Beholding a Fourteenth-Century Plutarch in the Long Room, Trinity College, Dublin
Robert Aquinas McNally
An eagle lands heavily on my shoulder, strokes my hair with his beak. I know these Latin
lines under glass, the opening of Theseus tale, smell now the chalk dust of undergraduate
afternoons, Professor MacDonald stumping back and forth on a bad leg, gesturing widely
about Greece and Rome, quoting Homer and Ovid and Virgil, the dactyls leaping easily
from his tongue as young eagles trading aerie for air. The page’s margins are wide, deep
blue, possessed by design and deer, lions, symbols of the sky gods detailed with the close-in
intimacy of miniatures, and the words, the words, are penned precisely, between small
lines, in clear Roman letters, the long Latin vowels singing. So one man hunched over
parchment in a stone room, in Italy, wearing wool and tonsure, smelling of his own sweat
and incense from High Mass just said, the elevation bells still echoing in the farthest fold
of the valley, his fingers colored from day upon day of inky quillwork, and he copied and
he copied, the Black Death raging outside, filling the horse carts with corpses and the
streets with keening, and he copied day upon day, his quill thrust deep in the round open
inkpot and the Latin. His mind burned, it burned with beauty and antiquity, and it passed
on, it leapt centuries, to MacDonald stumping and waving his arms and telling us young
ones, with soft longing, of the loveliness of Lesbos and its loving women.
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