Most readers will probably be familiar with Oscar Wilde’s brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest. The whole play, like the title, operates on several levels. From the philosophical point of view—if that is not too grand an approach to a work so light-hearted at the surface level—the subject is a classic one: the relation of words to the things they denote. In a sense this is an issue raised by all nouns, the English words noun and name actually being variants. The title of Umberto Eco’s delightful medieval romp—The Name of the Rose—reflects the medieval ancestry of the matter. When Juliet poses her wistful question to Romeo—"What’s in a name?”—she suggests the arbitrary nature of words, the meanings of which are “socially constructed” and depend upon a general cultural acceptance for their utility. I thought when I sat down to write about all this I might entitle the essay “The Unimportance of Being John.”
There are a lot of plays in the repertoire that exploit the theme of false or mistaken identity. The ancient playwright Plautus wrote a farce about twin brothers that inspired one of Shakespeare’s early efforts, The Comedy of Errors, and has echoes in probably dozens of other Renaissance plays. To get into my own little comedy of errors, though, I have to tell you a little more than is really interesting to you about the neighborhood in which we have lived for about thirty-five years. It is a subdivision of about eighty houses, most of which were erected in the 1960s. It is called the Gray Farm presumably on account of an old family farm that once filled the grounds, though I am only guessing. Several of them were designed by members of the faculty of the School of Architecture. Accordingly, there is considerable architectural variety among them, and even some architectural distinction, though most of them are comparatively modest in size, certainly as gauged by contemporary macmansion standards. The Gray Farm scheme was designed to allow modestly remunerated tenured faculty members to buy and own a house, and to enjoy whatever long-term appreciation accrued to the property, within the context of an expensive real estate market in a definitely upscale place. Naturally there was a catch. The owners of the houses truly owned them, but they could not be sold on the open market or be transferred by testamentary will to the owners’ children. They had to be sold back to the University at a price arbitrated between representatives of the University’s real estate department and the departing owners or their agents. The aim was to enable faculty to own property which they could not otherwise afford. There are other stipulations to the scheme, but those are the essentials. With the fairly dramatic long-term improvement in faculty remuneration over half a century, a development that greatly expands the housing horizons for faculty, the Gray Farm scheme has become less popular. There are other attractive and affordable options.
Of course living in a faculty ghetto means you have some interesting neighbors. For most of our years here our two nearest neighbors were both members of the Department of Near Eastern Studies. On the west was the eminent Bernard Lewis, historian, Semitic linguist, neo-con guru and counsel to the Bush administration, and a chief animator of Edward Said’s disdain in his book Orientalism. It was a rare week on our street that did not see a visit from a recording truck visiting our neighbor to tape an interview with him. Professor Lewis left the neighborhood for a retirement care facility and died several years ago. But there are several other such eminences scattered throughout the neighborhood.
Last week, as I was getting dressed after a shower, I heard the front doorbell ring. I knew that Joan was already out of the house, so I called out to Christie, our wonderful health aide, and asked her to answer the door. She did so, and I could hear snippets of her exchange with the man who had rung the bell. I heard him identify himself as from Philadelphia and from the Associated Press. He was looking for John. I soon was more or less dressed and able to meet him in the living room. The man had in his hands a rather formidable camera. “John?” he asked. So far so good. Without the slightest prevarication I was able to answer, “Right! I’m John.” “Well, I’d like to take your picture,” he said.
Suddenly I had the feeling that this—whatever this might be—probably was, well, you know….when a photographer from the national press tells you he wants to take your picture you somehow want desperately to think of some reason why that might be true. Milton’s last infirmity of noble mind. The photographer, noting my struggle, began to share it. “You…you are John Hopfield, right?” Alas, manifestly this was wrong. I did of course know who Hopfield was and had twice said “Good morning” to him over a twenty-five year period. He was yet another genius Princeton physicist, one who strayed into biology before straying even further into the faculty of the California Institute of Technology before (fortunately for us) returning to Princeton. And of course I knew that Hopfield built the house which we have owned since 1988, though it had had at least one other owner in between. He’s the guy who saddled us with the bamboo. I also knew, instinctively, what the photographer now was going to tell me. Hopfield had just won the Nobel Prize. I was able to tell the photographer that I thought Hopfield lived somewhere over on the other side of the golf course.
I then remembered years ago sitting nervously in the waiting room of a dentist’s office—flipping through a dogeared magazine of that specially trivial genre unreadable except by people desperately trying to prevent their minds from acknowledging impending root canal work. This magazine had brief “human interest” items interspersed with paragraphs of “fun facts”. Fun fact: Castor beans grow wild in Abyssinia. Fun fact: Paul Revere made George Washington’s first set of false teeth. Fun fact number three jolted me to attention. There are more Nobel Prize winners living on Hartley Avenue in Princeton NJ than live in seven western states. Hartley Avenue! Our little street! And indeed I knew of, indeed actually knew personally, two physics professors—Val Fitch (now unhappily deceased) and Joe Taylor (still going strong)—who were Nobel laureates. Ed Witten, who lived on a cross street a hundred yards frm the corner with Hartley, had merely won the Fields Medal, there being no Nobel Prize in mathematics.
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