Most
people agree that the invention of printing in fifteenth-century Europe marked
an astonishing advance in the history of culture and the advancement of
learning. Rabelais, who was born
about thirty years after the death of Gutenberg includes in his marvelous
novels an imaginary letter from Gargantua to his son Pantagruel praising the
cultural miracle effected by the printing press. “I see the robbers, hangmen, freebooters and stable-boys of
today more learned than the theologians and preachers of my time.”*
A
bit of poetic license, perhaps, but is hardly necessary to point out the
advantages of the machine-made as opposed to the hand-made book. They included quantity and price, both
of which favored the wide distribution of texts. But the printers themselves particularly boasted of another
feature: that the books they produced claimed a new accuracy, since before
being sent into the world the text could be read
and corrected in proof. The
reader could be confident that the correct reading was Lead us not into temptation, as printed, and that when their
manuscript read Lead us not into Penn
Station, that was probably a mistake born of human error.
My
most recent essay had been exposed to the eyes of the world for the better part
of a week when I received an email from a reader named Ian Jackson. Its brief subject line immediately
caught my attention: “Pubic”. Mr.
Jackson pointed out that in a passage in which I spoke of the American system
of public education, my text quite
clearly read pubic education. This would have been a cause for embarrassment even had the
context not been, as it unfortunately was, a high-and-mighty excoriation of our
national educational inadequacies.
There
really was no way of redeeming this blooper, though my mind did its best. I recalled a masterpiece of toilet
stall graffiti that I encountered in England fifty years ago. Among the sad, crude monuments to
unsatisfied longing scrawled upon the wall was the following masterpiece of
postmodern dialogue, written out in vertical form, as though in a Shakespeare
text:
[Hand
A]: God bless little grils.
[Hand
B]: Don’t you mean GIRLS???
[Hand
C]: What about us grils?
Good question, that!
And surely a similar point could be made about American pubic
education. Was it fair to neglect
it entirely?
But
the real lesson of my experience, and the reason I am so sincerely grateful to
Mr. Jackson, is that it is surprisingly rare even for friends to try to save
you from self-incurred embarrassment.
They seem to think that it is better for you not to know that your beard
is clotted with drool and the spume of your Starbucks latte. This leads me to invoke a second
English anecdote of the same era as the last—the period of my undergraduate
years at Oxford.
I
was a member of Jesus College, an institution at which in those days the
athletic culture somewhat outpaced the plumbing capacity. There were some showers, but there
wasn’t much hot water in them at the best of times. When you needed them most—when you were returning with large
numbers of your fellow footballers, oarsmen, or runners after some exhausting,
sweaty ordeal—there was usually no hot water at all. Remember this, as in the story I must now relate it is what
literary critics call a relevant detail.
One
day I was scheduled to go to an elegant sherry party sponsored by the English
Speaking Union. I believe the
venue was the upscale Randolph hotel or perhaps somewhere else in the block
opposite the Ashmolean Museum.
Bear in mind that the English Speaking Union is an organization that
celebrates the glories of international communication made possible by our
shared world language. The
schedule was tight. If I moved at
a brisk pace from our boathouse to college—a fair distance—I would have about
fifteen minutes to shower, shave, put on my brand new Harris Tweed jacket, and
hustle over to the ESU sherry party. The
hot water was already exhausted, but I faced it like a man. I took a chilly shower, and shaved
quickly—too quickly--in cold water.
Then off I went. The sherry-swigging had already begun
when I got there, but I was not the last to arrive, and I joined right in.
The ESU has both male and female members, though on this occasion there were several hostesses and no visible hosts. I
moved about among the English Speaking ladies, speaking English the whole
while, and pretty competently too, if I do say so myself. Some of them seemed to be regarding me
in a somewhat alarmed fashion, but years of experience had inured me to that
sort of thing. I have never shared
Byron’s experience of having women faint from excitement when I walk into a
room. About twenty minutes into
the circular chatter, when I had engaged a least a dozen English Speakers, I
felt a slight tickle or itch roughly below my left ear. Adroitly passing my sherry glass to my
left hand, I reached around with my right hand to give a surreptitious scratch
to the itch.
I
detected something wet and sticky, and when my hand reappeared in sight it was
pretty well covered in blood.
Hasty shaving, especially hasty shaving in cold water, is not to be
recommended. All unknowing I had
given myself a fairly good nick below the left ear. The flow, which had been surprisingly copious, had found its
course, invisible to me but certainly not to anybody with whom I was
conversing, down the back of my neck, over the shirt collar and onto the upper
shoulder of my new Harris Tweed.
The adjective “blood-soaked” is almost always hyperbolic, but a patch of
the jacket was actually soggy. For
all I know I was in need of a blood transfusion. However, not a single one of the good ladies of the ESU had
thought it proper to mention to me that I was hemorrhaging: an instance of
“death before dishonor,” perhaps? Hence
my gratitude to Ian Jackson. Just
like it says in the subway cars: if you see something, say something!
*Book 2, chapter 8.
