One paradox of the Christmas
season, a kind of social manifestation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,
is that we are too busy doing it to do it, so to speak. Four centuries past in one of the great poems
of our English tongue, John Donne wrote thus in “Good Friday, 1613--Riding
Westward”:
Let
mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The
intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And
as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject
to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And
being by others hurried every day,
Scarce
in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure
or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For
their first mover, and are whirld by it.
This
is not an easy poem to understand, even if one can grasp with sympathy the
situation of the speaker. The day is
Good Friday, the annual memorial of the Crucifixion of Christ in Jerusalem, a
place in its geographical relation to southern England distantly eastward. To this stupendous sacrificial event the
speaker’s mind should naturally turn; he is, however, constrained by some
unspecified business to be traveling westward. His larger complaint is that “pleasure or
businesse” (the appetite for gratification, the burdens of mundane necessity) generally
supplant “devotion” as the animating forces of human life: matter over mind,
flesh over spirit.
Phyllis and David Billington
Three
and a half months ago our dear friend Phyllis Billington, the wife of my
eminent engineering colleague David Billington, died in Los Angeles. Four of their children live on the West
Coast. It was a natural place for them
to head when they left Princeton some years ago. Their departure was for us a great personal
loss. What we call “aging” is often so
gradual a process as to be imperceptible.
That is what makes its major moments of inflection so brutal and the
news of old friends so dramatic. One
learns that someone has fallen and broken a hip, or “gotten a diagnosis;” they
downsize from the large family house with which you associate them in mind and
memory, they disappear to retirement homes near a daughter in Dubuque. Too often they simply drop dead. Still, we were lucky enough to have one good
visit with our beloved friends when I gave a talk at Stanford a while ago. They were living in Palo Alto then.
On the twenty-eighth of December in
the Princeton church where we were fellow parishioners for half a century there
will be a memorial service for Phyllis organized with devotion and no small
difficulty by the families of her many adult children, who recognized that
their mother should be honored here in the community where she spent most of
her long life. All of them will have
travelled considerable distances for the service. But the Flemings will not be there. We will be riding southward towards
Charleston, South Carolina, to participate in the long-scheduled pleasurable
business of a “Renaissance Weekend”.
At
least, “pleasurable business” is what I am anticipating. Over many years we have repeatedly been
invited to one of these annual events; over many years we have repeatedly almost gone. This is the year it was, for us, chiseled in
stone. Since this is actually going to
be my first experience, I don’t know exactly what to expect. One old hand described it to me as “a poor
man’s Davos”. Another agreed in
general—“except for the ‘poor man’s’ part.”
The Renaissance Weekend website itself is replete with elliptical
enthusiasm: “More than a conference: Intellectual content
punctuated by laughter, music, adventures and the power of personal stories.
Passionate change-makers, of all ages. More
light than heat: Traditional adversaries disagree without being disagreeable.”
I don’t know how passionate a medievalist’s change-making is
likely to prove, but it is clear from the materials with which I have been
provided that we owe our invitation to the obscure Spheares of preaching, teaching, and blogging that have for so long been spinning all about
us. Renaissance is French for
“rebirth”—a concept in which I firmly believe in many senses, including (and
especially) that old-fashioned one perhaps most immediately relevant to a dear
friend recently departed from transitory to eternal life. Augustine reminds us that all funerary and
memorial rituals are of necessity palliatives for the living, not honors for
the dead, now beyond such needs. Thus
will I excuse myself for my southward-riding, as I hope also our beautiful
friend Phyllis would have done. And how
beautiful she was! I think she was an
actual beauty queen in her undergraduate years at Northwestern, and she was
lovely still in advanced age. But of
course what we all knew was the spiritual beauty of her life as musician, wife,
mother, neighbor, and for a privileged few of us a friend for decades. Hers was a life in which the intelligence that moves was ever mindful
of its naturall forme.
Portrait of the Artist: Death, be not proud...
