Lost Treasure

 

            This week’s offering is less an essay than an anecdote that will have interest for few, but just at the moment is rather compelling to me.  Every stage of life has its surprises, but old age—or to use Cicero’s somehow more disturbing term senectitude—is a kind of Brunswick stew of alarums aptly characterized as one damn thing after another.  Very often the things involve physical health.  This time it is not I but Joan who is in the hospital.  The situation is naturally worrying but prospects also hopeful; and her hospitalization provides the context rather than the substance of this little essay.  There is other, literary, indeed biblical context in two of Christ’s parables—the hidden treasure in a field (Matthew 13:44) and the woman sweeping her house to find a lost coin (Luke 15:8-10).

 

            Joan has been hospitalized for several days with some kind of scary viral brain infection in the general category of meningitis.  She is very ill, but the signs have turned in the right direction.  Our adult children in New York have rallied around, but they both have very busy lives and/or demanding jobs.  Circumstances, including unknown and uncertain immediate prospects, are of course disquieting.  At the immediately practical level, I am dependent on others to get to the hospital.  We are blessed in having good friends.

 

            But on to the anecdote of lost treasure. Two days ago, in the afternoon.  I realized with a shock that my wedding ring was not on my finger.  The ring does not date from my wedding.  I got it about ten years later in Italy: a modest gold band which exploits simplicity to enhance significance.  Now it was gone, but not exactly mysteriously so.  I have been reading about “wizened” old men since childhood.  Now I was one.  My fingers had simply shriveled!  And since those fingers spent a fair amount of time at a computer keyboard in my office, I knew where, surely, my wedding ring must now be. I admit that from a conventional point of view my library office might be considered rather cluttered.  I think of the phenomenon as the chaos antecedent to creation.  An uncharitable observer might call it a mess.   

Most things that I can’t find eventually turn up there.  So I began with my long work table.  After extended searching I had found lots of useful stuff, but no wedding rings.  I didn’t really have a Plan B, but I continued searching through more and more unlikely locations in the house.  No luck, only a terrible feeling in the pit of the stomach.  Because that was the only place it could be.  Nonetheless, whistling in the dark, I spent the next two hours searching diligently through places I knew full well would prove sterile.  Eventually I abandoned myself to silent, slightly panicky despair.

 

            The next day we visited Joan, nearly comatose, in her hospital room.  The “we” was Christie (my Ghanaian health aide) and Frank (a close family friend and former colleague).   Joan’s hospital bed, deep in the room near the windows, left enough room for only a single caretaker to walk around it.  I was hovering over her head in that narrow space.  She was in a state of unnerving somnolence, eyes tightly closed.  Christie was on the same side of the bed, but at its foot.  Suddenly she started talking about a “miracle”.  Shen took a couple of steps forward, leaned down, and picked up the gold ring that had silently slipped off my finger more than a day earlier.  That true story deserves to be in the Legenda Aurea or the Gesta Romanorum.  Late on Tuesday the doctors came up with a diagnosis of which they are confident: babesiosis.  I had never heard of babesiosis.  The strange word derives from the name of its European discoverer, a Romanian pathologist named Victor Babes.  It is a dangerous condition initiated by the bites of infected insects.  I presume it is in the same pathological family as Lyme Disease, though rarer.  There are only about three thousand cases a year in this country.  Wooded areas of the middle and upper eastern states must be full of infected insects.  Babesiosis must be treated energetically.  But it can be treated, and they have begun treating it.  So I must hope that surely old Dame Julian of Norwich was right.  All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

 

 

 

Genuino Nazzaro, M. D.

 

    I write this little essay in memory of my dear friend, Genuino Nazzaro, M.D., who died at his home in Princeton on June 23^rd.  The death of any person of his remarkable character is a loss—to his family, to his community, to his friends, to his noble profession, a loss indeed to a needy world in which human goodness can never be in excessive supply.  But he had certainly had a good run.  He was nearing his hundred-and-second birthday, and only near the very end was the infirmity unsustainably oppressive.  As fate would have it, quite without knowing it we overlapped in the Princeton hospital for a day or two of the last week of his life.  There were other comforting serendipities.  At his funeral on Friday in Trinity Church, Joan and I were seated in the nave not twenty yards from the Lady Chapel, where we were married in 1962.

 

            That may also have been the year I met Dr.Nazzaro, though I think it was actually in the mid 1960s, when I returned to Princeton from Wisconsin as an assistant professor.  I can no longer remember the circumstances that first brought me to his office, but I liked the modesty of the operation with its private house vibe, and its never-empty waiting room presided over by a friendly but firm young lady named Nancy.  The office moved a couple of times, but it was always homey and welcoming,

 

For many years I always called him Doctor Nazzaro and he always called me Professor Fleming, but at some point the formality evaporated, and found I was calling him Gino and he was calling me “Johnny”, an infantilizing name by which I had not been known elsewhere for about half a century.  It is natural, I suppose, that a man should remember his friendship with a medical practitioner in terms of particular pathologies.  For me it was the coincidence of Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal and my Gall Bladder Crisis that cemented things.  Nazzaro did not perform surgery.  So that duty fell to another impressive medical friend and co-religionist, the late Bill Burks, probably in 1973, but Nazzaro was strongly recommending the operation.  When I slightly demurred on the grounds that surely no organ of the body was completely unnecessary, Nazzaro said: “Professor Fleming, I dono why God give you a gall bladder!”  Seldom is medical advice both understandable and succinct.

 

            Geniality was for this man a rule of life, but he had no sympathy with the sloppy immoralism that sometimes passes for sophistication in American culture.  My own cultural instincts on the whole lean conservative, but Gino put me the shade.  He sometimes could sound like a contemporary Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre.  Of his five children, four are women, and I can but imagine the delicacy required when one of them as teenagers introduced him to a young male friend.

 

            He read a lot, though I think almost exclusively medical papers.  He told me in so many words that he wanted to be the best doctor he could be, and for him that involved a lot of technical reading.  As a young man he had engaged with vigor against the power of the Communist Party in mid-century Italy.  When I gave him a copy of my 2009 book The Anti-Communist Manifestos, he was very pleased, though he cannot possibly have had time to read it.  It is a work of literary history, not political argument.  But its title was right down Gino’s line.

 

Though he spent most of his life in America, his English remained colorfully accented, especially when using technical medical language.  And Gino loved to speak medicalese.   One of his favorite words, which worked its way into a surprisingly large number of linguistic settings, was triglycerides.  That’s a pretty big word already, but Gino’s accent infused it with a kind of vatic or mystical dimension demanding not merely respect but actual awe.  I think I sort of know what a triglyceride is, as much as I understand physiological stuff at all, but I was clearly missing the magic of it all. 

 

            In retirement years (for both of us) our get-togethers became much more frequent.  Our houses were a short drive apart, and not even that long a walk.  We moved from joint food shopping adventures to talking about food shopping.  After the death of his wife Geraldine about five years ago, which roughly coincided with the beginnings of my own medical challenges, our visits became more sedentary.  Diminution of bodily dexterity had the recompense of more fluent and adventurous volubility.   We would sit at opposite ends of a large dining table, with me nibbling little bits of nectar-like Parmesan ham and this or that exotic cheese.  On a thoroughly bipartisan basis there was always plenty to grouse about on the political front.  Gino was a most gracious host but also a most reluctant guest.  It was the law of the Persians and the Medes that we meet at his house, never mine.

 

            There is a large and long-established Italian-American community in Princeton.  It was mainly Italian-American master masons who created the mini-Amiens Cathedral that is our university chapel.  Fifty years ago, and probably still today, there were numerous Italian-Americans in all sections of the University’s ever-expanding buildings and grounds divisions. The progeny of the stone masons now include several of the leading citizens of the town and the leaders of town’s business and artisanal sectors.  Dr. Nazzaro was held in reverence and professionally patronized by many members of this group.  In fact nothing was more American about this great American doctor than his living continuities with his fellow Italian-Americans.  The idea of the American sociological “melting pot” has somewhat fallen out of favor, but consciousness of family history is not the same thing as “ethnic identity”.  There is a real pluribus, but is not more powerful than the unum it has succeeded in achieving.  The posterity of the huge Italian immigration to this land is as “diverse” and as “American” as the Cabots and the Lodges or the Hatfields and McCoys.

 

            One of the prices of the longevity I myself have enjoyed, largely a benefit of the excellent health care I have received, is outliving so many friends and contemporaries.  Gino was more than ten years my senior, but I had come to suspect that he was immortal.  Now I am sure of it.  May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.  Genuino Nazzaro, medicus et amicus, 1923-2025.

 

Medical Redux

 

Since I am unlikely to have too many opportunities to draw even vaguely plausible parallels between my own career and that of John Milton, I must grasp at such few as come my way.  Milton pretends to have begun his inaugural masterpiece only under compulsion, which is sort of true.  “Lycidas,” one of the most famous works in the canon of English poetry, is indeed a masterpiece, and we must acknowledge that it came early in his poetic career.  It did indeed put him on the literary map.  But Milton thought, or pretended to think, that is was too soon for him to be forced to take on his task.   

 

It is not to soon to come up with the subject for a blog.  I have to do that every week—but it is too soon for the repeat topic to which I am compelled to turn, which was my latest stay at the Penn-Princeton hospital.  I was there only in February, and this time it was pretty much the same drill, congestive-pneumonia kind of thing, me gasping for air, seemingly dozens of professionals devoted to my care.  The imposing new(ish) hospital is planted on a large plot of land on the east side of US 1, technically I think in Plainsboro but hardly two miles distant from our own Princeton house.  On my last occasion I tried to write an essay in the spirit of the Jimmy Stewart film “Rear Window,” in which a fellow who is constrained by a cast on a broken limb has to solve--from his window in a city high-rise apartment--mysteries he comes upon in his rubber-necking.  But this time my window was on the other side of the building.  My view was that of a large scrub forest, not unpleasant, but with no variety of human activity.  Even in the short period of time since my last visit, they have expanded the already vast parking lot and seem to be starting on high-rises.

 

I have frequently heard or read about “America’s aging population” as though objectively from a distance.  A hospital stay reifies and objectifies this generalization.  I am a drop in the gray ocean of aging Americans enjoying superb Medicare that must be bankrupting the nation.  I got to the hospital before nine in the morning on Sunday.  The Emergency Room was already hopping.  Most if not all of the “temporary” examination rooms had already been turned into “regular” room.   I was quickly triaged into the category of the rolling wounded and spent the next twelve hours on a hallway gurney.  It would be an exaggeration to say that the atmosphere was that of Penn Station—more like the bus station.  The work of medical professionals under these circumstances is truly awesome.  After a quick examination by a super-nurse and significant blood-letting, I was temporarily rehoused in a nurses’ station.  Here I was soon joined by a seriously injured elderly man with a shattered hipbone.  The pain must have been terrible.  Though there was an opaque plastic screen between us, he was in fact only two feet away, and I was very much in on his intake.  He was born in 1927, making me his junior by a decade.  He was crying out in agony as a doctor tried to examine him without torturing him, probably an impossible task.  The middle-aged daughter who had brought him in, and obviously cared for him dearly, even then could not refrain from criticizing the old man for having been doing whatever transgressive thing she thought responsible for his accident.  If having to go to the hospital makes me feel sorry for myself—and it does—what you see when you get there soon enough redirects your pity to more deserving objects.

 

The realization that trying to understand “America’s health crisis” has to begin with an honest and searching look in the mirror is a sobering one.  It is not strange that having lived a long and blessed life makes one's appetite to living increase, not wane.  One’s soul cries out with Faust—“O, stay the passing moment.  It is so fair!”  But there are social costs too.

Fine Day in June

 

AND what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays; Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean To be some happy creature's palace; The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, And lets his illumined being o'errun With the deluge of summer it receives; His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings, And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings; He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,- In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?

 

That is the first stanza of the first poem I remember studying and admiring.  In fact I still have snatches of it by memory.  Its author was James Russell Lowell, a once eminent figure of the mid nineteenth century and in his day considered one of America’s great poets, perhaps even our greatest.  Believe it or not he was once taught in the junior grades of American public schools.  So I have among my readers, several of them like myself of a certain age, who may at least have heard of the poet, but I think on the whole he is pretty well forgotten.  I doubt if any of my English majors at Princeton would even react to his name.  But when the first beautiful days of June arrive, I myself always remember his “June” poem, and am even likely to quote a line or two.  It is the perfect expression of June’s freshness and gentleness as it introduces the welcome doldrums of real summer.

 

The relevance of all this may become a little clearer when I turn to a little experience of the last two weeks.  First you have to know that we have on the long south side of our one-story home a bluestone patio, perhaps twenty feet square, fairly recently installed.  A long backyard slowly descends from the patio to a distant stone wall, beyond which is an open field and a quarter-mile path through woods to the lake.  There is quite a bit of small wildlife in the yard—squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits, mainly, but with foxes, deer, skunks, and opposums by no means unknown.  The bird life is prolific and varied.  And all this is highly visible from indoors through a wall of large sliding glass window/doors.  In spring and summer we have the delightful experience of viewing the Peaceable Kingdom from our living room sofa.

 

A bunny and a squirrel were independently cavorting on different sides of the stone patio.  They were apparently unaware, as was I, that a red-tail hawk was also watching their activities.  Suddenly, and with amazing alacrity this fellow swooped down upon the little rabbit, delivering a blow that was utterly incapacitating but not instantly mortal, leaving the rabbit feebly struggling within the expanded fullness of the bird’s expanded wing.  The hawk, while pinning the dying rabbit to the patio stones, tore at its furry underbelly with  its gruesome talons.  We watched all this with a kind of infirm fascination.  Though we did nothing to intervene, two bluejays, appearing out of I know not where, did.  They attacked the hawk mid-execution.  I doubt that they were motivated by an innate love of rabbits, but they clearly did not want this raptor anywhere around their own bailiwick or accustomed turf.  With amazing dexterity, they repeatedly dive-bombed the hawk.  The attack was doubtless more annoyance than mortal danger, but a serious annoyance.  After a brief time the hawk flew up to a perch beyond our line of sight.  By then his prey was quite dead, its abandoned corpse visibly mangled.  The jays disappeared as suddenly as they had earlier appeared, not to be seen again that day.  We were left with a dead rabbit, its intestines visible at its torn stomach, and a couple of blood-smeared flagstones.  The episode was over—so we thought.  Certainly we hoped so. But even as we were clucking over the Darwinian drama, the hawk descended once more to the arena of his abattoir.  This time he was not alone.  He was accompanied by a trim female hawk, presumably his mate.  This pair then went seriously to work on the lapine cadaver.  They appeared to be tearing sizeable fleshy gobbets, including some furry ones, which they then swallowed down with apparent relish.  What remained after their energetic breakfast was a maimed but surprisingly tidy rabbit residue, with the vague appearance of a tee-shirt as it comes out moist but not dripping from the spinning cycle of a washing machine.

 

Small things may remind you of larger ones.  On All Saints’ Day of 1755, at about 9:30 in the morning, there occurred an event in Lisbon that perhaps permanently undermined the old Christian idea of a providential universe.  A devastating earthquake, accompanied by uncontrollable conflagrations, pretty well leveled the city with enormous loss of life.  Many died in the crowded churches, where masses were being conducted in celebration of the major religious holiday.  Death was dealt out by fire, flood, and hundreds of tons of falling stone.  News of this disaster, as it rapidly spread throughout Europe, had a devastating effect on what might be call conventional Christian morale.  For many throughout Europe, including the six-year-old Goethe who was one of many to have later written about its effect on his tender world view, it was an event that seemed to challenge the most fundamental belief in divine Providence.

 

Tennyson, author of the indelible phrase “nature red in tooth and claw,” was perhaps in his own mind able to defang it with conventional pie-in-the-sky bromides.  There is a lot of that in his famous “In Memoriam,” his poetic monument to a once-in-a-lifetime friendship and the poignancy of early death.  We ourselves don’t like to think too deeply about the jungle morality we see exemplified every day in the popular press.  After all, there is indeed a special perfection to many June days, and I hope to be able to catch glimpses of it during the two weeks of June still to come.  The more sinister implications of the ruthlessness of the natural order but rarely force themselves onto your garden patio, but when they do I have to sit up and take notice.

 

 

 

Study Abroad

 

 

            Once again I find myself reacting to an op ed in the Times, this one (6/3) entitled “U.S. Schools’ Reliance on Overseas Students Hurts Americans,” by David Bell, a Princeton historian.  I do not know Prof. Bell, who I assume has arrived here during the twenty years I have been retired.  Probably half of the current faculty has arrived during those years, leaving me simply as one of the innumerable antique Princetonians left to lament the Good Old Days.  And as everyone knows the Good Old Days refers to some vague, legendary time about twenty years before you yourself got there.  His subtitle, which could be either authorial or editorial is “Enrolling more foreigners limits opportunities for domestic applicants.”  It succinctly and accurately states his major theme.  

 

            I don’t think that I agree with Prof. Bell, but my purpose here is not to argue with him.  His stimulating essay stimulated me.  It is possible, I suppose, to regard our educational resources as finite and precious like the “rare earths” that I keep hearing about, whatever they are.  These treasures are to be carefully guarded and doled out only in guarded if not niggardly fashion.  My own task will be briefly to remind my readers of certain aspects of the origins of our universities, stressing their international and cosmopolitan tendencies, their sociological liberality, and rather free-for-all nature.  Of course the “free-for-all” exempted financial arrangements, a principal concern of the earliest surviving student letters we have.  There is an amusing but also inspirational passage about the value of a college education among the chapters in Rabelais.

 

But perhaps in the first place one has to ask whether in fact American higher education has a reliance on “overseas” students.  Certainly Harvard , which could easily fill its freshman class with American valedictorians, possibly with an odd salutatorian thrown in by way of affirmative action, has no such financial reliance.  That is, international students, though perhaps desirable for many reasons, are not economically vital for Harvard’s institutional life and continuity.  That is not true for all our colleges, however.  It is possible that some fiscally iffy institutions are precisely so dependent.  The large diaspora of middle class Iranians attendant upon the revolution of 1979 kept a few struggling American colleges going for a year or two more.  Seriously tuition-dependent institutions do get serious, inventive, and perhaps desperate about tuition revenues.  In this country we also have a very generous concept of “higher education.”    Among the many reasons American higher education has been and remains the envy of the world are its conceptual generosity and its variety.  On the one hand you have, say, Vassar; on the other, Hamburger University offering “A McDonald’s College Degree.”  The latter is a real place, not my invention.  Its graduates are mainly highly compensated executives in the Fast Food Game.  And, yes, their graduates include “many” foreigners.  Food is not just fast; it’s ubiquitous.  Hamburger U. lacks the kind of accreditation Harvard has, but that may not matter so much now that President Trump has declared himself Accreditor-in-Chief, as he indeed appears to have done by claiming to remove Harvard’s voluntary accreditation by ukase.

 

Not that medieval higher education wasn’t entrepreneurial, adversarial, and competitive.  Abelard got his start by trouncing his old teacher, William of Champeaux, in debate.  Medieval “college students” tended to look for great teachers rather than prestigious institutions.  They went where the teachers were.  That could be Chartres or Stratford- at-Bowe or Montpelier or Salerno or any place else an attractive professor hung up his shingle.  The wandering scholars of course wandered, but the medieval university could itself be mobile.  The venue of the university was much influenced by local attitudes and circumstances.  Here the professors had the model of several church councils, including the very significant fifteenth-century one that began in Ravenna and then moved lock, probably stock, and certainly barrel to Florence to flee the plague.  The fiction of Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which a group of cultivated Florentines set up a literary seminar in the salubrious country side for sanitary reasons, illustrates peripatetic invention. 

 

The world of Western learning was necessarily international when the language in which it was conducted was a universal one: Latin.  The Roman poet Terence is credited with saying Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto (I am a human and nothing human is foreign to me).  The world of learning naturally transcended parochialism of all kinds.  Long before the concept of the international “Republic of Letters” became popular the world of learning eschewed constraining concepts of race and nation.

 

The goal was the sophistication of Byron’s Don Juan, whose personal motto was Nil admirari.    The meaning of this little phrase is “Be astonished by nothing!”  The way of achieving this sophistication was travel that exposed you to the variety of human mores. The Byronic hero cannot be caught off guard by circumstances, for he has seen it all.  He had been to the Sulphur Springs Fair twice.  You can provide your own index of sophistication. 

 

It is not a requirement that a book be half a century  old before I recommend it, but it often helps.  Of old, there were giants in the earth.  So far as the pre-history of the university is concerned I recommend two golden oldies by two great twentieth-century scholars: Helen Waddell’s, The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages (London: Constable, 1927) and Eleanor Shipley Duckett’s, Anglo-Saxon Saints and Scholars (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947.)  These beautifully written studies demonstrate not merely the high seriousness of our educational origins but also their charming variety,

 

I do not suggest that nationality and national distinctions played no role in the formation of academic student bodies.  The “nations”, as they we called, provided an important structural category at Paris and some other places.  The comforts and convenience of the mother tongue eased the life of young men whose mastery of Latin was still imperfect.  But the idea that education itself would be organized on that principle occurred to no one.  In our own historical moment the world dominance of the English language continues.  That is the good luck of native speakers of English.  Anyone who has ever tried to function in a less than perfectly mastered foreign tongue can appreciate the convenience of a mother tongue; but only a rube would imagine that nothing is happening in the world except in English.  The very term lingua franca—meaning the mode of universal communication—should be enough to give us English-speakers a moment’s hesitation.

 

If a college education is regarded as a limited resource, there will always be contested criteria for admission.  One size does not fit all.  We have many great state universities in this country, all of which were founded by state legislatures with local political interests.  Many of them are now international and cosmopolitan in spirit and achievement.  I began my career teaching at the University of Wisconsin and could have happily spent my life there were it not for the weather.  The University of Wisconsin was founded to educate the young people of Wisconsin, and it took that responsibility seriously.  At the time I was there, the claim was that any qualified graduate of a public high school in Wisconsin was eligible for admission.  But admission did not guarantee graduation.  Once admitted, all students were required to achieve and maintain a certain standard, a pretty high one.  Flunking out was as easy as getting in.  By my day roughly half of the students were from out of state, admitted on a competitive basis.  This was before the heyday of orchestrated “diversity”, but it produced a quite diverse and on the whole academically able undergraduate body.  You might describe the system as one of regulated meritocracy.  That is, I think, the best we can hope for in the very uncertain non-science of college admissions.  But education itself belongs to that universal and spiritual Republic of Letters that was a part of the vision of the Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers.   Their ancestors were the cowled music-masters of the monastic schools; their posterity toil on at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.  Not the least among this great tradition were some of the founders of own beleaguered nation.

Colleagues

 

            Every now and again I am reminded, directly or indirectly, of a very great privilege I enjoyed during a long professional life.  Indeed, I continue to enjoy it still.  I refer to the circumstances of being placed in a professional setting in which I was surrounded by a large number of colleagues of talent and well deserved distinction.  If you have the privilege of teaching at a great university, you are automatically surrounded by such colleagues.  I was reminded of this fact vividly during the last week or so when in an op ed by David Brooks I came upon a reference to the “great historian James McPherson”.  McPherson is indeed a great historian, though he is categorized in my own mind as Jim.  The quirks of the human mind are such that it can all too easily transform the extraordinary into the ordinary.  A random sentence in an op ed by David Brooks set me on the road to a meditation upon scholarly friendships.

 

Over a professional association of decades, one has memorable experiences with dozens of colleagues.  Many, many years ago I was appointed to a term as chairman of the University Committee on Public Lectures.  There are probably ten or twenty public lectures a week on our campus, but there is one official big-deal series called simply “The Public Lectures.”  They are organized a year in advance, and they cover a wide range of scientific, humanistic, and social science topics, but they have at least a factitious coherence of theme.  They command a certain prestige.  The year I inherited the committee the organizing theme had already been set: “Origins.”  A historian who had agreed to talk about the origins of something or another was for one reason or another forced to withdraw at relatively short notice.  I was left with an “origin gap” that needed filling.  Indeed, I needed an historical origin on preposterously short notice.  “How about ‘The Origins of the American Civil War?’” I presumptuously asked Professor McPherson, an affable colleague who had a legendary reputation as a lecturer among some undergraduates I knew, whether he would leap into a breach at insultingly short notice.  I hoped that the emergent circumstances might almost justify the cliché of breach-leaping.

 

In any university, perhaps in any joint enterprise of any kind, roughly twenty percent of the people do roughly eighty percent of the work.  McPherson already had a full teaching load.  He certainly didn’t need to find an opportunity to reshape an academic lecture for a general educated town/gown audience.  But when I explained the difficulty, he barely hesitated.  He gave a dynamite lecture on “The Origins of the Civil War.”  The lecture itself was quite impressive; but what dazzled me most was the Q and A session that followed.  Around the edges of his answers, it became apparent to me that McPherson knew the names and political inclinations of every member of Congress (both houses) at least since the time of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 until the election of 1868 and the presidency of Grant.  This vast command of relevant knowledge was not a bravura knowledge dump, just appropriately deployed “background”.  If you read even part of his synoptic general history of the Civil War* for the “Oxford History of the United States” you will marvel at his ability to marshal the disparate evidence of military statistics and the analysis of personal human capacity and characteristics within the context of an overarching, fast-moving narrative.

 

The joy of an academic career, at least of mine, was having casual, cordial relations with literally dozens of remarkable scholars and teachers in many disparate fields.  I am not speaking here of intimate friendships.  One has only a few truly close friends in a lifetime.  The closest of my own friends have now themselves passed on.  But there can be a much larger circle of valued and admired colleagues and associates with whom from time to time one interacts with pleasure and often enough intellectual gain.  Many such people are witty and engaging conversationalists.  Others are brimming with good social works and community contributions.  Our late neighbor just up the road, Bart Hoebel, was an experimental psychologist of eminence who in his spare time built a steam calliope out of an old fire engine and drove it in the annual whingding alumni parade at class reunions.  For a while on my little suburban street (perhaps a thousand yards long) there lived in their separate modest domiciles two Nobel Prize winning physicists.  Various other neighbors were or are the kinds of people who are used to seeing their names show up in the New York Times.  It was my good luck to know several of them personally.  One enjoys basking even in reflected glory.

 

In the meantime this week the Flemings quietly celebrated their sixty-third wedding anniversary over spaghetti in the company of an old friend.

 

*James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Pp. 904.

Annals of Academe

Andrew Dickson White

 

 

This week I have been thinking about American higher education, the arena of my professional career and the vantage point from which I continue to view our rather alarming national political tensions.  Higher education is, of course, a vast topic, and even in a short blog essay it invites personal divagations and subordinations of a probably annoying kind.  Eventually I shall arrive at what I have most been thinking about, which is a spirited debate between prominent biblical scholars, one Catholic and one Protestant, around the hinge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

 

This has been the week of the Princeton Class Reunions, a very big deal around here, and one in which I have traditionally participated in a low-key way.  But this year for the first time I eschewed the campus entirely. I simply wasn’t up to it—physically or spiritually.  The solvent of passing time—I retired from teaching nearly twenty years ago—has eroded the vivacity of my felt connections with current faculty and current students alike.  I am now, like others, an observer.  And every observer will have his or her own sense of the symbiosis between our educational institutions and national political and cultural trends.  In my view the dangerous hostility of the quarrel now in many instances approaches the fervor of odium theologicum, the intense, bitter, mutual loathing of the churchmen of the sixteenth century.  So that is the odd context in which my disparate subjects have been related in my mind.

 

Our nation’s signal contributions to the history of higher education are numerous, and from the very start they reflect important aspirations of the young nation.    The great scholars and teachers involved in their foundations were, in my opinion, among the many heroes of the Heroic Age.  Harvard, Yale, Princeton and a few other institutions were already established before the Revolution.  The first half of the nineteenth century and the post-Civil War period saw the foundations of new institutions that in their variety and founding conceptions would typify a distinctively American cooperation, or symbiosis, of national aspiration, spiritual vision, and practical requirement, a model that has persevered to this day.  At a time when the states had little cash but lots of empty land there emerged a new kind of institution—the land-grant college—that remains, in my opinion—one of our nation’s great cultural inventions.  Among the leaders of what was in retrospect a great national movement was Andrew Dickson White, one of the two co-founders of Cornell University and Cornell’s first president. 

 

Like many other early educational leaders, White was animated by intensely held Christian religious motives.  He recognized, along with nearly the entire educational establishment of his age, both the historical and the spiritual affinities of traditional western education and religion.  But he was also much interested in the natural sciences and the promise of their practical application.  And of course he was  aware of the obscurantist traditions of some Christian thought.  The title of his most famous book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Religion in Christendom (1896), will give you an idea of his view of intellectual progress.

 

The most famous episode of this “warfare”, especially for Protestant historians, was the Roman Church’s persecution of the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1615 on account of his maintenance of the Copernican theory of heliocentrism.  By a somewhat circuitous route I have been reviewing scenes from this ancient war from a literary point of view.

 

I begin with the supposition that whether we know it or not we are by now all Copernicans.  Nikolaus Copernicus was the genius astronomer who in 1543 published a book entitled On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, explaining in its essence the basic astrophysics of our solar system.  The importance of this book in the history of thought would be difficult to exaggerate.  We have been taught (and convinced) that the earth is a planet, that it is in constant and quite regular motion, and that the diurnal phenomena of our visual experience (that is, alternating periods of sunlight and darkness) are the results of our residential orb regularly circulating around another orb, the sun.  But we do not have the felt experience of whirling about in space.  Our experience is of a sun that “rises” and “sets”.  We have dawn; we have dusk.  Earthlings are the center of a large cosmic drama moving in a stately sarabande around them.  This was an “image” potentially comfortable for our self-importance.  To be told that, No, not at all, our bailiwick is a flyspeck in an infinite universe not merely immeasurable but actually unimaginable, one which beggars the concepts of finitude and infinitude alike—you may not find all that good news for the superego of the human species.

 

The “Galileo episode” is among the most famous episodes in the history of science.  It has also remained an indelible stain upon the Roman Church’s magisterial claim.  But the “history of science,” for us a clearly delineated topic with its own scholarly monuments and protocols, did not in the sixteenth century exist as such.  The natural lens through which conventional thought approached most questions was a literary lens.  The astronomical problem was a literary problem since the formulation of its issues were bookish.  The book, naturally was The Book—that is, the Bible, which had quite a bit to say about what we now call astronomy and cosmology, beginning with its first verse: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

 

The debate to which I referred in the first paragraph was between Robert Bellarmine, a learned Jesuit who was one of the ornaments of the Roman Catholic counter-Reformation, and the Anglican William Whitaker, a profoundly erudite English scholar who spent much of his life at Cambridge.  Whitaker was the author of A Disputation on Holy Scripture (1588)—the original of course in Latin, the international language of learned discourse. The dispute is often if indirectly about the nature of figurative language; I hope I might one day explore this debate as an episode in the history of literary criticism.  The prospects are dim, however.  Though the intellectual issues are perennial and at times even still vibrant, the stench of the odium theologicum cannot be perfumed away.  The learnedly unreliable Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood (or as he called himself Anthony à Wood), a late seventeenth-century literary gossip indispensable to students of the literature of his age, claims that though Bellarmine hated the heretic in Whitaker, he admired the scholar in him.  Indeed, he went so far as to keep a portrait of the Puritan polemicist in the Jesuit studium in Rome!  We may regard this anecdote as “of uncertain authenticity.”

 

                                            (Saint) Robert Bellarmine