Langone Christmas

Life is sort of like a box of chocolates--but not really very much like one. But the sharp edges on the box may come to mind. On Christmas Eve Joan and I were lyfted into New York City to celebrate Christmas with our daughter's family.  By late in the afternoon I was feeling rather lousy.  I had to struggle through an excellent dinner, went to bed early, fell into a brief sleep from which I soon awoke violently ill expelling disgusting materials from major orifices of intake and expulsion and generally convincing myself and the whole household that my last hour had come.  Before midnight I had been transported in dramatic fashion to NYU Langone Hospital.  Santa himself had not yet arrived, though hundreds of nurses dressed in reindeer getups appeared to be eagerly awaiting him as they busily went about their varied tasks.  Whatever the category two notches beyond the surreal is, this was it.  The hero of the event was my son-in-law Zvi, whose only couch of repose was the hard floor.

What a hospital!  Everything works like clockwork, even if it is sometimes a cuckoo.  Midnight on Christmas Eve with the animation of Grand Central Station at 5 pm.  It took most of the night, but expert technicians dealing in sordid matter eventually found that it was the dread sapo-virus--a diagnosis that brings with it an embarrassing mandatory exhortation to improve one's personal hygiene and practice much hand-washing.  Meanwhile expert, cheerful and high performing nurses spending their Christmas Eve taking care of the likes of me.  Between these professionals and a loving family, the most memorable Christmas gift of my life.   I hope to be sprung as early as this evening.  Not much of a blog essay, but considering the circumsances, a small miracle. Gratias Deo and best wishes to all readers. 

Christmas: Father, Son, and Uncle

 

 

James Magnuson—novelist, playwright, for many years the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, and for even more years than that the bosom buddy of Joan and John Fleming—has just come out with a timely new novel you would do well to check out during the Christmas season: Young Claus.*  The biographical subject here is not the atom spy Klaus Fuchs, but old Saint Nick, the Fed Ex of children’s Christmas gifts, whose actual biography has been seriously confused over the centuries in the local traditions of the many lands of Christendom.  Sound historical information has been wanting.  Though there have been significant advances in Kringleology since Leclerc’s breakthrough and still controversial study of 1896 (Le Père de Père Noël), surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the obscure infancy and early development of the Gifter Who Keeps on Giving.  It is this much-needed lacuna that has been filled, albeit it in an occasionally speculative manner, by Magnuson’s Young Claus.  I was privileged to read this work in an early stage of its development.

 

The intensity of the season and the publication of my friend’s book set me on a trip down Memory Lane concerning a Klaus-figure in my own early life and, in particular, of a marvelous Christmas episode related to him.  It is the story of my Uncle John and the magic Christmas tree.  There is a fancy anthropological term, avunculate, that refers to the special relationship to be found in certain old societies between nephews and maternal uncles.  It is of importance in some works of our early literatures.  The relationship was one of mentoring, of protecting, and sometimes of discipline.  (The word “mentor,” incidentally is highly literary, being the personal name of a character in Homer’s Odyssey, the tutor of Telemachus.) I did have one maternal uncle, Uncle George, but I barely knew him.  It was from my father’s two brothers, John and Wayne, and especially John, whose namesake I was, that I benefited from abundant traditional avuncularism.  John was my beloved mentor when I was young.  And with him mentoring more than once meant joining in secret conspiracies.

 

There were seven Fleming siblings, three men and four  women who  at various times  lived in proximity in a sparsely populated community south of Mountain Home, Arkansas.  This area was six or seven miles south of the town and not too far from the north bank of the White River.  In what I shall call the main house lived my two uncles, both unmarried,  and, at various times, no fewer than four aunts, two of whom never married.  At the time of today’s story, the nuclear family of which I was a part lived in a smaller house about a mile away.   My Uncle John visited us very often.  He was  particularly devoted to my mother, with whom he played endless games of cribbage.  He also liked to give her surprise gifts, trophies from the fields and the woods through which he often wandered for miles: flowers, leaves, interesting fungi, beautiful or curious stones, beautifully weathered wood, things like that.  My mother, who for many years was nearly housebound,  had a small museum of such trophies.

 

One Christmas my dad and I had hurriedly cut a Christmas tree in a nearby glade and brought it to the house.  It was a cedar.  There is not a lot of evergreen in that part of the mainly hardwood Ozarks, except for two or three slightly different species of cedar.  The cedar is a beautiful tree with a beautiful smell, but is generally pretty clunky as a Christmas tree.  My mother, who could be difficult, complained about the somewhat awkward and  uneven specimen we had brought home.  “It’s too big,” she said, “takes up too much room.”  She went on to say that one day she would like to have “a perfectly shaped little tree, and put it in the bedroom.”  Well, we did put up the cedar tree, which in truth did occupy too much space in the so-called living  room.  But it happened that my Uncle John had been present to hear my mother’s complaint.  Later that day he took me aside.  I could tell he was about to engage me in conspiracy.  He said to me, “What’s wrong with having two trees?  I know where there is a perfect tree for Jan.  What do you think?”  But there was a problem—two problems, actually.  This perfect tree was about three miles away—from his house that is, at least four from mine.  He didn’t even know whose land it was on, but certainly not on any of ours.  At that time there was still a lot of the deep woods that seemed to belong to nobody in particular and had been seized a half a dozen times for non-payment of the (now) unbelievably low property taxes.  I doubt that the County Assessor actually knew who was supposed to own it.  But John was a stickler about his neighbors’ property lines, and I was both shocked and titillated that he seemed so nonchalantly to be suggesting the plunder of a tree of unknown ownership.

 

So the next day we set off from “his” house armed only with a slightly rusty medium-sized pruning saw about eighteen inches long, a tool I had never seen before and certainly never seen in use.   The day was quite cold, but crisp and bright.   The first part of the journey was into some densely wooded hills to the southwest.  Within a half a mile we were in the deep boonies.  There were a few deer paths, but absolutely no signs of human presence.  It was pretty much of a slog.  I don’t know how well Uncle John knew the topography of the back of his hand, but I’m pretty sure he knew that of his corner of Baxter County even better.  Within fifteen minutes I had only the slightest idea where I was, though I never lost my sense of the general direction to get to the river.  The rough Ozark topography is pretty much of sameness, but it can surprise you.  We came to a hollow where a sizeable stretch of beautiful white quartz-like stone lay semi-exposed in large quantities.  Beyond that was a kind of semi-hillock at the top of which, amid all the grays and blacks of a winter forest, was the light green crown of a single pine tree about three and a half feet tall.  We had not seen another pine on our miles-long walk.  God alone knows where it came from, but it was absolutely perfectly formed, with soft, gentle, pliant clusters of needles.  Yet the most striking feature of this arboreal aberration was that it seemed to be growing not in soil but atop a large flat gray rock!  Forty years later or so, when I was seriously studying Italian Renaissance paintings, I got used to trees growing out of rocks.  There is a memorable such tree in the “Saint Francis” of Giovanni Bellini, a painting to which I devoted a whole book.  Of course the roots of such trees actually are in small crevices in the rock in which a certain amount of soil has been caught.  The unyielding constriction stunts them as Nature’s own bonsai, I suppose.  But this one, my first, amazed me.  It seemed to me marvelous and mysterious.  And, yes, we committed the sacrilege; and yes, my mother loved it.  But do you have any idea how hard it is to carry even a small tree through a couple of miles of thick winter forest without damaging so much as a twig of it?

 

Let me wish to my regular readers and, indeed,  anyone who has come across this essay by typographical error or other misadventure, a very happy Christmas and a good beginning to the New Year.

 

 

 

 

 

*Young Claus (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2023);  pp. 335, ISBN 9780875658360

Prexies Under Fire

 

 

Necessity demands  yet another essay related to the war in Gaza.  I undertake it with reluctance.  But the war has indirectly become the occasion of an important event in the life of American elite universities, the arena of my life’s work.  I refer to the recent Congressional hearings, which were fairly widely viewed and very widely discussed throughout the country, and at which the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania answered questions about student life on their campuses.  These institutions are among the most eminent in this or any other land.  Harvard is the greatest university in the world.  But this hearing was in my opinion a national embarrassment and a humiliation for anyone who believes, as I do, that the American achievement in higher education has been one of our nation’s greatest, and one that, despite all, remains the envy of the world.  But it is possible, just barely, that the hearing lanced a cultural boil that has been tormenting the Academy with increasing ferocity.

 

As you probably already know, the presidents were grilled, in a less than friendly fashion, concerning the way their students felt treated in a context of political polarization currently exacerbated by the very strong feelings excited by the brutal war underway between the Israeli Defense Forces and the military wing of the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza.  Hamas fighters in a sneak attack on October 7 invaded Israel, killed with nearly incredible barbarity more than a thousand Israeli civilians, and kidnapped and removed back to Gaza well over two hundred hostages. Included in both the slaughtered and the kidnapped  were many women, children, and elderly persons.  In the devastating response since then Israeli forces have been hunting down and killing some thousands of Hamas fighters, mainly by aerial bombardment, and have destroyed or damaged much of Gaza’s crowded civilian environment.  In the process they have killed many thousands of Palestinian non-combatants, including a huge number of children.  As the war continues the humanitarian crisis among the displaced, the homeless, the wounded, the trapped, and the traumatized has grown ever worse.

 

The world’s horrified reaction to this situation, in many ways echoed on American college campuses, has been mainly anti-Israeli.  This is the background that partially explains how a Republican congresswoman and Harvard alumna could put to the three American college presidents the essence of the following question: Is the advocacy of the genocide of Jews tolerated by your institution’s disciplinary protocols and speech codes?  I am unable to explain why none of the three could answer this question in a sensible, straight-forward way that would make sense to the ordinary intelligent and educated person.  All three failed miserably.  The performance of the President of Penn, Liz Magill, was particularly egregious and seems to have been the final nail in her presidential coffin.  She has resigned.  The President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has retained the (official) confidence of her board.  But that the question of her retention should even be controversial, as  it actually is, is  a blot on the Harvard escutcheon.  Elise Stefanik, the right-wing congressional interrogator, is far from the only unhappy camper among Harvard alumni.  The unique importance of MIT lies in its legendary primacy in those fields of science and technology upon which many of us believe—and I think correctly believe—the future felicity and perhaps even the continuity of our species will depend.

 

There is and always has been a large element of political correctness in the selection of college presidents.  But of course what have been regarded as  the “correct” elements has varied considerably over history.  It is needless to say that western higher education, which has clearly evidenced origins in the medieval monastic schools, was long an all-male affair.  For a long time in Protestant America there were essentially two fundamental requirements for the man who would be a college president: theological orthodoxy and manifest erudition.  What we usually think of as “administrative skill” and “people skills” were of course desirable and in a surprising number of instances at least partially present.  By the middle of the nineteenth century the scene had evolved considerably.  The decade at the end of the Civil War must be regarded as a Copernican moment in our higher education.  Many old institutions, like my own, Princeton, gradually evolved by fits and starts toward educational modernity.  But Cornell University (1865) and Johns Hopkins (1876) offered from the very start innovations of secular inspiration and scholarly ambition that would define the great American research university.

 

As our institutions have become more complex, the presidential job description has changed utterly, the expectations vastly expanded, and the bar set ever higher.  The educational enterprise so brilliantly defined as the “multiversity” by Clark Kerr, the first Chancellor of the University of California about 1960, demands of its chief executive a panoply of skills and a reservoir of energy that simply cannot be reasonably expected of any single human being.  I hope it is needless to say that none of these presidents in the congressional hot seat is an anti-Semite, and certainly none is stupid.  They came to their high leadership positions through intellectual brilliance, practical know-how, manifest capacity for clear and inspiring communication, and a work ethic unknown to ordinary mortals.  Why, then, did these three college presidents shock the Congress and much of the nation?  Several commentators have suggested that an untenable situation derived  not from a want of rules and regulations at their institutions, but from a surfeit of them emphasized or soft-pedalled with an air that smacked of hypocrisy.

 

Perhaps we could help simplify their task somewhat by suggesting that there is no compelling reason that a college president express a public opinion on the Gaza war, let alone an institutional opinion, and a few good reasons not to.  And while an institution’s students  are indeed partners in the learning enterprise, the direction of the enterprise is the responsibility of competent professionals.  Likewise, the behavior of some students is such that it is necessary to remember that, with or without keffiyehs, they are in many instances often still unformed young people, as easily misled as led.  In a relatively few instances the behavior is so appalling that it should invoke serious discipline, a concept anathema (except for select political violations) on most campuses.  It is possible, barely possible, that this debacle in a congressional hearing room will lead to some good.

 

 

Gaza Blues

 

Like most people, I have read a lot about the often poisonous effects of “social media” on the popular mood and our shared discourse.  But such “social media”as I have experienced is mainly second hand.  We don’t have it or see it, except as reported in the news.  And if there is anything more febrile than a tweet, it is a newspaper account of a tweet.  I do get a great deal of email, though, much  of which is political or commercial junk.  My morning email included an arresting message from someone called Meghdad, a person (or bot) otherwise unknown to me.

 

Do you see and are you quiet?

Do you hear the cries of the oppressed people of Gaza and are you still silent?

Do you see the crushed bodies of thousands of children and women in Gaza and are you still silent?

Are you alive or just a moving corpse?

Do you have only one name for being human or do you also have human emotions?

If you have ears, if you have eyes, and if you have human emotions, why don't you shout and protest against the criminals who committed these crimes in support of your government?

 

The message, which I have reproduced in its entirety,  was accompanied by several photographs, mainly of dead babies.  It is on me, not Meghdad, that I looked at the photos.  I didn’t have to do so; I chose to do so.  They would wring tears from a serpent.  But Meghdad’s tone still offended me.  The idea that I, or anyone I knew, was silently indifferent to what was happening in Gaza confounded me, though I certainly expected there to be a diversity of opinion about just what that was, or is.  I was startled that some college professors and many idealistic students could actually praise the barbarous criminality (including, incidentally, baby-murder and revolting sexual violence) of October 7.  I am very far from an uncritical attitude towards Israel.  Who can look at practically any photograph coming out of Gaza without distress?  Though considerably reduced by infirmity I do make a claim to humanity and human emotions, and I do indeed have eyes and ears.  In addition to these organs of sensory perception, I do have a mind, and unfortunately the mind I have  tends sometimes to worry over troubling complexities at the expense of comforting and often deadly certainties.  I shall not venture down the endless and tortured dead end path of WhatAboutism, even if honesty demands acknowledgement that what the “Arab-Israeli conflict” is mainly about has become What About?

 

            What about, for starters, “the criminals who committed these crimes in support of your government”.  I do believe the war is “criminal”, not just in the general sense that most wars are, but in ways specific to this one.  But I see no other plausible interpretation of the phrase quoted than that in Meghdad’s opinion the Israeli Defense Forces are conducting a criminal war in support of the government of the United States of America!  What I actually see with my eyes is the American President, his Secretary of State, and large sections of the American policy  intelligentsia and opinion makers agonizing over a situation of mind-numbing complexity as they attempt, with a little success, to moderate Israeli military activity in a situation that has been fostered by bad actors since the days of the Pharaohs and continues to be exacerbated by bad actors today.  I actually have great sympathy with and admiration for President Biden’s impossible efforts.  There are some problems that are insoluble by loudly repeated dogmatism alone, such as all of them.

 

            Years ago, when I made a serious attempt to "keep up”, I read several books by Arthur Schlesinger. Jr. (d. 2007).  He is no longer frequently mentioned, but he was a prominent public intellectual of my youth and a notable luminary in the Kennedy galaxy.  He was an old-fashioned liberal intellectual, a serious historian who moved easily between academia, active public service, and the research library, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to write another book—so it seemed from his enormous output.  As a medievalist, I could never take the image of the Kennedy Administration as “Camelot” very seriously, but with Schlesinger—a balding egghead who looked like a 1950s rent-a-professor including the bow ties and tweed jackets—the idea was preposterous.  Sir Bedevere?  One Schlesinger book to which I had a complicated reaction appeared in 1991: The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.  Its central point was stimulating, but I resisted it.  It was that the “melting pot” theory of American immigration—e pluribus unum—forming a national unity out of a culturally diverse body of immigrants from all over the world—had come to an end.  It was being replaced by a better goal—cultural diversity.  In this vision our country could become a kind of demographic warehouse of a hundred mini-cultures.   Well I was a college professor, and how can a college professor not be in favor of  cultural diversity?  Let a hundred flowers bloom.

 

            But a version of the “multicultural” ideas he was talking about is  now entrenching itself in our universities and among other thought leaders, sometimes with perilous consequences.  It is setting Americans at each others’ throats.  It has already seriously weakened the freedom of speech that should be the bedrock of our cultural exchanges.  I fear it has already done permanent damage not just to the internal operations of our educational institutions but to their reputations in the eyes of the public they must serve and on which they must depend.  If hating Jews or despising Muslims is your thing, maybe it’s “cultural,” part of an essential “identity” of “identity politics”.  This New World is not so much the guarantor of new beginnings as the custodian of old grievances.  But the world has a plateful of problems related to demographic, agricultural, and climate matters of fairly recent appearance without so carefully preserving and reanimating ancient ones.  From the historical point of view there is something surprising, perhaps even amazing about the survival of the human race through its centuries of violent folly.  The pathway of its continuing survival has been the intense application of innovation, adaptation, and perhaps above all cooperation, which depends on ethical intelligence.  Will we still have that in sufficient quality and quantity?  I won’t be here to watch, but I can hope.

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Kennedy Assassination

 

 

This blog has not devoted much attention to historical anniversaries, but I must make an exception for one just past—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  I must inquire on behalf of all who are likely to recall the precise circumstances of the day with a sharp specificity.  Where were you when you learned that the president had been shot?  Practically everyone in my age group  can and will answer that question with minute detail.

 

            The first general elections in which I seriously interested myself were those of 1952 and 1956.  These were heady days for the serious expansion of civil rights in the country—a topic, contrary to much official memory, of large and sympathetic engagement by many young southerners of all races.  For many of us it was a time of serious mental maturation.  Like many contemporaries I was a fervent partisan of Adlai Stevenson, who lost twice, and pretty decisively, to Eisenhower.  But one now had the sense of freshness and possibility.  By the summer of 1958, a little more than five years before he was murdered, Jack Kennedy had made his prominent appearance on the national scene and in a curious way even on my scene.  It was hard for young people to stimulate much enthusiasm for Eisenhower, with or without the dubious assistance offered him by  Richard Nixon.  I graduated from college in 1958, and I spent most of that summer in Washington, thanks to a patronage job arranged out of the blue by Senator Fulbright, as I waited to sail to England to take up a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.  On a stifling late morning in July, when for forgotten reasons I was out on the streets sweating  in a heavy suit, Senator Kennedy pulled up in his open convertible and stopped at a light approximately five yards away from where I was standing, also waiting,  in the middle of Union Station Plaza near the Post Office.  He was tanned, his hair coiffed but unconfined.  Next to him on his big car’s big front bench-seat was an unknown beautiful young woman as perfectly turned out, radiant, and relaxed as the senator himself.

 

The Senator looked me in the eye and smiled charmingly directly at me.  His right hand was draped casually over the top of the steering wheel, and he languidly raised its index finger in  a gesture of minimalist  eloquence  that said “Not bad, huh, kid?”—meaning the convertible, the babe in the convertible, and doubtless the perfection of his current being and future prospects in general.  Obviously, this man was going to be President.  He knew it.  I knew it.  The babe knew it.  Silently but unequivocally he shared the vital data-point with me curbside.  Then the light changed; he nodded courteously; the young woman laughed; their car took off; I stood there dripping with sweat.  My first president.

 

Five years later, lots of changes.  He was President; but I myself wasn’t just chopped liver. I had earned three more academic degrees and completed a doctoral dissertation of intimidating erudition.  I had found and married my life partner.  We had a child on the way.  I was a newly appointed Instructor in English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and I was just at the moment puffing up a hill hurrying from one classroom to another amidst a large moving crowd with my friend and colleague Alan Dessen.  I picked up on the chatter.  Something about something bad happening to the President in Dallas.  “Well,” said Alan.  “This might be true.  Kennedy really was going to be in Dallas.”  “This will finish the Birchers!” said some hirsute graduate student from the human stream.  Then he said it again, and yet again even louder.  The reference was to members of the far-right group, the John Birch Society, who would now be discredited for having shot the President.  Every cloud has its silver lining.  It took us a while to get better information.  John Kennedy would appear to have been shot by the only Communist in Texas; and very soon we heard he was dead.

 

Dealey Plaza.  The Grassy Knoll.  The man in the window. The Zapruder film. Jack Ruby.  The New Orleans Cubans.  Magic bullets.  The Warren Commission.  Everybody knows the story, yet we still don’t know the story and never will.  In fact it becomes ever harder to believe there is a story at all.  A flood of information and disinformation, police incompetence risen to new heights, the agony of evidentiary ambiguity and a hundred special agendas—all inexplicable, all funneling into  mystery now canonized.  The Kennedy assassination has become, year after year for sixty years, increasingly fugitive and ungraspable.  Still, I would not have chosen the topic were it not for a serendipity.  About ten days  ago I got in the post a new volume of the Library of America: Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s.  The Names, White Noise, and Libra.  De Lillo is one of our truly brilliant experimental American novelists.  Libra is his novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, who was a Libra, or perhaps I should say it is a fictitious treatment of Oswald and the Kennedy assassination which, while repeatedly stressing its fictionality and denying its historicity, is more illuminating than eight or ten other “straight” histories I have read.  DeLillo is not merely a very fine writer; he is a formidable research scholar.  There is probably less fiction in his fiction than in most history books.  Certainly much better fiction.

 

But you cannot so much as approach this tar pit called the “Kennedy assassination” without being blackened with its very sticky goo, almost impossible to scrub clean.  I discovered this when I was writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos and became lured into a side-track following the flamboyantly anti-Communist  literary impresario Isaac Don Levine, a native Russian-speaker and plenipotentiary anti-communist hobgoblin who became guru to Marina Oswald as he had been guru to earlier generations of needy Soviet refugees and defectors.  His Russian fluency, fairly rare in the America of the earlier twentieth century, gave him what was at the time an unusual advantage in Soviet matters, and he made the most of it.  He is usually described as a journalist—which is not wrong, exactly, but hardly suggests the scope of his political influence on the anti-communist right.  You may never have heard of this master co-opter of agendas, but he will surely one day receive the major biography he deserves.

 

DeLillo is a novelist, and novelists tell stories.  Historical novelists tell historical stories.  The “story” of Libra is a doozy, but in case you have not yet read it, as I had not, I shall say no more.  The smallest homage I can pay to so brilliant a vision is to avoid ham-handed “spoilers”.  What I will venture to say is that  John Kennedy really did live, and he really did die from horrible gunshot wounds.  Before that this very same man really did lift his index finger in silent but significant communication with me, me personally.  How can it be that the nearest thing one can find to an explanation of the thing is a work of unapologetic fiction?

Collecting and Recollecing

 

 

On Sunday mornings Joan reads aloud the collect of the day at the breakfast table.  This week began with one of my favorites* and set me thinking about both certain eccentricities of the English language and the very powerful ways in which reading has informed my own life and the lives of so many close to me.

 

The noun collect, denominating the introductory prayer with which the celebration of the Eucharist has begun nearly since time immemorial, is a peculiar one.  Like the verb of the same spelling, it derives from the Latin colligere, which means “to gather together, to collect.”  But the nominative collect has a vocal emphasis on the first syllable and the verbal form on the second.  Participants in the same church service will pray a collect and join in when they collect the offering. In the first instance what is being gathered are prayerful intentions, in the latter pecuniary  contributions.

Thomas Cranmer

 

The verbal beauty of Anglican liturgy is in part a resort of historical serendipity.  Various early Latin versions of most of the collects are abundant, but the English Reformation coincided with a great increment in humanistic learning and vernacular enrichment that is evident in ecclesiastical translation.  Furthermore, many Church leaders were accomplished writers, in particular Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the literary genius behind the Book of Common Prayer of 1549.  Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series of novels (and plays) has popularized other less admirable aspects of the ecclesiastical events of the age.

The exhortation that Bible readers should read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the substance of Holy Writ would merit an essay of its own.  Particularly rich is the tradition of reading as providing a kind of nutrition through eating.  The famous phrase “inwardly digest” from this collect became nearly proverbial in later English literature.

 

                                              BOSWELL**

and

HUME

 

But I realized, unfortunately too late, that what I chose for literary and aesthetic interest compels me to brush up against some dreaded heavy-duty theology.  That is because what all the reading, marking, and spiritual manducation in the collect is in aid of is the fostering of hope in one of the most mysterious of Christian doctrines: the immortality of the soul, eternal life, “life after death.”

James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, made a visit to his dying friend, the famous philosopher David Hume.  Hume was a radical religious skeptic. Boswell, a conventional Christian who recited the Nicene Creed and its clause affirming his belief in "the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting" on a frequent basis, was perhaps hoping for a deathbed conversion.  If so, he would be disappointed.  Hume was utterly unphased at the prospect of his impending death and, in his own expectation, the definitive annihilation of his being.  Both Hume’s belief and his unbelief astonished and terrified Boswell.  That meeting took place on July 7, 1776, when the United States was three days old and perhaps five percent of educated people then held ideas closer to those of Hume than to those of Boswell.  I suspect that by the bicentenary of 1976 Boswell would have had trouble getting five percent  among the same demographic.  It has been well said that the Enlightenment project was the “disenchantment of the world.”  The more that science could explain, the less room there was for folkloristic legend and myth, however endearing or even fascinating it might be.  Anthropologists were wont to speak of “primitive” beliefs, from which the human species gradually emerged in its slow progress toward a fuller rationality.  In individuals this process involved overcoming the infantile sensibility, putting away “childish things” as the Apostle Paul himself called them.  But putting away childish things can be painful.  Wordsworth was a child of the Enlightenment.  “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” he cried out—that dawn being the French Revolution.  “But to be young was very heaven.”  Yet one of his most profound and mature poems—usually called the Immortality Ode-- (“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”)—begins with a lament for a spiritual truth overhwhelmed by an inferior “science”:

 There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream

   The earth, and every common sight,

         To my mind did seem

         Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

 

It is not now as it hath been of yore…

 

It is commonly believed that the origins of our religions are to be found in primal fears, especially the fear of death.  The Roman poet Statius put into the mouth of one of his less attractive characters an opinion that became a set piece for atheists in our older literature: “Fear first created the gods!”  It is a line that appears in Chaucer.  I myself have come to a very different hypothesis and a more positive one.  The belief in immortality grows not out of fear but out of affirmation of the goodness of life.  This was Cicero’s opinion.  He says that he could never deny the immortality of souls even if its impossibility could somehow be definitively demonstrated.  In his view life itself was so good that it could not possibly be subject to all the woeful limitations endured by human bodies.  I never used to think about any of this too much.  Funny how octogenarian thought may differ from that of junior high school.  But which of the two is actually more childish?

As the French say,--and of course they have something snappy to say about practically everything-- “Pour être mort, il faut mourir.”  In order to be dead, it is necessary to die.  But one can quite honestly express a fearlessness of death while acknowledging the dread potential of the dying part.  On this front the messiness of the possibilities become ever more obvious, and they do tend to crowd the mind.

         But so do many other things.  Hume was an empiricist, an empiricist being someone whose judgements and actions are founded in actual observed experience.  I think our worldviews are determined less by what we “believe” than by what we see.  What we see is for me best captured in words by poets who have written about their own observed experience in remarkable ways.  Here, for example, is Hopkins:

 

   The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed…

 

This is in one way a rather conventional Victorian religious poem.  That is what it seems to want to be.  But the poet’s extraordinary imagery will not allow it to be.  The grandeur of God cannot be captured in a simile, only hinted at.  It is bright; it is dynamic in its shining.  All well and good.  But then comes the seeing, the deep seeing.  “It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.”  What an amazing line.  Read, mark, learn…

 

 

* TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST: THE COLLECT.  Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them: that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast  the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our saviour Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

 

**The are pluses and minuses in having an erudite readership.  This post had been mounted for less than two hours when I received an email from Terry Seymour, once an undergraduate of mine and now (among numerous other achievements) one of the worlds leading experts on Samuel Johnson and his circle, suggesting that this painting, purloined for the usual decorative purposes from Google Images, is not of James Boswell but (probably) of Thomas Percy.  My feeble reply to this is "Who is Thomas Percy?" But I don't need much research to conclude that he was better looking than Boswell, and since it's still pretty early in the morning, and since only God and Seymour are likely to know the difference, I think I'll leave him there. I also appreciate an email from God relating to other matters touched upon in the essay.   But I warmly thank my friend Terry for giving me the opportunity of a little glad if embarrassed learning.

Special Aups

                                          Vaduz

Aups

 

A few subjects of this essay will be our daughter Katherine’s travel itineraries, the beautiful crisp fall weather we are enjoying, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, and the wit and wisdom of Julius Caesar.  Saturday’s beautiful weather—bright, chilly  crystalline air  rapidly warming beneath  a brilliant rising sun—was particularly splendid as experienced on the bluestone patio onto which the sliding doors of our glass walled house open at the back.  From the front everything about the house is flat and uninteresting.  It gives off the vibe of a small, windowless warehouse.  It does have the distinction of having been designed by an eminent member of the Architecture School about 1960, a fact that gives me small comfort whenever I contemplate its gray, windowless street front.  That is because its backside, which is for our purposes the living side, is almost spectacularly beautiful. The yard slopes down gradually toward a nearly acceptable workshop-tool house; behind that the view from the house includes several beautiful yards of the extensive fieldstone wall I myself built in earlier days.  Beyond that a lovely path makes its way through a field on which a younger generation once played baseball, and then along a forested path that leads, after about a quarter mile of forested common land, to a T-junction.  There walking paths in either direction follow the cliff side looking down on Lake Carnegie. 

 

This lake is one of the ornaments of our campus and our town.  According to legend it was a great disappointment to the university trustees, who had in the first decade of the twentieth century been cultivating Mr. Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist, in the hopes of a gift of some large and imposing public University building.  Among the favorite gifts for which he was noted were libraries and “science buildings,” both of which made them salivate—in the very discreet manner in which Presbyterian elders might be seen to salivate, of course.  But fortunately Mr. Carnegie had ideas of his own.  In the days when a dollar was a dollar, he gave away three hundred and fifty million of them.  He knew that what Princeton really needed was a long, thin water reservoir that could double as  a recreational site, with special emphasis on the manly British sport of competitive rowing. 

 

I’m sure you follow the sequence here.  It was on the bluestone patio looking down toward the path that could eventually lead us to Carnegie’s aqueous bounty that we on Saturday enjoyed a whirlwind visit of an hour and a half from our daughter.  All three of our children are notably dutiful with regard to us, the APs (aging parents) but Katherine’s attentiveness can be described only as heroic given the fact that her job, leading a major American cultural foundation with its principal seat in Los Angeles, requires frequent travel to major European capitals—and, as it turns out, at least one not so major.  She was on her way to hop a plane to Zurich, the major airport closest to her actual destination—Vaduz.  Vaduz???  I faced the humiliation of having to learn that it is the capital of Liechtenstein.  It turns out Vaduz is an actual place.  You might describe it as a suburb of Davos.  They apparently have Davos-style meetings there.  I wouldn’t know.  Look, I’ve been to the Sulphur Springs Fair twice, but I never heard of this Vaduz place.  To my credit I already suspected that Liechtenstein itself might be real, and I was secretly glad to have confirmation.  But our daughter was shocked, shocked, by my ignorance.  A European capital city!  You…a college professor?

 

         In the long run this humiliation excited a competitive spirit.  Surely there must be somewhere on my own itinerary that would stump her.  I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head, so that my own eventual email riposte probably reached her mid-Atlantic.  I inquired how frequently she visited Aups.  Gotcha!

 

Aups is not exactly the capital of anywhere.  It is actually a beautiful little village in upper Var in Provence that has been around for a very long time--a lot longer than this jumped-up Vaduz, I’ll warrant.   I have been able to visit it a couple of times thanks to its proximity (maybe ten kilometers) to our friend Andrew’s house at Salernes, where we have spent several delightful vacations.  In fact, both of the APs are practically Aups habituées.  Any place so ancient is bound to have some interesting associations, even if it has been in decline for a couple thousand years.  It is, for example, famous for its truffles, at least among trufflers.  In an earlier century its Catholic peasantry was badly bloodied up by a mob of Cathars, which is of interest given that the Cathars were usually on the losing side of that equation.  But its more interesting fame, for purposes of an obscurity contest, is more ancient yet.  For thanks to Julius Caesar Aups has a credible claim to be the most insignificant place in Europe.  If you know even a little about Julius you are likely to know that he was much concerned with fine distinctions of social and political hierarchies.  He liked arrangements in which the hierarchies were clear and he was at the top of all of them.  He happened to pass through Aups on his way to conquering Gaul.  He probably regarded the hamlet as nothing more than an inadequate watering hole for his men’s horses.  But he is supposed to have made his larger hierarchical attitudes clear by saying: “I would prefer to be the Number One Guy in Aups than the Number Two Guy in Rome.”  It was an attitude likely to get him into trouble one day.  But as an example of imperious wit it was enough to establish little Aups as the world’s quintessential Loserville.  I doubt that my attempt to invoke its legendary obscurity can harm it though.  The proper French pronunciation of the place may sound like what an Anglophone might blurt out after dribbling soup down his shirtfront, but Scandinavians now pay half a million for a decayed stable in the area.

 

Returning to the Number One Guy ever to visit Aups, everyone knows that Julius Caesar was a man of parts.  He was among other things quite the wit, and he seldom passed through any part of his expansive and expanding Empire without making some memorable comment especially designed for teachers of Latin 101.  His most famous such remark of course is a masterpiece of precision recording his activities when he strayed with imperial intent into a part of the world  that wasn’t quite yet fully pacified, as the Romans like to put it.  Veni, vidi, vici.  Where, I ask you, would introductory Latin students be without veni, vidi vici?  “I came; I saw; I conquered.”  Just popped out of his mouth, apparently.  He also has famous last words.  Et tu, Brute?  (Or was that Shakespeare?)  And into how many parts is omnia Gallia divided?...

                           

                                tres partes, of course

 

History and Oblivion

 

This will be a very brief essay.  No essay at all, really, more like a sad mini-meditation on the ambiguities of history.  It has been hard to be anything but sad in the current historical moment.

 

I have spent most of my life studying history.  It has been history of a special sort, since it has focused on old works of art, literary and visual.  My approach has been a fairly common one.  I have tried to understand old verbal and visual constructs in terms of the likely intentions of their creators and their intended audiences.  Trying to understand the past in its own terms is very hard work, because the past is a foreign country, or rather many foreign countries. We keep saying that we must heed the lessons of history, that we must never forget this or that.  Sometimes the thises and the thats are of gigantic size, the evils of the Atlantic slave trade, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust of European Jewry.  Who possibly thinks that such enormities should be forgotten even if they could be?

 

         But historical memory has many uses, some of them more conducive to human felicity than others.  My own paternal grandfather provides me with a monitory example.  Though born in this country, he was a fanatical pseudo-Irishman.  His father, who arrived in America as a youth about the time of the Civil War was for most of his life a coal miner in southern Illinois, but I think my grandfather was born in Detroit.  He had a mediocre career in various pockets of the lower, lower middle class.  Its high point was a brief stint as a recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War.  The immigrant father (my great grandfather) abandoned Catholicism in a dramatic fashion that I might recount another time.  His son (my grandfather) turned the family religion department over to his Northern Baptist wife.  His chief spiritual passion, so far as I could judge, was hating England.  I don’t know that he had ever seen an actual Englishman, but I supposed he must have.  However, he didn’t need to have done so in order to hate them all with a fury.  Thus did the internalization of certain quasi-legendary iniquities of the administrations of Viscount Melbourne and Robert Peel continue to sour the world view of a man into the 1950s.  And, incidentally, some of his posterity.

 

But among the world’s active and malignant ancestral hatreds, that born of the Irish famine was, if you will allow the irreverence, small potatoes compared with many others.  Some still active ones were already virulent at the dawn of written history.  When Joshua, who lived in the Bronze Age, first crossed the River Jordan, the land in which he found himself, however promising and indeed promised it might have been, was far from uninhabited.  It was replete with Amelikites needing to be smitten “hip and thigh”.  The Amelikites, sometimes called simply Amelik, were  an indefinite tribe, or race, or coalition, who appear widely but indefinitely,  (both in terms of chronology and of geography) in early sacred history.  What is definite is that they needed the hip-and-thigh treatment, that is, ethnic cleansing, aka genocide. 

 

Never forget.  Remember the three hundred at Thermopylae.  Remember the Alamo.  Remember Treblinka and Sobibor.  But for the love of God remember them in a fashion more likely to lead to their effectual oblivion than their repetition.  John Kennedy performed one of the most benign and brilliant achievements of modern history during the Cuban missile crisis when he simply pretended  that he never received a certain provocative note from Nikita Krushchev.  (To his credit, Krushchev, having taken the time to think twice, went along with the fiction.)  This was an act of willful oblivion that may have allowed the continuation of the human species.