Dim Sum and Victorian Verse

Two Chus, Two Flemings, and a Moy

 

Of the many rewards offered by the academic life, the greatest for me has been the endless succession of students, endless in number but also endlessly diverse and endlessly engaging, whom I encountered during a half century of teaching.  Hundreds of them remain vivid in memory, and not a few of them remain at least to some extent still in my life, or at least close enough to it that I am not all that surprised when they reappear, perhaps only for a few moments, often unannounced and unexpected.

 

An alumna friend with whom I had a pleasant interlude recently is Professor Olivia Loksing Moy of the English Department of Lehman College of the City University of New York.  To find the right stereotype under which to classify Prof. Moy presents the problem one faces with many polymaths, analogous to the problem of the “plurality of worlds” that taxed thinkers in the eighteenth century.  So “altruistic, overachieving female Asian-American literary scholar” will have to do.  She is an alumna of the Class of 2006.  That year was my final year of teaching at Princeton—a circumstance that would make me unlikely to forget her, even if there were not so many others.   I had also known her sister Olympia very slightly—Olympia today being a high-powered lawyer--so that I almost felt that she was a part of an incipient tradition.  In our shared final year Olivia took a class I was teaching in which a Princeton friend of mine for several years—a research physicist named T. K. Chu at our red-hot fusion laboratory—was also sitting in.  Dr. Chu and his wife are fellow supporters of the lively classical music scene around here.  The Moy sisters were both accomplished musicians.  So there was another link.

 

Thus both the nonagenarian Chu and the merely nearly nonagenarian Fleming were delighted to learn that Professor Olivia Moy was planning to make a trip to Princeton on academic business, a trip that might include a lunch with elderly Princeton friends.  That lunch actually took place last Saturday, and it was delightful.

 

In our adopted state of New Jersey, in which turnpike exit numbers are rich in their sociological significance, there is a tradition of locating surprisingly excellent restaurants, especially Chinese restaurants, in unlikely places.  I first experienced this phenomenon many years ago through a locally famous eatery that was an appendage to a BP gas station on US Route 1.  Its name was “A Kitchen”, and it was entirely unclear whether the “A” was a badge of merit or simply the indefinite article.  The fame of A Kitchen slowly grew to command the attention of the food editor of the New York Times.   Journalistic fame of course proved fatal.  Having achieved bourgeois celebrity the place moved to a slightly more conventional locale a little further north on (as I recall) Route 27 and submerged into the sea of Asian restaurants in the area, most of which I am sure are of course okay but, you know, simply lack the attractiveness of the gas-pump ethos.

 

The (current) name of the establishment at which we met Professor Moy is “The Shanghai Bun”.  It is located in one of the more modest, indeed obscure mini-malls of central Jersey, very near to the Princeton Junction railroad station.  I have no more idea of what the “Bun” is about in this name than I do of what the “A” is about in A Kitchen.  The restaurant does not seem to specialize in buns, but it does one hell of a business.  Its popular success seems to me well merited, for the food is delicious in taste and abundant in quantity.  If you consult the Internet for reviews, you will find only that “Dim sum & other traditional Chinese classics are prepared at this unassuming outfit in a strip mall.”  I presume that the “unassuming” in that description is artistic rhetorical understatement.  Nondescript is more like it.

 

The first person I recognized among the diners as we entered the place—indeed the only person I recognized--was the very nice lady who runs the best Chinese restaurant in Princeton proper.  This, thought I, is a very good sign.  Sort of like learning so many years ago that Stan Musial shaved with Gillette Blue Blades, same as me.   (They had “the sharpest edges ever honed,” though I thought the guy said “owned” and therefore wanted to own one.)  The restaurant was very busy, offering us the leisure for protracted catching-up conversations.  At the end, Professor Moy gifted us with two of her book-length publications.  One is a work edited with a colleague at Montclair State University and anthologizing essays by a dozen or so scholars under the general title of Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life.  I have as yet barely leafed through it, but I spent a little more time with her own monograph, The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).  I read a little more deeply in this one, deeply enough to know I want to read the rest.  By a strange chance the first scholarly article I ever published was concerned with Browning’s dramatic monologue “Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium’”.  Fortunately, that was so long ago that I have ceased to be embarrassed by it, but I was certainly interested in what Prof. Moy has to say about the poem.  The good news is that it is never too late to learn, and there are few better teachers than one’s students.  And speaking of students…

 

I conclude this post with a note of personal privilege.  Later in the day we shall be transported to New York City to celebrate our beautiful, brilliant, and absolutely beloved granddaughter Lulu Mae Fleming-Benite, B.A., who has just graduated, after four years of deep intellectual engagement and high academic achievement, from Barnard College. Lulu will be no stranger to habitual or even intermittent readers of this blog.  She has featured in many essays and, deo volente, will feature in many more in a future that begins with her continuing studies in France.  Congratulations dear, dear Lulu!

Pope Leo XIV

One of the most famous works of modern literary criticism is Mimesis by Erich Auerbach, first published in its original German in 1942.  The subtitle to Mimesis is “The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.”  It has since been translated into most of the languages on earth.   Auerbach was a brilliant German philologist and wide-ranging literary scholar who, as a Jew, fled Nazi persecution to take up a rather obscure academic appointment in Turkey, where he completed his great book.  After the war he moved to America and eventually to Yale University.  He published several other books of wide-ranging erudition and influence.  He is, indeed, one of the giants of twentieth-century literary study.  It is he who introduced into general academic currency the Greek word mimesis, often translated as “imitation” or “representation” as we use those words to describe the relationship between “real life” and life’s portrayal in literary or visual art. The word makes an important appearance in Aristotle’s Poetics, one of the fundamental books of our literary criticism.   As a character invented by one of our more notable playwrights famously remarked, “All the world’s a stage, /And all the men and women merely players.”  Is the whole thing “performative”—that is, one big act?

 

The phrase “art imitates life” has naturally invited the riposte that “life imitates art.” It is always pleasant to see art imitating life imitating art.  During the week just past, like millions of others throughout the world I found myself caught up in the papal election.  Well, “caught up” is probably overdoing it.  But we were subliminally prepared for it in a curious way.  Like a lot of other people, Joan and I had seen the film “Conclave” a few months ago. This engaging film exemplifies the principle that art also imitates art, because it is a cinematic version of the novel Conclave by Robert Harris, an excellent writer of historical fiction whose subject matter has often been taken from Antiquity.   (I particularly recommend the Cicero trilogy.)  Conclave is the fictional account of a papal selection in contemporary times.  You might say that Harris has mastered two thousand years of Roman political intrigue.  The fictional new pope, selected as a dark horse over a quite diverse field of leading candidates, is himself significantly diverse, but I won’t spoil things by explaining just how.  Art imitates life; it doesn’t reduplicate it.

 

We like to say that life is stranger than fiction, but, come on, you know that isn’t true.  There is no Saint Hermaphrotidus on the papal roster even in the darkest of the Dark Ages.  Pope Joan—that’s another issue!  Returning briefly to reality, Pope Leo XIV—concerning whom my entire knowledge comes from limited and often eccentric press coverage and the personal experience of two very brief statements he made in two Romance languages—seems a humble, dignified and sincere man.  He is obviously a man of deep and sincere faith, of unusual administrative capacity, of considerable learning, and of no small amount of diplomatic skill.  That he is by birth an American citizen is of real historical interest and apparently to much of the press the most interesting thing about him.  My own suspicion as a medievalist interested in the origins and histories of the principal religious orders in the Roman Church is that many decades living under the ancient Rule of Saint Augustine and long service as a missionary bishop in a developing country have had greater influence on his character than his American birth.  I am not a member of his branch of the universal Christian Church which is, however, the most numerous and widespread of all its branches, making him easily the most obvious and influential single spokesman for the Christian religion in the world.

 

The coverage of the papal transition has mainly been treated with what I have come to regard as conventional superficiality in our press’s discussion of religious matters.  There seems to be an unconscious imperative to make adversarial comparisons between Pope Leo and Donald Trump and to predict or at least wish for some manifest open conflict between Church and State of similar consequence to that between the pope and the secular potentates of the twelfth-century Investiture Controversy.  This contest between secular and ecclesiastical authority may be remembered from a history course as being important for—well, important for something important.  I am a professional medievalist, and as I can’t give you a serious explanation of all the issues involved, I can hardly assume such knowledge in my readers.  Jesus said that his kingdom was “not of this world,” but at least since the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who died nearly seventeen hundred years ago, the Church has failed to eschew temporal political power and has often eagerly pursued it.  Christians have to live with paradox.  Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave.  This invitation to servility is perhaps not a particularly attractive job description.  No number of decaying Roman palaces and halberd-carrying Swiss guards could persuade a sane man to take it on.  The new pope shows every sign of sanity, and his long record of votive self-discipline and ministerial service in Latin America offers no suggestion of a vaulting personal ambition.  It is, I suppose, of some interest that the new pope might be a fan of the Chicago White Sox—this factoid has been prominent in several reports—but not of as much interest as his demonstrated commitment to the wretched of the earth.  To this outsider he appears to have a servant’s mentality, and I wish him well in the burdensome role he now undertakes.  It is a pity that the mimesis—the representation of this election in the popular press—has been mainly and sometimes trivially political.  All Christian churches, among which the Church of Rome is of conspicuous and unique importance, are facing formidable head winds.  That the clearly designated leader of this church appears to be a person of intelligence, integrity, noble vision, and true Christian charity is good news for a world that gets too little good news.

Behrman Award

 

It has been an unusually active week for us geriatrics, so active indeed that it is not easy to identify its high point.  So I won’t even try, and simply go with the last major event, which was our attendance at the sumptuous annual banquet celebrating the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton University.  As treating this topic will obviously require some talk about the late Howard T. Behrman and some talk about the humanities, with any luck I should be finished before I am required to add any thoughts of my own. 

 

The event is officially a “black tie optional” event, but probably only a third of the male participants, including me, were wearing dinner jackets.  The venue was Prospect House, the closest thing we have (not very close) to a Faculty Club.  In the days of Woodrow Wilson, it was a grand private presidential residence; but the presidents have long since decamped to another mansion off campus.  Prospect has a big kitchen and does a brisk business in lunches and special dinners.

 

Prospect House

 

The Behrman Award consists of a handsome bit of money and a large bronze medallion.  At least in the version with which I am familiar, the medallion has a somewhat bizarre figure on its face, after a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci.  The image is often called “Vitruvian man” because of its obvious relationships to the ideas concerning visual perspective advanced by the ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius, which became popular in the Italian Renaissance.  A student once described it to me as “a naked hippie doing jumping jacks.”  Not bad, even if somewhat demythologizing.   It is also sometimes called “protagoran man” after the pre-Socratic philosopher Protragoras, famous for a cryptic utterance often rendered as “Man is the measure of all things.”

 

Howard Behrman, who died in 1985, was an eminent practitioner, research dermatologist and wealthy book collector (specializing in early editions of classic American writers).  He had no special connection to Princeton, but took up residence in the town and became deeply involved with the Friends of the Princeton University Library.  I came to know him personally in that role.  A generous and cultivated philanthropist, he made many large contributions to various cultural institutions, endowing (among other things) an annual banquet celebrating humanistic scholarship at Princeton at which a sizeable cash prize was to be awarded to an outstanding faculty humanist.  The endowment fund, wisely invested but strictly delineated in its focused purpose—an annual cash prize and sumptuous banquet—soon provided enough to fete two winners each year.  In 1987 I myself was one of the two, the other that year being the historian Robert Darnton, who later moved on to Harvard.  Judged objectively you might find that the dinner has a whisper of wine snobbery and stratospherically haute haute cuisine.   The president in his welcoming remarks stressed the fact that the terms of the gift restrict its use solely to conspicuous consumption. So it is frankly a mainly alimentary event, but there are always five fairly short speeches, one by the president, and one by each winner and their departmental introducers.  These little talks are typically learned and inspirational, often with much good humor; but this year the undertones of the brewing warfare between American academia and the American presidential regime emerged at times simply as tones.  These tensions are to me very worrying, but this is not the occasion to discuss them.  This year’s winners were the British historian Dame Linda Colley and the former Dean of the College Jill Dolan, Professor of English and an eminence in cultural and feminist studies.  For anyone interested, I expect that there will be an account of the work of these two colleagues on the Princeton University webpage by the time I publish this.  This essay is about our experience of the event.  Though long retired, I can still bask in the reflected glory of eminent colleagues.

 

What are the “humanities”?  As usual, linguistic history is a good place to begin.  At Oxford they have long called the classics curriculum that produced so many British leaders and Empire-builders of the modern age the litterae humaniores, the more “human[e]” branches of literary studies.  This course of study in usually referred to in academic lingo as “Greats.” More human than what?  Than theology, of course, than what in the Middle Ages they called “divine science” or “study in the sacred page.”  Secular learning, in short, the stuff, even practical technology,  of at least half of a modern American college curriculum.   Modern education in a sense involves a conscious turn away from the sacred.  Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century wrote the following memorable couplet: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man.”  Ancient educators often spoke of the pathways or avenues to learning.  Our word method reveals this in its etymology, hodos being the Greek word for road.   Of course, learning is not static, nor are the arrangements by which learning is pursued.  Though the advanced curriculum still has visible traces linking it with the medieval Seven Liberal Arts—themselves distributed in a preliminary trivium (three ways) and a more specialized quadrivium (four ways)--it is now much more capacious.  The natural sciences and the social sciences now loom large and will likely loom ever larger.

 

A special pleasure of our evening was provided by our dining companions—my fellow emeritus colleague from the English Department Michael Wood and his wife Elena Uribe.  Michael is a well-known and broad-ranging critic still prominent in the literary journals.  Only last Saturday did I learn that Elena, a Mexican by birth, has interests broadly similar to those of our son Luke, in linguistic anthropology, dealing with indigenous cultures.  Much of Luke’s early work centers on remote linguistic groups in Brazil.

 

A festive meal featuring many leisurely courses and several speeches, however mini, made it a pretty long evening.  The party broke up, and we tried to make a quick exit.  But unbeknownst to us revelers in the mead hall, outdoors a pretty serious rainstorm had set in.  We nonetheless set off toward our car, left in a parking lot perhaps six or seven hundred yards away.  Little did we imagine that the President, too, was making a quick exit.  But his car was parked maybe fifty feet away from the venue.  We had a lead of about two hundred feet along a narrowish driveway which he had to drive down.  So I guess he felt he just had to stop and pick us up.  The distance from the parking lot I just quoted is the distance on foot. By car it is substantially farther, and in the opposite direction to his actual residence.  I doubt that his spouse, though herself utterly gracious, could have been exactly delighted with the geriatric hitchhikers.  Just what an overworked college president needs at the end of a long day.  Even as this was happening Wordsworth’s lines from “Tintern Abbey” concerning “that best part of a good man’s life” came into my mind: “his little unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”  Well, they certainly won’t be unremembered by us.

Gatsby Centennial

 

On Sunday the Friends of the Princeton University Library held its official annual meeting, which was followed by its annual dinner.  The after-dinner speaker for this event is usually some eminent “book person,” in this instance Prof. Maureen Corrigan, who surely is one of the best-read readers around.  She is well known to a popular audience as the book critic for National Public Radio, and to many general readers as the author of So We Read On, the subtitle of which is How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.  This is a big year for literature lovers at Princeton.  It marks the hundredth anniversary of the most famous title by our most famous alumnus novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Or near alumnus; he never actually graduated.  So Corrigan was the perfect expert to speak about Gatsby, and she gave a memorable talk.   Command of material is always augmented by spirit and humor in its deployment, and she had plenty of both.  Joan and I had the honor of sharing a table with, among others, Scott Fitzgerald’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter.

 

The Friends of the Library is a group in which civic virtue and personal pleasure meet.  It is easy to be a friend of a library.  You begin by loving to read, doing a lot of reading, and helping others to love, study, acquire, and preserve books.  You will build a personal library of however modest a nature.   Almost anyone can afford to construct a small private library at modest expense.  Or, if you are a person of means you can purchase rare titles for a public institution at staggering prices.  Perhaps your collection will have a dedicated theme.  You will do all in your power to encourage literary habits in others and to practice them yourself.  Our organization of Friends has some members in all these categories, among others.

 

Unfortunately libraries have enemies as well as friends.  Among the political tidbits recently in the press was one concerning our somewhat specialized topic of interest: libraries.  “At the U.S. Naval Academy, it's not what's on the shelves that's drawing attention -- but what's missing. The institution's Nimitz Library has been stripped of 381 titles, according to a list first published in the New York Times, including works exploring race, gender, and national identity.”  Now this news article fits into a conventional genre.  It is not about the crisis of shelf-space familiar to places that house too many books, such as, for example, the Fleming home.  As you read it, your focus must be on the apparent content of the books.  Here’s a hint.  It begins with Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist.  It includes Monsieur d'Eon Is a Woman : a Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade.  You may already have caught the drift.  This is an article about that form of censorship usually called “book-banning.”  In the dreaded academic triad of approaches to humanistic study—class, race, and gender—all three have proved perennial stimulants to controversy.

 

But there is a paradox here.  While book-banning is a topic that should concern anybody concerned with—well, with anybody capable of being concerned about anything—book-banning has historically been pretty good for some authors.  Everybody wanted the latest banned book from Voltaire.  For a certain period of time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the New England Watch and Ward Society stimulated many a faltering author’s sales by declaring their books banned in Boston.  To be able to boast that your book was banned in Boston was probably better for your sales than being able to display a glowing review in some literary journal.

 

 

But my experience as a teacher and American citizen and a friend of libraries is that the real problem about reading in our country is not that by and large Americans are being deprived of books, but that they simply don’t read books.  There is no necessity for bad actors to ban books; our flimsy culture is doing that for us.  We have a very bright granddaughter, aged eleven, who mainly reads “graphic novels,” basically comic books.  That’s apparently just fine with her Brooklyn school teachers.  More paradox: the number of new novels published each year appears to me to vary inversely with the number of people who read lots of novels.

 

Since in my career I have been an English professor I need to be clear that I am here not speaking as one.  A college education will, I hope, introduce many thousands to some very good books and millions to a wide variety of technical or utilitarian ones.  But not everybody should or will be a French literature minor.  Yet if your national educational aim is universal literacy, as ours has long been, everyone should be encouraged to be a life-long reader of something useful.

 

Please do not suppose that I have lost the plot in this essay if I move on to an apparently political topic.  My subject is reading and readers.  But Ms. Corrigan’s prowess as a reviewer, and her stated belief that The Great Gatsby is the greatest of American novels has set me on a track that I hope no one will mistake for run-of-the mill academic Trump-bashing.  During my lifetime I have benefitted from the thoughts of book reviewers who seemed to me to have read everything.  When I was young there was Clifton Fadiman.  More recently the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt occupied that role at the New York Times.  Ms. Corrigan herself fits the category. The American president is a graduate of one of our most prestigious universities.  Surely it is impossible that he achieved his degree without reading books?  Indeed, he is the alleged author of a book on one of his apparently favorite topics, deal-making.  Its title indeed is The Art of the Deal.   In reviewing Trump’s book Lehmann-Haupt had this to say of the author: “The more important fact is that he arouses one's sense of wonder at the imagination and self-invention it must have taken to leap from his father's shoulders and reach for the deals that he did. Jay Gatsby lives, without romance and without the usual tragic flaws.”  Jay Gatsby lives.

 

The ghost-writer of the book under review, Tony Schwartz, along with the book’s original publisher, deny that Trump wrote a word of it.  I have no independent information, but “of disputed authorship” is a well-established category to students of, say, Elizabethan drama.  The book was a best-seller, and has many admirers to this day. Lehmann-Haupt’s review of it for the Times may have been the occasion by which the name “Trump” first became fixed in my mind.  Jay Gatsby lives, Mr.Lehmann-Haupt wrote,  without romance and without the usual tragic flaws.  Going back in memory to the ‘Eighties, when The Art of the Deal appeared, has been for me a clarifying imaginative experience. The book was followed by several other Trump titles.

 

 The uneven distribution of monetary resources in our country, often called the wealth divide has grown ever starker in our consciousness in recent decades.  It overlaps only somewhat with the literacy divide, but by a pretty large somewhat.  In a fast-moving world our public schools are graduating fewer and fewer young people prepared to find traditional “middle class” jobs or even jobs likely to lead to one.  This is already a serious social issue and may well become a national security issue.  But I believe most high-school English students have at least heard of The Great Gatsby, and not a few have read it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Easter 2025

imagine this with the lights off

 

Writing on the Monday after Easter, I am already reliving in memory the religious and family-centered pleasures attendant upon the festival in our household.  While one size does not fit all, there remain some cultural habits of such long duration and of sufficient current vitality as to provide for most of us a template for the continuity of the human species.  The basic unit of human society has mainly been the family, and the family has mainly been the product of the sexual union of a man and a woman.  Family life, though it reveals an extraordinary variety of forms throughout the human community, generally shares certain common practices.   Important among these are communal gatherings of some implicit or explicit solemnity involving the consumption of shared food, conversation, and other common social pleasures.

 

One is unlikely to think about matters in this schematic way.  Mostly we live life rather than ponder over or anthropologize about it.  But there are occasions, such as when you find yourself sitting alone and in the dark in the chancel of a vast Gothic church at five in the morning, when the thoughts might come.  That is the situation in which I found myself, briefly, on Easter morning.  It all started long ago and with a single short word in the medieval Latin Bible: mane, meaning “early morning”.  The women went looking for the body of Jesus early in the morning two days after the Crucifixion.  My own story happened like this.

 

For the last few days we had been enjoying a visit of one half of the family we call the Montrealers—our younger son Luke, daughter-in-law Melanie, and grandkids John Henry and Hazel.  As simple folk, we call this family the Montrealers because they live in, duh, Montreal.   We also have New Yorkers and Brooklynites.  Naturally we see the Montrealers less frequently than the New Yorkers and Brooklynites.  And on this occasion only Luke and Hazel were able to come.  Melanie and John Henry had other Easter obligations of their own in Canada.  You know the old adage about absence making the heart grow fonder.  But there is a trade-off.  There is always some pain in having to say goodbye to loved ones infrequently seen.  So I felt a little sniffly as their Dodge van disappeared from out driveway earlier in the day.

 

But they had been with us for the whole of the triduum, which is the churchy name for the extended period of the Easter weekend, including Good Friday, a period that includes several interesting ancient rites and services.  The spiritual themes of the weekend obviously accord with the sense of renewal and rebirth visibly present in spring in the northern hemisphere and widely marked by many pre-Christian or simply non-Christian groups.  Many things about Easter are syncretic, revealing pre-Christian parallels in other religions.  The very word Easter is probably pre-Christian.  Rites of Spring must be universal.  Winters are tough; and in earlier periods of history they were much tougher, at least for the vast majority of the population.  I began my teaching career in Madison, Wisconsin.  The winters seemed endless.  When the ice finally began breaking up on Lake Mendota it did so with loud cracking sounds.  Madison, which seemed to me at the time so far north, must actually be roughly along the latitudinal line of Brittany in France.

 

Almost everything about Easter is syncretic—meaning that in its history, its etymology, and even to a degree in its spiritual interpretation it brings together several different poetic and theological traditions.  That spiritual interpretation itself has evolved. But as the festival observance of the stupendous claim at the heart of Christianity—that Jesus, a male human being, after being horribly executed and his dead body buried, a couple of days later, by eye-witness testimony from many alleged witnesses, reappeared as a living man--is of very ancient origin.  The Resurrection has always been for Christians the essential and necessary fact of human history.  So revolutionary and extravagant a belief so long held by untold millions for many long centuries formative of our civilization and so widely examined in their art and philosophy is not to be easily abandoned.  It encapsulates in historical narrative an attractive solution to the most tragic reality of human life, which is human death.

 

But enough about the Meaning of it All, and back to my sitting in the dark.  By heroic effort Luke, Hazel, Joan and I all made it to the Episcopal Great Vigil Eucharist which begins at 5am in the Princeton University Chapel and runs for about two hours.  This is a fabulous service which takes place in the large chancel of a cathedral-sized building.  It begins with the congregation making a solemn procession, two by two, with studied pauses proclaiming the coming of the “Light of Christ”, down what seems like an endless nave in semi-darkness, the only light being supplied by small candles, one for each marcher.  You then climb four or five stairs to the level of the banked choir stalls.  My mobility is poor in bright daylight.  In the dimmest of dim religious lights it could be catastrophic.  So Luke offered to take me in and settle me in the top rank of the choir stalls on the gospel side.   I would have to sit in the dark and wait while he and all the others gathered on the outside of the building’s massive oak front doors for the “lighting of the new fire”, in itself an impressive liturgical event.  They would then join me in my perch high in the stalls.  That meant that for perhaps ten minutes I was sitting alone in a building with a seating capacity of nearly two thousand.  It was not absolutely pitch-dark, but until the slowly advancing Light of Christ approached, plenty dark enough to encourage some serious solemn thought.  It was an experience I never anticipated but one I shall not soon forget.

 

All major human institutions, I suppose, are likely to present interesting patterns of change within continuity.  But to participate in a very lengthy liturgy that is in effect a textual recapitulation of thousands of year of Jewish and Christian history while sitting alongside two other generations of one’s own history, a mere blink of the eye in our species’ existence, offers a special kind of experience, contemplative subject matter of universal utility but with a special relevance for the aged and the infirm.  Why seek the living among the dead?

 

                                           as recorded by Lukas van Leyden

 

 

 

 

 

Raise Your Hand

 

 

Some time ago I wrote a little essay about things and signs, res and signa in Latin, in relation to a little book Saint Augustine wrote on that subject.  Signs are of course of many kinds, but among the most prominent in human cultures are verbal signs.  This is probably a too elaborate way of saying something rather simple.  Language is absolutely fundamental to human societies, but language is also marked by ambiguities requiring interpretation.  The same sound means bear (an animal), bear (the verb) and bare (the adjective), among other things.  Hence the shaggy dog question: How can a bear bare to bear a bare bear?   According to some linguistic theories both ancient and modern, language can never completely eschew ambiguity.  The Stoic linguistic experts said that words could be explained only by using other words: “That is like bringing an unlit candle into a darkened room!”  Even more ambiguous very often are signs that are pictorial and gestural.  I present as examples some problems of “signage” raised by two eminent alumni of my institution, Princeton, who would appear to be on opposite sides of our deeply divided political culture.

 The first is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University.  He earned his doctorate in the Princeton History Department in 1984.  President Roth has written a couple of op eds that I have found interesting, one of which was recently in the New York Times: “Trump is Selling Jews a Dangerous Lie” (4.07.25).  Though chiefly concerned with the iniquities of Donald Trump, he also criticized Elon Musk and the Anti-Defamation League, a group that had in his view soft-pedalled the implications of a provocative body gesture Musk had performed from a public stage.  “The president hadn’t been in office a full day before the Anti-Defamation League spoke up to defend Elon Musk for throwing what sure looked to me like a Sieg heil.” I had missed out on this episode at the time, but it was clear that “throwing a Seig heil” had to mean that Musk had performed a Nazi salute, and he had done this at a party celebrating Trump’s inauguration three months ago.  Wow!  I may have missed this, but the rest of the world did not.  There is even a Wikipedia article on the “Elon Musk salute controversy.”

 

Princetonians singing "Old Nassau" in the '80's
 

            It turns out the gesture may have been imported from France, and it has a French name, quenelle.  Such quenelles as I have known are gastronomic delicacies, but signs (verbal and gestural) mean different things in different times and places.  “In late 2013, following its use by professional footballer Niccolas Anelka during a match, Jewish leaders, anti-racism groups, and public officials in France have interpreted it as an inverted Nazi salute and as an expression of antisemitism.  French officials have sought to ban the gesture due to its perceived subtext of antisemitism.”  The triumphant or defiant arm reach actually has no single conventional meaning, or indeed any conventional meaning.  It is more than doubtful that protesting black American Olympians in 1968 intended it as “throwing a Sieg heil” in a celebration of fascist power.  It was at the time described by some as a variant or perhaps desecration of an “Olympic salute”—another supposed common gesture of which I was unaware.  You can read about that one in a journalistic essay of 2012 by Rose Eveleth, published four years before Trump’s first inauguration*.  Elon Musk is one of those public figures I would be  inclined to dislike on the grounds of his obscene wealth alone, but that is my problem.  The idea that he was “throwing a Seig heil” with crypto-fascist intent is kind of looney.  Has Dr. Roth never himself sung the anthem of his doctoral alma mater, “Old Nassau”, with its weird but statutory arm gesture?

 

            My second subject is a bearer of strange signs rather than a strange interpreter of them.  I refer to Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, of the great undergraduate class of 2003.  Michael Roth didn’t quite overlap with Pete Hegseth at Princeton, but there is in general little commerce between undergraduate and graduate students in any event.  I remember Hegseth by name as a notable basketball player, but I never met him.  As a man tattooed, he is perhaps rare but by no means unique among Princetonians.  He was preceded by at least one celebrity, Secretary of State George Schultz, who thus explained the factors discouraging him against a presidential run of his own: “I’m afraid the country is not ready for a president who might have a tiger tattooed on his rear end.”   That’s Tiger, as in Princeton Tigers.  I suspect the country is by now ready for more or less anything, but Schultz, alas, died at a great age a few years ago.  What Hegseth has tattooed very prominently over one bicep is the Latin sentence Deus vult.  I am no expert, but this is one of the more learned tattoos I have encountered.  It means “God wants or wills [it],” it being the First Crusade.  The phrase was the crowd’s enthusiastic answer to the Pope’s suggestion of a holy war made at the Council of Clermont in 1096.  The war’s ostensible purpose was to “liberate” the holy biblical sites in Palestine and to safeguard the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem.  This verbal exchange was in all probability conducted in the vernacular, but chroniclers generally wrote in Latin.  You may or may not know how all that crusading business worked out, but it was, well, complicated.

            According to various reputable sources various proto-fascists have adopted this phrase (Deus vult) as their motto, so that it is now, according to critics, an emblem of white supremacists.  As it happens, I have encountered one or two of those supremacist types over the years, but none of them looked to me like Latinists.  Though I am strongly in favor of studying Latin, all good things have their limits.  There are many reasons to be tentative about Hegseth’s appointment to direct the largest, most expensive and perhaps most important division of our government, the one charged with the national defense in a dangerous world.  What special gifts or experience argue in favor of such an appointment?  But his tattoos and their putative interpretations are perhaps pretty far down on the list of concerns and may have already attracted more attention than they merit.

 

            I remember writing one time about Rudyard Kipling’s swastikas.  The swastika is an ancient Indo-European emblem of prosperity and well-being the English writer adopted as a personal symbol more than thirty years before the Nazis arrived in power.  Kipling was one of the most prolific and popular Anglophone writers of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and had millions of readers.   At least one of the collected editions of his works published in the 1920s is prominently decorated with swastikas in its binding.  After the 1920s came the 1930s.  And after that came a great world war.  A specialized journal devoted to Kipling and his works repeatedly had to point out that the swastika could not have had for him a meaning in any way connected with Adolph Hitler or the National Socialist Party of Germany.  For him it invoked the fascinating, often exotic energies of the mysterious India of his birth.  Use the Moby Dick test.  Queequeg was no less effective as a harpooner for all the tattoos covering his face, as Ishmael himself came to learn.  We have enough to worry about in how our new Secretary of Defense will handle the harpoons.  A good place to begin there is with an old adage: Loose lips sink ships.  We can  fret over the pigmented epidermis later.

Fascist elephant?

 

Spine of a Kipling novel?

 

*“The Olympic Salute We Don’t Use Anymore Because it Looked too Much Like Heiling Hitler” (Smithsonian Magazine, August 10, 2012). 

 

 

 

 

Civic Virtue

 

Lorenzo de' Medici, "the Magnificent"

 

Perhaps my title needs a question mark: Civic Virtue?  Or even reformulation as an actual interrogative sentence?  Is there even such a thing as civic virtue?  Now, obviously there are virtues that can be deployed to the benefit of the community and of one’s neighbors in particular: paying your taxes promptly, supporting local charitable and service organizations, contributing to or participating in joint civic activities.   There is a certain civic virtue perhaps in keeping the exterior of your grounds in a reasonably tidy condition.   You can cut your lawn grass in a timely manner and refrain from throwing your empty beer bottles into your yard.  Try to keep from having more than two jalopies up on cinder blocks in the driveway at any one time.  That sort of thing.  But is there such a thing as civic virtue as relates to cities themselves?  Can a city ever be said to be “virtuous”?

 

 Civic virtuoso by Norman Rockwell

These questions arise in my mind attendant upon a book review I have been asked to write.  Its title is Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem, a title with the increasingly uncommon virtue of telling you what the book is actually going to be about.  The time period covered is often referred to by historians as early modernity.  Several of the religions of the world have the concept of “holy places,” many of which are cities said to be sacred.  In medieval and Renaissance Italy the powerful city-state of Florence liked to think of itself as a “new Jerusalem”.  One can say only “Join the club!”  In fact I doubt that there was any conurbation of even moderate size that in one way or another didn’t exhibit signs of a kind of Jerusalem-envy.  But Florence, as with most things, did Hierosulamism with a flair.

A city can be virtuous by law.  I spent a good deal of my early life in a little place in north-central Arkansas, Baxter County.  The county seat was a quite small town—a good deal larger now, though still small, called Mountain Home.  During all the years of my youth Baxter County was “dry”—meaning that the trading in or consumption of alcohol was prohibited by law.  Between 1920 and 1933 the whole country was by law in theory “dry”.  I stress the “in theory” part, because violations (bootlegging) were rife and created organized crime on a vast scale.  Because of the rampant criminality and gangsterism that followed in its wake, enforced prohibition eventually came to be generally regarded as a disastrous failure and was repealed.  (I might add that lots of Americans really liked to drink.)  Prohibition had been imposed by the ponderous device of constitutional amendment, and it was repealed by the same means.  But prohibitionists could not be repealed, and there were still a lot of them around too, especially in the rural south.  So by a system called “local option” still operating in many southern states in my youth the residents of a county could choose to be either wet or dry as they pleased.  There are, I believe, still some dry counties in Arkansas.  An unpremeditated alliance of bootleggers (of whom there were a few) and Baptists (of whom there were not a few) perpetuated the system.  Motivation and implementation are seldom in perfect alignment.  The nearest places to get loaded were a group of dubious but busy establishments just over the Missouri state line about fifteen miles due north of Mountain Home.

Getting back to Renaissance Florence, it was a pretty lively place, quite apart from all the humanists walking around with copies of Cicero in their pockets.  The place was overbriming with professional religious—in its nominal rather than its adjectival meaning of "members of religious orders"--rapacious noblemen, armed bravos, prostitutes, pickpockets, beggars and conmen.  I say nothing of the common cutthroats and cut-purses publicly executed on a regular basis.  Lorenzo de’ Medici was more or less a strict contemporary of Dominican reformer, Girolamo Savonarola. Perhaps I should say “would-be reformer”.  Savonarola had major ambitions to turn the city into a kind of giant monastery.  His ambitions along these lines enjoyed some early promise and a famous bonfire of vanities; but his progress was definitively  when he was hanged and burned alive in a public square.  The secular powers were, shall we say, very secular.  Concerning all this I can recommend George Eliot’s underappreciated historical novel Romola.  If you don’t have time for that, as you probably don’t, at least read “Minever Cheevey”, a delightful little poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.  “Minever loved the Medici, Albeit he has never seen one.  He would have sinned incessantly, Could he have been one.”

                                                             Savonarola

 

The aspirations to civic sanctity among Renaissance humanists have given us some interesting episodes.  The monastic and the ascetic might seem to be antithetical to the civic and the secular.  But here we find a cultural heavyweight like Erasmus asking the following strange question: “What else is a city, I ask you, but a large monastery?”  One can probably think of a number of other things else; but of course Erasmus was hinting at the proto-Protestant idea that the aspiration to “religious life” was an option for all Christians, not exclusively those in religious orders.  Florence certainly offered some options.  Yet the attempt to infuse civic government with high-minded religious or ethical ambition began in ancient times and in my own lifetime has been the motive of action for idealists in many lands.  John Calvin did his best to sanctify the city of Geneva in the sixteenth century.  Our own American history is replete with the communal search for social righteousness as expressed in social experiments like the Brook Farm community of the 1840s.  The many “communes” of the 1960s are still fresh in my own mind.

In many respects our county’s seventeenth-century Puritan origins have lived on, though sometimes only in echoes and shadows.  We hear repeated endlessly the phrase attributed to the Puritan preacher John Winthrop that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.”  Virtue is to be displayed, as so also once was vice.  It is probably fortunate that we have abandoned scarlet letters, prominently placed town stocks and pillories, and public executions; but there are still means of conveying social disapprobation.  Every few years the public reaction to some unfortunate incident in the New York subways gains special notoriety and puts on display our unresolved attitudes concerning the nature, limitations, or dangers of demonstrating civic virtue, or perhaps even of defining it.