Arcadia and pays tribute to it in other plays as well.
A Virginia Woolf scholar of many years, I was introduced to Sidney and his magnum opus in a Woolf essay, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.” Extolling stories that reveal our secret desires, Woolf calls Sidney’s Arcadia “a land of fair valleys and fertile pastures; where the inhabitants are either great princes or humble shepherds; where the only business is to love and to adventure.” While it might seem passé and absurd, Woolf defends the work and its endurance over centuries.
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21st Century Arcadia
In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin described Lauren Groff’s 2012 Arcadia as “so immersed in the life of a hippie commune that patchouli ought to waft off its pages.” A novel of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it’s replete with acid trips and tree-hugging, collective child rearing and cult worship. The story moves beyond the caricature, but the Arcadian analogy evokes pseudo-pastoral images that feed the narrative.
Arcadia is also a fictional commune and the title (Arcadie in French) of Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam’s 2021 novel. Liberty House is a retreat in the hills of eastern France, where inhabitants abandon their birth names, walk about nude and “live in nostalgia for Paradise before the Fall.” Their leader is Arcady, who preaches about animal rights and the apocalypse, and encourages everyone to have sex with everyone else, especially him. The community unravels, another doomed quasi-Eden.
Arcadia as allegory abounds in fiction, utopian and dystopian, romance and horror, gothic and futuristic, sci-fi, paranormal, graphic. I found several more novels titled Arcadia and a bevy of variations on the theme, including In Arcadia, Being Arcadia, New Arcadia, Hotel Arcadia, Tripping Arcadia, American Arcadia, Arcadia Awakens, Arcadia Mon Amour, Arcadia’s Gift, Dreams of Arcadia. I suspect, but won’t try to enumerate, even more titles invoking paradise and fallen Edens, Milton’s Paradise Lost leading the pack.
It’s hard to resist using Arcadia as a metaphor for idealistic, romanticized places and times. I employed it myself several years ago in an essay about my frequent trips to England: “We fell in love with the East Sussex villages and towns, countryside and downs, and it [Rodmell village] became our English Eden.” But for the alluring alliteration, I might have called it our Arcadia.
Wiliam Faulkner uses “Et in Arcadia Ego” in The Sound and the Fury to suggest the presence of death. In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Arcadia is the name of the Judge’s gun. Another one jumped off the page on my third reading of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life: “Nostalgia is predicated on something that never existed. We imagine an Arcadia in the past, Ralph sees it in the future. Both equally unreal, of course.”
My favorite illustration is in Zadie Smith’s 2023 Fraud, a mid-19th century historical novel. In a scene that’s pure pastiche, Eliza and William have slipped away for an adulterous tryst in the countryside.
Behind them was an oak tree of perfect proportions. Above their heads, springing out of the nearest hedgerow, an explosion of verbena. Each purple cluster of blossom had its own hovering butterfly.
William says, Look around you. We are in Arcadia, by way of Willesden Green! Give yourself up to joy!
Eliza reminds him of reality in the form of his precarious finances. But William has a plan; Arcadia will be restored. After their frolic in the field, as they gaze at the sky, the birds and butterflies, the clouds, William has the last word: You will admit this is Arcadia, and that we have trespassed upon it.
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I consider Arcadia, the idea of Arcadia, its symbolism and significance over centuries, its curious attraction for me. People need, have always needed, to believe in something beyond this world, something better, to compensate for the disappointments and defeats in their lives and for this deeply flawed planet we inhabit. That’s why we have gods and religion. Or they look back and realize how good they once had it compared to the present. Goethe is reputed to have said that “At the end of their lives, all men look back and think that their youth was Arcadia.” As a nostalgic yearning for an idealized past or future, Arcadia is destined to result in disappointment or self-delusion. But in addition to being a metaphor for an imagined place of peace and harmony, can’t Arcadia represent a frame of mind, a way of being in the world? Rachel Eisendrath’s Gallery of Clouds is a series of reflective pieces that pays homage to Sidney’s Arcadia. Reading is what she calls a place for her consciousness, “a kind of Arcadia that was necessarily both a freedom from the pressures of a largely unsparing reality and a reflection on those pressures.”
I don’t believe in heaven and hell or paradise on earth, some distant place, past or future, real or imagined. My life has had its highs and lows, but I’m relentlessly realistic, too rooted in the here and now to entertain sentimental longings. Thirty years ago, I bought a very small, very old house on a canyon in a pleasant San Diego neighborhood. My home is my sanctuary, my solace, the only place I feel true peace of mind, the closest I can imagine to an Arcadia of my own. With a memento mori of my own—a goat skull, relic from a long-ago back-country hike, hanging on my kitchen wall. Et in Arcadia ego.
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Alice Lowe writes about life, language, food and family in San Diego, California. Her essays are widely published, including this past year in Big City Lit, Bluebird Word, South 85 Journal, Change Seven, Sport Literate, Tangled Locks, MORIA, and ManifestStation. She has been cited twice in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Alice has written extensively on Virginia Woolf’s life and work and is a regular contributor at Blogging Woolf. She’s part of the contributing collective at Bloom and a peer reviewer for Whale Road Review. Read and reach her at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.