Blueberry Pie

 

Old age is the natural season for introspection and reflection.  All lives are different, but there came a time in my own when serious illness demonstrated that I was over the hill, or perhaps even the foothills.  The road ahead looked steep, as it has proved to be.  The encouragement of well wishers to the effect that I was “eighty years young” or, even worse, that I was only as old as I felt (my God, that bad?!) could not by mere good intention alter mathematics.  Reflection can be dangerous but is more often salubrious.  I have had the opportunity to count my many blessings, as my dear grandmother instructed me to do in about 1943: an assignment I am at last fully prepared to undertake with gratitude.

 

So please allow me to tell you about my latest blueberry pie, even at the expense of granting me an exceptional indulgence of prolixity.  It will take me a little time to give an account of the pie, which arrived mysteriously on at my back door a few days ago.  I have very recently finished it off, but the particularly delicious memory lives on.  A light fluffy crust is a necessary but insufficient requirement for a pie.  The berries and the berry goo are of course crucial.  The mysterious origins of this one made it a symphony of delight.  It was accompanied by a note, unsigned, saying: “You taught us to think.”  So, a real mystery, up to a point.  Though I am genuinely in the dark concerning its donor(s), I do know what it is about, and that is the Augustinian binary concepts of caritas and cupiditas.  And both of those words can be translated by English “love”

 

It is always pleasing to a scholar to find his published work being cited by other scholars.  But in my career I have tried to emphasize the first half of the hackneyed phrase “teacher-scholar,” and on a few occasions I have been delighted to find my lectures being echoed by former students.  A couple of years ago, for example, I was reading a classicist’s learned if slightly edgy study of Ovidian pornography when I encountered a witticism of mine that she must have absorbed from a lecture I gave in about 1972.  Citing someone else’s written “work” without attribution is plagiarism.  Absorbing some memorable spoken remark you heard somewhere is a high form of compliment.

 

Getting back to the topic of love, I can say that it is complicated.  It is probable that you already knew that.  Meaning is conveyed by words, but many words are to some degree ambiguous.  And verbal ambiguity, as philosophers of all the schools have agreed, is the enemy of intellectual clarity.  The Stoic philosophers, for example, were much vexed with the problem of verbal ambiguity.  So was Saint Augustine.  In Anglophone countries the root of all evil is the love of money.  That is because Paul writing to Timothy (I Tim 6:10) says so in the King James English version.  For the love of money is the root of all evil.

 

What Paul says in the medieval Latin version, which is usually the one that counts with me as a medievalist, is that the root of all evil is cupiditas.  Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas  Cupidity, too seldom used today, is a great word, indicating a disordering desire for material possessions of all sorts as well as for sensual pleasure, especially sexual gratification.  Love of money, cupidity—two terms for dangerous moral dangers of very wide practical application.  That’s why Chaucer’s marvelously cupidinous Pardoner, a brilliant preacher, always preaches on the same text: the love of money is the root of all evil.  Some forms of cupidity are, so to speak, age appropriate.  One of the grosser forms often wanes somewhat with age.  I used to joke in lectures (and, alas, it was but a joke) that the only thing that could fully inflame my aging cupidity was blueberry pie.  The unintended but welcome result of this pallid witticism has been, over the decades, about fifty blueberry pies!  Many of them, including this latest, have been of mysterious origin.  Maybe in my search for the perfect emblem of cupidity I should have said instead of blueberry pie “a blue Porsch”?  Probably wouldn’t have worked so well.

 

            The ancient poet and literary critic Horace famously defined the twin ambitions of poetry as entertainment and instruction.  The best poets, he says, do both at once.  The two adjectives he used to identify the balancing goals are dulce and utile, sweet and useful.  The medical equivalent is, I suppose, the sugar-coated pill.  It is true that folksy sayings can be invoked for contradictory arguments.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but then again, out of sight, out of mind.  Yet my own experience of teaching, as of many other aspects of life, is that all work and no play is likely to make Jack not merely a dull boy but a resentful and restless one.

 

            A phrase that has become standard in educational circles is “life-long learning”.  In some respects this seems a limited cliché.  We all know that you live and learn.  However the phrase actually denotes something more specific, the idea that the society’s formal institutions of instruction should be extended to reach beyond the years of young adulthood, that they should be sufficiently capacious to be a service to people of all ages.  Hence the alumni colleges, the Elderhostels, the Road Scholars, the Ted Talks, the whole repertory of “continuing education” opportunities that continue to appear.  I think that such organizations have brought pleasure and profit to a large number of our “mature” or “senior” citizens.  I know for a fact that they have brought considerable gratification to at least one senior professor, namely myself.

 

            Augustine has a little book about teaching and teachers (De magistro in Latin) which is at once inspiring and daunting for any teacher. That is because it argues that in a sense it may be impossible actually to teach anything to anyone.  If I tell you that two plus two makes five, presuming that you have the most basic elements of numeracy, your mind will reject the “teaching” immediately.  For the same reason you will effortlessly agree that two plus two equals four.  That is, the mind assents to or balks at propositions proposed for its examination.  The mediating power, according to Augustine, is the “indwelling Christ.”  This is a highly spiritualized theory of knowledge consonant with Augustine’s version of Plato.  Even today many people, perhaps most, believe that conscience is a natural faculty, universally distributed.

 

            But I am a teacher, and I cannot so readily dismiss the potency of the profession to which I dedicated my life.  In my own stage of continuing learning, my most prominent teachers include many of my former students.  This is a most felicitous situation, and of course it has an appropriate expression in Holy Writ.  So far as I have been able to tell, everything does.  Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many  days (Eccl. 11:I).  The more secular if potentially more disquieting old saw is: What goes around, comes around.  The truth is that one never learns more felicitously than when trying to teach well.  It pleases me to think of the world of learning in circular form, indeed as the ever expanding if slowly diminishing circular rings emanating when a stone is dropped into a placid pool.  Or one can think of the matter in terms of an ever-expanding human community.  Intellectuals of the Enlightenment period had the beautiful phrase “the Republic of Letters”.  This community is exclusive but not exclusionary.  It is open to all, and it is the moral duty of all of us to aid in its extension and expansion.

 

            In this matter as in so many others there arises the question of the varieties of human capacity and the unequal distribution of intellectual powers.  Some of the medieval theologians, when speaking about divine grace, developed what might be called the bucket theory.  Though often accused of spending too much time on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, many of them were almost depressingly practical.  They recognized that people had very different capacities for grace even as they had varying capacities for weight-lifting or long-distance running.  People had different sized buckets.  As Thomas Aquinas sort of says somewhere, it doesn’t matter what size of bucket you have.  What matters is whether or not your bucket is full.  In modern educationalese, is this or that student living up to her or his “potential”?  Are you?  Am I?  These are hard questions, usually more comfortably evaded than confronted.  One of the most influential teachers of our Western world, the philosopher Plato, famously ascribed to his own great teacher, Socrates, the opinion usually rendered in English as “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  He didn’t add, but might have, “even if the examination is too dreadful to bear.”

 

            The operations of grace are as mysterious but also as powerful as the ocean tides.  My own soggy shards of stale bread have been returned to me repeatedly in blueberry pies.  That is definitely what you would have to call an upgrade.  As to this latest pie of happy memory I really don’t have the slightest clue as far as who the mysterious donor(s) could have been.  One or more of them?  Male or female?  For poetic reasons I will call this(these) person(s) Mister Pistor.  I think pistor in classical Latin usually meant a miller or a kind of generic baker; but in the vulgar Latin of the Middle Ages it is definitely the bread guy.  (The bread lady would I suppose be panifica.)  So I conclude this somewhat quizzical effort with my sincere expressions of gratitude to Mr/Ms Pistor, whether singular or plural, in the not absurd hope that (s)he/they, under whatsoever desired pronominal markers of gender and/or person, might be gracious enough to accept them.  And though blueberry pie is my number one favorite, cherry is a very close second.  Just saying….