Alice Lowe ~ Arcadia

- 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.

~

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?

~

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.

~

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. 

~

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. 

~

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.