When I was young it was common to
hear or read about two broad classes of people: introverts and extroverts. My family and most of my peers seemed to
suggest that I myself was an introvert.
I absorbed the impression that that was not particularly good, and might
even be bad. But I got a reprieve from
one of the first memorable serious books I read in my teens. It was a widely read work of sociology by
David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd. This book, as I remember, recast the
introvert and the extrovert in a new jargon more fitting for the book’s larger
social vision: the “inner-directed” and the “other-directed”. More importantly, to my mind, it added a
third category: tradition-directed.
The
tradition-directed type was, perhaps not surprising, the most traditional. Riesman attached it to earlier historical
periods, such as the Middle Ages, in which religion was powerful and marked by
recurrent ritual, and in which industrial and agricultural life operated
according to long established customs and routines. To the tradition-directed the conservative
structures of society, especially the family, were all important.
Being
“tradition-directed” seemed a whole lot better to me than being an “introvert”,
and I was willing to sign on the dotted line with one slight verbal
adjustment. I thought even then, and
certainly think now, that the better term would be “history-directed”. For by the age of ten I had discovered
history. The graph of human experience
has a horizontal axis and a vertical one.
The horizontal axis stretches wide to embrace all of contemporary human
life in its extraordinary anthropological diversity. I think of the vertical axis as the
historical one, reaching as far back into the human past as can be knowable,
pointing as best it can in the direction of the unknown human future.
In
my part of the world, as in so many parts still, the landscape was denominated
by the vanished dead—Appleford’s Mill, Miller’s Fork, the Thompson Forty. Nobody
living really knew who Appleford, Miller, or Thompson were. And there were the dead without names, in the
small, wild and overgrown country cemeteries and, at least as I imagined them,
lying beneath the artificial tumuli of the Indian mounds built upon the Ozark
meadows a hundred years or for all I knew a thousand years before I arrived,
but still vital to my experience.
One
index of our current national crisis of confidence comes in a form of the
statement that the next generation of Americans will be the first to enjoy a
level of material life less comfortable than that of their parents. Really?
I suspect that some will, and some will not. When I compare the material circumstances of
my grandparents with those of my
grandchildren, the incline of “upward
social mobility” is vertiginous. But
there were people in the fourteenth century who must have felt the same way.
Consider
my favorite centennial, Geoffrey Chaucer.
(He died in the year 1400).
Chaucer came from a fairly modest background, but he got a lucky break
by being admitted to the service of one of England’s greatest families. His own conspicuous abilities—only one of
which was being one of the world’s finest poets—won recognition in high places
and greatly improved his offspring’s prospects.
I started out on a tick-infested mountaintop, but I have a granddaughter
with an honors degree from a leading university and a high-flying job in social
media. But Chaucer, who started off as
an upscale intern, had a granddaughter who became a duchess!
Lady Alice in life...
Alice
de la Pole, eventually Duchess of Suffolk, was born in 1404, the daughter of
Thomas Chaucer, the poet’s son. She died
in 1475. By then she was a Lady of the
Order of the Garter, a club considerably more exclusive than Skull and Bones—and you
can see why I mention that particular
bastion of super-selectivity.
Upward social mobility, whether in the fifteen or the twenty-first
century, fits into a groove along the horizontal axis. But how different are things when we look at
the vertical axis, that of the historical change that ever accompanies
historical continuity. A big step in
Alice’s march to social splendor was the first of her three marriages, which
took place when she was eleven years old. (The Wife of Bath was married five
times, even with a slightly later start—the age of twelve.) It was very common in aristocratic circles
for women to be married before the onset of menstruation. It was all about the money.
...and death
Alice’s
last and surviving husband had built for her a funerary monument that is one of
the most remarkable in England. It is in
St. Mary’s Church, in the lovely Oxfordshire village of Ewelme. The burial place is of a fairly rare type
sometimes called the “cadaver tomb.” We
see the Duchess in beautifully carved stone from two points of view. Atop the catafalque she lies finely clad,
wearing her prestigious decoration. Behind
a stone grill beneath she lies as a hideous and decaying corpse—food for
worms. There was a popular medieval
story called “The Three Living and the Three Dead,” cognate in spirit to the
pictorial narrative of the “Dance of Death”. Three hideous corpses or skeletons appear in terrible confrontation before three
rich fellows full of carefree life.
“As you are now, I once was,” says a voice from the bones. “As I am now, you must soon be.” Some attitudes to the here and now in the
fourteenth and the twenty-first centuries might not be all that different. Attitudes concerning the hereafter—that’s a
different matter.
