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XXXIII. SALIAN RITES
This is a strange landscape indeed, a disquieting one. You are on foot, the four of you: Darwin, the two librarians Marcellus and Polybius, and you. The transfer from 284 A.D. a thousand years back to 753 B.C. is every bit as demanding and jarring as the passage from your era to 284 A.D. There are no host bodies here, so you are all here as yourselves. There was a time frame that you didn’t notice, during which your germs from 284 were replaced by germs from 750 so that nobody would die of some simple disease to which immunity was missing. All four of you look rather identically bundled in tunics and cloaks. You have no military escort, which could be fatal in this wild country, but you each carry a gladius (short military sword) and a dagger plainly visible as a warning for potential brigands. Your wear good leather sandals, which alone could get you killed by someone needing good shoes, but you are confident after a few days of wandering around here nobody will notice your shiny footgear. Marcellus is eager to see the suckling she-wolf, or at least some evidence of divine activity, and so he presses ahead while you, Darwin, and Polybius follow. Polybius as always seems more dour and reserved, and you suppose it is because of the embedded cynicism of a lifetime of Greek thinking and Roman slavery, no matter how luxurious. You have never had any experience with slavery, anymore than with some dreadful but extinct disease, but now you have had a chance to see it, to live with it, to eat and sleep and speak with its victims. Coming to it not as one who has grown up within the system, but as an outsider, you guess that when a person is another person’s property, both lose something of their independent soul. This is evident directly in the glaring abnormality of the slave’s life, which in some ways resembles more the life of an animal than of a person, but indirectly in a certain dishonesty with which the owner must converse with his soul each day, and an aversion from the truth that puts a distance between the owner and his own soul. The master must convince himself at all costs that he is superior to the slave, else slavery cannot be justified, and the slave is reminded every day at odd moments that he is not the owner of the heart that beats within him, and for this reason he feels a certain melancholia, and this is what you feel most likely is the inward meaning of the outward manifestations in Polybius’ stoic expression and dour eyes. Marcellus is still young and excitable, and is in fact of a different school than the older man. The fire still burns, and the light still shines, in Marcellus, whereas the light in Polybius is nothing more than embers that no amount of free air will ever kindle back into flame. For this alone, you ache to return to your own world, where slavery is not yet extinct, but practiced only on the fringes of the developing world (not counting the trafficking in humans for sex in the most sophisticated nations, and by the most sophisticated means including the Internet). At least in your world these things are forbidden by law, and efforts are made to enforce these laws. Here, the law glorious in the power of humans to own other humans. These thoughts flutter through your mind as you pinch your cloak around your neck in the cold, damp morning air. You trudge on the muddy lowland paths as best you can. You avoid low spots where the mud makes sucking sounds and tries to hold you by the bottoms of your sandals. You continue along these paths, which look very much like cow paths with an occasional wagon rut. It’s rather evident that the wear comes largely from herding sheep and cattle between their fields and someone’s barn or pen. Maybe the cattle are kept in caves, as is the practice higher up in the Apennines. Even shallow overhangs under cliffs offer the animals shelter from the rolling thunder and flashing lighting when the sky is an angry blue-black.
Far off, you see several men leading a donkey and cart. They wear drab wool and leather clothing and seem to hurry. A man on horseback rides beside them, and you imagine it is the owner of a salt works, taking his product to market in the various settlements, perhaps even an Etruscan city to the north where such things are brokered in the market. The men with the rider may be his sons, or his slaves. The cart, the horse, and the men disappear into mist to the north.
To the south you see riders on a ridge, three of them, wearing a kind of primitive armor that consists of a round plate of wood and leather strapped over the chest by leather straps that run over the shoulders and under the arms. It looks uncomfortable, but the trio seem intent on their task. Maybe they are going to rob the salt wagon, or maybe they are going to avenge a wrong in another village, or maybe they are a father and two brothers going to inspect a potential bride in a nearby settlement. They too are swallowed by the mist.
Marcellus stops and looks around suddenly. You three catch up, almost bumping into him. "What is it?" Polybius says impatiently. Marcellus holds up one arm. He cocks his head to one side, and the rest of you listen. You hear it now: a strange sound, a steady humming.
Darwin says: "If there are fields nearby, maybe it’s the sound of insects." You listen, and hear it too. It’s a persistent sort of mar-mar-mar-mar… sound that gets on the nerves. Accompanying it is a rattling noise that strongly suggests human origin. In fact, it sounds like a cross between a marching band and disco music.
"Don’t draw your swords," Polybius cautions. "Try not to look warlike. Try to smile."
You joke: "Try to look as if you belong here." You’re thinking of an old Abbott and Costello flick, except here it’s no joke, but could be a matter of life and death in the turn of an instant. Nobody laughs, and you realize again that steady undercurrent of fear you noticed in ancient Rome (as opposed to primordial Rome).
You all advance along the country lane, which has wild hedges on both sides, some garlanded with flowers that suggest it is spring in this tempestuous, moody landscape. You wonder if the sun ever does come out, as it will in later centuries as the weather warms. Right now there is a global cooling in progress, probably accelerated by a lot of volcanic activity as the vast European and African tectonic plates shift in their beds underground. The landscape is lush, with full oak trees whose crowns are rich with twittering birds. Apple and nut-bearing trees abound, along with the occasional palm. The dark cypress, that dark guardian of the Italic landscape, stands in its solitary watch-places. The buzzing sound gets louder.
"Cicadas?" you wonder out loud.
"Could be," Darwin says.
"No, it is music. I hear the sistrum clearly now." Polybius slides the hem of his garment over his head, which is the traditional Roman gesture of pietas or reverence amid dire things. It signifies mourning at a funeral, or it may signify the fearful respect of augurs at their craft when they see a spectacle in the heavens.
You hear it too: the steady pulsing of a low horn as you step into a crossroads marked by stumpy phallic posts or lingams at each corner. Yellowish puddles still roil from recent footsteps, and the wind stirs uneasy images that glide ghostlike over the water, a flock of birds suddenly bursts from a large oak tree and flies eastward. Now for the first time you truly sense that you have stepped into the primordial world and yet it could be a modern village anywhere in the developing world of your time. In fact, in the refined and bloodless ceremonies such as German Fasching and Brazilian carneval, you have the forgotten religious ceremonies of long-ago tribes like these people dancing before you right now in this Italic fog (the original bigamist).
In Germany, along the Rhine, during the springtime celebration of Fasching, one rather Nordic sounding legend that would never have stood the pride of Mediterranean manhood, says that for three days a woman may leave her husband and take any lovers she wants—though you don’t personally know anyone who has done this, even when loaded to the gills with Doppelbock (‘double Bock’)—that heady brew, which is enough to knock a big man out of his socks or a woman out of her moral girdings; the word allegedly stems from the city of Einbeck, but the name suspiciously suggests another sort of bock (‘goat’ or ‘ram’ or even ‘buck’ in the broader Germanic sense as you understand any proud male with huge horns and a pride to match; or does it refer to the kick from the ale?).
You think of carnevale, a pious Catholic practice, from the Italian carne + vale (goodbye to meat), a last-minute bash throughout the world wherever ancient Roman customs have been carried (that includes French influences from New Orleans to Quebec and Africa to Pape’ete; Spanish influences on every continent; Portuguese in Brazil and Africa; and on and on…hardly a spot on the globe not touched by the springtime rites of the Bronze Age mother goddess who receives her husband or son, whose seed is planted in the earth and sprouts forth at Easter time, in all sorts of variations from the incestuous to the simply motherly. You whisper these ideas back and forth with Darwin, who has read the same books by Frazer and Graves to mention just a few classic scholars of the White Goddess or of Isis/Osiris, Demeter/Persephone/Orpheus/Euridyce, and he nods, saying impatiently: "Yes, yes, but put all that out of your mind now. These people may vaguely remember snatches of this and that from long ago folk tales, but they only know the land immediately around here. They are principally animists, concerned with the spirits all around them, and they aren’t always sure they don’t have spirits inside themselves, or if some of them are maybe spirits also. Forget all your book learning, and open your mind. Think of young maids and lasses in Merry Old England dancing around the maypole, a phallic symbol for spring planting, under the noses of the Christian clergy." He reaches over and pinches Marcellus on the cheek with forceful though kindly fatherliness. "You too, my sophisticated young airhead with all of your polish and Greek wit." He gives Polybius a dragon-like stare (if eyes could spew fire, Darwin’s would now, but the icy composure of Polybius’ unfazed look would quench any such flames).
At the same time, you hear the outcry of farmers standing at the edge of the road not far ahead. They are waving their arms at something in the fields. They notice you—seamed, often toothless faces, ageless whether young or old. Their eyes are bright and courageous, with a kind of childlike openness, a lack of fear. They are strong men who have survived childhood in an age where most people die before puberty, and their strength is ox-like. Their women age fast, but in youth look athletic and shapely. The men’s skin color is that same burned reddish-brown you have seen in Mayans, Egyptians, and dwellers on the Indus. It is the universal color of those who work in the sun, which turns both the soil and the skin a dark ocher and leaves wrinkles. You speculate that the dichotomy in the Etruscan tombs, which D. H. Lawrence mentions, between the robust red skinned men and their pale, lily-like women, suggests that a mark of status among the well-to-do was that their women did no field work but stayed indoors and did as Greek ladies did, namely weave and spin while the slave women cooked and fetched. You see no pale women here, only hardy coffee-skinned ones with rough hands and gorgeous faces with sloe eyes, and you know these people work together from dawn to dusk when the sowing and reaping are good, in a year when their fields are blessed with abundance.
You come to a rise overlooking the fields, and there you see nearly two dozen young men performing a strange rite. They are naked except for loincloths, and they wear a cloth over their heads. The fields are brown, and tilled in rows: you can see the bullock, the horse, and the soil-encrusted plow over to one side.
"These are the Salian rites," Darwin says with awe. His eyes gleam, as do Marcellus’, at the living sight of this legend. Polybius, whose disdain for primitive Latin superstitions becomes clearer as the minutes go by, shakes his head and averts his eyes under the hood of his cloak to avoid having his pure philosophical mind polluted by local spirits.
You do feel a sense of awe. To be honest, you feel a chill, and it’s not the damp weather. Standing off in a corner are several men wearing masks, and these figures are nodding rhythmically. In fact, you notice that all the spectators by the wayside are nodding. They wave their arms in the rhythm of the dance, and sometimes swing their bodies around as if in a trance.
The lead priest—these are part-timers, most likely young farmers and their sons—who parade in this leaping procession. You’ve heard of this, even seen vestiges of it, as in the leaping procession every year in Luxembourg at Echternach, where pilgrims, joined by handkerchiefs they hold, hop three steps forward, two back, three forward, two back. The context is entirely different, dating to the Middle Ages in its present form as a penitential journey, but there is definitely rhythm.
Here, the young men are covered with sweat and mud as they energetically move through the field. They move in a double row, in parallel furrows, and their feet are black with muck. Some seem to be dropping seeds, while others play instruments. Some have figure-eight shaped shields that remind you of the Argive shields Homer mentions on the plains of Troy, except these are smaller ritual shields, beaten rhythmically not with swords but with sticks. The music has a strong steady rhythm provided by a sort of tambourine (hand-drum with cymbals) and the sistrum, a forked instrument in which cymbals are strung on wires. The lead man wears a red demon mask, as do those who stand nodding and clapping in the corner of the field. It’s kind of Hallow E’en meets Venetian opera, minus the castrati (oops, they come later, as you will find out when you get to the Saturnalia).
Darwin is at his analytical best: "The nodding would refer to nuere, nodding, which the numina do. That’s the gods. Oh Lord, if I may invoke thee, this is so wonderful to behold. This is all just the simple, unadorned country religion you were after, Marcellus. These are the original Salian rites, before the early Romans had a chance to add all the rituals they will soon enough starting with Numa, and ending with a major year-round industry by Imperial times, when the origins of most of it have been forgotten. Look at them, singing Wake up, Mars, time to plant the crops! Make them fertile and we’ll sacrifice in your honor, all in this ancient dialect."
"I can barely understand them," Marcellus says.
Darwin continues: "Later, when this primorial soup of a religion gets dollied up so there are gods with human forms, a god-nod can make mountains shake. For now, the world is run by spirits who live in everything."
You say: "Animism? Is that what you mean?"
"Oh yes," Darwin says, "in all its classic beauty. Just like the ancient Shinto of Japan or the mana of New Zealand or the native religions of Africa and the Amazon, just to name a few. It’s shamanism in all its primitive logic. There are no fanciful deities here, no Jupiter having sex with swans or goddesses giving birth to half-mortals like Achilles. There hasn’t been time here to dream all that up."
"What about the Greeks to the south, or the Etruscans to the north?" you ask.
Darwin says: "They do have more fancy gods and goddesses, mostly what survived from the Bronze Age throughout the Homeric age, but underlying that is a religion more primordial by far. I’ll tell you more about that later. As to these people, who are concerned only about surviving from one year to the next, which means having a decent crop—if you can’t be separate from nature by understanding nature in the scientific sense that we have had since the Enlightenment of the 18th Century, or even the fancier imports that flooded the Roman empire from all its provinces, then you are part of nature. You understand nature from the inside out rather than from the outside in."
"You are speaking in riddles like those dreadful Egyptians," Polybius says, unmindful that he himself is from Libya and probably of Egyptian or Coptic ancestry.
"I am puzzled also," Marcellus says in his characteristic eagerness, but with a tinge of disappointment that is to deepen on his own journey into the Roman past. "I have seen all sorts of jangling processions and weird masks in the temples that infest Rome, and in the deities that cast their false gaze down into the blackening clouds of incense on which the gullible spend their last drachm. What is it that excites you about these farm clods, these pagani with their muddy and ill-fitting tunics?"
Darwin shakes Marcellus gently by the shoulder. "You have more prejudice to undo at a thousand years’ remove than I do at nearly three thousand. You have to forget the low opinion in which the urban dwellers (‘citizens’) hold the country dwellers. You wanted to see the humble primitive ancestors of the Romans. Here they are."
"Here they are indeed," Polybius says, holding his nose at the scent of a pile of cow dung, horse manure, and straw ripening into a nice compost nearby.
"Well, yes," Marcellus says uncertainly.
"You didn’t think they would glide around marble corridors like those flittering fairy tales the Greeks brought from Olympus, did you?"
"No," Marcellus says uncomfortably. He is starting to look rather miserable, while Polybius has looked unhappy all along.
You call to mind of the awesome achievements of Egypt, and all the knowledge of the stars and the arts that her priests have accumulated over thousands of years, including the secrets of even now-lost Babylon, and all of it for just one reason: ensuring a nice, ripe overflow of the Nile in a good farming year, and the rich black compost the great river lays onto what would otherwise soon be reclaimed into the ever-growing Sahara Desert. You reflect upon the fact that the very name of chemistry, the subject taught in 21st Century universities, with its periodic table and other wonders, comes from an older word, alchemy (the transformation of base matter into higher metals, or of the baser spirits into higher natures during the Middle Ages) comes from the Arabic al-chemt, coined by the high Arabic civilization of 1,000 A.D., and derived from Classical knowledge, which in itself nods to barely remembered sources of wisdom thousands of years farther in the past, long before the Classical age. Marcellus wouldn’t understand much of this, but you can tell him: "Marcellus, think of this. You do respect the esoteric knowledge of the long-ago Babylonians, who gazed at the paths of the stars, and the secrets of the Egyptian priests, do you not?"
Marcellus shrugs. Polybius says dourly: "We tolerate their cults along with the worst detritus of the Orontes and the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, even the Indus, a thousand rivers of this world and the infernal world, which flows into the Tiber and into the bloodstream of the Romans so that they have forgotten what it means to be Roman."
You add: "The Egyptians referred to their fertile and mysterious land as the Black Land, or Khemt."
"Your point?" Polybius asks with the supercilious arched brow of a Socrates, and the ill will of a sophist or a political demagogue on the hunt for someone slower of tongue.
"My point is that it’s all about the soil. In go the seeds, out come the beans. It’s that simple. The rest is all rumbling—of hungry bellies, wars, thunder, lightning, everything unpleasant under the sun."
"You really must start your own stoa (‘porch’ hence ‘school’ or place for Greeks to argue about philosophy)," Marcellus says admiringly.
"No!" Darwin thunders. "Quiet, the lot of you! We’ve come to listen, to learn, to be quiet, not to babble like magpies on a branch."
You and the librarians look about, mortified, noting that some of the farmers are starting to look your way with hostility. Your voices have risen in argument, and irreverence.
In the field, the dancing of the Salians continues at a loud, steady, hypnotic pitch. They hop from side to side, and occasionally swoop upward and down again, imitating how the tall corn leaps from the ground. You whisper to yourself: "Who says white men don’t have rhythm?" but your wit is lost in the noise of the dance. In minutes, the farmers have forgotten all about you. No doubt they are used to strangers passing through their land, as long as nobody makes a move to harm their women, their animals, their crops, or worse yet, their boundary markers.
When the leaping priests reach the end of a pair of furrows, the drumming changes pitch briefly, as they make a turn and their chief leads them along the next furrows, back in the direction in which they came. So back and forth, they will traverse the entire tillage.
Darwin explains: "That sound we heard, mar mar mar… which reminds me of a plague of insects, may be the origin of the Roman god Mars. He was originally not a god of war, like the Greek Ares, but a god of agriculture. He went by variations on the name Marmarius or Mamurius, and he was connected with these people’s concern with blights. The worst of the blights we know of was a kind of rust, or ick. There was actually a deity named Robigo (‘Rust’) to prevent this blight or mildew, and most likely rusty pipes or swords or plows to boot. That’s how this numina thing works, as it gets more sophisticated. First you have a problem, lose sleep over it, start lying awake at night fantasizing about fixing it, and then you give it a name, and pretty soon it’s a whole nightmare, a saga in your life. Imagine a modern man, struggling with his leaky kitchen sink over the weekend when he doesn’t want to call a plumber (from later Latin plumbum, ‘lead’) and pay overtime, so he spends all weekend lying under the sink on his back with garbage dripping on his face, and skinned knuckles. You know, it doesn’t take him more than ten minutes to start referring to his plumbing as "you son of a bitch" and other choice expletives, which personify it, and that’s pretty much how the animistic, numinal thing works. The plumbing becomes a disembodied demon, or better yet, it is inhabited by disembodied demons who delight in tormenting our modern home owner."
You add, to the bafflement of Marcellus and Polybius: "Should we take it that the ‘son of a bitch’ reference is a kind of Isis/Osiris mother/son mythology?"
"You might," Darwin says, "particularly when you can imagine that the very next thing our friend under the sink starts shouting is a reference to the plumbing devils having sex with their mother. You know all the choice Anglo-Saxon epithets which do have their roots in ancient mythology as well as in the hard-wired instincts of the primitive human cortex."
"Yes," you say, "Sometimes, when words fail, the final instinct is to start hammering the pipes with a heavy spanner until nothing is left except twisted plastic and smashed fittings, which is sort of the place where Saturn kills his father, or Chronos devours his young, and Mars goes from being a god of bad crops to being a god of war, and then of course we give up and call the plumber."
"Except," Darwin says, "these guys here don’t have the option of calling in anyone else. There is no plumber. It’s all up to them. Either they coax that corn out of the ground, and wish or dance that robigo away, or else their children starve, their pregnant women end with stillbirth, and they themselves have no beer to drink."
"That alone must make these gentlemen dance as hard as they can," Marcellus chirps in while understanding almost nothing you’ve said except ‘beer,’ a word like ‘beverage,’whose roots go back to the Indo-European and beyond that to Proto-Indo-European, maybe ‘biru.’ This calls to mind pre-Biblical images of fat, feather-clad, big-eyed Sumerians drinking biru from cups with straws, from whose diuretic properties perhaps the Flood story got its course (no pun at all). Marcellus grins: "Beer is an essential part of life back home where I come from. I wouldn’t mind drowning myself in a tankard the way I feel right now."
Polybius gives his younger countryman a dark look: "All that I have taught you about keeping a placid and pure mind, like a chaste bed for Philosophia (‘Beloved Wisdom’), and you still joke about drowning in the swill of forgetfulness."
"It’s the drink of Ceres," Darwin jibes at Polybius, "which the Spanish will one day call cerveza in her honor, while timid Anglo-Americans will content themselves with merely drowning their morning cereal in a splash of milk."
Polybius shoots back: "If you were a Roman, you horrible goat, you would no doubt join the barbaroi and the pagani in their hillbilly rites and get yourself soused and vomiting copiously at the Cerialia." He refers in his derisive remark to the annual festival of the corn goddess on March 1, when humble peasants in the hills of Latium get soused in the grain goddess’ honor (Christianity’s initially ridiculed but later feared polytheists, originally just ‘country bumpkins’ before Medieval terror robbed people of clear thinking). His barbaroi is an added barb, being a derisive Greek word for foreigners (furriners) meaning ‘those who talk funny’ (as in bar bar bar…, hence barbaroi).
One of those ephemeral key insights drifts through your overloaded mind: everything important is childishly simple. All the more complicated stuff that folks think of later is hooey, invented by people with too much middle management, too much time on their hands, and too many third-rate poets. It’s best expressed by Jesus Christ: "The best faith is that of small children."
"Enough of this chatter," Darwin says. "We could have had this stupid argument in your library, Polybius. We came here to look, and listen, and learn."
"My apologies," Polybius says graciously, wrapping his cloak more tightly around his head.
A great shout arises, and your attention turns to the ceremonies in the fields.
A look of horror appears on Darwin’s face. "Oh my God," he says, hurrying forward. You and the librarians follow, not sure what Darwin is thinking.
The lead man, with the red mask, falls to his knees and gets up again. The peasants along the side of the field cheer. Women just then are arriving with a small train of mules, which are loaded with baskets of food and drink. Everyone is in a very festive mood, except perhaps the chap on his knees. You notice with a pulse beat of horror that the front of his body is stained red. Several Salii dance around him, whacking him with their sticks and shields, while the rest continue making music, singing, and dancing that odd but rhythmic leaping dance.
"He has blood all over him," you say to Darwin. The two librarians hang back, as if afraid to get their cloaks dirty. You want to bang their heads together.
"Yes," Darwin says, "I think some of it is his own." He points to the men. "See, they have been whipping him with dog guts and other offal. That’s part of some of the absolutely nutty rituals that apparently are already being practiced here, some of which even by now have lost their purpose. They are also beating the living tar out of that gentleman, and I think the way he is raising his mask and holding his jaw, someone just nailed him a good one in the kisser. Ouch."
"Can’t we do something?" you almost wail.
Darwin shrugs darkly. "What do you think this is, Around The World In Eighty Days, the suttee scene? There is nothing anyone can do for him."
"What do you mean?"
"I’m just guessing," Darwin says, "but I am willing to bet he is not only the springtime planting jocko—meaning he gets to do his disco music with all the women he wants—but come harvest time, he becomes the thank-you note they send to their goddess." He runs a finger across his throat.
"No!"
"Yes, a human sacrifice. They perhaps had a bad crop last year, and they don’t do this every year or they’d run out of young men, but this seems to be what the witchdoctor ordered." He looked at Marcellus. "Is this what you were thinking about the noble rustic savages and so forth?" Marcellus blanches, and Darwin turns to you. "Don’t feel bad for the young man out there. He’ll have the time of his life for the next six months, driving all that seed into the ground. He will become a living god to these people, and sometime between the planting and the reaping he will join his eternal mother in a bloody sacrifice." He paused, thinking, and added: "They might even eat him. Who knows?"
"Stop!" Marcellus cries, holding his hand over his mouth as if he is about to hurl dormice.
Darwin shrugs, "The Romans practiced occasional human sacrifice, on and off, less and less, reluctantly. Some of their contemporaries did it all the time, like the Carthaginians, who supposedly regularly sacrificed children. The last Roman human sacrifice (not counting a million or so people killed in the blood sports of the circuses) was in 216 B.C. after the disastrous defeat at Cannae during the Second Punic War. It looked as if Rome was about to be wiped out by Hannibal, and in their darkest hour the Romans buried two Gauls and two Greeks alive in the Forum Boarium, or cattle market, in the old salt-port near the Sublician Bridge." He seems to shudder. "Well, we could join these farmers in their celebration. They are going to be sousing and carousing all evening. When it gets dark of course, being idyllic and rustic and so forth, they won’t have electric lights, so they might burn a bonfire late into the evening, but then they’ll pass out. Headaches all around in the morning. Hangovers are infernal. Come, let’s move on!" So saying, he leads you through the throngs of cheering farmers who by now have hoisted their grinning and bloodied hero on their shoulders. The young man holds in each hand a cow’s horn, cornu, one of them filled with spring flowers and plenty (copia) of good things to eat (cornucopia, mythic ‘horn of plenty’ dating as far back as primordial Indus civilization), the other splashing with blood-red wine to ease the pain of his bruises. He is missing a tooth, too, as his grin reveals, and he laughs like Bacchus. What a way to go, you think, literally. You’re glad you won’t be around for the curtain call.
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