The Green Cabinet

“They shall be like a shrub in the desert and shall not see when the rain comes.” Jeremiah, 17:6

In later life one of Judith’s favorite possessions was a tattered copy of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer’s scholarly study, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric, picked up at a used-book store in Washington thirty years after its original publication in 1969, the container valued because she treasured the contents, a literary analysis, true, but one that seemed validated by real life. At the heart of the pastoral lyric, Rosenmeyer explains, are shepherds who watch their flocks while engaged in singing contests and dialogues modeled, to some degree, on Socratic discourse. Nevertheless, the songs as well as the discourse remain “natural,” “artless,” self-expressive yet “without self-consciousness.” Judith loved the idea of singing shepherds, and she appreciated the notion of unself-conscious self-expression, particularly because it was something she’d never encountered in her own career at a magazine published by an association dedicated to historic preservation. She was pretty sure that she herself had never expressed an unself-conscious word in her life.

Judith also liked the idea that these shepherds are not really shepherds. Instead, they are projections of the urban psyche, fictitious creatures devised by and for people unfamiliar with real shepherds but longing for experience. Perhaps as a result, the shepherds of the pastoral lyric closely resemble the desirous readers of the pastoral lyric, sophisticated urbanites on vacation, vacationers who are, however, threatened by their leisure and sing about the trials of unrequited love in order to forestall an unbearable boredom. And yet, Rosenmeyer points out, no matter how effective songs of unrequited love might be as a means of whiling away the time, they also intensify—indeed, create—an emotion that “shackles and blinds” the lover. This means that the projected shepherds, as well as the projecting readers, rely for amusement on an obsession that can destroy them altogether, a paradox Judith appreciated from long experience with the diverting but ultimately pointless pursuit of love.

Judith also treasured The Green Cabinet because she recognized the setting. The pastoral lyric, Rosenmeyer explains, takes place in a secluded rural location, which emphasizes the assumption that the best thinking, the best singing, the best living take place far from the city. This idealized locus amoenus is, however, merely “a highly selective arrangement of stage properties” chosen to convey the delights of freedom and pleasure, and “melancholy is triggered by the awareness, on the part of the herdsmen, that the bower in which they perform their songs and conduct their dialogues does not really exist” (p. 229). By the time Judith read The Green Cabinet she was all too aware of the non-existence of the “bower” because she had traveled all over the United States for decades writing articles about places that, for all their actuality, had to be reinvented to suit the purpose of the “song,” places that embodied the projected desire of readers who lived transitory lives while longing for eternal stability. At times Judith was even proud of the many stage sets she had concocted for the sake of Historic Preservation’s readers.

Most of all, Judith appreciated the way Rosenmeyer’s literary scholarship allayed her professional guilt: Invented by Theocritus in the third century B.C., the pastoral lyric has been endlessly riffed and parodied. She loved Rosenmeyer’s analysis of the scores of writers—both the straight-faced and the smirking—who have written pastorals over the centuries. Indeed, their very number, temporal range, and varied talents somehow make the pastoral lyric seem like an imperative lying beyond the will of the specific writer, a form with a life of its own.

Still, in spite of all her appreciation, it occurred to Judith as she repeatedly turned its pages that The Green Cabinet was not entirely convincing. What if the writers of the pastoral lyric were unaware that they were creating spurious shepherds? What if they believed they were describing actual shepherds as they really were? What if they felt they were revealing to their...