Adria Bernardi
Hello,
These two postcards—the one of an armor-wearing dog and the one of two empty Adirondack
chairs on a pier—were in a drawer for many years along with many other postcards. The first
was purchased when my sons were young boys and we would go to visit the Higgins Armory
Museum[1] in Worcester, Massachusetts; the other was a postcard from a summer family vacation
in Vermont.
I didn’t send either postcard to anyone at the time of purchase and I didn’t send the postcards to
anyone during all those the intervening years either. When I was looking through all of the
postcards on hand to write a message to an imagined recipient, the date was February 4, 2021,
almost one month after the attack on the Capitol and one more winter day during this ongoing
pandemic. There were other postcards that spoke to me that day but these were the two that
prompted me to start writing. The postcard of antique armor worn by a dog, with its elaborate
headdress including the very tall feathers, yielded associations with the viciousness of the attack
dog and the images of the insurrectionists who wore their own contemporary versions of armor.
In writing that postcard, the word that had most resonance was marauder, which is derived from
the French marault for beggar, mendicant, felon. This word appears in Montaigne’s essay, De
l’exercitation[2] (meaning, not physical exertion or exercising as we would define it today, but, rather,
the exercising of the practices or habits that inform self-reflection, the attending to the inner life,
ethics, morality, the essence and space of the soul, and the exercising of those habits in the living
life in the moment in which death approaches.) The reference, in Chapter 6 of Book II of the
Essais, appears in the form of an epithet, “ce mauart de”, which is applied to the brutal and
despotic Roman emperor, Caligula:
Canius Julius noble Romain, de vertu et fermeté singuliere, ayant esté condamné à la mort
par ce marault de Caligula . . .
(Julius Canus, a noble Roman, of singular constancy and virtue, having been condemned to
die by that worthless fellow Caligula . . .)[2] [see pdf below for footnotes]
In sitting with the photograph of the two empty chairs on the pier in the rain, I felt--
physiologically—how much I missed seeing long-time acquaintances and friends. I understood
then that, in the dealing and coping and managing and living within a pandemic, I had not, until
that point, allowed myself to experience the loss of companionability and conversation.
Adria Bernardi
Thursday, January 20, 2022
Nashville, Tennessee
These two postcards—the one of an armor-wearing dog and the one of two empty Adirondack
chairs on a pier—were in a drawer for many years along with many other postcards. The first
was purchased when my sons were young boys and we would go to visit the Higgins Armory
Museum[1] in Worcester, Massachusetts; the other was a postcard from a summer family vacation
in Vermont.
I didn’t send either postcard to anyone at the time of purchase and I didn’t send the postcards to
anyone during all those the intervening years either. When I was looking through all of the
postcards on hand to write a message to an imagined recipient, the date was February 4, 2021,
almost one month after the attack on the Capitol and one more winter day during this ongoing
pandemic. There were other postcards that spoke to me that day but these were the two that
prompted me to start writing. The postcard of antique armor worn by a dog, with its elaborate
headdress including the very tall feathers, yielded associations with the viciousness of the attack
dog and the images of the insurrectionists who wore their own contemporary versions of armor.
In writing that postcard, the word that had most resonance was marauder, which is derived from
the French marault for beggar, mendicant, felon. This word appears in Montaigne’s essay, De
l’exercitation[2] (meaning, not physical exertion or exercising as we would define it today, but, rather,
the exercising of the practices or habits that inform self-reflection, the attending to the inner life,
ethics, morality, the essence and space of the soul, and the exercising of those habits in the living
life in the moment in which death approaches.) The reference, in Chapter 6 of Book II of the
Essais, appears in the form of an epithet, “ce mauart de”, which is applied to the brutal and
despotic Roman emperor, Caligula:
Canius Julius noble Romain, de vertu et fermeté singuliere, ayant esté condamné à la mort
par ce marault de Caligula . . .
(Julius Canus, a noble Roman, of singular constancy and virtue, having been condemned to
die by that worthless fellow Caligula . . .)[2] [see pdf below for footnotes]
In sitting with the photograph of the two empty chairs on the pier in the rain, I felt--
physiologically—how much I missed seeing long-time acquaintances and friends. I understood
then that, in the dealing and coping and managing and living within a pandemic, I had not, until
that point, allowed myself to experience the loss of companionability and conversation.
Adria Bernardi
Thursday, January 20, 2022
Nashville, Tennessee
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Adria Bernardi is a writer and translator whose publications include an oral history, a collection of essays, a collection of short stories, and two novels. Her eight translations from the Italian include the prose of Gianni Celati and the poetry of Tonino Guerra and Raffaello Baldini. She has been awarded the 1999 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, the 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the 2007 Raiziss/DePalchi Translation Award. She was awarded the 2021 FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize for her novel, Benefit Street, which will be published by The University of Alabama Press in 2022.
Read "Palladian" published in Inverted Syntax's Fissured Tongue |
