Pasts Imperfect

        

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              The most precious book in my library is a small format edition of Petrarch’s famous Canzoniere, or book of love poems, brought out in Lyon by the French humanist printer Guillaume Rouillé in 1551.  Though it qualifies as a “rare book,” its value to me is mainly sentimental.  It was given to me as a gift, probably in 1959, by my future wife.  She found it in a little shop in Arezzo while on a singing tour with the Oxford Schola Cantorum.  What made it affordable were certain imperfections.  Most obviously an earlier reader had cancelled one of Petrarch’s sonnets in heavy black ink, scratching so heavily as to tear a hole in the page.  Only recently did I discover that another leaf of the book containing a sonnet on each side had been very tidily cut out nearly without leaving a trace.  A theme in all three “disappeared” poems, one of Petrarch’s persistent criticisms, was the equation of the migration of the papacy from Rome to Avignon with the Babylonian captivity.  This may not strike you as a hot-button issue, but some deeply offended papalist, possibly as late as the eighteenth century, found Petrarch’s hate verse intolerable.  This unknown censor was probably a high-minded and educated man.  John Ruskin certainly was, but that didn’t stop him from ostentatiously burning a rare collection of Goya’s etchings called the Caprichos, now regarded as a harbinger of modern art, though it does contain some pretty disturbing stuff, including, famously “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”.

            The paradoxical demonstration of virtue through the venue of vandalism was already on my mind with regard to press notices concerning the attacks on commemorative statues in various parts of the country when a somewhat cognate local issue captured my attention.  I received a courteous and confidential advance notice from the Princeton Dean that the University would very soon announce the removal of the name of Woodrow Wilson from our School of Public Affairs and from the residential college of which I was the master fifty years ago.  I don’t live in my email box these days, and the deed had probably been done by the time I read the message. I do not fault a decision thoughtfully deliberated by diligent trustees both morally and legally authorized to make it.  Four or five years ago I could make a case for retaining the Wilson name, which was originally proposed not by university officials but by idealistic undergraduates in the Woodrow Wilson Society seeking a more mature, democratic and inclusive social scene on campus.  But an argument based in local subtleties cannot withstand the urgency of this terrible national moment, and I believe the trustees acted wisely.

            Even such urgency, however, should not induce the Sleep of Reason.  If you want to deface a book you own or incinerate etchings which you have purchased especially for that purpose, you may be a philistine or a prophet or a self-righteous prig, but you have not committed a tort against a fellow citizen.  The officers and trustees of an educational institution are specifically charged with ordering institutional affairs, and they can hire and fire, build and demolish, institute and terminate, christen and dechristen with broad legal latitude.  The destruction of public property seems to me something else.

            The desecration of the dead is a widespread anthropological atavism from times we otherwise consider barbarous.  The police agents of Louis XIV dug up and scattered the bones of the Jansenist “saints” buried at Port-Royale.  At the time of the Restoration of 1660 British crown agents disinterred the rotten cadavers of dead regicides and exposed them for the unhygienic gratification and political instruction of the crowds crossing the Thames bridges.  This is not exactly the same as defacing the effigies of Confederate officers practically nobody has ever heard of sculpted by artists absolutely nobody has ever heard of, and in actual practical terms more important to pigeons than to people; but it has spiritual echoes.  Lynch law exercised on cultural artefacts is obviously less grave than lynch law exercised on human bodies, but hardly more attractive as a civil practice.  If a monument has been commissioned and erected by a legislative body or established by a recognized civic society, is it right that “any eight guys with ropes,” as a friend of mine has put it, should claim the authority to remove it without further consultation?

            The means of redress already do exist, democratic means.  It is all too easy to break eggs without getting omelets, but even in this long moment’s pain there are signs of hope in a vigorous, youthful generation rededicated to the old proposition.  There was a great photo in the paper the other day:  two Mississippi state legislators hugging each other in congratulation over the landslide vote to remove the “stars and bars” motif from the state flag.  Yes, Mississippi: Senator Theodore Bilbo, author of Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, the White Citizens’ Councils, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, that Mississippi.

            Passion is not the same thing as purpose or persuasion.  We have had passionate iconoclasts and vandals galore.  Some smashed exquisite marble heads in the Via Sacra in Rome.  Protestant fanatics shattered the glorious Gothic windows of the churches of the Scheldt.  Spanish missionaries torched the manuscripts of the Mexica.  German military engineers transformed a Jewish burial grounds into a latrine.  The Taliban blew up the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan.  And these things were not done furtively, but brazenly and with utter certainty of moral superiority. 

            Erasures, cancellations, book burnings, the creation of “former people” and Unpersonen, airbrushing Trotsky out of the photograph—we generally think of these things as characteristically totalitarian.  But an honest engagement with our past can have other foundations than self-righteousness, one of them being righteousness without so much self.  To attempt to understand the past with some sympathy and humility is hard work, and I know many historical scholars who regard it as no large part of the job.  Indeed life is for the living.  We cannot incubate diphtheria on the grounds that it played an important role in our medical past, but we better not forget how to make the vaccine. 

            In his inaugural address President Trump deplored a state of “American carnage” and promised that with his advent it would now end.  I did not actually understand what he meant by “American carnage,” presumably something metaphorical.  But Lincoln, in his great second inaugural, did know what carnage was.  Try to imagine the mood of Lincoln’s audience.  We have now been living in anxiety and constraint for several months.  They had been fighting a bloody war for years.  The country was far past Gettysburg with its fifty thousand casualties, more than six thousand of them corpses on the ground.  How many who heard the President speak had not lost a father, brother, son, or friend?  One can imagine that the audience was a pretty sick and tired and angry bunch.  And still the president proposed that the war must end—though that end was not yet clearly in sight--with charity for all, with malice towards none.  I say this not to make an easy point about contrasting “leadership styles,” though that is a subject to make the soul weep, but to remind myself of still available reservoirs of true American greatness.