Walter Pater’s 1885 novel Marius the Epicurean inspired the title Marius in Pasadena. Pater wrote it, in part, to justify his then-infamous conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which many Victorians mistook as an appeal to shallow hedonism. The novel, set in Italy and Rome during the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, draws us a picture of the aesthetic life as Pater conceived it in late 19th century England. But it was a life that martyred its principal character, Marius. It described an Epicureanism of sympathy and human feeling that shaded into the spirit of early Christianity. Pater believed that the ideas in Studies would not lead to hedonism but to empathy and gratitude. A few words from the novel supply the reason for Marius in Pasadena. Pater writes:
“From that theory of life as the end of life, followed, as a practical consequence, the desirableness of refining all the instruments of inward and outward intuition, of developing all their capacities, of testing and exercising oneself in them, till one’s whole nature should become a complex medium of reception, towards the vision—the beatific vision, if one cared to make it such of our actual experience in the world.”
Marius in Pasadena is about refining perception—this “outward and inward intuition”—as Pater expresses it. In the novel, the character Marius realizes this intensified reception through culture. The story’s sometimes complex but eloquent prose suggests that poetry, painting, and music offer some of what is best in life and that our attention to them makes our experiences sharper. Culture has a way of producing culture. We view paintings and begin to see more in them. We listen to music, its patterns and sonorities become vivid, and our preferences more defined. We read history, and its objects gain meaning. We see motivation and coherence, whereas before, we only knew a date and a name; it becomes a story.
Describing the education of Marius, Pater writes:
“He was acquiring what it is ever the chief function of all higher education to teach—a system or art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, the elements of distinction, in our everyday life—of so exclusively living in them—that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift and débris of life, becomes as though it were not.”
It’s a simple idea. The more we experience and learn, the more affecting our sensations and thoughts become—if we attend to them while they happen.
It is this way of seeing the world that the character Marius cultivates in the novel. Pater shows us a life shaped by the Cyrenaicism of Aristippus, the physics of Heraclitus, the Platonism of Apuleius, the piety of Numa and the early Christian church, and the Epicureanism of Lucretius. It is a moving story and part apology for an ethos that has had detractors ever since Aristippus danced for the tyrant Dionysus, scandalizing the young Plato. It puts means before ends and believes culture makes us truly human. It also reminds us that we have only so much time. That, along with Horace, we should “receive each unexpected hour with gratitude.”
An idea hidden in the text is presented late in the novel: “If the true value of souls is in proportion to what they can admire, Marius was just then an acceptable soul.” Marius in Pasadena is about becoming an acceptable soul.
Why Pasadena?
In Pasadena and its neighboring San Marino, you can get a complete aesthetic education without wandering outside their 20 square miles of dry hills and chaparral. What early Californians built as a winter resort for patrons in the East in the late 19th century has become a cultural center in the sometimes-incoherent Los Angeles. Here, we find structures built by the architects Charles and Henry Greene, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Frederick Roehrig. In its galleries, you can see paintings by Rembrandt and Giorgione, Claude and Degas, Matisse and Modigliani. It is home to Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Huntington’s extensive research library that contains millions of works from as early as the 11th century. All of this in a suburb of 140,000 souls.
Welcome to Marius in Pasadena!
