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H U M A N I T I E S
A N D T H E A R T S
Divine Motives
Author's Notebook
By Dale Keiger
As a writer of nonfiction, I'm professionally engaged in the
business of reading signs to figure out what someone is about. I
listen to what he or she says in response to my questions. What's
the content of her answers? How did he choose to say it? What did
they emphasize? What was her facial expression? What did he not
say? I look at how they dress, what's on the walls of their
offices, what they have in their homes. What are their passions?
What did he have for lunch? What did she name her cats? So it was
a particularly fascinating process to follow Dan Weiss's process
as he tried to figure out what Louis IX was all about, from a
distance of more than seven centuries. All he had to go on was
the art Louis commissioned. Yes, there are historical records, a
bit of correspondence from Louis himself, accounts of
contemporaries. But that presents narrative fact, the drier
expressions of history. To know Louis's soul, Weiss had to study
the art. He had to read images in a way that most of us cannot.
I'm fascinated by people who know how to read. I don't mean read
in the conventional sense of being literate. I mean read things
like images, sounds, subtle variances, and ghostly traces. I once
drove around Kentucky with a man who could identify the
manufacturer of deisel engines solely by the sound they made as
trucks roared by us. Years ago in Italy I enjoyed the company of
a woman who could glance at the wall of a 300-year-old building
and read for me all the uses it had been put to over three
centuries. Weiss "read" the Arsenal Old Testament and
Sainte-Chappelle in a way no one previously had done. Talk to him
for a while, and you emerge wondering how much else we've been
missing for centuries. It might be right their in front of us,
but we're illiterate to it.
RETURN TO
NOVEMBER 1999 TABLE OF CONTENTS.
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