Behrman Award

 

It has been an unusually active week for us geriatrics, so active indeed that it is not easy to identify its high point.  So I won’t even try, and simply go with the last major event, which was our attendance at the sumptuous annual banquet celebrating the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton University.  As treating this topic will obviously require some talk about the late Howard T. Behrman and some talk about the humanities, with any luck I should be finished before I am required to add any thoughts of my own. 

 

The event is officially a “black tie optional” event, but probably only a third of the male participants, including me, were wearing dinner jackets.  The venue was Prospect House, the closest thing we have (not very close) to a Faculty Club.  In the days of Woodrow Wilson, it was a grand private presidential residence; but the presidents have long since decamped to another mansion off campus.  Prospect has a big kitchen and does a brisk business in lunches and special dinners.

 

Prospect House

 

The Behrman Award consists of a handsome bit of money and a large bronze medallion.  At least in the version with which I am familiar, the medallion has a somewhat bizarre figure on its face, after a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci.  The image is often called “Vitruvian man” because of its obvious relationships to the ideas concerning visual perspective advanced by the ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius, which became popular in the Italian Renaissance.  A student once described it to me as “a naked hippie doing jumping jacks.”  Not bad, even if somewhat demythologizing.   It is also sometimes called “protagoran man” after the pre-Socratic philosopher Protragoras, famous for a cryptic utterance often rendered as “Man is the measure of all things.”

 

Howard Behrman, who died in 1985, was an eminent practitioner, research dermatologist and wealthy book collector (specializing in early editions of classic American writers).  He had no special connection to Princeton, but took up residence in the town and became deeply involved with the Friends of the Princeton University Library.  I came to know him personally in that role.  A generous and cultivated philanthropist, he made many large contributions to various cultural institutions, endowing (among other things) an annual banquet celebrating humanistic scholarship at Princeton at which a sizeable cash prize was to be awarded to an outstanding faculty humanist.  The endowment fund, wisely invested but strictly delineated in its focused purpose—an annual cash prize and sumptuous banquet—soon provided enough to fete two winners each year.  In 1987 I myself was one of the two, the other that year being the historian Robert Darnton, who later moved on to Harvard.  Judged objectively you might find that the dinner has a whisper of wine snobbery and stratospherically haute haute cuisine.   The president in his welcoming remarks stressed the fact that the terms of the gift restrict its use solely to conspicuous consumption. So it is frankly a mainly alimentary event, but there are always five fairly short speeches, one by the president, and one by each winner and their departmental introducers.  These little talks are typically learned and inspirational, often with much good humor; but this year the undertones of the brewing warfare between American academia and the American presidential regime emerged at times simply as tones.  These tensions are to me very worrying, but this is not the occasion to discuss them.  This year’s winners were the British historian Dame Linda Colley and the former Dean of the College Jill Dolan, Professor of English and an eminence in cultural and feminist studies.  For anyone interested, I expect that there will be an account of the work of these two colleagues on the Princeton University webpage by the time I publish this.  This essay is about our experience of the event.  Though long retired, I can still bask in the reflected glory of eminent colleagues.

 

What are the “humanities”?  As usual, linguistic history is a good place to begin.  At Oxford they have long called the classics curriculum that produced so many British leaders and Empire-builders of the modern age the litterae humaniores, the more “human[e]” branches of literary studies.  This course of study in usually referred to in academic lingo as “Greats.” More human than what?  Than theology, of course, than what in the Middle Ages they called “divine science” or “study in the sacred page.”  Secular learning, in short, the stuff, even practical technology,  of at least half of a modern American college curriculum.   Modern education in a sense involves a conscious turn away from the sacred.  Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century wrote the following memorable couplet: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man.”  Ancient educators often spoke of the pathways or avenues to learning.  Our word method reveals this in its etymology, hodos being the Greek word for road.   Of course, learning is not static, nor are the arrangements by which learning is pursued.  Though the advanced curriculum still has visible traces linking it with the medieval Seven Liberal Arts—themselves distributed in a preliminary trivium (three ways) and a more specialized quadrivium (four ways)--it is now much more capacious.  The natural sciences and the social sciences now loom large and will likely loom ever larger.

 

A special pleasure of our evening was provided by our dining companions—my fellow emeritus colleague from the English Department Michael Wood and his wife Elena Uribe.  Michael is a well-known and broad-ranging critic still prominent in the literary journals.  Only last Saturday did I learn that Elena, a Mexican by birth, has interests broadly similar to those of our son Luke, in linguistic anthropology, dealing with indigenous cultures.  Much of Luke’s early work centers on remote linguistic groups in Brazil.

 

A festive meal featuring many leisurely courses and several speeches, however mini, made it a pretty long evening.  The party broke up, and we tried to make a quick exit.  But unbeknownst to us revelers in the mead hall, outdoors a pretty serious rainstorm had set in.  We nonetheless set off toward our car, left in a parking lot perhaps six or seven hundred yards away.  Little did we imagine that the President, too, was making a quick exit.  But his car was parked maybe fifty feet away from the venue.  We had a lead of about two hundred feet along a narrowish driveway which he had to drive down.  So I guess he felt he just had to stop and pick us up.  The distance from the parking lot I just quoted is the distance on foot. By car it is substantially farther, and in the opposite direction to his actual residence.  I doubt that his spouse, though herself utterly gracious, could have been exactly delighted with the geriatric hitchhikers.  Just what an overworked college president needs at the end of a long day.  Even as this was happening Wordsworth’s lines from “Tintern Abbey” concerning “that best part of a good man’s life” came into my mind: “his little unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”  Well, they certainly won’t be unremembered by us.

Gatsby Centennial

 

On Sunday the Friends of the Princeton University Library held its official annual meeting, which was followed by its annual dinner.  The after-dinner speaker for this event is usually some eminent “book person,” in this instance Prof. Maureen Corrigan, who surely is one of the best-read readers around.  She is well known to a popular audience as the book critic for National Public Radio, and to many general readers as the author of So We Read On, the subtitle of which is How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.  This is a big year for literature lovers at Princeton.  It marks the hundredth anniversary of the most famous title by our most famous alumnus novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Or near alumnus; he never actually graduated.  So Corrigan was the perfect expert to speak about Gatsby, and she gave a memorable talk.   Command of material is always augmented by spirit and humor in its deployment, and she had plenty of both.  Joan and I had the honor of sharing a table with, among others, Scott Fitzgerald’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter.

 

The Friends of the Library is a group in which civic virtue and personal pleasure meet.  It is easy to be a friend of a library.  You begin by loving to read, doing a lot of reading, and helping others to love, study, acquire, and preserve books.  You will build a personal library of however modest a nature.   Almost anyone can afford to construct a small private library at modest expense.  Or, if you are a person of means you can purchase rare titles for a public institution at staggering prices.  Perhaps your collection will have a dedicated theme.  You will do all in your power to encourage literary habits in others and to practice them yourself.  Our organization of Friends has some members in all these categories, among others.

 

Unfortunately libraries have enemies as well as friends.  Among the political tidbits recently in the press was one concerning our somewhat specialized topic of interest: libraries.  “At the U.S. Naval Academy, it's not what's on the shelves that's drawing attention -- but what's missing. The institution's Nimitz Library has been stripped of 381 titles, according to a list first published in the New York Times, including works exploring race, gender, and national identity.”  Now this news article fits into a conventional genre.  It is not about the crisis of shelf-space familiar to places that house too many books, such as, for example, the Fleming home.  As you read it, your focus must be on the apparent content of the books.  Here’s a hint.  It begins with Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist.  It includes Monsieur d'Eon Is a Woman : a Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade.  You may already have caught the drift.  This is an article about that form of censorship usually called “book-banning.”  In the dreaded academic triad of approaches to humanistic study—class, race, and gender—all three have proved perennial stimulants to controversy.

 

But there is a paradox here.  While book-banning is a topic that should concern anybody concerned with—well, with anybody capable of being concerned about anything—book-banning has historically been pretty good for some authors.  Everybody wanted the latest banned book from Voltaire.  For a certain period of time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the New England Watch and Ward Society stimulated many a faltering author’s sales by declaring their books banned in Boston.  To be able to boast that your book was banned in Boston was probably better for your sales than being able to display a glowing review in some literary journal.

 

 

But my experience as a teacher and American citizen and a friend of libraries is that the real problem about reading in our country is not that by and large Americans are being deprived of books, but that they simply don’t read books.  There is no necessity for bad actors to ban books; our flimsy culture is doing that for us.  We have a very bright granddaughter, aged eleven, who mainly reads “graphic novels,” basically comic books.  That’s apparently just fine with her Brooklyn school teachers.  More paradox: the number of new novels published each year appears to me to vary inversely with the number of people who read lots of novels.

 

Since in my career I have been an English professor I need to be clear that I am here not speaking as one.  A college education will, I hope, introduce many thousands to some very good books and millions to a wide variety of technical or utilitarian ones.  But not everybody should or will be a French literature minor.  Yet if your national educational aim is universal literacy, as ours has long been, everyone should be encouraged to be a life-long reader of something useful.

 

Please do not suppose that I have lost the plot in this essay if I move on to an apparently political topic.  My subject is reading and readers.  But Ms. Corrigan’s prowess as a reviewer, and her stated belief that The Great Gatsby is the greatest of American novels has set me on a track that I hope no one will mistake for run-of-the mill academic Trump-bashing.  During my lifetime I have benefitted from the thoughts of book reviewers who seemed to me to have read everything.  When I was young there was Clifton Fadiman.  More recently the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt occupied that role at the New York Times.  Ms. Corrigan herself fits the category. The American president is a graduate of one of our most prestigious universities.  Surely it is impossible that he achieved his degree without reading books?  Indeed, he is the alleged author of a book on one of his apparently favorite topics, deal-making.  Its title indeed is The Art of the Deal.   In reviewing Trump’s book Lehmann-Haupt had this to say of the author: “The more important fact is that he arouses one's sense of wonder at the imagination and self-invention it must have taken to leap from his father's shoulders and reach for the deals that he did. Jay Gatsby lives, without romance and without the usual tragic flaws.”  Jay Gatsby lives.

 

The ghost-writer of the book under review, Tony Schwartz, along with the book’s original publisher, deny that Trump wrote a word of it.  I have no independent information, but “of disputed authorship” is a well-established category to students of, say, Elizabethan drama.  The book was a best-seller, and has many admirers to this day. Lehmann-Haupt’s review of it for the Times may have been the occasion by which the name “Trump” first became fixed in my mind.  Jay Gatsby lives, Mr.Lehmann-Haupt wrote,  without romance and without the usual tragic flaws.  Going back in memory to the ‘Eighties, when The Art of the Deal appeared, has been for me a clarifying imaginative experience. The book was followed by several other Trump titles.

 

 The uneven distribution of monetary resources in our country, often called the wealth divide has grown ever starker in our consciousness in recent decades.  It overlaps only somewhat with the literacy divide, but by a pretty large somewhat.  In a fast-moving world our public schools are graduating fewer and fewer young people prepared to find traditional “middle class” jobs or even jobs likely to lead to one.  This is already a serious social issue and may well become a national security issue.  But I believe most high-school English students have at least heard of The Great Gatsby, and not a few have read it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Easter 2025

imagine this with the lights off

 

Writing on the Monday after Easter, I am already reliving in memory the religious and family-centered pleasures attendant upon the festival in our household.  While one size does not fit all, there remain some cultural habits of such long duration and of sufficient current vitality as to provide for most of us a template for the continuity of the human species.  The basic unit of human society has mainly been the family, and the family has mainly been the product of the sexual union of a man and a woman.  Family life, though it reveals an extraordinary variety of forms throughout the human community, generally shares certain common practices.   Important among these are communal gatherings of some implicit or explicit solemnity involving the consumption of shared food, conversation, and other common social pleasures.

 

One is unlikely to think about matters in this schematic way.  Mostly we live life rather than ponder over or anthropologize about it.  But there are occasions, such as when you find yourself sitting alone and in the dark in the chancel of a vast Gothic church at five in the morning, when the thoughts might come.  That is the situation in which I found myself, briefly, on Easter morning.  It all started long ago and with a single short word in the medieval Latin Bible: mane, meaning “early morning”.  The women went looking for the body of Jesus early in the morning two days after the Crucifixion.  My own story happened like this.

 

For the last few days we had been enjoying a visit of one half of the family we call the Montrealers—our younger son Luke, daughter-in-law Melanie, and grandkids John Henry and Hazel.  As simple folk, we call this family the Montrealers because they live in, duh, Montreal.   We also have New Yorkers and Brooklynites.  Naturally we see the Montrealers less frequently than the New Yorkers and Brooklynites.  And on this occasion only Luke and Hazel were able to come.  Melanie and John Henry had other Easter obligations of their own in Canada.  You know the old adage about absence making the heart grow fonder.  But there is a trade-off.  There is always some pain in having to say goodbye to loved ones infrequently seen.  So I felt a little sniffly as their Dodge van disappeared from out driveway earlier in the day.

 

But they had been with us for the whole of the triduum, which is the churchy name for the extended period of the Easter weekend, including Good Friday, a period that includes several interesting ancient rites and services.  The spiritual themes of the weekend obviously accord with the sense of renewal and rebirth visibly present in spring in the northern hemisphere and widely marked by many pre-Christian or simply non-Christian groups.  Many things about Easter are syncretic, revealing pre-Christian parallels in other religions.  The very word Easter is probably pre-Christian.  Rites of Spring must be universal.  Winters are tough; and in earlier periods of history they were much tougher, at least for the vast majority of the population.  I began my teaching career in Madison, Wisconsin.  The winters seemed endless.  When the ice finally began breaking up on Lake Mendota it did so with loud cracking sounds.  Madison, which seemed to me at the time so far north, must actually be roughly along the latitudinal line of Brittany in France.

 

Almost everything about Easter is syncretic—meaning that in its history, its etymology, and even to a degree in its spiritual interpretation it brings together several different poetic and theological traditions.  That spiritual interpretation itself has evolved. But as the festival observance of the stupendous claim at the heart of Christianity—that Jesus, a male human being, after being horribly executed and his dead body buried, a couple of days later, by eye-witness testimony from many alleged witnesses, reappeared as a living man--is of very ancient origin.  The Resurrection has always been for Christians the essential and necessary fact of human history.  So revolutionary and extravagant a belief so long held by untold millions for many long centuries formative of our civilization and so widely examined in their art and philosophy is not to be easily abandoned.  It encapsulates in historical narrative an attractive solution to the most tragic reality of human life, which is human death.

 

But enough about the Meaning of it All, and back to my sitting in the dark.  By heroic effort Luke, Hazel, Joan and I all made it to the Episcopal Great Vigil Eucharist which begins at 5am in the Princeton University Chapel and runs for about two hours.  This is a fabulous service which takes place in the large chancel of a cathedral-sized building.  It begins with the congregation making a solemn procession, two by two, with studied pauses proclaiming the coming of the “Light of Christ”, down what seems like an endless nave in semi-darkness, the only light being supplied by small candles, one for each marcher.  You then climb four or five stairs to the level of the banked choir stalls.  My mobility is poor in bright daylight.  In the dimmest of dim religious lights it could be catastrophic.  So Luke offered to take me in and settle me in the top rank of the choir stalls on the gospel side.   I would have to sit in the dark and wait while he and all the others gathered on the outside of the building’s massive oak front doors for the “lighting of the new fire”, in itself an impressive liturgical event.  They would then join me in my perch high in the stalls.  That meant that for perhaps ten minutes I was sitting alone in a building with a seating capacity of nearly two thousand.  It was not absolutely pitch-dark, but until the slowly advancing Light of Christ approached, plenty dark enough to encourage some serious solemn thought.  It was an experience I never anticipated but one I shall not soon forget.

 

All major human institutions, I suppose, are likely to present interesting patterns of change within continuity.  But to participate in a very lengthy liturgy that is in effect a textual recapitulation of thousands of year of Jewish and Christian history while sitting alongside two other generations of one’s own history, a mere blink of the eye in our species’ existence, offers a special kind of experience, contemplative subject matter of universal utility but with a special relevance for the aged and the infirm.  Why seek the living among the dead?

 

                                           as recorded by Lukas van Leyden

 

 

 

 

 

Raise Your Hand

 

 

Some time ago I wrote a little essay about things and signs, res and signa in Latin, in relation to a little book Saint Augustine wrote on that subject.  Signs are of course of many kinds, but among the most prominent in human cultures are verbal signs.  This is probably a too elaborate way of saying something rather simple.  Language is absolutely fundamental to human societies, but language is also marked by ambiguities requiring interpretation.  The same sound means bear (an animal), bear (the verb) and bare (the adjective), among other things.  Hence the shaggy dog question: How can a bear bare to bear a bare bear?   According to some linguistic theories both ancient and modern, language can never completely eschew ambiguity.  The Stoic linguistic experts said that words could be explained only by using other words: “That is like bringing an unlit candle into a darkened room!”  Even more ambiguous very often are signs that are pictorial and gestural.  I present as examples some problems of “signage” raised by two eminent alumni of my institution, Princeton, who would appear to be on opposite sides of our deeply divided political culture.

 The first is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University.  He earned his doctorate in the Princeton History Department in 1984.  President Roth has written a couple of op eds that I have found interesting, one of which was recently in the New York Times: “Trump is Selling Jews a Dangerous Lie” (4.07.25).  Though chiefly concerned with the iniquities of Donald Trump, he also criticized Elon Musk and the Anti-Defamation League, a group that had in his view soft-pedalled the implications of a provocative body gesture Musk had performed from a public stage.  “The president hadn’t been in office a full day before the Anti-Defamation League spoke up to defend Elon Musk for throwing what sure looked to me like a Sieg heil.” I had missed out on this episode at the time, but it was clear that “throwing a Seig heil” had to mean that Musk had performed a Nazi salute, and he had done this at a party celebrating Trump’s inauguration three months ago.  Wow!  I may have missed this, but the rest of the world did not.  There is even a Wikipedia article on the “Elon Musk salute controversy.”

 

Princetonians singing "Old Nassau" in the '80's
 

            It turns out the gesture may have been imported from France, and it has a French name, quenelle.  Such quenelles as I have known are gastronomic delicacies, but signs (verbal and gestural) mean different things in different times and places.  “In late 2013, following its use by professional footballer Niccolas Anelka during a match, Jewish leaders, anti-racism groups, and public officials in France have interpreted it as an inverted Nazi salute and as an expression of antisemitism.  French officials have sought to ban the gesture due to its perceived subtext of antisemitism.”  The triumphant or defiant arm reach actually has no single conventional meaning, or indeed any conventional meaning.  It is more than doubtful that protesting black American Olympians in 1968 intended it as “throwing a Sieg heil” in a celebration of fascist power.  It was at the time described by some as a variant or perhaps desecration of an “Olympic salute”—another supposed common gesture of which I was unaware.  You can read about that one in a journalistic essay of 2012 by Rose Eveleth, published four years before Trump’s first inauguration*.  Elon Musk is one of those public figures I would be  inclined to dislike on the grounds of his obscene wealth alone, but that is my problem.  The idea that he was “throwing a Seig heil” with crypto-fascist intent is kind of looney.  Has Dr. Roth never himself sung the anthem of his doctoral alma mater, “Old Nassau”, with its weird but statutory arm gesture?

 

            My second subject is a bearer of strange signs rather than a strange interpreter of them.  I refer to Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, of the great undergraduate class of 2003.  Michael Roth didn’t quite overlap with Pete Hegseth at Princeton, but there is in general little commerce between undergraduate and graduate students in any event.  I remember Hegseth by name as a notable basketball player, but I never met him.  As a man tattooed, he is perhaps rare but by no means unique among Princetonians.  He was preceded by at least one celebrity, Secretary of State George Schultz, who thus explained the factors discouraging him against a presidential run of his own: “I’m afraid the country is not ready for a president who might have a tiger tattooed on his rear end.”   That’s Tiger, as in Princeton Tigers.  I suspect the country is by now ready for more or less anything, but Schultz, alas, died at a great age a few years ago.  What Hegseth has tattooed very prominently over one bicep is the Latin sentence Deus vult.  I am no expert, but this is one of the more learned tattoos I have encountered.  It means “God wants or wills [it],” it being the First Crusade.  The phrase was the crowd’s enthusiastic answer to the Pope’s suggestion of a holy war made at the Council of Clermont in 1096.  The war’s ostensible purpose was to “liberate” the holy biblical sites in Palestine and to safeguard the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem.  This verbal exchange was in all probability conducted in the vernacular, but chroniclers generally wrote in Latin.  You may or may not know how all that crusading business worked out, but it was, well, complicated.

            According to various reputable sources various proto-fascists have adopted this phrase (Deus vult) as their motto, so that it is now, according to critics, an emblem of white supremacists.  As it happens, I have encountered one or two of those supremacist types over the years, but none of them looked to me like Latinists.  Though I am strongly in favor of studying Latin, all good things have their limits.  There are many reasons to be tentative about Hegseth’s appointment to direct the largest, most expensive and perhaps most important division of our government, the one charged with the national defense in a dangerous world.  What special gifts or experience argue in favor of such an appointment?  But his tattoos and their putative interpretations are perhaps pretty far down on the list of concerns and may have already attracted more attention than they merit.

 

            I remember writing one time about Rudyard Kipling’s swastikas.  The swastika is an ancient Indo-European emblem of prosperity and well-being the English writer adopted as a personal symbol more than thirty years before the Nazis arrived in power.  Kipling was one of the most prolific and popular Anglophone writers of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and had millions of readers.   At least one of the collected editions of his works published in the 1920s is prominently decorated with swastikas in its binding.  After the 1920s came the 1930s.  And after that came a great world war.  A specialized journal devoted to Kipling and his works repeatedly had to point out that the swastika could not have had for him a meaning in any way connected with Adolph Hitler or the National Socialist Party of Germany.  For him it invoked the fascinating, often exotic energies of the mysterious India of his birth.  Use the Moby Dick test.  Queequeg was no less effective as a harpooner for all the tattoos covering his face, as Ishmael himself came to learn.  We have enough to worry about in how our new Secretary of Defense will handle the harpoons.  A good place to begin there is with an old adage: Loose lips sink ships.  We can  fret over the pigmented epidermis later.

Fascist elephant?

 

Spine of a Kipling novel?

 

*“The Olympic Salute We Don’t Use Anymore Because it Looked too Much Like Heiling Hitler” (Smithsonian Magazine, August 10, 2012). 

 

 

 

 

Civic Virtue

 

Lorenzo de' Medici, "the Magnificent"

 

Perhaps my title needs a question mark: Civic Virtue?  Or even reformulation as an actual interrogative sentence?  Is there even such a thing as civic virtue?  Now, obviously there are virtues that can be deployed to the benefit of the community and of one’s neighbors in particular: paying your taxes promptly, supporting local charitable and service organizations, contributing to or participating in joint civic activities.   There is a certain civic virtue perhaps in keeping the exterior of your grounds in a reasonably tidy condition.   You can cut your lawn grass in a timely manner and refrain from throwing your empty beer bottles into your yard.  Try to keep from having more than two jalopies up on cinder blocks in the driveway at any one time.  That sort of thing.  But is there such a thing as civic virtue as relates to cities themselves?  Can a city ever be said to be “virtuous”?

 

 Civic virtuoso by Norman Rockwell

These questions arise in my mind attendant upon a book review I have been asked to write.  Its title is Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem, a title with the increasingly uncommon virtue of telling you what the book is actually going to be about.  The time period covered is often referred to by historians as early modernity.  Several of the religions of the world have the concept of “holy places,” many of which are cities said to be sacred.  In medieval and Renaissance Italy the powerful city-state of Florence liked to think of itself as a “new Jerusalem”.  One can say only “Join the club!”  In fact I doubt that there was any conurbation of even moderate size that in one way or another didn’t exhibit signs of a kind of Jerusalem-envy.  But Florence, as with most things, did Hierosulamism with a flair.

A city can be virtuous by law.  I spent a good deal of my early life in a little place in north-central Arkansas, Baxter County.  The county seat was a quite small town—a good deal larger now, though still small, called Mountain Home.  During all the years of my youth Baxter County was “dry”—meaning that the trading in or consumption of alcohol was prohibited by law.  Between 1920 and 1933 the whole country was by law in theory “dry”.  I stress the “in theory” part, because violations (bootlegging) were rife and created organized crime on a vast scale.  Because of the rampant criminality and gangsterism that followed in its wake, enforced prohibition eventually came to be generally regarded as a disastrous failure and was repealed.  (I might add that lots of Americans really liked to drink.)  Prohibition had been imposed by the ponderous device of constitutional amendment, and it was repealed by the same means.  But prohibitionists could not be repealed, and there were still a lot of them around too, especially in the rural south.  So by a system called “local option” still operating in many southern states in my youth the residents of a county could choose to be either wet or dry as they pleased.  There are, I believe, still some dry counties in Arkansas.  An unpremeditated alliance of bootleggers (of whom there were a few) and Baptists (of whom there were not a few) perpetuated the system.  Motivation and implementation are seldom in perfect alignment.  The nearest places to get loaded were a group of dubious but busy establishments just over the Missouri state line about fifteen miles due north of Mountain Home.

Getting back to Renaissance Florence, it was a pretty lively place, quite apart from all the humanists walking around with copies of Cicero in their pockets.  The place was overbriming with professional religious—in its nominal rather than its adjectival meaning of "members of religious orders"--rapacious noblemen, armed bravos, prostitutes, pickpockets, beggars and conmen.  I say nothing of the common cutthroats and cut-purses publicly executed on a regular basis.  Lorenzo de’ Medici was more or less a strict contemporary of Dominican reformer, Girolamo Savonarola. Perhaps I should say “would-be reformer”.  Savonarola had major ambitions to turn the city into a kind of giant monastery.  His ambitions along these lines enjoyed some early promise and a famous bonfire of vanities; but his progress was definitively  when he was hanged and burned alive in a public square.  The secular powers were, shall we say, very secular.  Concerning all this I can recommend George Eliot’s underappreciated historical novel Romola.  If you don’t have time for that, as you probably don’t, at least read “Minever Cheevey”, a delightful little poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.  “Minever loved the Medici, Albeit he has never seen one.  He would have sinned incessantly, Could he have been one.”

                                                             Savonarola

 

The aspirations to civic sanctity among Renaissance humanists have given us some interesting episodes.  The monastic and the ascetic might seem to be antithetical to the civic and the secular.  But here we find a cultural heavyweight like Erasmus asking the following strange question: “What else is a city, I ask you, but a large monastery?”  One can probably think of a number of other things else; but of course Erasmus was hinting at the proto-Protestant idea that the aspiration to “religious life” was an option for all Christians, not exclusively those in religious orders.  Florence certainly offered some options.  Yet the attempt to infuse civic government with high-minded religious or ethical ambition began in ancient times and in my own lifetime has been the motive of action for idealists in many lands.  John Calvin did his best to sanctify the city of Geneva in the sixteenth century.  Our own American history is replete with the communal search for social righteousness as expressed in social experiments like the Brook Farm community of the 1840s.  The many “communes” of the 1960s are still fresh in my own mind.

In many respects our county’s seventeenth-century Puritan origins have lived on, though sometimes only in echoes and shadows.  We hear repeated endlessly the phrase attributed to the Puritan preacher John Winthrop that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.”  Virtue is to be displayed, as so also once was vice.  It is probably fortunate that we have abandoned scarlet letters, prominently placed town stocks and pillories, and public executions; but there are still means of conveying social disapprobation.  Every few years the public reaction to some unfortunate incident in the New York subways gains special notoriety and puts on display our unresolved attitudes concerning the nature, limitations, or dangers of demonstrating civic virtue, or perhaps even of defining it.

The Mess at Columbia

 

            It is in a quasi-apologetic spirit that I return to some subjects only recently touched upon.  Like many others who have spent a lifetime teaching, I find many aspects of our unsettled cultural moment disquieting.  In assessing the strengths of American social institutions, we may be apt to underestimate the importance of our system of higher education.  American colleges and universities are unique in the world in terms of their number, their variety, and the role they have played in advancing important national goals and aspiration, including democracy itself.   To be honest, one has to point out the contrast between the exceptional nature of American higher education and its sometimes mediocre (or worse) public high schools.  It is therefore a cause of particular sadness to me when I sense, as I do at this moment, a diminution of the respect with which Americans regard the state of higher education just now. Our American system of higher education has been pricing itself out of the easy reach of the general population for decades.  It seems to me now in danger of stumbling into outright cultural hostility with that population as well.

 

            At one level the problem is a money problem, as so many of our national problems are.  There are macro- and micro-manifestations of the financial problem.  On the macro level, there has been an agreement between government and research institutions that universities would conduct all kinds of scientific research useful to the government and mainly paid for by the government—theoretically, but only theoretically, with no strings attached.  The cultural contract between our colleges and the general population is informal and implicit, but it has been reasonably clear.  Whatever other benefits collegiate institutions may claim to offer—principal among them the personal and spiritual growth of individual students and the preparation of citizens prepared for vigorous and informed participation in democracy—the frequently explicit claim of life-long economic advantage has been prominent.  Parents have been willing to scrimp and save for the demonstrable probability that their material sacrifice will enhance the prospects for the material prosperity of their offspring.  For a variety of reasons, this rationale is no longer a consensus.

           

            Columbia University in New York City, possibly the most famous of the many great educational institutions in what is probably still thought of by many as our nation’s greatest city, is going through a stressful time.  In fact, it is in a huge mess.  The latest tribulation is the resignation of an interim president appointed after the resignation of a predecessor who herself barely warmed the seat in the presidential office.  This has pretty much been an all-girl band.  And the latest lady is already being menaced by the congresswoman whose Perry Mason-stye cross examinations in a congressional committee hearing ended the executive career of the Penn president nearly instantly.  Ex-President Shafik of Columbia, who happens also to be a peer of the British realm and returned to England after only a year in New York, was in my opinion an outstanding educational leader.  But she was not a commando nor a barroom brawler,  both of which roles may now descend upon a college president almost capriciously  The newest temporary leader is being called an acting president as opposed to an interim.  Though I have never taught at Columbia University, I have had some reasonably close connections with the institution and have had many friends there.  To observe from a distance the distress of one of the world’s flagship institutions must be painful to anyone concerned with high quality higher education.

 

            Our universities inherited from their medieval European ancestors a certain sense of privilege when compared with other sections of civil society.  The phrase “ivory tower” is one that suggests an institution liberated from our own daily struggles and challenges in order to pursue a contemplative purity.  Many college professors think of themselves as modern ascetics who have sacrificed the fleshpots of Egypt for the cold but bracing water streams of Academe.  Never mind the fatuousness of the idea.  It is one that preserves a faint racial memory of the monastic origins of our universities in the Latin Middle Ages.  But just how unmonastic a great American university actually is may be suggested by the fact that Columbia now needs many millions of dollars of government money to operate on all cylinders.  And I mean many: four hundred million.  The Trump Administration says it is unwilling to provide the wanted and wonted money unless Columbia redresses certain alleged features of its “campus culture”.  The dereliction of which Columbia is accused is being soft on anti-Semitism.  The context in which this dereliction is supposed to have manifested itself are campus protests relating to the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, a militant group of Palestinians. 

 

In the neo-Manichaean style preferred by the New York Times the issue was thus analyzed: “Many professors saw it as surrender, a reward to the Trump administration’s heavy hand. Conservative critics of academia celebrated it as an overdue, righteous reset by an Ivy League university.”  One discovers what the it was in that sentence—either surrender or reward, in the paper’s dramatic prose—only later in the sentence.  It was the decision by the administration of Columbia University to cooperate with requirements concerning the conduct of students participating in political protests on campus.

 

It is easy to deplore the implications of a full-throated culture war between American academia and the current presidential administration, but rather harder to avoid the conflict itself.  That the research universities truly need government money is suggested by the staggering shortfall of four hundred million dollars with which Columbia was threatened.  It may require a little more intellectual subtlety to appreciate that the government is no less in need of what American colleges and universities uniquely provide to the nation’s well-being.  And it is just possible that intellectual subtlety ought to be more of a national priority.

 

Applicants take extreme measures to gain entrance to top-ranking schools

 

A Cultural Weekend

 

I am coming off what was a highly satisfying cultural weekend.  Years ago there were two movie theaters in our no longer so little town.  One of them gave up the ghost so many years ago that I can barely remember it, but the other, the Garden, hung on and eventually metamorphosed into the kind of “art” cinema every college town should have and usually does.  It has to a degree prospered and seems recently to have had a qualified interior spruce up.  It is no longer in obvious need of roof repair.  From the frequency with which we receive its begging letters it appears to remain appropriately marginal from the business point of view.  But of course it is wonderful to have an “art” cinema in town.  We find ourselves in fairly frequent attendance.

 

So near the end of last week we went to view “The Tree of Life.”  I had never seen this film; in fact, I don’t think I had ever even heard of it.  The setting of “The Tree of Life” is a little difficult to describe, as it includes both highly imaginative cosmic topography and (mainly) that of a modest middle class section of a sizeable Texas town or small city, which I think “is” Waco, in the 1950s.  East Texas is apparently an especially apt geography for “coming-of-age” movies.  I remember another great one from fifty ago: “The Last Picture Show.”  Waco is not an unknown place on the national scene, and it is certainly known to me as a professor of English literature  It is the home of Baylor University, an important cultural institution in the state, and a center for the study of Victorian poetry, especially that of the Brownings.  There is a certain eccentricity to academic libraries.  There are some outstanding specific topical collections on individual writers to be found scattered throughout the world.  In the middle of the 1950s I was living in a little town in East Texas, Mount Pleasant, where I graduated from its high school in 1954.  Mount Pleasant is maybe a couple of hundred miles northeast of Waco.  This must have been about the time of the imagined setting for “The Tree of Life.”  The makers of the film had spent a lot of time on authenticity of the film’s setting.  So I experienced a certain vague sense of dejà vu arising from my own late adolescent experience in East Texas.

 

            I am by no means a cinema buff, and I knew nothing of this particular movie in advance, except that it was supposed to be good—a judgment that I regard as an understatement.  The film is in my view superb.  Not that I could tell you exactly what it is “about,” beyond what is accurately if elliptically suggested by its title.  I would have to see it again even to be sure I could summarize all the elements of the plot accurately.  But the acting—including that performed by several very young actors—is superb.  It is not always easy to predict those sections of the population likely to be moved by a work of art, but this one has broad ambitions.   If you are a mother or a father—or are closely related to anyone who is, such as your own parents—you will almost certainly be moved, pensive, curious and reflective after seeing this film.  One of the things you will be pensive about, even if you have never heard the word before, is what Aristotle called mimesis—the fascinating and mysterious ways in which art is made to “imitate” life.

 

Jennifer Borghi, soprano

 

            Well, that was (I think) Friday night.  We now move on to Saturday night and something, as they say, completely different: Mozart’s Requiem performed by dedicated and talented singers from the chancel steps of a mini-cathedral, the Princeton University Chapel.  Except that it isn’t “completely different,” of course.  The energies of art, though highly differentiated, are quite often surprisingly convergent.  Anybody who watches “The Tree of Life” is likely to be set to thinking about the meaning of life.  Anyone who listens intently to the Mozart Requiem is guaranteed to be set to thinking about both life and death.  The huge chapel was nearly full for this superb performance, which was offered to the Princeton community as a free gift.  Amazing!    It was an event we would both want to attend under any circumstances, but there was in this instance a particular reason that guaranteed our presence.  The soprano soloist was Jennifer Borghi, who has been our friend since she was an undergraduate here twenty-some years ago.  Jen’s singing on this occasion was particularly strong and beautiful, I thought, as indeed was that of the other soloists.   It was a stunning performance.

 

 

            I suppose it is possible to react to a religious liturgy in purely aesthetic terms; then again it is possible to take a shower with your socks on.  I do not recommend it. Mozart himself was deeply religious, however conventional his actual religiosity may seem to us.  I remember seeing a letter of his, written when he was twenty or twenty-one, in which he practically gloats over the death of Voltaire.  But people’s meditations upon eternity tend to sharpen and mature as they approach its portals.  Given the fact that he was working away at his Requiem on his own death-bed, I can hardly doubt that the Last Things were on his mind.  The word requiem has become a bit dark and scary, but it actually means neither death nor a death dirge.  It means rest, as in relaxation, freedom from physical or mental effort.  The first two words of the Mozart requiem Mass petition for an eternal rest bathed in perpetual light.  That is solemn, sober, exalted; but it is far from tragic. 

 

            The simple medieval hymn Dies irae (“Day of Wrath”) appears early in the work.  Dies irae, dies illa/Solvet saeclum in favilla/Teste David cum Sibylla…(Day of wrath, that day/Will dissolve the earth in ashes/As David and the Sibyl bear witness…)  This little poem—it has a second strophe of three lines—is a nearly perfect example of medieval literary humanism.  It hard wires together the archetypes of the biblical and the classical-gentile prophetic traditions, the latter of which is so often explicated and illuminated by the former.  I spent a good deal of my scholarly career trying to understand and demonstrate this theme in early European poetry and the visual arts.   The Sibyl (who guides Aeneas between the worlds of the living and the dead) is the gentile “type” of the Hebrew king and prophet.  The word sibyl came to denote various versions of the female prophet.  Mozart attempts in music what so many Renaissance poets attempted in their verses.  He produced a work which, imitating the spiritual scheme from which it rises, defies mortality.

turned out to be not quite the last