Jacques Barzun - 100th Birthday (30th November 2007)
The great french-american historian and polymath is 100 years old this month. But after 70 years teaching at the Columbia University, New York and dozens of books, his daily routine is still rigorous. The New Yorker in a good piece (here) tells us,
"Barzun is usually out of bed by 6 A.M. He brews coffee, reads the San Antonio Express-News, exercises for forty minutes, and heads down the hall to his study. After lunch, he dips into the manuscripts and books that people send him, answers letters, and takes calls from family members and friends. In the afternoon, he likes to read in the sunroom, whose white brick walls and black-and-white tiled floor accommodate without protest a mélange of armchairs and end tables of no particular style. But then all the furnishings in the house—including the art: Piranesi fortifications, Daumier scenes of Parisian life, Expressionist studies by Cleve Gray, and bright watercolors of flowers and plants by Marguerite—have an aesthetic compatibility that seems to issue more from accident than from design. Cocktails are at six-thirty (Barzun favors Manhattans); a light dinner follows, then a session with the New York Times. Barzun doesn’t watch TV and is usually in bed by nine-thirty."
Also see this piece in The New Criterion in praise of this great defender of western civilization and culture - HERE.
Read his "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present" (2000)
The great french-american historian and polymath is 100 years old this month. But after 70 years teaching at the Columbia University, New York and dozens of books, his daily routine is still rigorous. The New Yorker in a good piece (here) tells us,
"Barzun is usually out of bed by 6 A.M. He brews coffee, reads the San Antonio Express-News, exercises for forty minutes, and heads down the hall to his study. After lunch, he dips into the manuscripts and books that people send him, answers letters, and takes calls from family members and friends. In the afternoon, he likes to read in the sunroom, whose white brick walls and black-and-white tiled floor accommodate without protest a mélange of armchairs and end tables of no particular style. But then all the furnishings in the house—including the art: Piranesi fortifications, Daumier scenes of Parisian life, Expressionist studies by Cleve Gray, and bright watercolors of flowers and plants by Marguerite—have an aesthetic compatibility that seems to issue more from accident than from design. Cocktails are at six-thirty (Barzun favors Manhattans); a light dinner follows, then a session with the New York Times. Barzun doesn’t watch TV and is usually in bed by nine-thirty."
Also see this piece in The New Criterion in praise of this great defender of western civilization and culture - HERE.
Read his "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present" (2000)
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