In week 23 of the humanities crash course, I read the Letters of Abelard and Heloise. I also listened to Monteverdi madrigals and watched a classic movie about star-crossed lovers — but not the ones you’re thinking of.
Readings
I hadn’t heard of Abelard and Heloise before this week, but before Romeo and Juliet, they were considered the prototypical lovers. Differently than Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise were real people. They lived in France in the 12th century. This book collects their correspondence.
It’s salacious stuff. Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was a philosopher and professor in Paris. Heloise (1100–1163/4) was a brilliant and learned young woman who became his pupil.
Heloise lived with her protective uncle, Fulbert. Abelard spotted her and set out to woo her. He convinced Fulbert to let him lodge in their house and become her tutor. Of course, he did more than that: they began a torrid (and very physical) love affair.
Heloise becomes pregnant. Abelard removes her to a convent, disguised as a nun. (At this point, she hasn’t formally entered the religious life.) There, they continue their affair. In one of Abelard’s visits, they have sex in the refectory.
Fulbert is furious. To appease him, Abelard offers to secretly marry Heloise, since the marriage would ruin his career. Fulbert agrees, but then spreads the word. Abelard isn’t happy about this, of course. But then things take a tragic turn.
Fulbert still isn’t satisfied. One night, he pays thugs to come into Abelard’s room in the middle of the night and castrate him. His emasculation effectively ends both the marriage and Abelard’s philosophical career. Despondent, he becomes a monk. Heloise becomes a nun, and eventually an abbess.
They write letters trying to explain themselves to each other (and to themselves.) Abelard’s are formal, academic, dry, and rather heartless. Heloise’s are passionate and yearning. They both lead desperate lives — Heloise because of her love lost, Abelard because of his squandered potential.
Audiovisual
Music: Monteverdi madrigals. I’d never heard these, and frankly didn’t pay too much attention. I expect they sing of love, but I wasn’t drawn into finding out.
Arts: Gothic cathedrals: Notre Dame, Chartres, and Cologne. Among the great monuments of mankind, these astonishing buildings began construction around the time when Heloise and Abelard lived. (Their completion spanned generations.)
The websites shared by Gioia showcase how digital media can help us better understand architecture. While not a replacement for being there, videos and 360° panoramas are much richer than mere photographs. Interactive 3D tours of these beautiful buildings would be a compelling argument for VR headsets.
Cinema: David Lean and Nöel Coward’s BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945).
Two married people — Laura and Alec — meet by accident. They continue seeing each other and fall in love. They come close to consummating the affair, but their consciences hold them back. After a few weeks, Alec — a doctor — accepts a post in South Africa as a way to end the relationship.
Lean went on to direct two of my favorite films of all time, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. BRIEF ENCOUNTER is a more intimate affair (pardon the pun) but his directorial mastery shines through. Coward produced the film, which was based on one of his one-act plays. The movie’s script, acting, and cinematography are noteworthy.
Reflections
Heloise comes across as a brilliant woman, intellectual, and leader who has strong feelings and isn’t afraid to express them. Abelard comes across as a brilliant but self-sabotaging intellectual with a tremendous ego. He attracts misfortune by continually pissing people off.
We imagine medieval people to be ignorant fanatics. But these people are brilliant, learned, passionate, and surprisingly candid given their context. Here’s Heloise writing to Abelard:
God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore.
Keep in mind she wrote this as abbess of a convent! Certainly not what I expected of people of this time.
In contrast, the Alec and Laura — the lovers in BRIEF ENCOUNTER — seem helplessly fettered by middle class mores. Like Abelard, it is Alec who initiates the relationship. But whether the lovers enter into it out of love or boredom is left unclear. Somehow, the 12th century romance feels more emotionally honest than the one from 1945.
People fall in love. The consequences can be both ecstatic and devastating. Somehow, I’ve always imagined people of the distant past as crude caricatures. But some of theme were sophisticated thinkers — and some of them fell passionately in love with each other, for better or worse.
Notes on Note-taking
I’ve picked up a dangerous habit in recent weeks. When I finish reading a book, rather than attempt my own summary, I ask GPT to summarize it first. Only then, after reading its summary, do I write my own.
I’m doing this inside Obsidian via the fabulous Text Generator plugin. I simply write a sentence such as:
Write a concise summary of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.
I place my cursor at the end of the sentence, and press CMD-J, which I’ve bound to Text Generator’s Generate Text command. After a half second or so, the LLM’s summary appears below my sentence. It’s convenient but dangerous, since I’m not using my memory.
One of the points of this course is learning how to use LLMs to learn better. I don’t want the LLM to think for me — I want it to augment my thinking. So I’m returning to the previous pattern:
- Write my own summary and reflection first
- Pass that to the LLM for feedback
- Integrate in to the summary the relevant feedback
I’m not doing this inside Obsidian. Instead, I’m copying the summary from Obsidian and pasting it into the macOS ChatGPT app. I prompt GPT to not re-write my summary. Instead, it should produce an outline of the things that are and aren’t working.
Sometimes, GPT can’t help itself — it offers suggestions for how to reword my text so it flows better and whatnot. I increasingly avoid this. Often, what it does is remove my edge to make the summary more “correct” and “palatable.” I don’t want this.
LLMs tend to produce very middlebrow and milquetoast responses. This is by design. For one thing, they’re trained on huge corpuses that lead to a “wisdom of crowds” situation. For another, I bet system prompts have been sanitized to offend as few people as possible. I understand why this is desirable for many use cases. My personal notes aren’t one of them.
As with other weeks, this week I asked Perplexity for film recommendations. Specifically, I requested classic films that reflect similar themes to The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. In this case, I tweaked the prompt a bit to ask only for movies that are listed among the world’s greatest.
The results of this prompt are much better now than they were earlier in the year, when I first tried this. Perplexity’s LLM suggests bona fide classics and explains its choices in cogent ways. (When I asked for classic Chinese films back in January, I got back some hallucinated results.)
Up Next
Next week, I’m revisiting what many consider the world’s greatest poet: Dante Alighieri. Gioia recommends Dante’s Vita Nuova and the first part of the Divine Comedy, the Inferno. The following week, I’ll read the two remaining parts of the Divine Comedy.
These were the first books I read on my first iPad back in 2010. So I’m torn. Should I re-read them now? It’s been fifteen years, and revisiting my notes, it’s clear I didn’t understand and appreciate the poems. But I’m slow with verse, so I’m apprehensive. Still, the Divine Comedy deserves a more open reading. (Perhaps I’ll complement them with an audiobook.)
Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack. See you next week!