Summer Camp Early Report

 

 

 

This will be an essay without a topic, more along the lines of the kind of extorted report that might be a parent’s best hope from a twelve-year-old at summer camp.  Since I never went to summer camp, I never had a chance to write one myself, and so leap at it now.  One of my granddaughters has familiarized me with the genre.  I am on my own in Princeton and feeling rather unconnected.   Joan, accompanied by elder son Richard, flew off to England on Thursday morning.  They went to visit granddaughter Lulu, a Barnard College junior who is spending a happy term abroad in Pembroke College, Cambridge.  Telephonic and email reports from various the principals suggest that visit is a great success, and everyone is having a great time.  Richard has even seen a life-list bird, an increasing rare event and one usually requiring geographical exoticism beyond East Anglia.  They will be home by the time I post this.  I do wish I could be there, but I I am fortunately not entirely on my own.  My wonderful health aide, Christie Kadelu, had been keeping me out of trouble.  But I still have the feeling of Life on Hold.  And after a couple of days reaching the high seventies, the weather turned rainy and cool again, and in general I feel the week has actually conspired against me. 

 

I had a rather bad twenty-four hours on account of what I call my “electric foot”.   This is a a neurological aberration the medical name of which may or may not be a neuroma.  It is not uncommon among the aging, but has been considerably exacerbated by some of my other difficulties.  There is the sensation, beginning abruptly,  of a sharp, short electric sting in the toes, foot, ankle, or lower leg.  It is intermittent, with the little shocks spaced with a more or  less regular rhythm at intervals of about a minute at its height and three minutes at its mildest.  At its rare worst it I painful enough to make the leg jump, and even when relatively mild it makes falling asleep difficult or impossible.  The mind cannot relax into somnolence as it anticipates the next jolt.  This episode, the first in many months, was also the most painful I can remember, inflicting its intermittent short sharp stings to my lower left ankle with a real malice for several hours.  It then decreases both in frequency and in the sharpness of the sting and generally disappears entirely within twenty-four hours.  It had been so long since I experienced this annoyance that I was rather offended by its return.  I lost all but a couple of hours of a night’s sleep.  However, it is now reduced to a sleepable level.  Unfortunately, you don’t get a memo from the universe alerting you to the corporal insults awaiting you in old age.  But even amidst all this self-indulgence, I must not drift into an organ recital, as an elderly wit of my acquaintance characterizes the typical conversation of seniors.

 

Two major events in the public sphere have dominated my attention, along no doubt with that of a great many of my fellow Americans.  As my last couple of essays must suggest, I have been very concerned about the student demonstrations on many of our campuses.  I will say what worries me in a moment, but I think a sigh of relief is perhaps in order.  That is, I think that the weekend just past was relatively reassuring on the protest front. Protestors were allowed to make their point, and most institutions were allowed to make at least a gesture toward theirs—the point of an academic commencement being ceremonial and quasi-sacramental.   So far as I know, and despite the apparently high hopes of several thousand journalists and the malicious actions of a very few bad actors, dozens of institutional celebrations took place in an atmosphere of reasonably good order.  I will breathe a little easier if the next weekend transpires as the last one did.  There is serious potential mischief awaiting us at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late summer, but sufficient unto the day…What worries me about the protests had no direct connection with Israel, with Gaza, or even the horrible slaughter that initiated the war and has characterized its prosecution.  I fear that this particular form of campus disorder is likely further to alienate an important segment of the American population who already have a dim view of academic self-righteousness and self-satisfaction and will be further put off by this episode.  There are already enough cynical politicians fanning these flames.  I want our colleges to be, and to be seen to be, the great national treasures that at their best they are.

 

            There is, however, a big however.  Though my opinion is that the protests have often been wrong-headed and transgressive, they evidence the moral seriousness and idealism of at least many of the youthful protesters.  The other major news story of the moment is the continuing trial of Donald Trump.  It is generally called the “hush money trial” though it is technically a “falsification of documents” trial, there being no precise actual legal category for what it is really about, which is sleaze, personal and political.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m as much of a voyeur as any tabloid reader, even if my tabloid is the Times.  The latest reports I have read concern the testimony of Mr. Trump’s one-time lawyer, Michael Cohen, who is of course a felon, a perjurer, a former convict, and now a kind of male version of Alecto or Tisiphone, remorseless in his vengeful mission.  Mr. Trump has repeatedly boasted that in his choice of lieutenants he takes only the best, and Cohen does seem to have been very good at what he did, at least for a while. 

 

The headline on one Times story reads thus: “Trump Told Cohen Disclosure of His Fling Would Be a Total Disaster.”  This headline seems hyperbolic in at least two ways.  Few disasters are actually total.  Indeed, the testimony is that Mr. Trump and/or his advisers thought that most potential male voters would be okay with the story, but that it might not go over so well with women.  Do you think?  My real objection is to the word “fling”.  Surely a fling has a little more going for it than this?  Surely “a drop” would be better, or at best a “toss”.  Best of all would be best to drop the whole subject.  It’s funny that so many things that aren’t funny are so laughable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Unquiet on Campus

 

Readers will know that I have been caught up in the news about campus protests.  Circumstances have had me reading lots of stories in the New York Times, many of which are of dubious authority as they tend to stress short moments of drama and confrontation that belie the generally static and indeed tedious aspects of the “sit-in” or “occupation” mode.   Indeed, it is rather difficult to dramatize the “hours and hours of boredom” as opposed to the comparatively rare “few moments of absolute terror” that punctuate them.  That was the formulation journalists came up with to describe the battlefields of the first World War.  And of course it is fair to say that student protests have rendered some of our campuses battlefields of a sort.

 

Surely the large majority of student protesters are idealistic and passionately sincere.  They are utterly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, which also means of course of their own virtue.  They are prone to think that those who might disagree with them are bad people but that they are good people.   But those are explanatory descriptions of a mind set, not  Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards.  It has generally been a principle of American political protest when it manifests itself in the public realm that the protesters be frank and bold in their protestations—that they “claim ownership of them,” as the phrase goes.  There is a famous story involving Thoreau and Emerson, the only inconvenience of which is its fictionality, illustrating the idea.  In 1846 Thoreau was (very briefly) jailed for failing to pay his poll tax.  As he later wrote in "Civil Disobedience," he believed "it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and . . . not to give it practically his support."  He did this to register his hostility to chattel slavery, tolerated by American law.  That is the historical part of the story.  The legend is that he was visited in jail by Emerson, who is supposed to have said, “Henry, I am very surprised to find you in this place of custody.,” to which the prisoner is supposed to have retorted, “Waldo, I am very disappointed that you are not in jail!”  The moral: when the civil disobedience demanded by justice and conscience clashes with the law, break the law.

 

The large majority of the protesters at Columbia and several other places have masked their faces.  This is not a fact without significance.  There are various benign masked figures in our folklore—Robin Hood and the Lone Ranger come to mind.  But in real life most masked brigands have not in fact robbed from the rich in order to give to the poor.  Their masking is an effort to avoid identification and legal retribution.  When cloaking violence and criminality, masking likewise heightens the terror effect.  If you knew for a fact that that menacing sub-kleagle of the KKK was actually a balding guy who sells Fuller brushes you might at least have the slight comfort of knowing something about the banality of evil.  Even if they do not fear the illegality of their actions—or even if they are performing no actual illegal actions—the protesters may fear the retribution of “doxing”.  This English neologism, a child of the Internet age, is supposedly short for “documenting” or “dropping documents”—such as name, address, etc.  “Doxing is a form of cyberbullying that uses sensitive or secret information, statements, or records for the harassment, exposure, financial harm, or other exploitation of targeted individuals.”  It is another term for public identification.  Demonstrators may well prefer that school authorities, or their parents and friends, or public safety officials, or their professors, political adversaries, or parole officers actually not know for sure who they are.  Disguised identity, however, strikes me as sinister, and at the very least Civil Disobedience Light.

 

What captures my attention today, however, is a certain body of evidence of how the general public is reacting to the demonstrations.  There is a feature of the on-line Times of special interest to a protest-watcher.  That is the “Comments” section.  For many stories it is possible for any reader to make a comment, and often some hundreds of readers do just that.  The genre of the “comment” is not friendly to subtlety.  “Both sidesism” is rare and sometimes execrated.  The “Arab-Israeli conflict” provides a kind of political Rorschach Test in the American press.   I think it is also safe to say that the Times readership tips decidedly left on the whole.  Under these circumstances I find what seems to be a decisive  majority critical of the protestors a fact of which Democratic Party officials may want to take note.  Another feature of the comments of interest to me is that what I shall call the pro-Palestinian commentators, who though in a marked minority are still numerous, not infrequently invoke their own experiences as anti-War protestors in the late ‘Sixties and early ‘Seventies.  What interests me most, though, is their frequent use of the phrase “the right side of history.”  Does history have “sides,” and if so only two, heads or tails, right or wrong?  As an historian of medieval religious movements myself, I have spent a fair amount of time studying “heresy”—deviations from orthodox religious belief or practice.  I am afraid my study has left me with what must seem a cynical definition of heresy.  Heresy is the side that loses.  In 1972, Zhou Enlai, the premier of China under Mao Zedong, was supposedly asked the question: “What was the long-term impact of the French Revolution?” His answer: “Too early to say.”  The anecdote is frequently treated as whimsical or facetious, but in fact it seems to me good Confucian wisdom.  

 

Many professors, including myself, are happy to acknowledge the huge debt they owe to their generations of students over many years.  Students are in many ways our teachers as well.   But action born of youthful passion too often claims the authority of a spurious certainty.  It is fairly easy to see that the situation in Gaza is absolutely horrible, and that the massive slaughter of a civilian population is unconscionable.  It is much more difficult to see that the current campus protests will have any practical effect in ameliorating that situation.  On the contrary, my fear is that their tendency is likely to further degrade the reputation of some of our finest institutions of higher learning in the eyes of the larger population in whose service they have been founded and to whose benefit they are dedicated. 

 

The Eighty Per Cent Principle

Hamilton Hall, Columbia University

 

        In this essay I return to the arena of American higher education, which was the arena of my own long professional activity; but I do so with the realization that in the flux of our quickly evolving social and political history, I do so as an outsider with increasingly obsolete expertise. 

            As I write, the health of American higher education has become a subject of general discussion.  Several American college campuses are in a state of excitement, tension, or even upheaval attendant upon (mainly) student political demonstrations responding to the conduct of the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza.  I suspect there is more to come.  I also fear some of it could prove seriously troublesome.  One of the most prominent sites of protest and discord is the campus of Columbia University in New York.  Columbia’s new president, Minouche Shafik, is under criticism from several directions and is, I rather imagine, wishing she were back at the London School of Economics from which she was plucked by a Columbia search committee following an intergalactic search.

 

            It is distressing to me that the situation at Columbia University has gone off the rails.  Though I have only the slightest connection to the institution, to be mentioned presently, I have a particular admiration for it.  Toward the end of my teaching career I spent some years as a commissioner of the Middle States accrediting body, and I was a member of a team sent to consider Columbia’s reaccreditation.  For such a high quality, financially stable, and internationally renowned institution, the question of reccreditation is of course a foregone conclusion.  But such a visitation can still be helpful to such a place, especially if the visitors focus on topics of current administrative interest and effort and current campus discussion.  Our focus was the university’s vision of undergraduate education.

 

Under the leadership of a visionary provost, Columbia was in the process of rethinking and reanimating its approach to undergraduate life.  I think it is fair to say that at the time the institution’s justly exalted reputation was based primarily on its important professional schools and its post-graduate programs in many departments.  Undergraduate education had not exactly been neglected, of course, but it was now enjoying a fresh investment of conscious attention.  There must be hundreds of thousands of young Americans who would love to attend college in New York City.  The Columbia administration knew that and developed imaginative ways of appealing to them.  One was a so-called “Passport to New York,” soon imitated by other NYC institutions, which allowed students to explore museums and other cultural venues of the city “free” as part of their “citizenship” in the University.  The liberal arts faculty, traditionally of outstanding quality, became an even more visible attraction.  As someone who taught at a high quality, undergraduate-focused institution myself, I was mightily impressed.  I am less favorably impressed by what is now transpiring at Columbia.  I can claim some slight personal interest.  Our daughter is a Barnard alumna and current trustee.  One of her daughters is a current Barnard junior—fortuitously now studying for a term at Cambridge University in England.

 

Intractable situations are intractable for various reasons, but one of them is almost always a complexity resistant to simple solutions shouted through bullhorns or printed on cardboard posters.  It is possible to have complex and nuanced ideas about the current war in Gaza, and I have a few myself, but they have no particular authority and surely lack bullhorn confidence.  In fact it is the lack of full confidence in them that is my real subject today.  The significant experience I want to relate is one that I touched on in this blog a few years ago.  It is the “Eighty Percent Principle”, and it is a memorial tribute to a great man I was privileged to know: Robert Goheen (1919-2008), a former president of Princeton.  

 

When I was much younger, and newly arrived as an assistant professor at Princeton, I served a term on a committee involved with the quality of undergraduate life.  This was a subject concerning which I actually knew very little but nonetheless had definite opinions.  I had spent a single year in residence in the graduate program.  As graduate students we were indeed aware of the sea of undergraduates surrounding us.  But this was before the time in which graduate students began teaching them in the preceptorials (discussion groups) spun off from large courses.  By the time of the anecdote I shall now relate I had had some experience teaching Princeton undergraduates, but certainly not enough to justify my confidence in making dogmatic statements concerning them to the institution’s president.  Nonetheless I did so.  President Goheen had invited me to lunch with him at the faculty restaurant—an event most rare for a junior professor.  He actually had an agenda.  He eventually would ask me to take over the direction of the Woodrow Wilson Society, which was the pioneer forerunner of our residential college system, a system that eventually grew to accommodate all students in their underclass years.

 

But before he approached that subject he wanted to give me some personal advice.  It takes a skillful administrator to make what easily could have the full force of a reprimand sound like a hot tip instead.  He said that he had learned that though the major goals of a major university could be defined with surprising clarity, the means of achieving them were often uncertain, opaque, or experimental.  You had to have well thought-out ideas, of course, and you had to be forceful and prepared in advancing and attempting to implement them.  Never be sure, he said, that you are more than eighty percent right about any particular idea. 

Now it is obvious that what been known as the “Arab-Israeli Conflict” during at least the last seventy-five years of my life has ideological roots.  All conflict has to be rooted to some extent in ideas.  The ideas lying behind the establishment of Israel—call them “Zionism” if you wish—are varied and complex.  The resistance to Zionism (in situ as well as simply as an intellectual concept) is nearly as old as Zionism itself and certainly equally bellicose.  And the debate, or conflict, or struggle—the very words used to denominate it usually imply a strong point of view—is a dubious battle.   Surveying the antagonists you will find precious few eighty percenters.  There is no trace of moral ambiguity in the minds of the leadership of Hamas or of the Israeli war cabinet.  Those guys are all absolutely certain, hundred percenters.  It seems to me they would have to be, to do what they are doing.

 

Indeed, probably most of us are hundred percenters about a great many things in life.  I have ideas and judgements concerning the war in Gaza that easily reach the eighty mark.  Perhaps you do, too.  But the soundness of an idea is but imperfectly judged by the certainty with which it is held and the passion with which it is proclaimed.  Utter certainty about matters concerning which there is manifestly intelligent and plausible difference of opinion does not earn validation or assent from a supposed virtue of hundred percentism.  In the midst of pondering these things, I came upon a Times opinion piece by one of its editorial board gurus, Serge Schmemann, once a graduate student at Columbia: “Student Protest is an Essential Part of Education.”  This struck me as a rather dumb essay by an undoubtedly smart man who had succumbed to nostalgia for his youthful glory days as a student in 1968!  But one of the truly essential parts of education is developing the ability to see distinctions in things only superficially similar.  Student protest is not an essential part of education.  It may be a heartfelt expression of ethical passion or a characteristic part of the performative rites of spring and a welcome substitute for final exams and papers.  But if I had just spent four years of academic hard work financed by my self-sacrificing parents and the generosity of dozens of others unknown to me, I might like to enjoy the solemnity and festivity of a hard-earned graduation ceremony without being shouted down as a thought criminal.

 

knocking at the gates of knowledge

Lord of the Dance

Poussin: "Dance to the Music of Time"

 

This will be a small essay on a huge subject, namely universal harmony, or the “music of the spheres,” called the mundana musica by the learned among our premodern European ancestors.  I begin with one Sir John Davies (1568-1626), hardly a household name, but nonetheless a Renaissance man of parts.    He was an Elizabethan lawyer and parliamentarian who left a footprint or two in the sands of time as a writer of elegant philosophical verse fashionable in the Inns of Court of his day.  Two ambitious poems merit some attention: (Nosce teipsum, or “Know Thyself”, and “Orchestra: A Poem Upon Dauncing.”)  It is the latter I touch upon here.  I first encountered it as a graduate student sixty years ago, and I have been studying it a bit recently.  It is full of “wit” in the Renaissance sense, meaning a large display of the playful use of wide-ranging literary learning.  It pretends to be a dialogue between a secondary character in Homer, Antenous by name, and the woman he is wooing, Penelope, faithful wife of the endlessly wandering Ulysses.  Antenous is perhaps the chief of the many suitors who take up residence in Ithaca in the belief or at least the hope that Ulysses is dead, leaving behind a highly desirable widow.  Davies says “Orchestra” records an episode Homer forgot to include.  At the literal level the poem is about a guy trying to persuade a girl to dance, but Davies so clearly has no interest in the literal level that you can forget that immediately.  His interest is proposing dance as an image of the harmony of a divinely created universe.

 

Christian humanists delighted in finding parallels between scriptural narrative and the classical narratives of ancient Greece and Rome.  When the pilgrim “Dante,” lost in a dark wood, is told by Virgil that he must undertake a difficult journey, he demurs, pleading incapacity; “I am not Æneas; I am not Paul.”  He thus invokes two famous wanderers of the Mediterranean world, the one pagan and fictive, the other Christian and historical.

 

            St. Paul’s metaphoric moral terms, enshrined in the baptismal liturgy, had a great impact on the European vocabulary, in which old and new were widely used with broad moral implications.  Paul spoke of corrupted human nature as the old man, and nature regenerate in Christ as the new man.  St. Augustine, taking the phrase new song from the ninety-sixth psalm interpreted the “old” and “new” songs as two versions of love, cupidity and charity.  The musical metaphor embraced dance as well.  Two of Chaucer’s “experts” in cupidity, Pandarus and the Wife of Bath, knew all about “the old dance.”  Chaucer did not have in mind the Virginia Reel.

 

            It is an ill wind that blows no good, and enforced Covid isolation allowed me to improve through study my ability to read the Portuguese language to a level that opened a new literature to me.  At that point I had already written a book about a remarkable poem by Luis de Camões, the “Portuguese Shakespeare,” but knew little beyond the Renaissance period.  Camões's poem is an extended poetic exegesis of the psalm “By the Waters of Babylon,” which is a song about songs and musical instruments and thus invited me to learn a bit about Renaissance music and music theory.  The rich exegesis of the psalm (Super flumina, no. 137 in the Authorized English Bible) was a logical place to begin.  That all of life, indeed all of human history is a dance is a commonplace idea in premodern Western thought.  And if life is a dance, so also is death, in the Danse macabre, or Dance of Death.  The music for this dance is time itself, as in Poussin’s famous painting “Dance to the Music of Time,” a title then appropriated by the twentieth-century English novelist Anthony Powell for what can justly be regarded as the Anglophone answer to Marcel Proust’s huge and famous book(s).  There are not a lot of modern hymns that have impressed me, but Sydney Carter’s “Lord of the Dance” (1963) is an exception.  The idea of a cosmic dance, led by a cosmic Christ seems possibly Byzantine in its inspiration.

 

The philosophical and even explicitly ethical examination of musical harmonies is pre-modern, indeed pre-Christian.  It is the basis of what we usually call Pythagoreanism, named for its famous philosophical founder, Pythagoras who was born about six hundred years before the birth of Jesus.  A legend concerning him—concerning which there is no particular reason to doubt the basic details—is that he discovered musical harmonic episodes by chance.  He was walking by a large blacksmithy, where the smiths were working simultaneously on multiple anvils, beating on heat-softened metal with hammers of differing weights.  Anyone with a sentient ear would probably discern the differing tones produced under these circumstances, but Pythagoras, who was of course a genius, was able to figure out the harmonic progressions involved.  One of the early English vernacular alliterative poems, sometimes called by modern editors “A Satire on Blacksmiths,” begins thus: Swart smekyd smethes smateryd with smoke/dryue me to deth with den of here dyntes.  That is to say, roughly speaking: “Dusky smoky smiths darkened by smoke/are going to kill me with the noise of their blows.”  Until fairly recently we didn’t really understand the subject of the poem, which, though humorous and satirical, is intellectually serious.  Then a good friend of mine, Richard Schrader, a medievalist (now retired from Boston College) published a brilliant article* suggesting a connection to this anecdote of Pythagoras.  The recognition of the learned inspiration behind an ostentatiously vernacular and “popular” poem  is unlikely to surprise any medievalist.  But of course it does take somebody smart to make the recognition in the first place.  The poem itself is actually rather brilliant, as the consonantal coarseness of its language seems intentionally jarring and percussive.

               

                The interference of "artificial" lights,  from gas and from electricity, make it almost impossible on our earth today to see the night sky with the brilliance experienced by our pre-Edisonian ancestors—a sad fact recognized and lamented already by Ruskin and others in the 1880s!  But in one of his typically brilliant throw-aways C. S. Lewis points out that medieval sky-watchers not only saw the night skies but heard their thrilling harmonies: the mundana musica, the music of the spheres.  The animator of the motion.  “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”  Such was the music taught to the poet Keats by an ancient ceramic urn.  Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. 

 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

 

Before this silent music--“ditties of no tone”—even the author of the “divine poem”, Dante Alighieri, fell silent.  Thrilled by the silent music, the great poeta himself fell silent.  The last words of his poem are these: “To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and will were rolled—even as a wheel that moves equally—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”  Love.  On that animating power of the universe the medieval Catholic Dante and the Renaissance Protestant John Davies were in agreement.  Mundana musica.  Quite a song, quite a dance.

 

 

*Richard J. Schrader, “The Inharmonious Choristers and Blacksmiths of MS Arundel 292,” Studies in Philology, 104 (2007): 1-14.

 

Tree Planting

 

 

            Over the past weekend we spent an exhilarating (and for me enervating) day up at our son’s fabulous rural retreat at Kingwood in Hunterdon County.  As the place name suggest, this stretch of land on the east bank of the Delaware River was once a royal forest and its first growth timber must have been magnificent.  Rich and Katie, in addition to being generous and imaginative hosts, are serious environmentalists, dealing heroically with a large wooded property, the forestry aspects of which had been long neglected when they acquired the property.  They are trying slowly to clear out some of the more troublesome invasive wood and also (unfortunately) the hulks of dead ash trees, formerly prolific but now pretty well annihilated by the recent blight of the emerald ash borer.  Like Covid itself, the ash borer is another probable but unmentionable import from China.

cleared of invaders; ready to plant

 

The first photograph, which shows a finished piece of my handiwork along with the shadow of a friend, is hardly self-explanatory; but it is very meaningful to me and may be at least a little to you as well when I explain it.  One of the easiest and most effective ways of conservative forest management is the thoughtful and well prepared planting of select native seedlings in the early spring.  One of our great national public benefactors, the National Arbor Foundation, fosters this practice by each year distributing at nominal charge, hundreds of thousands of seedlings, indeed probably millions, of desirable species.  Numerous other organizations also distribute seedlings.  Rich tried to give me a simple task that I could probably accomplish even from a sedentary posture.  It was one at which I was reasonably practiced after the experience of previous years: the construction of protective sturdy wire cages for the vulnerable seedlings.  The statistical chances of any particular seedling growing to mature plant on the forest floor are very slight.  A hungry deer could, and if given the opportunity would more or less effortlessly, suck up in five minutes as many as a man could plant in a day.  Nature has a few strategies, the most obvious of which is a vast overproduction of seeds.  Search around the base of a big walnut tree in the woods.  You can easily find a thousand walnut carcasses, and encounter some happy squirrels, but only most rarely will you see a thriving young walnut sprout.   I can remember seeing only one.  The sometimes horrifying cruelty of nature captured in the words of Darwin and Tennyson (“survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth and claw”) are realities.  The survival rate even of seedlings protected by my stout wire cages would be considered disastrous in our human population.  But the human populations determine to a very large extent the forest ecology.

 

 

            The top photograph is of a planted pine sapling defended in its wire cage.   The circular cage is is four feet tall and about a yard in diameter.  The name on the red tape is that of my mother, Rich’s paternal grandmother, Janet (Davidson) Fleming, who was born in Salida, Colorado in 1909, and died in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1979.  She spent most of her life in rural western and southern places, and she had what most people might regard as a pretty hard life.  She was a complicated lady who raised three very different sons under often difficult circumstances.  It has taken many years of mature reflection on my part to realize in full the nobility of her character.   The tree planted, a cadet member of an ever-changing natural forest, will be an arboreal memorial to her.  I shall hope to supply a slightly more durable memorial—her name shallowly etched on a piece of soft native slate found on the forest floor--at a later date.  We also planted trees that will memorialize my father and our dear English friend, so recently departed, Andrew Seth.  This seems to me a beautiful initiative: living memorials in a living forest binding the living with the dead.

 

            I am especially pleased that it is a pine sapling.  I don’t expect anybody to read any particular blog post, let alone remember what they might have found there.  But last Christmas I published a family story about my mother and a small pine tree (“Father, Son, and Uncle,” December 20, 2023).  So this post is as it were the second panel of a fortuitous diptych.

 

            A very great deal of what happens in our vegetative world begins with human beings.  The development of agriculture is universally recognized as a definitive one in the history of the human species.  The word agriculture literally means the artisanal management of natural topography and botanical states for the production of foodstuffs for human and animal consumption.  So what we now often call “natural” or more absurdly “organic,” actually refers to the conscious human direction or management of botanical growth.

 

            The human management of the vegetable world has by now a very long and fascinating history, and a controversial one.  The wisdom of, indeed the necessity for what we now generally call “conservation” has been recognized if too often ignored throughout recorded human history.  The human struggle for dominance over field and forest is ancient and continuing.  In many places in Europe the battle for human cultivation and nature’s resistance to it is everywhere painted on the landscape.  Aerial photographs of what at ground level appears to be virgin meadowland often reveal patterns of a nearly invisible tillage of several centuries past.  Even in our own comparatively shiny new country, in which serious population centers date from no more than two hundred and fifty years ago one often encounters signs of dramatic population shifts.  It seems to me pretty clear that my own native haunts in the rural Ozarks had a considerable population in the year 1900 that had almost wholly vanished by the time I came around.  I spent many summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English, under the auspices of Middlebury College.  More than once I found cutting through what seemed to be dense forests long, straight stone walls set up as property markers and made from hundreds of tons of fieldstone removed by hand or horse-drawn sled from once cleared and cultivated land.  One wall I came upon somewhere near Ripton, invisible until I came right upon it, had been elegantly constructed with the care one might expect from a mason in Tuscany.

 

            I described the task I was assigned as “simple,” but that does not mean that the work involved was easy for me.  It doesn’t take much to tire me these days, and wrestling with heavy gauge wire fencing was rather exhausting.   These days it’s hard for me to be sure whether it is the amyloid or the anni domini that is the bigger foe, but working in tandem as they do they can exhaust me pretty quickly.  I have to pace myself.  Joan drove us home in the late afternoon.  I fell into bed around 7:30. Five hours of sleep a night I regard as the basic minimum.  Six hours is adequate.  Seven in usually my maximum.  That night I slept, with but a single necessary but barely sentient trip to the bathroom, until 7am!

Franz Schubert's Power

Franz Schubert 

Last Wednesday (blog day) sometime in the afternoon I informed my spouse that I was feeling rather tired and thought I would make an early night of it.  It was with some alarm that she had to remind me that, in fact, we were supposed to attend a musical concert that night.  And this was not just any concert.  Mitsuko Uchida and Jonathan Biss would devote an evening of piano four hands to an all-Schubert program. How I had failed to have this event seared upon my memory I cannot say, but had it been up to me alone I could well have missed this extraordinary performance of a virtuoso composer being interpreted by two virtuoso pianists.

 

            I am by no means an expert in these matters, but Mitsuko Uchida is presumably the best-known interpreter of Schubert’s piano music in the world.  Someone with far more musical training and experience than I could dream of has told me that Uchicda is the best pianist in the world!  I can only suspect that Jonathan Biss cannot be all that far behind.  When after the intermission the two changed their side-by-side places on the long piano bench, one could imagine reliving a famous party stunt of Chopin and Liszt, or at least enjoying a visit to the Musée  de la vie romantique in Paris. It is truly amazing that a roomful of elderly folk in Princeton, NJ, could be privileged by such a performance.  I believe that the artists were taking the same program to Carnegie Hall within a week or so.  That is a not uncommon pattern for the Princeton concert series.  And I will risk shocking sensibilities by saying that in my opinion the acoustical arrangements in Richardson Auditorium are if anything superior to those in New York. What an amazing privilege!

 

            This concert series involves a kind of anomaly or sociological paradox, possibly having to do with their cost.  The essence of a university is youth.   And the student music scene here—individual student performers and the student orchestra—is of a very high quality.  But the enormously affirmative audience for the Princeton University Concerts looks at first glance like a meeting of the American Association of Retired People.  A significant  proportion of it arrives and departs on retirement home shuttles.

 

            What amateur means, in its obvious literal sense, is lover.  If you are an amateur of or at something, you participate in it because you like or love it.  Amateurism does not imply expertise, though many amateurs achieve it, and at a high level, nor should it be a term of disparagement or even scorn, as it often is in the phrase amateur hour.  I am an amateur of humble grade.  I play no musical instrument and am incapable of reading with comprehension a serious musical score.  I read music at a “Dick and Jane” level if at all.   I enjoy many, though not quite all, forms of musical performance but am capable of actual participation in none.  Analogies here may be particularly feeble, but I think there is one between athleticism and musical performance.  You don’t have to be a football player to make an intelligent assessment of the quality of play in a football match.  But it is likewise obvious that an important aspect of the appreciation of an athletic event is the context in which it is viewed.  How different it is to watch a game on television and to watch one as part of a stadium crowd.

 

Musical performance, like all other fields of theatrical performance, has its endearing conventions, one of the most solemn of which in venues featuring classical piano programs, is the page-turner.  Simply keeping up with the breakneck pace of moments of Schubert is a full-time, two-handed job for a pianist,  I do have to say that in watching this pair of geniuses—and indeed practically all the professionals one enjoys hearing in this venue—I conclude that the availability of sheet music seems merely a convention, one probably demanded by some obscure governmental agency or featherbedding labor union regulations.   The musicians themselves appear to have by memory any score shorter than War and Peace.  But of course conventions are very important.  Civilization would collapse without them.  It is also conventional that the page-turner be so discreet a background element as to be essentially invisible to the audience.  Richardson Auditorium has a superb class of page-turners.  The perfect page-turner, deserving of an honorable mention in the program that she never gets, needs to be a petite undergraduate of Asian ethnic extraction and constant expressionless mien, whose presence is so self-effacing as to seem more rumor than fact.  You may have no idea who she is, though you can make a safe guess that she’s a straight-A major in molecular biology or something, and that she herself plays the violin or flute at concert level.  She does this while running some ambitious and useful public service project and singing in an a capella group that has just returned from a triumphant tour in central Europe.

 

            There appears to be some controversy, or at least difference of opinion, concerning whether Schubert (1797-1828) should be regarded as a “Classical” or a “Romantic” composer.  This question may arise mainly from scholarly predilections for refined but unnecessary distinctions and categories, but I shall opt for the romantic.  That is because I have to think of him in connection with the English poet John Keats (1795-1821), an artistic contemporary of similar achievement and talent, and one whose short life included similar adversities and disappointments.  Surely Keats was a “Romantic” if there ever was one.    What could be more romantic than his self-devised epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”?  

 

Interior of Richardson Auditorium

 

            The paradox in Shelley’s famous phrase about the unfulfilled poetic aspirants in which he includes Keats—“the inheritors of unfulfilled renown”—is that there is hardly anything that has made certain artists more famous than the tragedy of early death.  What was unfulfilled was their longing.  Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is in a strange way both the most mannered and the sincerest poem he ever wrote.  And I would venture to suggest that you must be missing an important gene or two if your eyes do not tear up when listening to Schubert’s song cycle called “Winter Trip” (Winterreise).  And that is whether or not you understand the meaning of the words.  Longing unfulfilled, separation, loss irreparable, the erotic near miss, the unattainable beloved: that’s the Romantic plot.  My lords, would you hear a noble tale of love and death?  In his famous book Love and the Western World Denis de Rougement found in a single line of a medieval romance the introduction to a vast cultural inheritance.  You will find it everywhere in Schubert, perhaps because you first find it everywhere in Life.

Family Easter

 

There is a certain kind of holiday letter that might better be called the Annual Family Report.  Its purpose is to bring the reader up to date on the most recent doings and achievements of the various members of the family being reported upon.   The posterity of our friends all appear to be prolific, very active, and fertile.  If one’s contemporaries tend to be grandparents with a scattering of even great-grandparents, the dramatis personae of the annual Christmas reports can easily grow to Shakespearian proportions.  It soon enough can become impossible to keep your Gloucesters differentiated from your Leicesters, or be certain that your Imogens, Violas, Rosalinds and Beatrices are accurately distributed among the bourgeoning households of the second and third generations.  One reads on in admiration but sometimes only with modified comprehension.

 

In attempting to convey some sense of the highly satisfactory family Easter we just observed, I am doubtful that I can entirely avoid something of the vibe of the annual report.  But given the facts that the numbers involved were relatively limited, and that the events of the day can plausibly be carved into manageable and discreet episodes, it may prove possible.

 

Late on Good Friday, our younger son Luke, his wife Melanie, and their two children—John Henry (11) and Hazel (9) arrived by car from Montreal.  They had not been able to leave all that early, and there had been a long line at the border crossing, and there was not a lot of Friday still left.  There was of course enough time for us to ooh and aah about the kids’ notable increment in size since last sighting, but the serious visit began on Saturday.  At what age do Easter eggs, especially their decoration, and the disputes attendant upon their decoration, cease to command passionate family engagement?  I cannot yet answer that question, but it is obviously well over eighty.  Nonetheless a multi-generational corps of decorators did at last succeed in producing a small but elegant collection of eggs approaching Romanov standards.  From the point of view of weather Saturday was as at best mediocre, with prognostications for Sunday at first being not all that much better.  

John Henry, Hazel, & eggs 

 

The miracle of Easter is of course an improbable and unexpected corporal resurrection.  So was its secular echo on Hartley Avenue.  All the Montrealers, in addition to the two permanent residents, were up and about by about 4:15 a.m. to prepare to attend the Easter Vigil eucharist in the Princeton University Chapel.  This chapel, which cost more than a million dollars in the 1920s (when it was affectionately known as “Princeton’s million-dollar answer to materialism”), is a mini-Amiens of great beauty.  The lengthy Easter service is of exceptional beauty.  Save for a few rare occasions when I was temporarily resident in Europe, I have not missed one in more than thirty years.  The congregation gathers in darkness outside the cathedral-like west door for the lighting of the “new fire", then solemnly processes, in the dark and  in two parallel single lines, the whole length of the huge nave before mounting the chancel stairs to take up places in facing banks of  unlit choirstalls of the slightly elevated chancel.  More miraculous activity: here the Hartley Avenue group was joined by granddaughter Cora Louise, currently a sophomore living on campus.  The service is long, solemn, and impressive, and more than an hour of it elapsed before the light appeared, but faintly at first, in the huge east window.  Soon the sun would be fully risen in a cloudless sky.  But by then you already knew that Easter had really arrived.  We certainly knew it when we got home and rustled up the rare treat of a pancake breakfast—festively eaten, though in moderation, as we knew the real feast that awaited us in the afternoon.

 

At about ten-thirty we all piled into the monster Dodge van from Montreal and headed north toward Kingwood Township.  We took the route along the Delaware River from Trenton, which goes through several little waterfront villages, including two sizeable ones, Lambertville and Frenchtown, though we turn east before reaching the latter.  Most of the way is through beautiful Hunterdon County, still amazingly rural, the seat of which, Flemington, was presumably founded by one of my very distant relatives.  It is barely more than thirty miles from our house to the Fleming-Dixon property, but it takes about an hour to get there.  The word “property” is definitely a faute-de-mieux.  Farm, estate, mansion, and empire—though not without accuracy—don’t capture the down-home vibe.  Obviously some money exchanged hands in its acquisition; but the real enabler was imagination.  The house is a genuine colonial mansion (ca. 1790), and if Washington didn't sleep there I want to know the reason why!

Kingwood House
 

By the time we got there, the major New York delegation had already arrived: our daughter Katy and son-in-law Zvi (daughter Katy fortunately being orthographically distinguishable from our daughter-in-law Katie), who arrived with their eldest daughter Sophia (whose husband Raymond was unfortunately sidelined at home in Brooklyn with a cold).  So with the thus far unmentioned but indispensable granddaughter Ruby (daughter of the Kingwood hosts) the dinner party of eleven was now complete.  That is also the end of the incomprehensible family catalogue

 

Son Richard is a super chef and also a small-d democrat who imaginatively catered to the majoritarian vegetarianism of his guests.  Carnivores like me simply had to suck it up, which is not hard to do if what is on the table is the festival of vegetables we found before us.  These were such delicacies as galette of caramelized onion, imperial lentils, and a half dozen other succulent dishes previously known to me only from the Le Guide culinaire of Escoffier (from which my favorite untried recipe, for bear’s paw, begins thus: ‘Wrap the paw in clean mud…’).  

Rich's vegetarian feast

 

The young kids, in the nine to eleven range, still love an egg hunt, and there was one, using the rather superior eggs we had painted on Saturday.  There was also a limited bit of walking about the open woods, still leafless, but just on the verge of verdure, so to speak.  There was a marvelous show of daffodils.  The kids are fascinated by the huge old barn, and even more by its contents, including Richard’s burgeoning shop.  But mainly it was a gab-fest sitting around on a side patio with its view down to the pond.   Zvi, always interesting,  was recently returned from China.  The conversation was wide-ranging and mellow.

 

The Montrealers regaled us with tales of the life and hard times of Justin Trudeau, and the two K’s, Katy F. and Katie D., offered occasional expert opinions about the larger arts scene.  I have probably said enough in earlier posts about our daughter, who is the President and CEO of the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, one division of which is the fabulous Getty Museum.  Let me now say a few words about the somewhat less well-known museum of which our esteemed daughter-in-law Katie Dixon is the current interim director.  That is the Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, Queens, on the East River front just below the Astoria Ferry and just above the Noguchi Museum.  It is one of many little-known cultural institutions that make their contributions in establishing New York City as the inexhaustible cultural resource it continues to be through thick and thin.  As its name and location might suggest, the origins of the Socrates Sculpture Park are to be found among philanthropists in the large Greek-American community in Astoria.  It is among several New York cultural institutions that I myself, alas, have never visited; but it is claiming an eminent place among the growing number of sculpture gardens and parks displaying monumental works of material and size more appropriate to open spaces than enclosed salons.  There was a lot to hear about.  By the late afternoon of this perfect day the incoming light clouds were beginning to contest the day’s sunshine, and the party broke up, replete with good food and family fellowship.  Cora decided to go to the city with her parents and her elder sister, but we were still six driving back to Princeton, replete with good food and good talk and that relatively uncommon feeling of celebration rightly demanded and achieved.