Two Thing Tuesday: Harry’s Wall and Augustine’s Monica

As the semester comes to the final stretch, my attention gets scattered across a number of smaller projects, teaching, family life, and future travel.  

Thing the First

Every now and then a conference paper sticks with you mostly because they really good (or comically bad). I’ve heard lots of conference papers in my 20+ years in academia and the ones that have often impressed me the most were small papers that gave entrée into larger issues. 

Three years ago, in Patras, Greece, I heard one. Iain Davidson presented on a scratched inscription on a 19th century railroad viaduct pier by the pop singer Harry Styles. The viaduct is in one of those eminently British sounding places — Twemlow — in Cheshire near a place called Homes Chapel. The scratched inscription occurred as part of a 2013 documentary on the band One Direction called This Is Us. I’ve not seen it.

On account of this inscription, the piers of the viaduct — which itself is a heritage listed site — have attracted visitors, pilgrims, from around the world who have added their names and messages to the roughly scratched name of Harry Styles. As near as I can tell, the original Styles inscription is lost. 

This past fall, Iain published a nice 15-page article on his work to document the inscriptions on the viaduct titled “Harry’s Wall: Whose Heritage is it Anyway?” In the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. The article offers a series of analytical lenses to consider the graffiti on the viaduct including commentary on the themes in the graffiti (Styles’s sexual politics, a sense of community, inspiration, pilgrimage, and kindness), the history of the monument itself, and even, interestingly the “navvies” who built it. In fact, the construction of the viaduct my “navvies,” itinerate workers who focused on infrastructure projects, offered a way to merge the history of the 19th century structure with the continued engagement by contemporary pilgrims whose work has transformed the heritage listed site into an object of renewed relevance. 

Thing the Second

There are odd coincidences in life that make me happy. As some readers of this blog know, the past two years have been challenging for my family. My father has experienced a rapid decline in health. This weekend, I re-read Augustine’s Confessions. This has become a little tradition for me over the Easter holidays when I’m teaching Roman history. Confessions is the penultimate reading in my undergraduate Roman history class and our discussion of it has tended to fall the week after Easter.

What made this week’s reading of Augustine special is that my father has had a series of significant strokes (from what we can tell). He’s been in hospice for around 15 months and so diagnoses are less important than care. These events infused my reading of Book 9 of Confessions with a new tenderness. For those who don’t know, Book 9, beginning around chapter 23, Augustine tells us about his last days with his mother Monica as they sat at Ostia looking out over the garden in the place they were staying. Monica had encouraged Augustine to convert to Christianity for most of her life and by the time they were in Ostia, Augustine had become a Christian. While they looked out over the garden, they talked about lower and higher things and this culminated in Monica admitting that the wish that kept her alive was seeing her son become a Christian.  

To be clear, my father didn’t have any such theologically laced hopes for us. He was happy that we are happy. He enjoyed our visits and on our last visit we looked out over the parking lot and tidal marsh from the assisted living facility where he stayed. We looked at a nest of bald eagles and the tentative first hops (and hopes) the two small eaglets had moving from branch to branch. We didn’t unpack them as a metaphor, much less some profound Neoplatonic truth, but after reading Augustine, my father’s interest in them made sense to me.

He’s being kept comfortable right now and I think he knows that it won’t be much longer. He already told us that “since I’ll be dead, I don’t care what you do with me. You can put me in a shoebox.” That’s not too far from what Monica said: “Bury this body anywhere you like. Don’t be troubled or perturbed about it. All that I’m asking of you is to remember me at the altar of the Master, wherever you are.” (9.27).