tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69070717007219660112024-03-19T01:48:30.393-07:00Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche"Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche" is the personal web log of John V. Fleming, the Louis W. Fairchild Professor of English and Comparative Literature emeritus at Princeton University. It continues in its title and its spirit his one-time newspaper column in The Daily Princetonian. As a general rule a new post is mounted every Wednesday morning (EST).John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.comBlogger756125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-72290654815316280572024-03-12T17:19:00.000-07:002024-03-13T01:46:21.616-07:00Andrew Seth<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguJ1Z2-C91K_Kea9b1m5xRStMRG1REFX_3dBkcj1pYuG5OqZMM_IbvoTyGm7rdRVEI31KIgJiAmb8OyOY4S5sh0E7rYDBjkQzwchkPwlWHa0F7YU5m5mAZ1fFFXMjSt8sDkWC7U4JoAqxr7aMldzMo6Opx8HzHEz5q4oSqCnGfB-aCZYb10mYNI3YIpOHH/s538/thumbnail_IMG_0133%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="256" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguJ1Z2-C91K_Kea9b1m5xRStMRG1REFX_3dBkcj1pYuG5OqZMM_IbvoTyGm7rdRVEI31KIgJiAmb8OyOY4S5sh0E7rYDBjkQzwchkPwlWHa0F7YU5m5mAZ1fFFXMjSt8sDkWC7U4JoAqxr7aMldzMo6Opx8HzHEz5q4oSqCnGfB-aCZYb10mYNI3YIpOHH/s320/thumbnail_IMG_0133%202.jpg" width="152" /></a> <br /></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Even before I had
begun to cast about for this week’s topic, it was unhappily thrust upon me, and
therefore on you, with the shocking news of the sudden death of a very dear
friend, Andrew Seth, in England.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andrew
was, indeed, the closest of my surviving friends from my wonderful years in
Oxford (1958-1961).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have written about
him on this page several times, and indeed recently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have even posted a couple of blog essays
from Saint Michel, the Seths’ delightful old house in the hills skirting the
small old town of Salernes in the upper Var.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Spending a generous stretch of September there in a serious gastronomic
and conversational orgy with Andrew and his partner Lee, in the company also of
other old friends from decades past, had become for us an annual highpoint of
our senior years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So there are no glad
tidings in this blog and practically no glad teaching; but I cram a linguistic
point in at the end.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Andrew’s importance
in the British commercial world, which saw him in prominent positions in
various parts of the world and heading the British branch of a large
international conglomerate, will guarantee ample obituary notices in the
British press.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What follows is in no
sense a biography, merely the first thoughts of a grieving friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andrew and his late wife Edith, also a good
friend, came from Belfast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andrew’s
father was a prominent professor of psychology at the university there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would meet Andrew in the autumn of 1958 at
Jesus College, Oxford.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a
lawyer—meaning a student of law as an undergraduate Oxford subject—and our
rapidly established friendship had little to do with the academic side of
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Young Andrew was in fact a bit of
a rogue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he was brilliant, knowledgeable,
a great wit and the kind of fellow whose broad popularity soon guaranteed his
election to the presidency of the Junior Common Room.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet eventually he could not conceal, nor
particularly desired to conceal, a broad-based and usefully focused knowledge
of literature, music, and politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some
of our undergraduate highjinks were of the kind that cannot be recalled without
a certain amount of embarrassment, but I was never unaware of his broad
intellectual interests or the passion with which he pursued them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I did not know is that our rather
casually shared “serious” interests would be the basis of our own life-long and
gradually intensifying friendship.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">The academic world
into which I fully submerged myself after leaving Oxford tends to become narrow
and exclusive in its academic character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I had the good luck to have a few real world friends doing real world
things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very slowly, but also with a
pleasant inexorability, Andrew became the greatest of such friends to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He and lovely Edith raised four remarkable
and versatile sons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andrew rose—not
without testing adversities—to the high roles of professional leadership that
allowed him in time a country house and a property in the south of
France—magnificent, but not fancy, if you understand the distinction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Edith, alas, was taken away, far too early, by
a bad cancer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, I suppose there are
no <i>good </i>cancers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We grieved for
and with Andrew, but were delighted when in later years he connected with Lee,
the surviving widow in a couple with whom the Seths had once shared a long
friendship and French vacations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We soon
came to know and love her, as did Andrew’s offspring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was with Andrew at the sudden end, and we
are grieving with her even as we admire her deep strength of character.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilgq13HGJhJlHeEYFIdirgWn1Xv9L7BKDTkkUzX0_Xs-Z4i77XO-33RSAqJPeBbAoEZ7ny6zii2XhbSMB0AmyaaU6bE7PF3UHA3chyy9BD1FFofZ1k6LMf-prHm5sSAHkyqL_qQ6j06lBQ7owpl0SI8GcDFv5PT86f9Ad54hZTV_plM_hXo9CCUd73KCdc/s292/images-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="173" data-original-width="292" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilgq13HGJhJlHeEYFIdirgWn1Xv9L7BKDTkkUzX0_Xs-Z4i77XO-33RSAqJPeBbAoEZ7ny6zii2XhbSMB0AmyaaU6bE7PF3UHA3chyy9BD1FFofZ1k6LMf-prHm5sSAHkyqL_qQ6j06lBQ7owpl0SI8GcDFv5PT86f9Ad54hZTV_plM_hXo9CCUd73KCdc/s1600/images-1.jpg" width="292" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">Seth in pundit mode</span><br /></div><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">The only newspaper
photograph I could find of Andrew on the Internet is a rather somber one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe it must have appeared in the British
press to accompany his solicited expert opinion regarding the “grocery wars”
periodically waged among the supermarketeers in the Continental European
countries and in Britain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I learned
from him in conversation, the highly volatile large-scale market in domestic
table food is a huge and treacherous one where small margins mark the divisions
between lucre and loss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With his late long-time
friend Buff Randall, another Jesus College contemporary, he had co-authored a
book called <i>The Grocers: the Rise and Rise of Supermarket Chains</i> (2011).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fortunately, we had more recent photos, taken
by us in Salernes about six months ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of
the two I have chosen is one memorializing what were literally the last moments
we would spend on this earth in the company of this dear friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Squinting into the brilliantly rising
Provençal sun we lined up together for a staged farewell photo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Behind us is the car that would take us to
Nice airport.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The driver of that car is
the one who took the picture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were
sad to be leaving such beautiful friends and such a beautiful place, but the
last thing in our minds was that the farewell might be final.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed: <i>in the midst of life, we are in
death.</i></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></i></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Some
friendships are great multipliers of friendship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During our autumnal stays at Saint Michel we
met and became friends with other of Andrew’s friends, or increased the
friendship with others whom we already knew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One new friend, Alison Loyd, has known him well for sixty years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They worked closely together in his first job
after leaving Oxford.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a lovely letter
in which she commiserated with us, she summarized the essence of our shared
Salernes idylls thus: “Above all, Andrew loved conversation and we were all
the beneficiaries of his wide reading, broad interests, enquiring intellect,
listening skills and decisive mind, alongside wit and humour.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another member of this year’s house party,
our shared Oxford friend Michael Nicholas and one of the most prominent church
musicians in England, will probably be the organist at Andrew’s funeral.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in; mso-line-height-alt: 10.8pt;"><span face=""-webkit-standard",serif" style="color: black;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in; mso-line-height-alt: 10.8pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Naturally, very old friends often preserve
between them long superannuated “in” jokes, the shelf-life of which expired
decades earlier , adding further absurdity to the absurdities of discourse
characteristic of class reunions or accidental meetings with the old
girl-friend you last saw forty years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One such bit of humor, a tedious “in” joke, involved the words for a
meal’s final course--<i>dessert </i>(American) and (<i>sweet</i>) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>often English.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Andrew would occasionally ask me “How would you like a </span><span class="s2"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">Fresh
fruit, juice, jelly, cream and ice cream</span></i></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> to top things off?”</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> This referred, obscurely, to an offering to be had in the
prix-fixe menu (three shillings and sixpence, as I recall) on offer at a modest
café in the little village of Iffley where he and other memorable friends lived
for a year when room had to be made in the college buildings on the Turl to
give incoming students their chance to dwell among forehead-smashing lintels
and gargoyled façades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A mixture of
fresh fruit, juice, jelly (Jello in our land), cream, and ice cream were
presumably the contents of this mouth-watering concoction, but also its name.
The waitress would cut no corners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This course could not be referred to in less than ten syllables.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andrew and his flat-mates derived mirth from
this habit of speech,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And note that it was not “fresh fruit juice”
but two different items: a</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">fresh</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">fruit (to be determined) and a juice (likewise)</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">that might or might not be a relative of the juice. </span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">In Mencken’s still wonderful</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s3"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">American Language </span></i></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">(1919)</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">the author points out the typical way in which the British usage</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">with regard to</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">the names</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">of</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">comestibles and potables
differs (or used to differ) from the American. An Englishman prepares</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">a</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">drink composed of Scotch
whiskey (or even whisky) and soda water and calls it what? A whiskey-and-soda,
of course. His American counterpart needs poetry. His identical
drink had to be a <i>high ball</i> at the very least and quite possibly</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">a</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> </span></span><span class="s2"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">Caledonian
Comforter</span></i></span><span class="s2"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;"> or something more exotic. I doubt that anyone in the world
still asks for a high ball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I am a
certain that never again will anyone in this world be offered this ten-syllable
sweet course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One minute loss amid a
great personal one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andrew Seth,
1937-2024.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>May he rest in peace in rise
in glory.</span></span><span face=""-webkit-standard",serif" style="color: black;"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><span face=""-webkit-standard",serif" style="color: black;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ybur47xnJjYp4NQNx8dgG8dLFLFQq6Y4cx89aFm5AHZaJx9nhlLS-rYnaN6ld5Vpx-aomjLdsZMghkLwjeqbVoMciiL655iuK_lh10XEOy20XgjmzuK4VZI3ZkNWNVUL6R-22fKCsPkjcKEwysCsaje40fSiQnWxDPfZPj_cpzcwQWFN_iIQN8FzuwP5/s1920/thumbnail_IMG_0634.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1440" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ybur47xnJjYp4NQNx8dgG8dLFLFQq6Y4cx89aFm5AHZaJx9nhlLS-rYnaN6ld5Vpx-aomjLdsZMghkLwjeqbVoMciiL655iuK_lh10XEOy20XgjmzuK4VZI3ZkNWNVUL6R-22fKCsPkjcKEwysCsaje40fSiQnWxDPfZPj_cpzcwQWFN_iIQN8FzuwP5/s320/thumbnail_IMG_0634.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">John, Andrew, Joan, Lee: September 2023</span></span><br /></div><span face=""-webkit-standard",serif" style="color: black;"> </span><p></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-71477829451664028972024-03-06T01:52:00.000-08:002024-03-06T03:44:07.049-08:00Flower Girls<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi13syUTVsHp3gQBsQST4m05joasrSp0CreGyBoW3IFbr-juTkFy37pl8k4uwu7EM2VRiwyx_LA7HQJbDRFHDeWyowepnDnuPT7XhLQnyahLvvUdqtGwN6eGfMMvzgEBdncOV5mqcVscbn2ufOdHnXENrhvAN6ImedeZ9BWseN0f6YHIYqgNoi6sSOPh7p3/s440/440px-Enle%CC%80vement_de_Proserpine_d'apre%CC%80s_by_Alessandro_Allori.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="288" data-original-width="440" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi13syUTVsHp3gQBsQST4m05joasrSp0CreGyBoW3IFbr-juTkFy37pl8k4uwu7EM2VRiwyx_LA7HQJbDRFHDeWyowepnDnuPT7XhLQnyahLvvUdqtGwN6eGfMMvzgEBdncOV5mqcVscbn2ufOdHnXENrhvAN6ImedeZ9BWseN0f6YHIYqgNoi6sSOPh7p3/s320/440px-Enle%CC%80vement_de_Proserpine_d'apre%CC%80s_by_Alessandro_Allori.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><i>Raptus Proserpinae</i> by Alessandro Allori</span><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"> </span>
<p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">I am sometimes asked how I came to
spend a career studying medieval literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In fact, the question comes up so frequently that I early invented a
facetious answer designed to disarm the apparent surprise or even disdain that
resides within it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“When it became clear
that I was going to be a college professor and therefore irrelevant anyway, I
determined to do it with as much pizzaz as possible.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, the choice was to some extent
arbitrary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The world is infinitely
interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The wonder of it all is to
have lived in a time and place when the larger culture not merely allowed but
actually encouraged me in a scholarly vocation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I could have as easily become a historian as a literary scholar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, my view is that literary study when
brought to bear on anything written before the day before yesterday is
necessarily “historical”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This means
that a real literary scholar has to learn a lot of other stuff along the way. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">But beyond that, the aesthetic
assumptions of the earlier (pre-Romantic) periods of European poetry were
crucially different from those of modernity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Alexander Pope (early eighteenth century) famously defined “true wit”
(roughly, fine literature) as “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well
expressed.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Originality of thought, and
the individual expression of unique poetic consciousness, are in this view
supplanted by tradition—what <i>oft </i>was thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The English theologian and murder mystery
writer Dorothy Sayers has an essay with a title that explains the classical
idea succinctly: “The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “statements” of major medieval works
require the study of history, philosophy, theology and very often earlier Latin
and vernacular poems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I liked the idea
of the “whole package”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To begin with, the
medium in which literature exists—namely language—is among the most malleable
of human institutions, so that the study of early literature necessarily brought
with it philological challenges that intrigue me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare’s language (around 1600)—classified
by language students as <i>modern </i>English—is still a hill too steep for
some of today’s undergraduates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Chaucer’s English (around 1400) actually does require a bit of
preliminary study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The preparation to
read <i>Beowulf</i> (about 1000 or earlier) requires learning an essentially
foreign language.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My
doctoral dissertation of 1963 was a hybrid literary-art historical essay in
which I tried to interpret the moral and philosophical sense of the <i>Romance
of the Rose</i> (<i>Roman de la Rose</i> in French) by analyzing the miniature
painted illustrations to be found in so many of its surviving medieval manuscripts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is visual as well as verbal allegory;
and I would spend many years studying the language of medieval pictorial
iconography.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This poem enjoyed huge
popularity among aristocratic readers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
and exercised a large influence on such writers as Chaucer. It is a very long, and in some ways very
difficult poem, the hybrid work of two authors living at different times
(Guillaume de Lorris, probably about 1240, and Jean de Meun, closer to
1300).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jean claims to have taken up the
unfinished work forty years after Guillaume’s death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The two authors, of whom the latter was by
far the more prolific both in lines written and in ideas raised, were of very
different temperaments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Guillaume was an
elegant Ovidian love poet, Jean a learned university theologian and very much
of an ideas man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could also be distinctly
ribald.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The allegory that Guillaume
began is that of a Lover in pursuit of a hard-to-get lady represented as a <i>rose</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the continuation by the randy theologian
the much sought-after rose is more clearly a <i>part </i>of a woman, if you
follow—an emendation that considerably changes the tone of the work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have not followed the philological track
back to its origins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Deflowering” (<i>defloratio)
</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">is already in the moral vocabulary
of early Christian writers.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Many
flowers are lovely, but the rose is definitively the flower of love, romantic
and sexual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its classic simple
statement, perhaps, is the most famous line penned by sweet Robbie Burns “O, my
Luve is like a red, red rose…”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it
even possible to imagine the beloved object as hollyhock or petunia?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For many poets, it was possible to imagine
the “floral lady” in quite extraordinary ways.<i></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">One early poet who typically
illustrates his Christian humanism in a union of the classical and the biblical
is John Milton.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the fourth book of <i>Paradise
Lost,</i> which is a fancy retelling of the biblical story of the “Fall of
Man,” Milton describes the arrival of Satan on earth, an earth so stunning in
its prelapsarian beauty that the poet can but tell us of about twenty beautiful
places which--though of the greatest beauty described by the classical
poets—cannot approach it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a
catalogue of places that the site of our primal fall was <i>not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>And the first is this:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Not that faire field <br />
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours <br />
Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain <br />
To seek her through the world… (<i>P.L</i>. 4, 268-72)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS9GPIw7P-9PhHqA3i1ofPIo6xmxT2CYkkvDh-5MxWJhGz6N-YsiVDolOaqRptUHUvtmXzBO4mYqnKmcoaRWN4o-0OpYoRPl3QcG8QcAewP5gUr9Rs5P445WLMSQ-34VlfLnjGmqucUJhypaeiN9NSc9RqX7dnMLEyj_oKtrPRP8X0OTdUQw_jVXoDvfzO/s275/Enna.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS9GPIw7P-9PhHqA3i1ofPIo6xmxT2CYkkvDh-5MxWJhGz6N-YsiVDolOaqRptUHUvtmXzBO4mYqnKmcoaRWN4o-0OpYoRPl3QcG8QcAewP5gUr9Rs5P445WLMSQ-34VlfLnjGmqucUJhypaeiN9NSc9RqX7dnMLEyj_oKtrPRP8X0OTdUQw_jVXoDvfzO/s1600/Enna.jpg" width="275" /></a></b></div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"> Enna</span><b><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"><br /> </span></b><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">The geography of the brilliant image of Proserpina (Persephone
in the Greek sources) as both flower gatherer and flower builds on a passage in
Ovid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Enna is a hilltop town in the
center of Sicily and therefore, in a sense, the very center of the
Mediterranean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The infernal ravisher has
also the names of Pluto and Hades, but Milton follows Dante (<i>Purgatorio</i>
28) in calling him Dis (<i>Ditis</i> in the medieval Italian, formed from the
Latin genitive.) Dante’s own treatment
of the story is stamped with the startling originality of the Tuscan genius:
what oft was thought, but…Ceres, goddess of agriculture and mother of Proserpina,
searched fruitlessly for her stolen daughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Romantic poet Shelley thought Dante’s remaking of Proserpina as
Matelda so extraordinary that he translated it in a fine poem of his own.*</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">“Where
have all the flowers gone?” crooned Pete Seeger in the ‘50s of my early
youth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think they were actually still there, certainly
in song titles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mainly red roses, and
mainly Hibernian, as in “Rose of Tralee,” and “My Wild Irish Rose” and Robbie
Burns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we also have bluebells,
daisies, and buttercups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And not all the
roses are red.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mature readers of the
blog may well remember the brilliant fist-fight scene in the film version of
“Giant” (1956), one of the best of Edna Ferber’s terrific novels, in which the
Rock Hudson character is beaten to a pulp by the racist proprietor of a two-bit
diner as the broken Wurlitzer plays “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Theme music, you might say.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">The "six degrees of separation” rule supposedly governing human beings is
cumbersome when compared with the association of <i>ideas</i>, for which the
number is usually one. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the great
joys of literary study is the caprice by which one thing leads to another,
potentially endlessly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We may doubt that
George Stevens, the director of “Giant,” was ever aware of the Latin poet
Claudian; but here he comes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Claudian, I
mean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Around the year 400 Claudian wrote an epyllion (baby
epic) of a thousand lines or so entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">De
raptu Proserpinae</i> (<i>The Rape of Prosperpina</i>). I find it slightly
tough sledding, but it seems to have been well-known to John Ruskin, the
Victorian sage, art critic, architectural historian, early eco-warrior, and
incidental medievalist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of his
books are slightly odd in a geniusy sort of way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Modern Painters</i> (1843-60) and <i>The
Stones of Venice</i> (1851-) are the most famous monuments of his polemical
erudition, and both works of permanent literary merit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was himself a painter and draftsman of
ability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first book of his I ever
bought was an old and battered copy of his essay on wildflowers:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Proserpina.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air Was
Yet Pure Among the Alps and in the Scotland and England which my Father Knew</i>
(1879).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We may note in passing that
Ruskin, and not he alone, thought the earth’s atmosphere was already poisoned
by 1860 or so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He hated the
smoke-bellowing railroad engines with a passion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually I bought up, one at a time and all
for a song, most of the matched set to which this edition of <i>Proserpina</i> belonged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That volume reproduced dozens of his own
exquisite botanical drawings, but it is necessarily of a larger format than the
others in the set, and hence too tall for the “Ruskin shelf”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have just conducted an exhausting (but
obviously not exhaustive) search for it amid some of the double- and triple
stacked shelves of my library.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had no better luck in finding Proserpina than did her mother. I know it
must still be in this house somewhere, but <i>where</i>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A conundrum for the heirs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his
grasp, or what’s a heaven for? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> <br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtcUWHkW3mhUGdzITcj26NGfKhMSNrRnSiuzpkWPKMBZOvtY0_6feifeL_f8kDfV_dOMitOIkTl_zULjDqM0WDrbwhxNeequNHitqYSRoN_wfzQuMwhNU5KqSqz1PTBb8n6i5cv2tP7rikM2ZdFxKr5lS_r4nLXU5089uHxMqxMkAGCBAF4OR0dUw1tpEc/s1137/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_-_Proserpine_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1137" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtcUWHkW3mhUGdzITcj26NGfKhMSNrRnSiuzpkWPKMBZOvtY0_6feifeL_f8kDfV_dOMitOIkTl_zULjDqM0WDrbwhxNeequNHitqYSRoN_wfzQuMwhNU5KqSqz1PTBb8n6i5cv2tP7rikM2ZdFxKr5lS_r4nLXU5089uHxMqxMkAGCBAF4OR0dUw1tpEc/s320/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_-_Proserpine_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" width="141" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">Daniel Gabriel Rossetti: <i>Proserpina</i></span><br /></div><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> <br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left: 0.75in; mso-add-space: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; font-size: 8pt;">* “Matelda Gathering
Flowers”: from the <i>Purgatorio </i>of Dante</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p></div>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-72731738547372465472024-02-28T01:22:00.000-08:002024-02-28T01:22:21.240-08:00Kennel Rations<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEQ2btyMgITLS_SKXtsq5KDzn8KkqfHypFp-8rnxzJ7n4HQ-xfPFwt0566NXiCBOMG87vbchwBnSpU4n0iXVKJBtpGB92mByF8RCeCqshLIF3TgDSBGDTNsyQBUVlUtYLZYsvCDuG1Rb9GROczYItzjcdaWHFl2BibQDDTRB-cBTXN85pLaJrSNhitU1hu/s275/TEUMBIDEN.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEQ2btyMgITLS_SKXtsq5KDzn8KkqfHypFp-8rnxzJ7n4HQ-xfPFwt0566NXiCBOMG87vbchwBnSpU4n0iXVKJBtpGB92mByF8RCeCqshLIF3TgDSBGDTNsyQBUVlUtYLZYsvCDuG1Rb9GROczYItzjcdaWHFl2BibQDDTRB-cBTXN85pLaJrSNhitU1hu/s1600/TEUMBIDEN.jpg" width="275" /></a><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;"> </span><br /></span></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;">“The dogs don’t like the dog food.”<span> </span>I don’t remember where I encountered this
pithy remark, which referred to unpopular offerings by Washington politicians
to the citizens they supposedly serve.<span> </span>But
it came to mind when I read of a recent opinion poll suggesting that about
seven out of ten Americans polled expressed dissatisfaction with the
prospective presidential election in which the only two candidates who will be
actual contenders are Joe Biden and Donald Trump.<span> </span>I am certainly one of those seven. In my
view, the situation is one that would seem to be the inevitable result of our
two party system as it has now developed.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;">Officially our country is a broadly based egalitarian
democracy.<span> </span>Millions upon millions of our
citizens—I’d guess at least fifty million--meet the constitutional requirements
to present themselves as presidential candidates.<span> </span>It must be <span> </span>only by coincidence that our sixth president
was the son of our second president and our forty-third the son of our forty-first;
and that the entire governing class is only slightly more “diverse” than the House
of Saxe-Coburg.<span> </span>These days our country
has a population of well over three hundred million.<span> </span>Anyway, you can humor me in my estimate of fifty
million potential presidential candidates.<span>
</span>Let us further estimate that of this constitutionally eligible pool, a
scant <i>two percent</i> are of marked intelligence, social and professional competence,
moral probity, and in vigorous physical health.<span>
</span>That very parsimonious estimate would leave us with only the tiny reservoir of about a million outstanding
men and women from among whom we might choose two as major party presidential
candidates.<span> </span>So you may want to wonder,
as I do, why our choice right now must be between two geriatrics who, despite
the very marked differences between them, share crucial inadequacies and
debilities.<span> </span>You might further wonder why
the voices of the Democratic Party establishment keep saying “Move on folks, nothing
to see here!”—and the Republican Party establishment keeps saying, well,
essentially nothing, except “Yes, sir, Mr. Trump, right away!”<span> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;">This is one of the reasons that I am one of the dogs
who doesn’t like the dog food.<span> </span>Even
humble citizens like me can recognize Alpo advertised as steak
Chateaubriand.<span> </span>More to the point,
perhaps, I think my own life experience gives me a useful insight into the
circumstances of the two candidates.<span> </span>I
am a man eighty-seven years old (and, no it is not eighty-seven years <i>young</i>,
as the makers of Hallmark cards want to insist.)<span> </span>Leaving aside my marked difficulties with
balance and ambulation, born of serious disease and the powerful remedies
applied to overcome it, my physical strength is not what it was thirty years
ago, not by any means.<span> </span>I have most of my
original marbles, I think, but certainly not all of them.<span> </span>There is a difference between losing a chess
match to a superior player, and losing one by blundering, as I now commonly
do.<span> </span>I have trouble keeping straight the
characters in novels if there are a lot of them.<span> </span>I forget where things are all the time.<span> </span>One hardly earns bragging rights by being
more articulate in extemporaneous speech than Joe Biden or Donald Trump, but I
am that by a long shot.<span> </span>However, <span> </span>I certainly don’t have the verbal dexterity I
had at fifty.<span> </span>And while I acknowledge
that one size does not fit all here and concede that the ravages of age
manifest themselves differently in different people, the clear and unsurprising
suggestion of my own eyes is that neither of the presidential candidates is
exempt from visible signs of the aging process, some of them acutely familiar
in my own personal experience. <span> </span>Putting
this in the vernacular, they are losing it.<span>
</span><span> </span>It is questionable whether one of
them ever had all that much of it in the first place, but I shall let that pass.<span> </span>That aspect of the situation among others may
make a voting decision easier for me, but it does not make me happy with the choice.<span> </span>Nor does all the whistling in the dark by
prominent Democrats to the effect that behind the scenes, beyond the trees where nobody sees, their candidate does
the work of three ordinary mortals, is as active as Atlas and as eloquent as
Demosthenes.<span> </span>He is a well-meaning
elderly man, as someone or another recently said.<span> </span>That is a judgment in which I myself would find a compliment.<span> </span>It is very different
from being a malevolent old man.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;">The hyper-liberal, hyper-articulate, and
hyper-intelligent columnist for the <i>Times,</i> Ezra Klein, set the cat among
the pigeons last week by suggesting that, in order to achieve their applauded
goal of electing a Democratic president, the Democrats should even now replace
the presumptive nominee, Biden, with someone more likely to win.<span> </span>Klein did not write this piece merely to
cause a sensation.<span> </span>If you read his essay,
you know that his motive, far from dissing Biden, whom he admires and respects,
is actually to win the election for Democrats.<span>
</span>The suggestion nonetheless is awkward in the extreme, being born of what
Klein is not alone in thinking is an emergency situation.<span> </span>Klein may be wrong or unrealistic or wishful
in making it.<span> </span>But from the way what I
will call the Democratic Party establishment has reacted you would have thought
that he had farted in church or had donned a MAGA hat.<span> </span>As for the Republican Party establishment, I
must invoke a comment of my dear old dad’s.<span>
</span>What would embarrass them would shame a hog to death.<span> </span>Klein didn’t say that the emperor had no
clothes, only that the clothes were ragged and threadbare.<span> </span>That seems to me an empirical reality that
the most wishful of wishful thinking cannot in honesty banish.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;">I see in the press increasing criticism of the way
the press itself is treating the campaign.<span>
</span>That is, as a “horse race”.<span> </span>This
puzzles me a little since presidential elections <i>are</i> in effect horse
races.<span> </span>Two people “run” against each
other in a national poll.<span> </span>One of them
wins.<span> </span>One of them loses.<span> </span>But I think I see the rationale behind the
criticism.<span> </span>Instead of obsessing over who
is up or down a couple of points in the volatile public opinion polls, we need
to be thinking a little more deeply, and about fundamental structural aspects
of the national political life.<span> </span>One
possible topic that occurs to me is party politics.<span> </span>Many of the Founders were skeptical about
political parties, and with very good reason as it almost immediately turned
out when the drafters of immortal political theory actually started to govern
in actual fact.<span> </span>It is of course today’s
Party establishments—both of them—who are the kennel-masters dishing out the
dog food that at least <i>this</i> dog does not fancy.<span> </span>One hears a great deal at the moment about the
assaults on our democracy; but I have not noticed listed among the contributing
negative factors the current state of the “two-party system”.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;">Politics is supposed to be the art of the <i>possible</i>.<span> </span>Okay.<span>
</span>Even though there seems to be little spirit of compromise in either of
the political parties, ordinary voters will be forced to adopt it.<span> </span>This means accepting the value of certain
compromising principles.<span> </span>Don’t make the
perfect the enemy of the good, or even of the minimally acceptable, for that
matter.<span> </span>Beggars can’t be choosers.<span> </span>Half a loaf is better than none.<span> </span>In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man
is king.<span> </span>The nearly blasphemous “lesser
of two evils” comes to mind.<span> </span>You may
want to supply other useful old saws from your own family traditions.<span> </span>And all of us may want to try to think a
little more deeply, realistically, and patriotically about our political
circumstances.<span> </span>It might turn out that
the possible or alleged inadequacy of the candidates presented has something to
do with the possible inadequacy in the procedures by which they are anointed as
candidates.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria", serif;"> </span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-46616025388328822642024-02-21T01:38:00.000-08:002024-03-02T09:39:35.852-08:00Pedants Observed<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha671KzgJWhX3hmk7mbpP3GvtL_efOH08ojDjaBqZKgN3L9q6Agy8jgvr72ktLTJWwLatfnzAzMVAmhmWwqK38wqDN1Ov6MVaj0-B4t1hOGjiuOtN74lydILM253eBNr86h_BeWoQ3D2N4KjmkmvgTQ9_MmchlTT3PJFUUs5o3MAB2f6Fuk9gnEJaaNvq7/s1000/91fu1pRSVhL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="662" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha671KzgJWhX3hmk7mbpP3GvtL_efOH08ojDjaBqZKgN3L9q6Agy8jgvr72ktLTJWwLatfnzAzMVAmhmWwqK38wqDN1Ov6MVaj0-B4t1hOGjiuOtN74lydILM253eBNr86h_BeWoQ3D2N4KjmkmvgTQ9_MmchlTT3PJFUUs5o3MAB2f6Fuk9gnEJaaNvq7/s320/91fu1pRSVhL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="212" /></a></div> <span style="font-size: 14pt;"> <br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">There
are all sorts of reasons to become an habitual reader of books in your youth,
and I am discovering one of the best of them right now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(A little later in the essay I shall touch
upon possible dangers in doing so.) But when age and infirmity begin to attack
your physical energy and dull your mental acuity, you can very easily retire to
a comfortable chair in your library, physical or electronic, and read to your
heart’s content.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And since you may have
forgotten some of the crucial details of that Conrad story you read thirty
years ago, you can read it with the pleasurable shock of eventual recognition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I recently had a satisfying experience in
this genre, one that links good books with good friends.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I
have a younger friend, John Raimo, a one-time undergraduate student here, who is at an advanced
stage in completing an ambitious doctoral dissertation in the Department of
History at NYU.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His topic is a broad
one, dealing with some major trends and figures in modern European intellectual
history; and it involves a good deal about academic writers and their
publishers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is a great polylingual reader
himself, and every couple of months or so he sends me a report on current studies,
and not infrequently a sample of it in book form.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">That
is, we exchange news about our current reading and writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a recent email John<b> </b>reminded me of
a book that I believe I had once recommended to him some years ago but had
hardly entered my mind since: the late A. D. Nuttall’s charming though
trenchant study of some works of English literature dealing with “Scholars and
Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination.”* </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Nuttall
must have been an undergraduate at Oxford at the time Joan and I were<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>there, though I never met him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was, I think, a classicist, who went on to
become one of the leading scholars of English literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was wide-ranging in his interests and very
original in his approach, especially to Shakespeare. His early death was a real
loss to literary scholarship.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I
suppose it is the easy target pedantry presents that has attracted so many
clever writers to poke fun at teachers and scholars, but there are certainly a large
number of their satirical victims, from Shakespeare’s Holofernes to Kingsley
Amis’s Lucky Jim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have trouble
thinking of prominent counter-examples. Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford, perhaps, or<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mr Chips?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The intriguing title of Nuttall’s book -–<i>Dead from the
Waist Down</i>--is a line from Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “A
Grammarian’s Funeral”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The unidentified
speaker is an old student of the likewise unnamed <i>defunctus,</i> who was a probably
Italian expert in Greek philology. The dead scholar emerges as a dry-as-dust
pedant, like Edward Causaubon in <i>Middlemarch</i>, one of the other satirized
fictional scholars to whom Nuttall gives extensive attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The temporal setting of the poem is “shortly
after the renewal of learning in Europe”—so, probably the fifteenth century at
a guess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The improbable setting is a
funeral cortege bearing the body up a steep rise to an elevated gravesite
explicitly symbolic of the scholar’s above-it-all separation from normal
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The situation approaches the surreal. This is Browning, so that a
certain amount of obscurity is inevitable, but the major issue raised in the
poem is quite clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in essence
the conflict of the Active and Contemplative lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The adjudication of their ordering has been a
major occupation of Western literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The dead grammarian’s choice has been clear:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“This man decided not to Live but Know.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Of
him Browning writes that “He gave us the doctrine of the enclitic <i>De </i>/
Dead from the waist down.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You hardly
need to master the arcane linguistic jargon to realize that a doctrine of the ancient
Greek enclitic <i>De, </i>whatever <i>that </i>might be, is unlikely to be as
important as the law of supply and demand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The grammatical definition of an enclitic is “a word pronounced with so
little emphasis that it is shortened and forms part of the preceding word”, as
the <i>not </i>in <i>can’t,</i> for example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is the mere hint or shadow of a word, as the grammarian is a hint or
shadow of a man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The achievements of the
grammarian are puny except to other pedants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That he is dead from the waist down in another poet might hint at a
sexual meaning, but Browning is even crueler, suggesting a comprehensive
rejection of action in the world, a spiritual crippling and voluntary
immobility.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The
hierarchy of the Active and Contemplative lives is an old one much discussed by
early philosophers and especially ascetic theologians of the early Christian
centuries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The biblical prototypes are
Mary (contemplative) and Martha (active) in a well-known passage in the gospel
of Luke (10:42) in which Jesus says that Mary has chosen the “good part.”—the
parallels in the Hebrew Scriptures being Leah and Rachel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Medieval art and literature are rich in these
“types”, as for example in Dante’s <i>Commedia</i> (<i>Purgatorio,</i> 27). There
is small comfort in this pronouncement for secular scholars like myself who are
likely at times to question the efficacy of the “life of the mind”—Greek
enclitics and all—in a troubled world in which so many human bodies are in
distress or danger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Things need to<b> </b>be
done, and not merely thought about<b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>The
words engraved upon Marx’s tomb, the famous apothegm from the <i>Theses on
Feuerbach</i>, are these: “</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The philosophers have only <i>interpreted</i> the world, in
various ways. The point, however, is to <i>change</i> it.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But one hopes that the change will be for the
better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The history of the twentieth
century suggests that the enactment in political fact of what is thought of in
the mind is not always positive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
are so many things that seemed like a good idea at the time.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The
treatment of the theme of the contrasting modes of life in modern literature,
though seldom frontal and direct, is ubiquitous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many years ago another dear friend introduced
me to Hermann Hesse’s remarkable novel<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Narcissus
and Goldmund.</i> (1930).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This book with
its medieval setting and almost violently modern treatment of the ancient
theme, is among the most intellectually provocative novels I have ever read.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Nuttall’s
book is of course witty, urbane in its erudition, and it does not deal
explicitly with the contemporary Anglo-American arena of higher education.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nonetheless I find it highly relevant to that
subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The modern university, however
“engaged,” “woke”, or “activist" its denizens be, is still housed in its Ivory
Tower.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are just below the surface the
clearest filiations of attitude between the ascetic organization in which the
Parisian schools incubated and contemporary Anglo-American academia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While most professors today hardly follow the
ascetic life, most of us silently believe that we have sacrificed the power and
emoluments we could have for the asking in the world of business and high
affairs for the self-abnegation of high cultural service to the world at large.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is of course no external evidence for that
comforting belief, but never mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After
all, mastering the enclitics is so much fun. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">*A. D. Nuttall , <i>Dead from
the Waist Down</i> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.)</span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-80407626067998875752024-02-14T02:21:00.000-08:002024-02-16T07:23:48.240-08:00Settler Colonialism<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisHDePq-a-HthC50ihHwWfdazdmgnFFN_9X9x1gDpjEx6PqXJK1V32Synje30UtScm9Zenk7ejjnwphAxK15P-AJq2klX75HUosHcHJ0M_qjuQuOs9Zp1YNCDtXhJqP0KOEDLPufFXGgcq8eEupaHnsD5nHO9RuSTvFYHOLqpCUgcTPQPC5b8sGu8x6odU/s276/manhattan.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="276" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisHDePq-a-HthC50ihHwWfdazdmgnFFN_9X9x1gDpjEx6PqXJK1V32Synje30UtScm9Zenk7ejjnwphAxK15P-AJq2klX75HUosHcHJ0M_qjuQuOs9Zp1YNCDtXhJqP0KOEDLPufFXGgcq8eEupaHnsD5nHO9RuSTvFYHOLqpCUgcTPQPC5b8sGu8x6odU/s1600/manhattan.jpg" width="276" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">"Purchase of Manhattan Island" (Historical Society of N.Y.)</span><br />
</div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span>I recently
read with interest a polemical essay by Bret Stephens, a <i>Times </i>opinion
writer, responding to the frequent charge that Israel is a “settler colonial”
state and therefore by implication an illegitimate state.<span> </span>The term is used in some left-wing circles to
denote territory in which a native or “indigenous” population has been replaced
or overwhelmed by invaders or immigrants.<span>
</span>It is not my purpose to re-enter the discussion about the War in Gaza
from a particular point of view, nor do I wish to endorse or refute the larger
political drift of Mr. Stephens’s essay; but I do want to say a word or two
about “settler colonialism,” the process that is in actuality the principal
dynamic force in recorded history.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="s4"><span style="color: black;">Among European historians ther</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black;">e </span></span><span class="s4"><span style="color: black;">is still in use a German
term—</span></span><span class="s5"><i><span style="color: black;">Volkswanderung</span></i></span><span class="s4"><span style="color: black;">, or the “migration of
peoples,” used to describe the gradual demographic construction of what we now
call “Europe.” This word is translated in one standard dictionary of
American English as “the migration of nations especially</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span><span class="s4"><span style="color: black;">the movement into southern
and western Europe of the Teutonic peoples, Huns, and Slavs from the 2d century</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span><span class="s4"><span style="color: black;">a.d.</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span><span class="s4"><span style="color: black;">to about the 11th century
reaching the peak in the 5th and 6th centuries and closing with the settling of
Norsemen in England and France.”<span> </span></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhihlj5EvpJFHiqyW4gH3TQiJlYltIksN42QUE0hS2_N9ubzF49_1jcKtiOWIKm-5TDY_O5yvUG39IKLQgSeMaqEgD9KT-Oy2CFPEcIqpXL5qgBhS6_ni8q10MELZgJ_JnO1x5YGoZIklilhkvISnr3fWKSmXyRb4_QtPRj4p2tmZ7HGvDBbBj-uHlkFm9S/s259/barbarian.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhihlj5EvpJFHiqyW4gH3TQiJlYltIksN42QUE0hS2_N9ubzF49_1jcKtiOWIKm-5TDY_O5yvUG39IKLQgSeMaqEgD9KT-Oy2CFPEcIqpXL5qgBhS6_ni8q10MELZgJ_JnO1x5YGoZIklilhkvISnr3fWKSmXyRb4_QtPRj4p2tmZ7HGvDBbBj-uHlkFm9S/s1600/barbarian.jpg" width="259" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span><br /></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>About
twenty-five miles north of the ancient city of York and about one hundred and
twenty five miles south of Berwick-upon-Tweed on the border with Scotland is
one my favorite British archaeological sites, the ruins of the magnificent
Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx.<span> </span>The
Cistercians, whose name derive derives from the Order’s mother house at Cîteaux,
about fifteen miles south of Dijon in Burgundy, was a major source of spiritual
renewal in the twelfth century.<span> </span>The
ruined abbey is spectacular, and its larger geographical context one of subtle and
changing beauty.<span> </span>In his fine little book
<i>Medieval England 1066-1485</i>* the great British medievalist Professor Sir
Maurice Powicke invoked this modest stretch of land in the North Riding of
Yorkshire, the Vale of Pickering from Rievaulx eastward, as an historical
summary of “the curiosity, the invasions of men and things which we call the
history of England.” In this one small area there is to be found evidence of
prehistoric cromlechs erected by human beings of unknown ethnicity, <span> </span>of multiple Viking<span> </span>raids and permanent settlements, of Pictish
slaughter, and Saxon conflict.<span> </span>There are
dozens of ancient stone enclosures from many periods in the hundred-mile
stretch between Rievaulx and Hadrian’s Wall.<span>
</span>Scandinavian influence on the vocabulary of northern English dialects is profound. The history of ancient strife, of invasion, expulsion, resistance and
the growth of new communities is written upon the landscape in stone.<span> </span>It is thus in miniature a model for the <span> </span>larger human history of the world, which is
the history of “settler colonialism”.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span>
</span>The best guess of the population of today’s Europe in the time of
Emperor Augustus was about forty-five million.<span>
</span>Today it is about eight hundred million.<span>
</span>The processes by which this vast increment in human population came
about are of course many and complex, but the </span><span class="s5"><i><span style="color: black;">Volkswanderung </span></i></span><span class="s5"><span style="color: black;">has not ceased, nor ceased
to have an agonistic dimension, whether on the Mediterranean island of
Lampedusa or in Eagle Pass, TX.</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="s5"><span style="color: black;"></span></span><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="s5"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="s5"><span style="color: black;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRb5fM_JRQPa-piuaJnjv14Ey7GZCA5I_-eux3wN-5J1ZUDT-MHTyvec-PvQ9gIynbjQqNVJazH1f7FJwnlMLgyfZL7dwGW0VKocVuwXNKVf1bl9ypjtMt-YgOeiUfAyNfkLgCFoQQ0hZvVkI7SnaelJmoSPoLmxhHBOy8XT4Q8p5BDLyWG0EqYVcp3kew" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="175" data-original-width="288" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRb5fM_JRQPa-piuaJnjv14Ey7GZCA5I_-eux3wN-5J1ZUDT-MHTyvec-PvQ9gIynbjQqNVJazH1f7FJwnlMLgyfZL7dwGW0VKocVuwXNKVf1bl9ypjtMt-YgOeiUfAyNfkLgCFoQQ0hZvVkI7SnaelJmoSPoLmxhHBOy8XT4Q8p5BDLyWG0EqYVcp3kew" width="320" /></a></span></span></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span class="s5"><span style="color: black;"> Rievaulx</span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>The
dictionary definition of colonialism is “control by one power over a
dependent<span> </span>area or population.”<span> </span>Broad as it is, this definition is inadequate
to describe the “Arab-Israeli problem.”<span>
</span>If we apply to the situation in the Gaza Strip the normal economic
explanation of colonialism—the desire to exploit for financial gain—the
inadequacy of the definition becomes yet more apparent. The origins of the catastrophe of the "Arab-Israeli" problem are to be found in a series of earlier catastrophes beginning no later than the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius and extending down to and beyond Hitler's Holocaust.<br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>I
long ago became dubious about grand historical theories, yet it does seem that
in its long development history exhibits certain broad principles.<span> </span>These include at times the ruthless Darwinian
principle of the survival of the fittest.<span>
</span>It is thus that <i>homo sapiens</i> the species has survived, developed,
<span> </span>and adapted over aeons.<span> </span>Is it really true, as Marx<span> </span>and Engels maintained, that “</span><span class="hgkelc"><span lang="EN">the
history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggles”?<span> </span>John Ball, the egalitarian
priest prominent in the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is credited with the
potent distych: “When Adam delved and Eva span/ Who was then the
gentle-man?”<span> </span>William Morris and other
early Socialists claimed him as an ancestor. </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="hgkelc"><span lang="EN"></span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWsZswnHgKf8ALNb3-WB3TGholn1TYUCEAv6_YKtJrhm5IeG25XPW8nevrUeDL7Lf63qXj7vALtimA2VTmxDeuCldrWN8M80nd0mfpFsC02roJi8gJe5R8pi6vxVFKmfzSmSTXuelUlaI6YZ6dEzS2VnSx0tuBsZmHOsqL5xresX2btUqKVknr5G1izO03/s1000/adamdelved.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="732" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWsZswnHgKf8ALNb3-WB3TGholn1TYUCEAv6_YKtJrhm5IeG25XPW8nevrUeDL7Lf63qXj7vALtimA2VTmxDeuCldrWN8M80nd0mfpFsC02roJi8gJe5R8pi6vxVFKmfzSmSTXuelUlaI6YZ6dEzS2VnSx0tuBsZmHOsqL5xresX2btUqKVknr5G1izO03/s320/adamdelved.jpg" width="234" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="hgkelc"><span lang="EN"><span> </span>Relatively small advantages in technology
could have huge political and social results.<span>
</span>How could fifty rough adventurers from Extremadura in an astonishingly
brief period of </span></span><span>time overcome the
mighty Aztec Empire with its thousands of ferocious warriors?<span> </span>How could the Empire of which the conquistadors
were a spearhead decay into political debility over a couple of centuries, yet
leaving behind around half<span> </span>a billion
native speakers of their language?<span> </span>And
how could <i>that</i> vast number yet be only roughly a <i>half</i> the number
of the native speakers of Chinese?<span> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">On the whole the history of the
treatment of many American Indians by the European immigrants who eventually
overwhelmed them is the history of crimes against humanity.<span> </span>Less well-known, because largely unrecorded,
is the widespread ferocious warfare among American tribal groups before they
were overwhelmed by European immigrants.<span>
</span>I do wish more of our citizens would read our early, now classical
historians, William Prescott and especially Francis Parkman.<span> </span>Particularly mind-opening is the second
volume of Parkman’s <i>England and France in North America</i> , entitled <i>The </i></span><i><span>Jesuits in North America in the
Seventeenth Century. </span></i><span>Parkman’s
principal sources were the eye-witness accounts of Jesuit missionaries
intimately familiar with the cultures of and genocidal warfare and barbarous
cruelty among various groups of Indian tribes in what is now Québec, Ontario
and the contiguous tier of bordering states in this country.<span> </span>The “story” that emerges is often terrible
indeed, but it defies the simplism of “land-stealers” and noble savages
alike.<span> </span>The annoying complexity of
historical </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">reality is what makes “Black Robe” a film of comparative historical integrity
and ambition and “Dances with Wolves” a romantic idyll in the lineage of “savage”
Romanticism found in Chateaubriand’s <i>Atala</i> or Les <i>Natchez</i> or for
that matter Fenimore Cooper’s <i>Last of the Mohicans</i>.</span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The high school graduation ceremony of
one of my granddaughters, which took place al fresco on a Hudson River venue in
lower Manhattan, began with the familiar prohemium recited by the headmaster, that
we were gathered on stolen land, the despoiled in this instance being Lenape
Indians.<span> </span>This statement of course
conflicts with the clear visual evidence of the event in 1626, <span> </span>admittedly recorded some years later by an
artist who knew what really happened.<span>
</span>The Dutchman Peter Minuit actually <i>bought</i> the island for a
handful of bling from an all-purpose treasure chest he never traveled without.<span> </span>As closing on such a choice property was a
ceremonial occasion, the seventeenth-century sellers thought it best to wear
their nineteenth-century Comanche warrior best.<span>
</span>To discern the facetiousness in grave matters is different from taking
them lightly.<span> </span>When we accept legend as
“history”—whether the legend be the predisposition of the contemporary
politically correct or of the nineteenth-century romantic—we are unlikely to be
much the wiser.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span> </span>The “Arab-Israeli conflict”
might actually be more tractable were it primarily an issue of “settler
colonialism.”<span> </span>In fact, it is of a
different and in some ways unique character.<span>
</span>Two groups of people lay claim to the same fairly small piece of land
which for differing reasons—history, religious conviction, the approbation or
disapprobation of the world community, or the principle of the Caucasian Chalk
Circle—they believe is theirs by <i>right</i>.<span>
</span>The certainty and passion with which such beliefs are acted upon lie
behind the absolutely unconscionable barbarity of the Hamas attack of October 7
and the unconscionable “collateral” slaughter attendant upon the Israeli
military response.<span> </span>There are by now perhaps
<i>twenty thousand</i> or more killed, mostly women and children, among the Gazan
population.<span> </span>And this “episode” is but one—albeit
a sensational one--of many in the course of my own lifetime.<span> </span>And, alas, the bitterness of this conflict, its
continuing incubation of long invested hatreds, its recurrently sanguinary
episodes, and the apparent ineffectiveness of the international community, have
themselves become perpetuating motives for its continuation.<span> </span>But the simplistic phrase “settler
colonialism” does little to explain, and nothing to resolve. Pray for more plowshares, fewer spears.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span></span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii7Rwq2yzucD9VtGR01S9ZzzAysdN2Cc2wzGBt0pM1tJjXK63loRJ7DMLZmOkxNbFzJ0f_IGaS0QL48zYpBjpRuEFP4431yzp10r0gC1vWIhO1cdp1hTc9fH9crXJ9Y_bRX3KmLUuYSftJ2JzAmNMpOC3nIrYWreQMWpjlheouNaPqor3MK84EO4peeu4Y/s739/before%20and%20after.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="739" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii7Rwq2yzucD9VtGR01S9ZzzAysdN2Cc2wzGBt0pM1tJjXK63loRJ7DMLZmOkxNbFzJ0f_IGaS0QL48zYpBjpRuEFP4431yzp10r0gC1vWIhO1cdp1hTc9fH9crXJ9Y_bRX3KmLUuYSftJ2JzAmNMpOC3nIrYWreQMWpjlheouNaPqor3MK84EO4peeu4Y/s320/before%20and%20after.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span>Negev Desert of Israel</span></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span><b>BEFORE AND AFTER IN PALESTINE <br /></b></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><span><br />Beit Hanoun, Gaza (BBC photo) </span></span></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWP5XZnDs_64ZcYIUBSGAcyoFydbaA9ys6qYtwAXruP_sFA7JhTJ1VDcyk_HTpVQgiRdlCBJa1AYrfE32UQjb90nSF-wX76LYz50lsRimyfGv5BERXRBqOCMslSwS3CuWPdS8eSH0wnMmP0zy5yaxOS_Iydmnu1VVRlywCzkTcqo8a9lKGqYv_haKJAEOg/s1129/_131546881_gaza_beit_hanoun_wide_before_after_oct21640_x2_nc.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1129" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWP5XZnDs_64ZcYIUBSGAcyoFydbaA9ys6qYtwAXruP_sFA7JhTJ1VDcyk_HTpVQgiRdlCBJa1AYrfE32UQjb90nSF-wX76LYz50lsRimyfGv5BERXRBqOCMslSwS3CuWPdS8eSH0wnMmP0zy5yaxOS_Iydmnu1VVRlywCzkTcqo8a9lKGqYv_haKJAEOg/s320/_131546881_gaza_beit_hanoun_wide_before_after_oct21640_x2_nc.jpg" width="290" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p> </p><p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">*London 1948, in the popular series “Home<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>University Library” intended for a general audience, with several later
reprintings.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p><style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-48616095193795869832024-02-07T01:45:00.000-08:002024-02-07T03:13:16.802-08:00The Inner Sanctum Edition<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQNarevVNnishuo163GSk5MTOrYU7kS1u724dSJRhFW5OltEK6rkk6o0ZnNK2JpHaRDs77V7uoqP0z2kJI_CmJV514REXMYAxIU6mCar8xbLPYYSsPJo4OPUzYPufEoumNSe4i4hCmcgo7q00XGtDtlC1I1AOwY2vwffelja87ptNDDLcLgPu_1MTthycU/s268/W&P.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="188" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQNarevVNnishuo163GSk5MTOrYU7kS1u724dSJRhFW5OltEK6rkk6o0ZnNK2JpHaRDs77V7uoqP0z2kJI_CmJV514REXMYAxIU6mCar8xbLPYYSsPJo4OPUzYPufEoumNSe4i4hCmcgo7q00XGtDtlC1I1AOwY2vwffelja87ptNDDLcLgPu_1MTthycU/s1600/W&P.jpg" width="188" /></a></div><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i> <span style="font-family: verdana;">War and Peace </span></i><span style="font-family: verdana;">(Inner Sanctum edition)</span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span>
<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>When
I last week announced the prospect of an essay about “the world’s greatest
novel,” I still felt somewhat tentative about actually writing it, but I soon
felt forced to do so under the goading of an eminent reader who immediately
emailed me “Ah, finally, we’ll have a blog post about <i>The Count of Monte
Cristo</i>!”<span> </span>Comments like that make it
difficult to maintain the intended air of bloggatorial pomposity for which I
aim.<span> </span>In fact, I lack the credentials to
write anything<span> </span>of general interest about
Tolstoy’s <i>War and Peace</i>, the novel to which I was of course
alluding.<span> </span>I do not know Russian, and I
am no expert in Russian literature even in translation.<span> </span>But I have read the Maude translation of <i>War
and Peace</i> several times over the years, with each reading bringing
augmented appreciation and admiration. <span> </span>So
I am a mere Tolstoy enthusiast, not a Tolstory scholar.<span> </span><span> </span>But
what I shall talk about here is my association with a particular edition of <i>War
and Peace</i> in the frequently published English translation by Aylmer and
Louise Maude. <br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTxtlFbWV7j4rYy79SSXz-F_j4qwHzo0PZ_GO2-sPY7WcoP1_DKJ1BdvusXjvGk0fNvr7JOcop5kjfSa7-u9LVpOvj5LzSMEZgI5B8ZXQWeIWnnvVoaYQZ3imUUtv7Vtat52wSZG20ZTWEqfXcRA0T-5zH4OPaKZBEpsu8huJP8UkiGDkwKfnr_9eaFjtm/s480/hqdefault.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="480" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTxtlFbWV7j4rYy79SSXz-F_j4qwHzo0PZ_GO2-sPY7WcoP1_DKJ1BdvusXjvGk0fNvr7JOcop5kjfSa7-u9LVpOvj5LzSMEZgI5B8ZXQWeIWnnvVoaYQZ3imUUtv7Vtat52wSZG20ZTWEqfXcRA0T-5zH4OPaKZBEpsu8huJP8UkiGDkwKfnr_9eaFjtm/s320/hqdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> Leo Tolstoy (1)-----Aylmer Maude (0)</span></span><br /> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>There
are of course many translations in English, and perhaps one who does not read
Russian should be shy of<span> </span>pontificating
about translations; but just watch me.<span> </span>The
Maude translation of Tolstoy reads, as it obviously should, like other great
door-stopper novels of the Victorian period, like<span> </span><i>Vanity Fair </i>(1847), or <i>The Cloister
and the Hearth</i> (1861) or <i>Les
Miserables </i>(1862) or <i>Middlemarch</i> (1871).<span> </span>Long resident in Russia, the Maudes were
fluent speakers of its language<span> </span>as
spoken by Tolstoy himself in his own social milieu.<span> </span>Both translators <span> </span>were highly educated and both were widely read
in the European fiction of their age.<span>
</span>Both of them were personal friends of Tolstoy.<span> </span>Aylmer Maude was a close friend.<span> </span>Both were on Tolstoy’s elevated ethical
plain.<span> </span>Both had literary interests of
their own.<span> </span>Those credentials impress me.<span> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipYBwQDIwYUw77vYx7QrRCrD28rZLCbgWcz1y5At9VvBg4nxVJe-Y6MHMSiChkoKMyZVDlv2kw2PHyri56-WFPUmzxQsdXjyZHeC3zV0FmZvtWPIBb8LLIfz_01C61mb0WlXQtLMzTDInO2iliESeTcF1X5AVC9KoxuBm5ahFsUuaN2hCa_ys7Yei6fqaJ/s254/tp.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="199" data-original-width="254" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipYBwQDIwYUw77vYx7QrRCrD28rZLCbgWcz1y5At9VvBg4nxVJe-Y6MHMSiChkoKMyZVDlv2kw2PHyri56-WFPUmzxQsdXjyZHeC3zV0FmZvtWPIBb8LLIfz_01C61mb0WlXQtLMzTDInO2iliESeTcF1X5AVC9KoxuBm5ahFsUuaN2hCa_ys7Yei6fqaJ/s1600/tp.jpg" width="254" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>But
I am talking about not merely a particular translation but a particular <i>edition</i>.<span> </span>I refer to the “Inner Sanctum” edition of the
novel published in New York in 1942 by Simon and Schuster.<span> </span>Everything about this book is pleasing to
me.<span> </span>It is physically imposing.<span> </span>Its 1370 pages make a paper block two and a
half inches thick.<span> </span>It is heavy enough to
serve as a door-stopper.<span> </span>The typeface
(Electra, in ten point) was one of the two most famous faces created by the
brilliant American typographer William Addison Twiggins (the other being
Caledonia).</span><span face=""Arial", sans-serif" style="color: #212121;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>I
first read <i>War and Peace</i> in this edition by serendipity, having borrowed
it from an Arkansas neighbor, whose father had picked it up at the end of the
War on a military base in the Philippines!<span>
</span>At that time I had no particular interest in typography, and didn’t even
read the introduction or note the name of its author.<span> </span>But education is a continuous process, and
I was destined later to find myself interested <span> </span>both topics—printing and Clifton Fadiman,
editor of the Inner Sanctum edition.<span>
</span>Fadiman’s name is no longer as famous as it was in the days when I was
becoming a serious reader and encountered it in essays and reviews everywhere,
or listened to his popular radio game show, “Information, Please.”<span> </span>He was a polymath literary intellectual in
the Edwardian style.<span> </span>Such popularizing
“super readers” are no longer in the national cultural sphere.<span> </span>He died at a great age in 1999.<span> </span>A line from his <i>Times </i>obituary: “In
the1940's and 50's, Mr. Fadiman's presence in and influence on American
intellectual life were ubiquitous. He prided himself on his skill as a
popularizer and on his ability to make lofty subjects accessible to people who
lacked his education and acuity.”<span> </span>He was
among the extraordinary influential group of Columbia University professors,
students, and drop-outs and “adjacents” <span> </span>(including Whittaker Chambers, Mark Van Doren,
and Lionel Trilling) famous in the mid-twentieth century.<span> </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span></span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiq16N0FVh4Ce6meIDU_BR2gNuDoB19WcHA2y-on7fXrI6uTksLIzbZwdAz2ToLPxgAOvLjhbNb_lmr2p-Wp0Zw7BuZZq4PFbbRGfYsziOcUtNufXSKLFecYvOxyK0WXL_hub0tgWC51IIVbw73NFsaEmkgW1nJdO2-bdI-iaiW78wbzHe-vdjThgWfuTcb" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="197" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiq16N0FVh4Ce6meIDU_BR2gNuDoB19WcHA2y-on7fXrI6uTksLIzbZwdAz2ToLPxgAOvLjhbNb_lmr2p-Wp0Zw7BuZZq4PFbbRGfYsziOcUtNufXSKLFecYvOxyK0WXL_hub0tgWC51IIVbw73NFsaEmkgW1nJdO2-bdI-iaiW78wbzHe-vdjThgWfuTcb" width="185" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span><span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> Clifton Fadiman</span></span></span></span>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>Fadiman
had to have written his long and illuminating introductory essay on <i>War and
Peace</i> no later than the very beginning of 1942.<span> </span>By then the German army was at the gates of
Moscow, but still distant from Stalingrad to the east and south, with the
outcome of the titanic struggle far from certain.<span> </span>But nearly half the essay is devoted to the
parallels (at the date of its writing) between Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in
1812—which is course the principal event of the <i>war</i> part of <i>War and
Peace</i>-- and the Wehrmacht’s advance in late 1941.<span> </span>Fadiman’s essay—illustrated by an
extraordinary map on the volume’s endpapers, is thus, in retrospect, an
astonishing if only implicit historical prophecy.<span> </span>I don’t have exact sales figures for this hugely
successful book, but judging from the comparatively large numbers still
available on the second-hand market over the years (40 on Abebooks at the
moment), they must have been very good. <span> </span><span> </span>There were many successive press runs.<span> </span>Over the years I myself have bought at least
fifteen used copies to give to friends.<span> </span>Unfortunately
even battered copies are no longer dirt cheap, as they were thirty years ago.<span> </span>But my point here is that many Americans must
have been reading it during the six months (August 1942 to February 1943) of
the Battle of Stalingrad, the beginning of the end of Hitler.<span> </span>The<span>
</span>defeat of the German Sixth Army under Friedrich Paulus was even more catastrophic
than that of Napoleon’s Grande Armée.<span> </span>A
good number of Frenchmen did return to their homeland alive, if barely.<span> </span>Readers of Fadiman’s “Foreword” might rightly
regard him as a prophet.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> By
the time I was writing <i>The Anti-Communist Manifestos </i>(2009) I knew a
good deal about Fadiman, who was peripherally involved with some of the
Thirties intellectuals with whom I dealt.<span>
</span>I concluded that by 1941 he was “gracefully sloughing off, without<span> </span>any dramatic gestures of political conversion,
the hard leftism of the mid-thirties.”<span> </span>I
don’t believe that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, but he
certainly was very far left; and like so many other Western leftists he had
been deeply shaken by the Hitler-Stalin “Devil’s Pact” of 1939.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> This
Inner Sanctum edition of <i>War and Peace</i> has several special
features.<span> </span>Though not “illustrated” it
has a striking jacket, end papers and title page art.<span> </span>The table of contents is unusually
detailed.<span> </span>At the end of the book is a
detailed <i>dramatis personae</i> or list of its myriad characters as they
appear sequentially in the text.<span> </span>Don’t
buy—or at least don’t pay more than ten bucks for-- a copy unless it<span> </span>includes the separate twelve-page brochure (“A
Readers’ Guide and Bookmark”) containing this same list of characters and maps
of Napoleon’s campaigns of 1805 and 1812.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRSbvcEh30-KYF6JUUa0ac8IeWPV-mfHCUWeqSJ1BpKe466zQCHqQqAyD9no4afwwQ1LPoWobNFVe9hOL9xkUPS5ssGQcEA-NMVOKrwr8-VhU1KMX-N1yTc6b-qn6XD8eLoTob4b5riu4-tmR15-UmNGhkBMOzD-X4q45D6Z13NlRLBWrvr0pPuKXG8Hlr/s275/WPbrochure.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="183" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRSbvcEh30-KYF6JUUa0ac8IeWPV-mfHCUWeqSJ1BpKe466zQCHqQqAyD9no4afwwQ1LPoWobNFVe9hOL9xkUPS5ssGQcEA-NMVOKrwr8-VhU1KMX-N1yTc6b-qn6XD8eLoTob4b5riu4-tmR15-UmNGhkBMOzD-X4q45D6Z13NlRLBWrvr0pPuKXG8Hlr/s1600/WPbrochure.jpg" width="183" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>I don’t know that <i>War and Peace</i>, a novel of three
quarters of a million words, can be called a “subtext” or a sub-anything, but
it, the novel, Tolstoy’s majestic creation, is what has stimulated me to my curious
historical discussion of one of what are probably dozens of its English
language editions.<span> </span>I feel justified in
this odd approach not merely because of the book’s genre (historical fiction) but
also because history might be said to be an active character in it.<span> </span>Many readers, including me, find a challenge
if not a stumbling block at the novel’s end: two substantial final chapters,
more than a hundred pages in all, dealing with the philosophy and at times it
seems theology of history.<span> </span>Among several
major themes of the first epilogue is the role of chance in history.<span> </span>It suggests a sort of cosmic capriciousness
very different from such common Providential (God is mysteriously in charge) or
Marxist (“dialectical materialism” is scientifically in charge) theories of historical
purposefulness.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>In
case my own essay is not yet sufficiently<span>
</span>perplexing, I shall add a comment illustrating the strange byways that
history can take by mentioning two old bed frames—a twin set of once beautiful
Scandinavian <span> </span>maplewood Thirties “modern”
design—that have been mouldering in our musty crawlspace for the last thirty
years.<span> </span>They were<span> </span>given to us (perhaps “unloaded on” would be the
better phrase) in an early stage of our married life by Joan’s one-time
employer, Hans Rosenhaupt.<span> </span>He was at the
time <span> </span>the head of the Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship Foundation.<span> </span>They had come
into the possession of the Rosenhaupts in an earlier unloading in the 1940s by
their friend and neighbor in Leonia, NJ—one Clifton Fadiman!</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-5628966622695360912024-01-31T01:16:00.000-08:002024-01-31T04:58:01.387-08:00The Gospel in Brief<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOjCa74n01roqHKNFdcnbDkDcasEqChb-0wWCPBRSRW8KSs-r0jZ3R-gxldD14la5ilc3sTtg5L4pDsSQpJlWKQJhvAdCajC7emvHk5zCB5dLVsabjMLWSVNc5rIFflMxD2vv8P8XCnQoBzPf97byV3ksufgrPynofIaaZeVf_Ne_wr9WPwGkn_vcuNFVe/s612/gettyimages-2661902-612x612.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="459" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOjCa74n01roqHKNFdcnbDkDcasEqChb-0wWCPBRSRW8KSs-r0jZ3R-gxldD14la5ilc3sTtg5L4pDsSQpJlWKQJhvAdCajC7emvHk5zCB5dLVsabjMLWSVNc5rIFflMxD2vv8P8XCnQoBzPf97byV3ksufgrPynofIaaZeVf_Ne_wr9WPwGkn_vcuNFVe/s320/gettyimages-2661902-612x612.jpg" width="240" /></a><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span>Leo Tolstoy</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> <span> </span>After disappointing
postponements caused by the weather, illness, and other forces hostile to
conviviality, our Montreal branch—younger son Luke, Melanie, and grandkids John
Henry and Hazel—were at last able to make a Christmas visit to Princeton a
couple of weeks ago.<span> </span>The visit was short
but jolly, and coincided with a magical but manageable snowfall that allowed
the kids to practice their various Canadian chops in<span> </span>the lakeside forest behind our house.<span> </span>Who could imagine that suburban New Jersey
would have anything to teach Montrealers about snow?<span> </span>I think the woods made the difference.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>Luke’s present for me was a
paperback book of modest appearance and size: <i>The Gospel in Brief</i>, by
Leo Tolstoy.*<span> </span>Luke knew I have found
myself deeply interested in the literary evidences of the influence of the
nineteenth-century “historical” or demythologized Jesus, especially that of
Ernest Renan, whose <i>Life of Jesus</i> (1863) brought down upon his head Pius
IX’s execration as “the arch-blasphemer of Europe” but probably allowed
thousands of others the route to a viable personal reconstruction of their own
inherited faith.<span> </span>By the time Tolstoy
entered his intensely religious period, Renan’s approach was “mainstream” among
European intellectuals.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>Tolstoy’s remarkable book, of
which I am embarrassed to say I was previously unaware, presents a single
continuous narrative of Jesus’s life as Tolstoy had abstracted and unified it
from the four gospels, making narrative <span> </span>adjustments in the first three designed to
increase the sense of a sequential story.<span>
</span>He found to his delight that John’s gospel already had the clear and
accurate chronology of his rearrangement of the synoptics.<span> </span>But that was by no means all he did.<span> </span>He edited out all the miraculous episodes,
and many of his “translations” are in fact radical reformulations in which it
is difficult to discern the textual skeleton of the original texts.<span> </span>The actual structuring principal of the book
is based on the sequential phrases of the Lord’s Prayer (<i>paternoster</i>).<span> </span>But the book is so “heretical” that it stood
absolutely no chance of being tolerated by any of the churches, and certainly
not by the Orthodox Church.<span> </span>He not so
much as tried to publish it in Russia, and in fact it was not published even in
Western Europe until after his death.<span> </span>In
its organizational principles it is a brilliant literary tour-de force.<span> </span>The Bible is the most widely published, and
the most widely written about book in the world.<span> </span>It is not easy to do something fundamentally
new with it.<span> </span>But it is far more than
literary cleverness and innovation.<span> </span>It
is a profoundly reverent and honest emblem of a great mind and a great heart
struggling with the claims of Christianity.<span>
</span>It is likely to challenge any Christian believer—and I am one—to examine
what it is, precisely that he or she actually <i>believes</i>.<span> </span>For it is also an essay on the meaning of
belief.<span> </span>Tolstoy is everywhere alert to
the liveliness of spirit and moribundity of letter.<span> </span>What is the meaning for <span> </span>a “believer” in, say, Judges 9:8?<span> </span>(“The trees went forth on a time to anoint a
king over them; and they said to the olive tree, ‘Reign thou over us’.”)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>I don’t like simply to gush
about books, but in this instance I find support in one of the A-List
intellectuals of the twentieth century.<span>
</span>Luke supplemented his gift of the book with an anecdote—well known to
students of philosophy, perhaps, but new to me.<span>
</span>Today’s graduate students in my line of work—that is, the analysis of works
of literature as possibly illuminated by the intellectual, philosophical, and linguistic
contexts in which they are created—find they must also confront a phalanx of
famed German-language philosophers, theologians, political analysts, linguistic
theorists, and social critics whose works, when translated into English, still
seem somehow to remain in German. <span> </span>I
refer to such intellectual heavy-weights and cultural superstars as <span> </span>Adorno, Buber, Carnap, Dilthey, Engels,
Feuerbach, and Gadamer.<span> </span>It appears that
the importance of knowing what these people have had to say is equalled only by
the difficulty in fully grasping their mode of saying it.<span> </span>There must be at least one such genius for
every letter of the alphabet, but as I cannot off the top of my head come up for one with
“I”, let me <span> </span>skip directly to <span> </span>“W” where we find, among others, Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1889-1951), generally regarded as among the most important of
twentieth-century philosophers.<span> </span>He dealt
with big issues, as might be suggested by the unfriendly title of his most frequently
name-dropped work, <i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</i>. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8BMuNelpWyuMJ9vKtMWQkL6Ta_ghqBO1XPE4k_SftdMsUFwQmNOoVWoxBVj-xwyc0X0uU9Ljd298LDa84soHcS1Yb2CTg8xaCo-7TDr2rWqeYlWjAPbP53gpSNFvmUUGG0nDjPB9AemnIamMT4yvSjBAxyY7Z757CkgGL8mU1wjLuyJBYqaEuO4ex2yN1/s290/Wittgenstein.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="174" data-original-width="290" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8BMuNelpWyuMJ9vKtMWQkL6Ta_ghqBO1XPE4k_SftdMsUFwQmNOoVWoxBVj-xwyc0X0uU9Ljd298LDa84soHcS1Yb2CTg8xaCo-7TDr2rWqeYlWjAPbP53gpSNFvmUUGG0nDjPB9AemnIamMT4yvSjBAxyY7Z757CkgGL8mU1wjLuyJBYqaEuO4ex2yN1/s1600/Wittgenstein.jpg" width="290" /></a></span></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span>Ludwig Wittgenstein</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span> </span><span><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>Wittgenstein was an Austrian nominal Catholic of
extraordinary intellectual acuity and distinguished social background.<span> </span>He was also<span>
</span>a person of emphatic social presence.<span>
</span><span> </span>In 1911 he sought out the already
famous Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, with whom he studied, argued, and
collaborated.<span> </span>Russell would later write
of him that </span><span class="hgkelc"><span lang="EN">“He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever
known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and
dominating.”</span></span><span><span> </span>The first World War broke out in his late twenties.<span> </span>Though the very epitome of international
European intellectuality, he served with distinction in the army of the
collapsing Austro-Hungarian army.<span> </span>As he
was readying himself to be sent off to his military duties he was in the small
old city of Tarnow, now in Poland.<span> </span>At
the last minute <span> </span>he hurriedly tried to
find a good book to while away the journey he faced.<span> </span>Time was short and options limited.<span> </span>He went into some kind of bric-a-brac shop
where there was to be found for sale precisely <i>one</i> book; so he bought
it.<span> </span>It was Tolstoy’s <i>Gospel in Brief</i>.<span> </span>It blew his mind, as we used to say. <span> </span>He carried it with him throughout his war
service, including its final phase as a prisoner of war in Italy, rereading and
studying it as opportunity allowed.<span> </span>It eventually
displaced his <span> </span>superficial and abandoned childish
Christian formation.<span> </span>What it replaced it
with is not easy to pin down.<span> </span>His
reaction was a stage in some kind of a religious conversion, but not an easy or
conventional one.<span> </span>Well, if the gospel in
Tolstoy’s book could catch a whale like Ludwig Wittgenstein, I feel justified
in my own minnow-level amazement at its discovery.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>I spent a career in large part trying to convince young
people that the world’s literature is an inexhaustible treasure and that its
masterpieces carry no “sell by” date.<span> </span>In
truth the idea required no hard sell. Still, one of the pleasures of old
age—and there are a few—is to confirm the validity of my own clichés peddled to
students throughout my own life. <i><span> </span></i>Others
have expressed the idea far better than I ever could.<span> </span>It would be difficult to improve on the
famous words of John Milton, a man who knew a good deal about<span> </span>books.<span>
</span>“</span><span class="hgkelc"><span lang="EN">A good book is the precious lifeblood of a<b> </b>master
spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to life beyond life.”</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="hgkelc"><span lang="EN"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="hgkelc"><span lang="EN"><span> </span>There are
many “master spirits,” remembering always that the primary sense of the Latin
from which the word <i>master</i> derives is “teacher.”<span> </span>Our great literary teachers come in both
sexes, and from many times and<span> </span>many
lands.<span> </span>They have left their gifts in
many languages.<span> </span>Leo Tolstoy was a master
spirit in more than one sense; but he is probably most widely known as the
author of the world’s greatest novel.<span>
</span>Whether there even <i>is</i> such a thing as the world’s greatest novel
is irrelevant, but I am more than willing to entertain the hypothesis.<span> </span>And I think I’ll devote my next essay to
it—sort of.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="hgkelc"><span lang="EN"><span> </span></span></span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>*Leo Tolstoy, <i>The Gospel
in Brief</i> , trans. Dustin Condren (NY:Harper, 2011), pp. 180</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> </span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-2895368086617947702024-01-24T01:56:00.000-08:002024-01-24T02:01:24.042-08:00Immolated Women<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgucjfBcdzClYFskQvc-EhdYrMaLR5ufNfGhMEBes1lUQW9WZQoZPJ91rvIxz5O-V4keP1H6OJt8mlt4rBtWU5pQZPiZAuJbD2jMFwMzqwgu-K1LGgbK1I8YxZ8H3h-yhzfJUwlMUmoLquIR6yuG5yxuskIXkGvDwg0kXB8kYH73RVxYoblQxJNPwewbP3n/s1520/800px-Inmaculada_Concepcio%CC%81n_(Tiepolo)%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1520" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgucjfBcdzClYFskQvc-EhdYrMaLR5ufNfGhMEBes1lUQW9WZQoZPJ91rvIxz5O-V4keP1H6OJt8mlt4rBtWU5pQZPiZAuJbD2jMFwMzqwgu-K1LGgbK1I8YxZ8H3h-yhzfJUwlMUmoLquIR6yuG5yxuskIXkGvDwg0kXB8kYH73RVxYoblQxJNPwewbP3n/s320/800px-Inmaculada_Concepcio%CC%81n_(Tiepolo)%202.jpg" width="168" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlTnkeVB-baWVGVVVHd6RZl-KV9UQfD_Uu1MobA4-v_F0L-FPPvsk46NMIYtK5TvHgwjztX7yT0egaEhhRaP6NWQL9VgAhimgpThC_GKVDFcn9amtf-_OMqpMtc4-obPzR7qnquLzjf86HUKVdqy3MC-zRjNSaPGu4lL_ulFRuKawIht1mLdR9PbN9z3zO/s245/Mary%20as%20Seamestress.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="206" data-original-width="245" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlTnkeVB-baWVGVVVHd6RZl-KV9UQfD_Uu1MobA4-v_F0L-FPPvsk46NMIYtK5TvHgwjztX7yT0egaEhhRaP6NWQL9VgAhimgpThC_GKVDFcn9amtf-_OMqpMtc4-obPzR7qnquLzjf86HUKVdqy3MC-zRjNSaPGu4lL_ulFRuKawIht1mLdR9PbN9z3zO/s1600/Mary%20as%20Seamestress.jpg" width="245" /></a></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>If
you have read Sterne’s <i>Tristram Shandy</i> you may remember the quixotic way
Sterne plays with John Locke’s discussion of the “association of ideas”—essentially
how one thought can lead to another in a wandering, circuitous and sometimes
comic direction. Throughout the book
there is running, slightly off-color, and entirely whimsical joke involving
grandfather clocks and marital sex.<span> </span>But “Lockean” <span> </span>associations can also be tragic.<span> </span>I have just been taken along a circuitous
mental path of tragedy, and I do mean circuitous.<span> </span>It began with memories of my grandmother’s
house in Denver where I spent some of the War years of the 1940s. Among a
relatively few decorations adorning its walls were a couple of cheaply
reproduced images of the Virgin Mary.<span>
</span>One of these was Tiepolo’s famous “Immaculate Conception.”<span> </span>The other, which I remember less clearly,
showed Mary as a seamstress, a theme, as I learned many years later, common in
the folkloristic iconography of medieval Europe.<span> </span>The illustration I found for this essay is
not identical to the print in my grandmother’s house.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>In
1854 Pope Pius IX (the famously long-serving Pio Nono) <span> </span>dogmatized the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.<span> </span>Thus,
Tiepolo’s painting is of an <i>idea</i> rather than an event.<span> </span>Allow me briefly to explain this doctrine,
since I have found that many knowledgeable people, and even a few learned ones,
mistakenly think it refers directly to the Virgin Birth of Jesus.<span> </span>It does not. It was a “pious belief,” a tenet
of popular thought, that has been widely but informally believed by some Christians
for centuries.<span> </span>It became theologically
“hot” in the thirteenth century, though only official dogma in the nineteenth.<span> </span><span> </span>It
refers to the supposed supernatural intervention by which <i>Mary’s own birth</i>
was shielded from the Original Sin inherited from Adam and Eve.<span> </span>The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception
seemed to be necessitated<span> </span>by Scholastic
logic in order to guarantee the human sinlessness of Jesus.<span> </span>In the later Middle Ages the Franciscans were
particularly zealous in championing the doctrine. <span> </span>A good deal of my scholarly work has related
to the medieval Franciscan Order, so that I have perhaps read more treatises on
the Immaculate Conception than are good for me.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>The Feast of the Immaculate Conception was
assigned the date of December 8.<span> </span>On that
day in 1863, <span> </span>in the huge church of
Santiago (Chile) that had been built by the Jesuits before their Order’s
expulsion from South America, there was a packed festival Mass attended by most
of the city’s elite, with many of the female worshippers wearing elaborate gowns
and dresses.<span> </span>A dropped candle or oil
lamp kindled a flash fire that “almost instantly” engulfed the entire
building.<span> </span>Partly because of seating
arrangements and partly because of the flammability of the women’s clothing,
the loss of life was much higher for females than for males.<span> </span>We lack exact numbers, but at least
twenty-five hundred, and possibly as many as four thousand worshippers were
immolated.<span> </span>It was perhaps history’s
largest known single building incendiary disaster.<span> </span>European anticlericalism, especially in Italy
and France, but also in republican circles in Latin America, was
bourgeoning.<span> </span>Garibaldi had originally
had high hopes for Pio Nono, but as the pope aged into bleak political reaction
he and his republican followers came to despise him.<span> </span>Blasphemous radicals scandalized the pious throughout
the Catholic world by suggesting that the catastrophe was a judgement on the
pope and his dogma of the Immaculate Conception!</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-6fk7NAAtUItvUuYcaLYIwjLoelubdrk-Rk3bO6iVugbntjftU2k9zH0Dz_iKI-LGi3n65xZ45NQiPwYuIkQVuBsTW4ri013lVq57c0wq12qeY2BTABCNVyAXdSpAmW2y6ENcJymFZjZxWw5aF_BBTk5SzDG_JyuRgSvIULna4r1yZhc-55OmRuo8rYUF/s443/Santiago.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="350" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-6fk7NAAtUItvUuYcaLYIwjLoelubdrk-Rk3bO6iVugbntjftU2k9zH0Dz_iKI-LGi3n65xZ45NQiPwYuIkQVuBsTW4ri013lVq57c0wq12qeY2BTABCNVyAXdSpAmW2y6ENcJymFZjZxWw5aF_BBTk5SzDG_JyuRgSvIULna4r1yZhc-55OmRuo8rYUF/s320/Santiago.jpg" width="253" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>The fire in the Church of the Company of Jesus in Santiago
de Chile, for all its horror, led to no particular reforms so far as I
know.<span> </span>But <span> </span>about fifty years later another disastrous immolation
of women, this one in Greenwich Village in New York, would prove to be an
important impetus in the advancement of the American labor movement.<span> </span>I refer to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (25
March 1911), which ravaged a factory in the upper floors of a building on Washington Place now owned by
New York University.<span> </span>I am personally
acquainted with the site of the old building, as it is very near the large
apartment house, also owned by NYU, in which our daughter and son-in-law have
lived for many years.<span> </span>(The roster of earlier
residents of note in that<span> </span>building
include Eleanor Roosevelt.<span> </span>Every inch of
lower Manhattan is “historic”.)<span> </span>The
product manufactured by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, the shirtwaist, is, or
rather mainly <i>was</i> (as it is no longer common) an item of female apparel.<span> </span>The shirtwaist is a long-sleeved blouse, sometimes
with wide shoulders, narrowing tightly at the waist—often quite a sexy item in
my view, by which I mean the view of book illustrators and Hollywood
costumers.<span> </span>In the late nineteenth
century low-paid workers, mostly young immigrant women in <span> </span>sweatshops in New York and Philadelphia,
produced untold thousands of them.<span> </span>Most
of the workers at the Triangle Company were young women, southern Italians and
Central European Jews, working for long hours seated at constantly humming sewing
machines.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi69e9psh-QzzPvLkGBJ14T6J79b-uqyhHjLwsg1_ER-AekEeWufniqmgvvIPfxu-HtNYNyspBmxYRuox0M02HUpxkp6_yFRpQfpizNtYU0_VlUAIRz_vGdK3lNRxeUPKi8GN4KCDq7v5i2M-gFEpyxrgVBnvDH9V-fdzxoAqUX_BhCYqkLoIvPaxl9k4Y0/s237/SHIRTWAIST.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="237" data-original-width="213" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi69e9psh-QzzPvLkGBJ14T6J79b-uqyhHjLwsg1_ER-AekEeWufniqmgvvIPfxu-HtNYNyspBmxYRuox0M02HUpxkp6_yFRpQfpizNtYU0_VlUAIRz_vGdK3lNRxeUPKi8GN4KCDq7v5i2M-gFEpyxrgVBnvDH9V-fdzxoAqUX_BhCYqkLoIvPaxl9k4Y0/s1600/SHIRTWAIST.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>The precise origin of the Triangle fire is uncertain.<span> </span>The post-fire investigation found that safety
precautions were casual.<span> </span>There was a
single and as it proved feeble exterior fire escape.<span> </span>Scraps of material, some highly flammable,
littered the floors beneath the sewing tables.<span>
</span>There were dust piles.<span> </span>Strict
prohibitions against smoking were at times violated.<span> </span>But what guaranteed unspeakable disaster when
fire broke out was the fact that the factory owners had <i>locked </i>the main
exit doors during working hours.<span> </span>The
owners said the motive was to discourage
theft.<span> </span>Some historians have claimed it
was to keep labor organizers <i>out</i>.<span>
</span>Once again, nearly total conflagration was said to be almost
instant.<span> </span>Between those actually
incinerated and those forced to leap to their deaths nearly 150 perished, the
large majority women and girls.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>It was at such a terrible price that significant
improvements in working conditions of the American garment industry were
achieved.<span> </span>The Triangle fire encouraged
the reformation of some of the more appalling practices<span> </span>of the sweatshops and hastened the
organization and powerful expansion of the International Ladies Garment Workers
Union, generally regarded as a major positive force in American labor history.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>The site of the Triangle fire now boasts an impressive and<span> </span>moving memorial to its victims of more than a
century ago.<span> </span>And in the whimsical ways
in which the Lockean association of ideas leads from one way to another I find
that I myself have a thematic link to that moment in history.<span> </span>For it just so happens that I am the <i>emeritus
</i>Louis W. Fairchild professor at my institution.<span> </span>Mr. Fairchild, who died in 1981 and whom I
never met, was the publisher of <i>Women’s
Wear Daily, </i><span>one of the most famous
trade journals in the country</span><i><span> </span></i><span>I
never met his son either, though he was the one who established “my” chair in his
father’s name.<span> </span>He was apparently for
decades a prominent and highly public figure in the New York fashion world.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxNn6-dp9RHzLPeq3qxmBk_uU4AUtwkf1bZKidqgoghF5C44uwaF_lKzZlSof8hPCVIIylqggnd167Hq8nvabDn7BGtl25JjJuSZQCIFMBG7YNxGjVBhT3T4TC-RcOm6Y0-kbKKZFNmq8AE8pN6dql7-CiIUZzIg7s8XJBMqG0EjLPi9Jr92NSWEQmQiqC/s280/images.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxNn6-dp9RHzLPeq3qxmBk_uU4AUtwkf1bZKidqgoghF5C44uwaF_lKzZlSof8hPCVIIylqggnd167Hq8nvabDn7BGtl25JjJuSZQCIFMBG7YNxGjVBhT3T4TC-RcOm6Y0-kbKKZFNmq8AE8pN6dql7-CiIUZzIg7s8XJBMqG0EjLPi9Jr92NSWEQmQiqC/s1600/images.jpg" width="280" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-2262646095331041402024-01-17T01:40:00.000-08:002024-01-17T01:40:13.751-08:00The End of Merit?<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibx86V96oeYLBuIjwTo076dRxRfovM6K9-JY_Fo_nDfpOs7yddGEmvNiZryWLMCrBKoSrfGhdqVz8AtZynzyY8qlfyQyg13BqKCh2M5GpNQtf8A7_gOublZDlXgpp142vJHexVRCxcXG2sTO9IFp_Amd22MhOQ7gnEWuW_Qnavq5OVujKZ_TVch4q3Y434/s267/images.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="189" data-original-width="267" height="189" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibx86V96oeYLBuIjwTo076dRxRfovM6K9-JY_Fo_nDfpOs7yddGEmvNiZryWLMCrBKoSrfGhdqVz8AtZynzyY8qlfyQyg13BqKCh2M5GpNQtf8A7_gOublZDlXgpp142vJHexVRCxcXG2sTO9IFp_Amd22MhOQ7gnEWuW_Qnavq5OVujKZ_TVch4q3Y434/s1600/images.jpg" width="267" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">Meritorious striver and his creator, Horatio Alger</span><br /><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;"> </span></div>
<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">“DEI”
is hot—or perhaps the verb should be plural, DEI <i>are</i> hot, as each letter
stands for its own nominal concept: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This trinity of fair dealing designed to
limit the damage inflicted by decades of white prejudice<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is potentially applicable to many aspects of
personal and social life; but just at the moment it is especially current in
discussions of higher education, and more especially in relation to the racial
categories of students accepted by institutions of higher learning and to the
racial compositions of college faculties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Oversimplifying only slightly, the aspiration of the DEI regime would be
to achieve a social mix of both students and faculty that would reflect
approximately the same ethnic profile on campus as is to be found in the
general population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the moment
roughly 14% of our American population is of African and 6 or 7% of Asian
ancestry.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">I
would be happier with the slogan if its last term were to be <i>inclusivity</i>
rather than <i>inclusion</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My
preference is not wholly based in euphony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That slight change would underscore the revolutionary aim of the project
by echoing the rhythms of the motto of the French Revolution: <i>liberté,
égalité, fraternité</i>—an inspiring motto still prominent on thousands of
public buildings in France.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the
really problematic English term is <i>equity</i>, a word used with differing
connotations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its most general sense, <i>fairness</i>,
is one to which we can all subscribe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But to some who are advancing the DEI regime equity is taken to promise
equality of <i>outcomes</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is one
thing to guarantee an equable opportunity of access to an open competition and
another to foreordain the results to conform to skin-color statistics.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">The
latter, mind you, is by no means an indefensible position.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dream of absolute social equality, though
never achieved, lies latent in the democratic dogma. The distribution of physical
prowess, mental acuity, skills and talents is not uniform among the human race;
but it would be at least theoretically possible to make a social division of
the world’s material goods on grounds of strict equality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the famous apothegms of Karl Marx is
that allotment of resources should be made on a socially equable basis: “from
each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such a revolutionary redistribution of
material resources might seem to guarantee that no one could be “born on third
base” because there would be no bases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
situation might last as long as fifteen minutes.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: 16pt;">The
History</span></i><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> <i>of the French Revolution</i>
by Jules Michelet, still among the most famous books devoted to what is
probably the defining cultural event of Western modernity, surprisingly begins
with an essay in historical <i>theology</i>: “Concerning the religion of the
Middle Ages”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This may seem
curious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The historian had abandoned
Christian belief<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>early and was a
ferocious enemy of the Jesuits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his
introductory chapter Michelet contrasts the discarded medieval world as a
regime of <i>grace</i> (as in “grace and favor”) with a regime of revolutionary
<i>justice</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many well-meaning
enthusiasts of DEI seem to think of <i>equity</i> as <i>justice</i> in
Michelet’s sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But for me the
historical evidence of the results of the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions
suggests that the theory leads to neither equity nor to justice but to the
annihilation of the specific individual in the sea of statistical
abstraction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Koestler’s <i>Darkness at
Noon</i>, one of the truly consequential novels of the twentieth century, is
perhaps the most forceful literary amplification <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of the idea in practice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Koestler’s French publisher changed its title
to <i>Le Zéro et l’Infinie</i>—<i>Zero and Infinity</i>--the individual being
nothing, and the “masses” everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is a point developed in one of the more philosophical moments in a
dialogue between the doomed central character and his NKVD interrogator.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">I
stick with the now embattled idea that when all is said and done, human beings
are to be judged, in Martin Luther King’s famous phrase, “on the content of
their character.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To do so is to
acknowledge individual <i>merit</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
of the best-selling American writers of the later nineteenth century was
Horatio Alger, and although few people today have read any of his books, his
name is still known by many as a specialist in the rags-to-riches plot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The typical Alger hero was a young man who by
his pluck, talent, and industry overcame the disadvantaged circumstances of his
origins to achieve material and social success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This has been called “bootstrap capitalism,” but it always depends upon
a Helping Hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Horatio Alger
template is partly hokum, but only partly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In my experience it is more convincing than the oppressor-oppressed
model.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But of course we all tend to turn
our individual life experience into a useful social template.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to consider myself a meritocrat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surely we all want to consider ourselves
meritocrats.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A great deal has changed since I was
young.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To judge from the press it is now
something newsworthy to be the first college graduate in your family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was common among my contemporaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “GI Bill” alone must have expanded the sociology
of American college graduates hugely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
remember being at a conference of Danforth Fellows in the late 1950s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was a group of highly select doctoral
students in the humanities bankrolled by a midwestern foundation established by
an agricultural tycoon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At our
conference the Harvard Dean of Arts and Sciences (a job of storied eminence
later held by Claudine Gay on her rise to the presidency) said in a lecture to
the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>assembled fellows that the great
challenge facing American higher education in the 1960s and 70s would be
producing PhDs rapidly enough to meet the ever-expanding need for more college
professors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could this be done at scale
while sustaining true standards of excellence?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We felt we were part of a large wave of dynamic, positive social change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even Homer nods, but I personally still feel that way. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">In
the polemical atmosphere both evidenced and exacerbated by the <i>de facto</i>
firing of Harvard’s president it is not surprising that academic DEI regimes
are loudly defended as effective instruments of social justice by one group and
decried as gravy trains for race hustlers by others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the debate, if one can dignify it with
that name, is likely to be unproductive so long as the credentialed proponents
of “diversity” think that word means “more people who think just like me.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-30588259543039911032024-01-10T01:22:00.000-08:002024-01-11T01:46:33.900-08:00Harvard, Humiliated<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLdVPUs8SE9zMvFY8LWxSJapMcG73EiR5D6PjpRn8FF5PRIIWlZq8kFb1Vmwr87ItRIKVB6TY6qJud8iYpWw7Rav5qcGDWNM0kQAENxJJmFwXZIRfkci_2i0Dak0QygUhvdrW77VUlnw_cokKH4WrJ1P8VhYMju3VBJvJi96ZlT7PhnsbIy7MQDL4ujAo8/s259/images.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLdVPUs8SE9zMvFY8LWxSJapMcG73EiR5D6PjpRn8FF5PRIIWlZq8kFb1Vmwr87ItRIKVB6TY6qJud8iYpWw7Rav5qcGDWNM0kQAENxJJmFwXZIRfkci_2i0Dak0QygUhvdrW77VUlnw_cokKH4WrJ1P8VhYMju3VBJvJi96ZlT7PhnsbIy7MQDL4ujAo8/s1600/images.jpg" width="259" /></a></div><br />
<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">It has been a month since I
wrote about the disastrous Congressional hearing at which the presidents of
three of our most prestigious universities gave testimony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 16pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">I concluded that essay with the
following sentence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It is possible,
barely possible, that this debacle in a congressional hearing room will lead to
some good.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is hardly a confident
or optimistic remark, but as things are turning out it is not nearly
sufficiently tentative or guarded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
it now seems likely that far from lancing the boil, this episode is likely to
inflame it further.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
presidents—all of them highly accomplished, credentialed, and experienced —testified
in a fashion at its best disappointing and at its worst disastrous concerning
the intellectual health of their institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Let me expand that sentence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Their testimony had to do with the intellectual and <i>spiritual</i>
health of their institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For though
education is no longer frequently a religious enterprise, at its best it is
often a spiritual one, especially when its subject matter is the modern versions
of the “liberal arts”, the old <i>trivium</i> and <i>quadrivium</i> of the
medieval schools.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">Here
the word <i>spiritual</i> is being used not in distinction to <i>secular</i>,
but perhaps to <i>material</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All our
earliest universities were born as religious institutions; the evolution of all
of them has been secular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they all continue
to claim, and rightly claim, intellectual and cultural aspirations beyond the
utilitarian and the vocational.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
implicit acceptance and valorization of this claim by society at large forges
the bond uniting it with the higher education “industry.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ordinary folks may be nearly wholly ignorant
of the “ivory tower” or bemused by its eccentricities, but they have been at
least subliminally convinced of its important social role.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">During
the forty years of my own teaching career, despite all the minor league drama
that comes with dealing with a large variety of often temperamental people on a
regular basis, hardly a day passed without my pinching myself to make sure I
was immersed in real life rather than a dream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Was it really possible that I was being paid good money to do something
that wild horses could not prevent me from doing for free?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not everyone gets to follow a vocation,
carried out among ever-changing throngs of exciting and often inspiring young
people, that is so plausibly useful as well as pleasant.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The
tardy resignation of Harvard’s president, a resignation at least tacitly
demanded by her employers, dissolves the bonds of an unwritten contract.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I call it “tardy” because the first response
of the Harvard Corporation was an imprudently strong affirmation of seemingly
enthusiastic support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This essay is not
about the ex-president personally, but about how the “question” of American
higher education has instantly been transformed into a major battlefield of our
culture wars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>News from our universities
seldom makes a big splash in the press.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But on page 2A of today’s (Tuesday’s) paper, the “Inside the <i>Times</i>”
page, there is a whole article detailing the extraordinary interest that recent
events in Cambridge Mass have garnered far beyond the Harvard campus.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">For
Harvard is special.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I called it the
greatest university in the world, and I am willing to stick by that for
purposes of convenience, despite the fact that the genius of our higher
education is the variety which renders such a judgement symbolical if not
meaningless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least let us agree that
Harvard is “iconic.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>average Americans think of the acme of higher
education in this country—you must grant my premise that average Americans do
exist and that some of them from time to time might think about higher
education--they are likely to think “Harvard”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I am old enough to remember when President Eisenhower’s Secretary of
State caused a bit of a stir by suggesting that what was good for General
Motors was good for America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this
instance I have to think that what is bad for Harvard is bad for America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I think what has just gone down in
Harvard Yard is likely to be <i>quite</i> bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There are not too many large institutions in this country that command
wide-spread admiration or even respect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Our Congress is a disgrace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our
system of primary and secondary education, though impossible to categorize
easily, is generally mediocre when compared with world leaders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The distribution of the nation’s nearly
incalculable wealth, which is mainly managed by people whose job is to make
rich people richer, is grossly, possibly dangerously, uneven.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Religious institutions and their leaders no
longer play a major role in our national life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Our great universities have been the world’s envy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We could do without thrusting them into the
vortex of nasty polemic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it has
immediately turned nasty. A good deal of the fault lies with the Harvard board
whose investigative diligence has been less than keen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was perhaps imprudent to endorse the
embattled president so fulsomely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
not-so-subtle <i>volte face</i>, when it came, smacked rather of the G-men
determined to get Al Capone at any cost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Fortunately for them Capone hadn’t been paying his taxes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who could have guessed that the wild card in
Cambridge would be pre-presidential <i>plagiarism</i>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The origins of plagiarism are not always
sinister, but they are never wholly innocuous, let alone flattering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in the academic context plagiarism—and
what you have here is, yes, plagiarism—has to be taken seriously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a gross offense against fairness or
what they call “equity”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not to be
judged non-existent because the whistle-blowers are your political enemies or
simply strike you as unpleasant people with bad motives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And as this plays out, it is very
disappointing that among the first cards to be played is the race
card—disappointing, but sadly probably inevitable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-4662879407809578192024-01-03T01:16:00.000-08:002024-01-03T05:12:39.586-08:00From the Irresolute Desk<p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGGFCdlNKJd57gPVxraTjRoTXwu5LCjhp8fawLaErTT6kAmGN1vZJ-SFBWaVEL8RwF-nTMwMzIuxFEJTiwE0MDuo7nSxVFAZi77LMkuSgsQm0JeZKexhzkfMDVEtMK5fTJ33_y7yy5m6W2zMYJWuWey1Y1LMO9cegbJIpIJ-Yx2iwWapDsofR7AdKWQiGk/s245/BRYANT.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="245" data-original-width="206" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGGFCdlNKJd57gPVxraTjRoTXwu5LCjhp8fawLaErTT6kAmGN1vZJ-SFBWaVEL8RwF-nTMwMzIuxFEJTiwE0MDuo7nSxVFAZi77LMkuSgsQm0JeZKexhzkfMDVEtMK5fTJ33_y7yy5m6W2zMYJWuWey1Y1LMO9cegbJIpIJ-Yx2iwWapDsofR7AdKWQiGk/s1600/BRYANT.jpg" width="206" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">Jacob Bryant</span><br /></div><div> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span>My possibly cryptic title invokes a famous piece of nineteenth-century furniture, somewhat
reminiscent of a small, beached whale, that adorns the office of the President
of the United States in the White House: the "Resolute Desk."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Unfortunately I sit behind an Irresolute Desk. I am good neither at the making of resolutions nor at the
keeping of those made, but since I write this on New Year’s Day, the pressure
is on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, while I am not resolving
actually to <i>do </i>anything except think about something I <i>might </i>do,
I intend in this new year to dip a toe of pussy-footing possibility into the
shallow end of the kiddies’ pool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be
a little less oblique, I am thinking about undertaking another book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I guess I am in the situation of one of our obscure
politicians who announces at a sparsely attended news conference that he is
establishing an “exploratory committee” to look into his possible prospects as
a presidential candidate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As you read
the newspaper squib about this on page seventeen, you are already pretty
certain the squib is the last you will hear of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I am appointing myself an exploratory
committee of one to consider the wisdom of an eighty-seven year old man
undertaking a major writing project still needing significant primary
research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With artful procrastination I
probably can take up the whole year with committee meetings.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span>During the pandemic, to improve the unshining hours, I put
in a lot of time on a Duolingo Portuguese language course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My studies eventually led me—as I have
explained before in this blog—to discover a major novelist<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>whose very name I cannot remember having
encountered earlier: José Maria Eça de Queiróz, or Queirós (1845-1900).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eça was the conduit by which I became
usefully sidetracked into the fictional manifestations of developments in
biblical criticism and interpretation as reflected in some major European
writers, in the century between the birth of George Eliot (b. 1819) and the
death of Mikhail Bulgakov (d. 1940).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That is roughly speaking my proposed topic, and it is of course
enormous.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span>How to share with you some sense of what I have in mind?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I might well begin with the most famous novel
dealing with my chosen theme, as it is also a strong competitor for the rank of
greatest novel in the English language: George Eliot’s <i>Middlemarch</i>,
first published in 1871/2 but set in the era of the Reform Bill of 1832.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a book with many plots, perhaps too many,
but the “through line” is the history of a remarkable woman named Dorothea
Brooke, a provincial orphan, and the ward of an uncle whose affable pomposity
at times invites our affection and at others our derision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A major theme of the book is the clash
of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>older and newer modes of social,
political, scientific, and religious thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The book begins with Dorothea, not yet twenty, naively accepting a
marriage proposal from the Rev. Edward Casaubon, a country parson of
considerable means and an erudite amateur scholar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Casaubon is bogged down in apparently endless
research for a vast literary, historical, and theological study called <i>The</i>
<i>Key to All Mythologies</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
conclusion of his vast researches (determined long before he has concluded them),
will prove that all the great myth systems of the ancient world are but
distortions or mangled memories of the true revelations of Moses in the
Pentateuch: in other words a “fundamentalist” (as we might now call it) defense
of the historicity and inerrancy of the Bible.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiybHPjGoYmVpu5OJi72EvPsOHfEDL264cutOXvJBvq9UcdTKznm-Q9cJ8qGNfPb0uWfZWMHnVv6FXzBKS1YYRDR8J18orymEiGgk5myZw0EAYbO0du1B6gwReb_oUYOrZiV5IokSvrdo6TFeJeqYQ2d_id56Jgb2ZiVCFaYzKg79ftGNNheDrYFSPPIlMa/s175/ELIOT%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="175" data-original-width="130" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiybHPjGoYmVpu5OJi72EvPsOHfEDL264cutOXvJBvq9UcdTKznm-Q9cJ8qGNfPb0uWfZWMHnVv6FXzBKS1YYRDR8J18orymEiGgk5myZw0EAYbO0du1B6gwReb_oUYOrZiV5IokSvrdo6TFeJeqYQ2d_id56Jgb2ZiVCFaYzKg79ftGNNheDrYFSPPIlMa/s1600/ELIOT%202.jpg" width="130" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">George Eliot</span><br /></div></div><div> <p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“George
Eliot” is of course the pen name of a woman named Mary Ann Evans who was not
merely a Bible reader, having been raised in Evangelical piety that she later
abandoned, but a real Bible scholar, the translator of revolutionary works of
German theology such as D. F. Strauss’s <i>Life of Jesus</i> (1835/36) and
Feuerbach’s <i>The Essence of Christianity</i> (1841).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her abandonment of orthodox Christian belief,
though it scandalized many of her contemporaries, did nothing to qualify her
life-long admiration of the literary qualities of the Authorized English
Bible.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There are
many dimensions to the literary exposition of the sterility of Dorothea’s relationship
with her considerably older husband, who sees in her a subservient research assistant rather than
anything approaching an intellectual partner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But his vast and wacky <i>Key to All Mythologies</i> is itself a major
load-bearing pillar of the novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
exemplifies<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in intellectual terms the
“dead hand” with which Casaubon would seek to crush his wife’s spirit and
control her even from his grave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Casaubon’s erudite stultification would renew and expand the enterprise
of numerous episodes of intellectual reaction of the eighteenth century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Specifically, it is clear that his <i>magnum</i>
<i>opus</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in endless progress <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is a fictional <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>extension, expansion, or imitation of the work
of the Cambridge antiquarian <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>theologian
Jacob Bryant (1715-1804) entitled <i><span style="background: white; color: #111111; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">A New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology </span></i><span style="background: white; color: #111111; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">(1774–76).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Motivated by the same aims pursued by <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Casaubon—to defend supernatural Christianity
and biblical inerrancy—Bryant erected one of history’s more amazing piles of
learned nonsense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His method was
pseudo-philological, consisting mainly of the etymological reduction to three-
or four-letter “roots” of personal and place names found in ancient Near
Eastern and classical texts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These roots he presented <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as crucially related to vaguely similar forms
to be <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>found in the Pentateuch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The relevant part of his lengthy article in the <i>Dictionary of</i></span><i> </i><i><span style="background: white; color: #111111; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">National Biography</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #111111; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> can be
summarized in one sad sentence:</span> “His research is remarkable, but he had
no knowledge of oriental languages, and his system of etymology was puerile and
misleading." </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Eliot critics, especially the
female ones, are wont to beat up on Casaubon, and Lord knows, he deserves
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is prissy, pedantic, emotionally
stingy and as we now say “controlling” to an extreme degree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His treatment of his young wife is one of
literature’s more convincing depictions of domestic emotional cruelty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Graduate students of English literature long
ago found in Casaubon and his monstrous <i>Key to All Mythologies</i> the
archetypes of pedantic futility that too often haunt their nightmares.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We can all
endorse the condescension with which Eliot’s readers have scoffed at the
wrong-headedness and futility of his white-elephant scholarly enterprise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will
Ladislaw (Casaubon’s younger cousin, a spirited modern idealist with modern
ideas and a modern temperament, who eventually marries the widowed heroine) does
so within the text of <i>Middlemarch </i>itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ladislaw<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>specifically alludes to Bryant’s works—part of the sluggish pond of the
past that in the novel the wave of political Reform promises to refresh--as the
emblems of an antiquated intellectual order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But we can scoff at his biblical studies only in the same way we can<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>scoff at the adepts of alchemy, who, believe it
or not, were still fairly numerous at the dawn of the nineteenth century. There
is scant philological difference in English between <i>alchemy</i> and <i>chemistry</i>,
save that the latter has shed its Arabic article.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>project of the alchemists, however, was a fantastic and sterile one in
terms of its stated goal to transmute base metal into gold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even so, through the centuries of the
Renaissance and early modernity the alchemists perfected many of the techniques
crucial for the emergence of <i>real</i> chemistry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I find here an analogy with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>numerous episodes in intellectual
history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The shining pearl is the
oyster’s response to the irritating grain of sand, and that fact makes the sand
of interest in itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of this calls
for exploration with or without a committee. But is the world really in need of a <i>Key to the Key</i>?<br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p></div>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-77801673728583480102023-12-27T09:40:00.000-08:002023-12-27T09:41:41.166-08:00Langone Christmas<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFpo0wwUjEdv9KIcpKRbH6asbq2owgfwZkITPtR61Eyw0h4lMdtdkmZKF31qSUcOC7SFC9VMv6pE-NsyMYtQdQFdRZCuEfBXCj4KBePsY-e1VvBDP_HGaSkq3yGC_HtEoU3LjlG0leRXnGRKuKjHBX_2JtsBEyMlIgUdi9tVtykyXrYbT-usBtysYhsApy/s284/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="177" data-original-width="284" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFpo0wwUjEdv9KIcpKRbH6asbq2owgfwZkITPtR61Eyw0h4lMdtdkmZKF31qSUcOC7SFC9VMv6pE-NsyMYtQdQFdRZCuEfBXCj4KBePsY-e1VvBDP_HGaSkq3yGC_HtEoU3LjlG0leRXnGRKuKjHBX_2JtsBEyMlIgUdi9tVtykyXrYbT-usBtysYhsApy/s1600/download.jpg" width="284" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Life is sort of like a box of chocolates--but not really <i>very</i> much like one. But the sharp edges on the box may come to mind. On Christmas Eve Joan and I were lyfted into New York City to celebrate Christmas with our daughter's family. By late in the afternoon I was feeling rather lousy. I had to struggle through an excellent dinner, went to bed early, fell into a brief sleep from which I soon awoke violently ill expelling disgusting materials from major orifices of intake and expulsion and generally convincing myself and the whole household that my last hour had come. Before midnight I had been transported in dramatic fashion to NYU Langone Hospital. Santa himself had not yet arrived, though hundreds of nurses dressed in reindeer getups appeared to be eagerly awaiting him as they busily went about their varied tasks. Whatever the category two notches beyond the surreal is, this was it. The hero of the event was my son-in-law Zvi, whose only couch of repose was the hard floor.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">What a hospital! Everything works like clockwork, even if it is sometimes a cuckoo. Midnight on Christmas Eve with the animation of Grand Central Station at 5 pm. It took most of the night, but expert technicians dealing in sordid matter eventually found that it was the dread sapo-virus--a diagnosis that brings with it an embarrassing mandatory exhortation to improve one's personal hygiene and practice much hand-washing. Meanwhile expert, cheerful and high performing nurses spending their Christmas Eve taking care of the likes of me. Between these professionals and a loving family, the most memorable Christmas gift of my life. I hope to be sprung as early as this evening. Not much of a blog essay, but considering the circumsances, a small miracle. Gratias Deo and best wishes to all readers. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-4801389552420011152023-12-20T00:48:00.000-08:002023-12-20T00:48:48.292-08:00Christmas: Father, Son, and Uncle<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 18pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh2e4-lsJks2HFQHX9Vlxz3GcJMxYICJg6Zq7SCVbnk_uHHkHvvJcKPqvn8Go_UqFbofgzp8aiKsFffD0HAEnCdia5DgIbs70OXSi5S_HuHSOjVwzbZRCZDgd30L4_AF9HOZP9VCIcj2Mbs7jUt9BtzLRdjV_W-eVLF3DIc5wC8Yf7r17p2SfE5pWX6bcP/s400/9780875658360-2T.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="267" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh2e4-lsJks2HFQHX9Vlxz3GcJMxYICJg6Zq7SCVbnk_uHHkHvvJcKPqvn8Go_UqFbofgzp8aiKsFffD0HAEnCdia5DgIbs70OXSi5S_HuHSOjVwzbZRCZDgd30L4_AF9HOZP9VCIcj2Mbs7jUt9BtzLRdjV_W-eVLF3DIc5wC8Yf7r17p2SfE5pWX6bcP/s320/9780875658360-2T.jpg" width="214" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>James Magnuson—novelist,
playwright, for many years the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at
the University of Texas, and for even more years than that the bosom buddy of
Joan and John Fleming—has just come out with a timely new novel you would do
well to check out during the Christmas season: <i>Young Claus</i>.*<span> </span>The biographical subject here is not the atom
spy Klaus Fuchs, but old Saint Nick, the Fed Ex of children’s Christmas gifts,
whose actual biography has been seriously confused over the centuries in the
local traditions of the many lands of Christendom.<span> </span>Sound historical information has been
wanting.<span> </span>Though there have been
significant advances in Kringleology since Leclerc’s breakthrough and still
controversial study of 1896 (<i>Le Père de Père Noël</i>), surprisingly little
attention has been devoted to the obscure infancy and early development of the
Gifter Who Keeps on Giving.<span> </span>It is this
much-needed lacuna that has been filled, albeit it in an occasionally
speculative manner, by Magnuson’s <i>Young Claus</i>.<span> </span>I was privileged to read this work in an
early stage of its development.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>The intensity of the season
and the publication of my friend’s book set me on a trip down Memory Lane
concerning a Klaus-figure in my own early life and, in particular, of a
marvelous Christmas episode related to him.<span>
</span>It is the story of my Uncle John and the magic Christmas tree.<span> </span>There is a fancy anthropological term, <i>avunculate</i>,
that refers to the special relationship to be found in certain old societies between
nephews and maternal uncles.<span> </span>It is of
importance in some works of our early literatures.<span> </span>The relationship was one of mentoring, of
protecting, and sometimes of discipline.<span>
</span>(The word “mentor,” incidentally is highly literary, being the personal
name of a character in Homer’s <i>Odyssey</i>, the tutor of Telemachus.) I did
have one maternal uncle, Uncle George, but I barely knew him.<span> </span>It was from my father’s two brothers, John and
Wayne, and especially John, whose namesake I was, that I benefited from abundant
traditional avuncularism.<span> </span>John was my
beloved mentor when I was young.<span> </span>And
with him mentoring more than once meant joining in secret conspiracies.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>There were seven Fleming
siblings, three men and four <span> </span>women
who<span> </span>at various times <span> </span>lived in proximity in a sparsely populated
community south of Mountain Home, Arkansas.<span>
</span>This area was six or seven miles south of the town and not too far from
the north bank of the White River.<span> </span>In
what I shall call the main house lived my two uncles, both unmarried,<span> </span>and, at various times, no fewer than four
aunts, two of whom never married.<span> </span>At the
time of today’s story, the nuclear family of which I was a part lived in a
smaller house about a mile away. <span> </span>My
Uncle John visited us very often.<span> </span>He was
<span> </span>particularly devoted to my mother, with
whom he played endless games of cribbage.<span>
</span>He also liked to give her surprise gifts, trophies from the fields and
the woods through which he often wandered for miles: flowers, leaves,
interesting fungi, beautiful or curious stones, beautifully weathered wood, things
like that.<span> </span>My mother, who for many years
was nearly housebound,<span> </span>had a small
museum of such trophies.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>One Christmas my dad and I
had hurriedly cut a Christmas tree in a nearby glade and brought it to the
house.<span> </span>It was a cedar.<span> </span>There is not a lot of evergreen in that part
of the mainly hardwood Ozarks, except for two or three slightly different
species of cedar.<span> </span>The cedar is a
beautiful tree with a beautiful smell, but is generally pretty clunky as a
Christmas tree.<span> </span>My mother, who could be
difficult, complained about the somewhat awkward and<span> </span>uneven specimen we had brought home.<span> </span>“It’s too big,” she said, “takes up too much
room.”<span> </span>She went on to say that one day
she would like to have “a perfectly shaped <i>little</i> tree, and put it in
the bedroom.”<span> </span>Well, we did put up the
cedar tree, which in truth did occupy too much space in the so-called
living<span> </span>room.<span> </span>But it happened that my Uncle John had been
present to hear my mother’s complaint.<span>
</span>Later that day he took me aside.<span>
</span>I could tell he was about to engage me in conspiracy.<span> </span>He said to me, “What’s wrong with having <i>two
</i>trees?<span> </span>I know where there is a
perfect tree for Jan.<span> </span>What do you
think?”<span> </span>But there was a problem—two
problems, actually.<span> </span>This perfect tree
was about three miles away—from his house that is, at least four from mine.<span> </span>He didn’t even know whose land it was on, but
certainly not on any of ours.<span> </span>At that
time there was still a lot of the deep woods that seemed to belong to nobody in
particular and had been seized a half a dozen times for non-payment of the
(now) unbelievably low property taxes.<span> </span>I
doubt that the County Assessor actually knew who was supposed to own it.<span> </span>But John was a stickler about his neighbors’
property lines, and I was both shocked and titillated that he seemed so
nonchalantly to be suggesting the plunder of a tree of unknown ownership.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>So the next day we set off
from “his” house armed only with a slightly rusty medium-sized pruning saw
about eighteen inches long, a tool I had never seen before and certainly never
seen in use.<span> </span>The day was quite cold,
but crisp and bright.<span> </span>The first part of
the journey was into some densely wooded hills to the southwest.<span> </span>Within a half a mile we were in the deep
boonies.<span> </span>There were a few deer paths,
but absolutely no signs of human presence.<span>
</span>It was pretty much of a slog.<span> </span>I
don’t know how well Uncle John knew the topography of the back of his hand, but
I’m pretty sure he knew that of his corner of Baxter County even better.<span> </span>Within fifteen minutes I had only the
slightest idea where I was, though I never lost my sense of the general
direction to get to the river.<span> </span>The rough
Ozark topography is pretty much of sameness, but it can surprise you.<span> </span>We came to a hollow where a sizeable stretch
of beautiful white quartz-like stone lay semi-exposed in large quantities.<span> </span>Beyond that was a kind of semi-hillock at the
top of which, amid all the grays and blacks of a winter forest, was the light
green crown of a single <i>pine</i> tree about three and a half feet tall.<span> </span>We had not seen another pine on our
miles-long walk.<span> </span>God alone knows where
it came from, but it was absolutely perfectly formed, with soft, gentle, pliant
clusters of needles.<span> </span>Yet the most
striking feature of this arboreal aberration was that it seemed to be growing
not in soil but atop a large flat gray rock!<span>
</span>Forty years later or so, when I was seriously studying Italian
Renaissance paintings, I got used to trees growing out of rocks.<span> </span>There is a memorable such tree in the “Saint
Francis” of Giovanni Bellini, a painting to which I devoted a whole book. <span> </span>Of course the roots of such trees actually are
in small crevices in the rock in which a certain amount of soil has been
caught.<span> </span>The unyielding constriction
stunts them as Nature’s own bonsai, I suppose.<span>
</span>But this one, my first, amazed me.<span>
</span>It seemed to me marvelous and mysterious.<span> </span>And, yes, we committed the sacrilege; and
yes, my mother loved it.<span> </span>But do you have
any idea how hard it is to carry even a small tree through a couple of miles of
thick winter forest without damaging so much as a twig of it?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>Let me wish to my regular
readers and, indeed,<span> </span>anyone who has come
across this essay by typographical error or other misadventure, a very happy
Christmas and a good beginning to the New Year.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjonm2ZHG9zKh58FGcay0vJfEdx7sMe-Z0TpJIA1QKoRHZ4YSfyNGhnEiRARnT_9cFBuLCYdSVl1ksW5olpFSTUK-VkVV3rCLoCM7N51TvBeYiBBjv2DQPKkpNCQXkIcqJ8A8hrcGI5lGAedKFNeqdg6gz_TD51ouQ29qmLnIiTIGzYeqfFBZWlh5IpDWqm/s540/rock-tree.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="540" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjonm2ZHG9zKh58FGcay0vJfEdx7sMe-Z0TpJIA1QKoRHZ4YSfyNGhnEiRARnT_9cFBuLCYdSVl1ksW5olpFSTUK-VkVV3rCLoCM7N51TvBeYiBBjv2DQPKkpNCQXkIcqJ8A8hrcGI5lGAedKFNeqdg6gz_TD51ouQ29qmLnIiTIGzYeqfFBZWlh5IpDWqm/s320/rock-tree.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 18pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 18pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;">*<i>Young Claus</i> (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2023);<span> </span>pp. 335, ISBN 9780875658360</span></p>
<p><style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-7511338163282896622023-12-13T01:52:00.000-08:002023-12-15T01:40:44.874-08:00Prexies Under Fire<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoVUvVAQXQdztAcgsk1iz1plpM0bHwxNTWSXx7zLbRKjD2OTjniySJ_u8q240Z_6LSeHlhcw6XAZQ_MsbvfohyphenhyphenIJ9CGQ4hb8-v0l7QeWeSwbVr75ZRmkj5y1bwd-1U2AaB8RvzLsm9Bw1zn-DxAUUJwl3AyFPH4x6x58HwoJlj4SyCYjOBVWZenGEzzfXT/s300/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoVUvVAQXQdztAcgsk1iz1plpM0bHwxNTWSXx7zLbRKjD2OTjniySJ_u8q240Z_6LSeHlhcw6XAZQ_MsbvfohyphenhyphenIJ9CGQ4hb8-v0l7QeWeSwbVr75ZRmkj5y1bwd-1U2AaB8RvzLsm9Bw1zn-DxAUUJwl3AyFPH4x6x58HwoJlj4SyCYjOBVWZenGEzzfXT/s1600/download.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Necessity
demands<span> </span>yet another essay related to the
war in Gaza.<span> </span>I undertake it with
reluctance.<span> </span>But the war has indirectly
become the occasion of an important event in the life of American elite
universities, the arena of my life’s work.<span>
</span>I refer to the recent Congressional hearings, which were fairly widely
viewed and very widely discussed throughout the country, and at which the presidents
of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of
Pennsylvania answered questions about student life on their campuses.<span> </span>These institutions are among the most eminent
in this or any other land.<span> </span>Harvard is
the greatest university in the world.<span>
</span>But this hearing was in my opinion a national embarrassment and a
humiliation for anyone who believes, as I do, that the American achievement in
higher education has been one of our nation’s greatest, and one that, despite
all, remains the envy of the world.<span> </span>But
it is possible, just barely, that the hearing lanced a cultural boil that has
been tormenting the Academy with increasing ferocity.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>As
you probably already know, the presidents were grilled, in a less than friendly
fashion, concerning the way their students felt treated in a context of
political polarization currently exacerbated by the very strong feelings
excited by the brutal war underway between the Israeli Defense Forces and the
military wing of the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza.<span> </span>Hamas fighters in a sneak attack on October 7
invaded Israel, killed with nearly incredible barbarity more than a thousand
Israeli civilians, and kidnapped and removed back to Gaza well over two hundred
hostages. Included in both the
slaughtered and the kidnapped <span> </span>were many
women, children, and elderly persons.<span> </span>In
the devastating response since then Israeli forces have been hunting down and
killing some thousands of Hamas fighters, mainly by aerial bombardment, and
have destroyed or damaged much of Gaza’s crowded civilian environment.<span> </span>In the process they have killed many
thousands of Palestinian non-combatants, including a huge number of
children.<span> </span>As the war continues the
humanitarian crisis among the displaced, the homeless, the wounded, the
trapped, and the traumatized has grown ever worse.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>The
world’s horrified reaction to this situation, in many ways echoed on American
college campuses, has been mainly anti-Israeli.<span>
</span>This is the background that partially explains how a Republican
congresswoman and Harvard alumna could put to the three American college
presidents the essence of the following question: <i>Is the advocacy of the
genocide of Jews tolerated by your institution’s disciplinary protocols and speech
codes</i>?<span> </span>I am unable to explain why
none of the three could answer this question in a sensible, straight-forward
way that would make sense to the ordinary intelligent and educated person.<span> </span>All three failed miserably.<span> </span>The performance of the President of Penn, Liz
Magill, was particularly egregious and seems to have been the final nail in her
presidential coffin.<span> </span>She has
resigned.<span> </span>The President of Harvard,
Claudine Gay, has retained the (official) confidence of her board.<span> </span>But that the question of her retention should
even be controversial, as<span> </span>it actually
is, is<span> </span>a blot on the Harvard
escutcheon.<span> </span>Elise Stefanik, the
right-wing congressional interrogator, is far from the only unhappy camper
among Harvard alumni.<span> </span>The unique
importance of MIT lies in its legendary primacy in those fields of science and
technology upon which many of us believe—and I think correctly believe—the
future felicity and perhaps even the continuity of our species will depend.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>There
is and always has been a large element of political correctness in the
selection of college presidents.<span> </span>But of
course what have been regarded as <span> </span>the
“correct” elements has varied considerably over history.<span> </span>It is needless to say that western higher
education, which has clearly evidenced origins in the medieval monastic
schools, was long an all-male affair.<span>
</span>For a long time in Protestant America there were essentially two
fundamental requirements for the man who would be a college president:
theological orthodoxy and manifest erudition.<span>
</span>What we usually think of as “administrative skill” and “people skills”
were of course desirable and in a surprising number of instances at least
partially present.<span> </span>By the middle of the
nineteenth century the scene had evolved considerably.<span> </span>The decade at the end of the Civil War must
be regarded as a Copernican moment in our higher education.<span> </span>Many old institutions, like my own,
Princeton, gradually evolved by fits and starts toward educational
modernity.<span> </span>But Cornell University (1865)
and Johns Hopkins (1876) offered from the very start innovations of secular
inspiration and scholarly ambition that would define the great American
research university.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>As
our institutions have become more complex, the presidential job description has
changed utterly, the expectations vastly expanded, and the bar set ever
higher.<span> </span>The educational enterprise so
brilliantly defined as the “multiversity” by Clark Kerr, the first Chancellor
of the University of California about 1960, demands of its chief executive a
panoply of skills and a reservoir of energy that simply cannot be reasonably
expected of any single human being.<span> </span>I
hope it is needless to say that none of these presidents in the congressional hot
seat is an anti-Semite, and certainly none is stupid.<span> </span>They came to their high leadership positions
through intellectual brilliance, practical know-how, manifest capacity for
clear and inspiring communication, and a work ethic unknown to ordinary mortals.<span> </span>Why, then, did these three college presidents
shock the Congress and much of the nation?<span>
</span>Several commentators have suggested that an untenable situation derived<span> </span>not from a want of rules and regulations
at their institutions, but from a surfeit of them emphasized or soft-pedalled
with an air that smacked of hypocrisy.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Perhaps
we could help simplify their task somewhat by suggesting that there is no
compelling reason that a college president express a public opinion on the Gaza
war, let alone an <i>institutional </i>opinion, and a few good reasons not
to.<span> </span>And while an institution’s
students<span> </span>are indeed partners in the
learning enterprise, the direction of the enterprise is the responsibility of
competent professionals.<span> </span>Likewise, the behavior
of some students is such that it is necessary to remember that, with or without
keffiyehs, they are in many instances often still unformed young people, as
easily misled as led.<span> </span>In a relatively few
instances the behavior is so appalling that it should invoke serious discipline,
a concept anathema (except for select political violations) on most campuses.<span> </span>It is possible, barely possible, that this
debacle in a congressional hearing room will lead to some good.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK82epzY-UbAoBgNmJ3YuovnonCZs1VOXW1eOPiQjNeiCl3btSuhXGH1MLsjIZhlqvRd-qld3MSBRSABk_KkYvysGKEhBWLkrGeANHqtyhM8pNTxHpU_Y1DE0qeMtFIpVtz3YAIHpPiJ_CFTcLsWe9fEpknrZY4sEEuCBrpcDpJWN3z3wK1kcOqDpE7uG4/s275/VERITAS.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK82epzY-UbAoBgNmJ3YuovnonCZs1VOXW1eOPiQjNeiCl3btSuhXGH1MLsjIZhlqvRd-qld3MSBRSABk_KkYvysGKEhBWLkrGeANHqtyhM8pNTxHpU_Y1DE0qeMtFIpVtz3YAIHpPiJ_CFTcLsWe9fEpknrZY4sEEuCBrpcDpJWN3z3wK1kcOqDpE7uG4/s1600/VERITAS.jpg" width="275" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /> </span><p></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-41043654790152988732023-12-06T00:38:00.000-08:002023-12-06T03:36:53.547-08:00Gaza Blues<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTAjVShAkktSkgCeUINkUOzQLfAbrUPZnO3OVTMCOoCT8tSvwCNOk7lDl4Yi7GWkO0d1ke8YQOTMkcAEsH9PgM50e1HZODdZe8-PzTLIyVtpOGChQDv8n5hm7bwHSThdNKbrOSH1O1rzmkEmhwPMo3D6eGyzMQFu_aZ4xl5v4N5bE5cJgnbEK0-b2G50pO/s1200/v2-israel-1-getty.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTAjVShAkktSkgCeUINkUOzQLfAbrUPZnO3OVTMCOoCT8tSvwCNOk7lDl4Yi7GWkO0d1ke8YQOTMkcAEsH9PgM50e1HZODdZe8-PzTLIyVtpOGChQDv8n5hm7bwHSThdNKbrOSH1O1rzmkEmhwPMo3D6eGyzMQFu_aZ4xl5v4N5bE5cJgnbEK0-b2G50pO/s320/v2-israel-1-getty.gif" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="color: #202124; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Like most people, I have read a lot about the often
poisonous effects of “social media” on the popular mood and our shared
discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But such “social media”as I
have experienced is mainly second hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We don’t have it or see it, except as reported in the news.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if there is anything more febrile than a
tweet, it is a newspaper account of a tweet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I do get a great deal of email, though, much <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of which is political or commercial junk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My morning email included an arresting
message from someone called Meghdad, a person (or bot) otherwise unknown to me.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="color: #202124; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="color: #202124; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Do you see and are you quiet?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="color: #202124; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Do you hear the cries of the oppressed people of
Gaza and are you still silent?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="color: #202124; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Do you see the crushed bodies of thousands of
children and women in Gaza and are you still silent?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="color: #202124; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Are you alive or just a moving corpse?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="color: #202124; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Do you have only one name for being human or do you
also have human emotions?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="color: #202124; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">If you have ears, if you have eyes, and if you have
human emotions, why don't you shout and protest against the criminals who
committed these crimes in support of your government?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="color: #202124; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The message, which I have
reproduced in its entirety, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was
accompanied by several photographs, mainly of dead babies. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is on me, not Meghdad, that I looked at the
photos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t have to do so; I chose
to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They would wring tears from a
serpent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Meghdad’s tone still
offended me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea that I, or anyone
I knew, was silently indifferent to what was happening in Gaza confounded me,
though I certainly expected there to be a diversity of opinion about just what
that was, or is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was startled that
some college professors and many idealistic students could actually <i>praise</i>
the barbarous criminality (including, incidentally, baby-murder and revolting
sexual violence) of October 7. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am very
far from an uncritical attitude towards Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Who can look at practically any photograph coming out of Gaza without
distress?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though considerably reduced by
infirmity I do make a claim to humanity and human emotions, and I do indeed have
eyes and ears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition to these
organs of sensory perception, I do have a mind, and unfortunately the mind I
have <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tends sometimes to worry over
troubling complexities at the expense of comforting and often deadly certainties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I shall not venture down the endless and
tortured dead end path of WhatAboutism, even if honesty demands acknowledgement
that what the “Arab-Israeli conflict” is mainly about has become What About?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What about,
for starters, “the criminals who committed these crimes in support of your
government”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do believe the war is
“criminal”, not just in the general sense that most wars are, but in ways
specific to this one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I see no other
plausible interpretation of the phrase quoted than that in Meghdad’s opinion the
Israeli Defense Forces <i>are conducting a criminal war in</i> <i>support of
the government of the United States of America</i>!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I actually see with my eyes is the
American President, his Secretary of State, and large sections of the American
policy <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>intelligentsia and opinion makers
agonizing over a situation of mind-numbing complexity as they attempt, with a
little success, to moderate Israeli military activity in a situation that has
been fostered by bad actors since the days of the Pharaohs and continues to be
exacerbated by bad actors today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I actually
have great sympathy with and admiration for President Biden’s impossible
efforts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are some problems that
are insoluble by loudly repeated dogmatism alone, such as <i>all </i>of them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Years ago,
when I made a serious attempt to "keep up”, I read several books by Arthur Schlesinger.
Jr. (d. 2007).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is no longer
frequently mentioned, but he was a prominent public intellectual of my youth
and a notable luminary in the Kennedy galaxy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He was an old-fashioned liberal intellectual, a serious historian who
moved easily between academia, active public service, and the research library,
stopping every fifteen minutes or so to write another book—so it seemed from
his enormous output.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a medievalist, I
could never take the image of the Kennedy Administration as “Camelot” very
seriously, but with Schlesinger—a balding egghead who looked like a 1950s
rent-a-professor including the bow ties and tweed jackets—the idea was preposterous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sir Bedevere?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One Schlesinger book to which I had a complicated reaction appeared in
1991: <i>The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its central point was stimulating, but I
resisted it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was that the “melting
pot” theory of American immigration—<i>e pluribus <b>unum</b></i>—forming a
national unity out of a culturally diverse body of immigrants from all over the
world—had come to an end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was being
replaced by a better goal—cultural diversity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In this vision our country could become a kind of demographic warehouse
of a hundred mini-cultures. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well I was
a college professor, and how can a college professor not be in favor of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>cultural diversity?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let a hundred flowers bloom.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But a
version of the “multicultural” ideas he was talking about is<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>now entrenching itself in our universities
and among other thought leaders, sometimes with perilous consequences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is setting Americans at each others’
throats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has already seriously
weakened the freedom of speech that should be the bedrock of our cultural
exchanges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I fear it has already done
permanent damage not just to the internal operations of our educational
institutions but to their reputations in the eyes of the public they must serve
and on which they must depend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If hating
Jews or despising Muslims is your thing, maybe it’s “cultural,” part of an
essential “identity” of “identity politics”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This New World is not so much the guarantor of new beginnings as the custodian
of old grievances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the world has a
plateful of problems related to demographic, agricultural, and climate matters
of fairly recent appearance without so carefully preserving and reanimating
ancient ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the historical point
of view there is something surprising, perhaps even amazing about the survival
of the human race through its centuries of violent folly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pathway of its continuing survival has
been the intense application of innovation, adaptation, and perhaps above all
cooperation, which depends on ethical intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will we still have that in sufficient quality
and quantity?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I won’t be here to watch,
but I can hope.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-60255661635358571222023-11-29T01:36:00.000-08:002023-11-29T03:25:31.103-08:00The Kennedy Assassination<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb6y2kkbpgBoP2Ci-EEGxzQB7dORVgzMRAyzAVJSu4Dpsm61rBDtY3aIjvYgT6za0gwZnd93qqYeqn2tgVNqT9r7nL3FK_jVsVtTb23rW-H6knmPQzLsiAlTvh3eZQt0-FKdfsVkBTYjxXr9hAFwTE0KAmKxANd_gnzpaDtyGXRzbp9Q1wsOSgjyVO65x8/s252/download-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="200" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb6y2kkbpgBoP2Ci-EEGxzQB7dORVgzMRAyzAVJSu4Dpsm61rBDtY3aIjvYgT6za0gwZnd93qqYeqn2tgVNqT9r7nL3FK_jVsVtTb23rW-H6knmPQzLsiAlTvh3eZQt0-FKdfsVkBTYjxXr9hAFwTE0KAmKxANd_gnzpaDtyGXRzbp9Q1wsOSgjyVO65x8/s1600/download-1.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal">This blog has not devoted much attention to historical
anniversaries, but I must make an exception for one just past—the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I must inquire on behalf of all who are
likely to recall the precise circumstances of the day with a sharp
specificity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where were you when you
learned that the president had been shot?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Practically everyone in my age group<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>can and will answer that question with minute detail.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The first
general elections in which I seriously interested myself were those of 1952 and
1956. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These were heady days for the
serious expansion of civil rights in the country—a topic, contrary to much
official memory, of large and sympathetic engagement by many young southerners
of all races.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For many of us it was a
time of serious mental maturation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like
many contemporaries I was a fervent partisan of Adlai Stevenson, who lost
twice, and pretty decisively, to Eisenhower.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But one now had the sense of freshness and possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the summer of 1958, a little more than
five years before he was murdered, Jack Kennedy had made his prominent
appearance on the national scene and in a curious way even on <i>my </i>scene.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was hard for young people to stimulate much
enthusiasm for Eisenhower, with or without the dubious assistance offered him
by <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Richard Nixon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I graduated from college in 1958, and I spent
most of that summer in Washington, thanks to a patronage job arranged out of
the blue by Senator Fulbright, as I waited to sail to England to take up a
Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On a stifling
late morning in July, when for forgotten reasons I was out on the streets sweating
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in a heavy suit, Senator Kennedy pulled
up in his open convertible and stopped at a light approximately five yards away
from where I was standing, also waiting,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>in the middle of Union Station Plaza near the Post Office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was tanned, his hair coiffed but
unconfined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Next to him on his big car’s
big front bench-seat was an unknown beautiful young woman as perfectly turned
out, radiant, and relaxed as the senator himself.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Senator looked me in the eye
and smiled charmingly directly at me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His right hand was draped casually over the top of the steering wheel,
and he languidly raised its index finger in <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a gesture of minimalist<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>eloquence <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that said “Not bad, huh, kid?”—meaning the
convertible, the babe in the convertible, and doubtless the perfection of his
current being and future prospects in general.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Obviously, this man was going to be President.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I knew it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The babe knew it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Silently but unequivocally he shared the
vital data-point with me curbside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then
the light changed; he nodded courteously; the young woman laughed; their car
took off; I stood there dripping with sweat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My first president.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Five years later, lots of
changes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was President; but I myself
wasn’t just chopped liver. I had earned three more academic degrees and
completed a doctoral dissertation of intimidating erudition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had found and married my life partner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had a child on the way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was a newly appointed Instructor in English
at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and I was just at the moment puffing
up a hill hurrying from one classroom to another amidst a large moving crowd
with my friend and colleague Alan Dessen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I picked up on the chatter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Something about something bad happening to the President in Dallas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Well,” said Alan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“This might be true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kennedy really was going to be in
Dallas.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“This will finish the
Birchers!” said some hirsute graduate student from the human stream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then he said it again, and yet again even
louder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reference was to members of
the far-right group, the John Birch Society, who would now be discredited for
having shot the President.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every cloud
has its silver lining.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took us a
while to get better information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John
Kennedy would appear to have been shot by the only Communist in Texas; and very
soon we heard he was dead.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Dealey Plaza.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Grassy Knoll.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The man in the window. The Zapruder film.
Jack Ruby.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The New Orleans Cubans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Magic bullets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Warren Commission.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody knows the story, yet we still don’t
know <i>the</i> story and never will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
fact it becomes ever harder to believe there is <i>a</i> story at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A flood of information and disinformation,
police incompetence risen to new heights, the agony of evidentiary ambiguity
and a hundred special agendas—all inexplicable, all funneling into<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>mystery now canonized.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Kennedy assassination has become, year
after year for sixty years, increasingly fugitive and ungraspable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, I would not have chosen the topic were
it not for a serendipity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>About ten days<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ago I got in the post a new volume of the
Library of America: Don DeLillo: <i>Three Novels of the 1980s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Names, White Noise, and Libra</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>De Lillo is one of our truly brilliant
experimental American novelists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Libra</i>
is his novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, who <i>was</i> a Libra, or perhaps I
should say it is a fictitious treatment of Oswald and the Kennedy assassination
which, while repeatedly stressing its fictionality and denying its historicity,
is more illuminating than eight or ten other “straight” histories I have read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>DeLillo is not merely a very fine writer; he
is a formidable research scholar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is
probably less fiction in his fiction than in most history books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certainly much better fiction.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But you cannot so much as approach
this tar pit called the “Kennedy assassination” without being blackened with
its very sticky goo, almost impossible to scrub clean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I discovered this when I was writing <i>The
Anti-Communist Manifestos</i> and became lured into a side-track following the
flamboyantly anti-Communist <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>literary
impresario Isaac Don Levine, a native Russian-speaker and plenipotentiary
anti-communist hobgoblin who became guru to Marina Oswald as he had been guru
to earlier generations of needy Soviet refugees and defectors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His Russian fluency, fairly rare in the
America of the earlier twentieth century, gave him what was at the time an
unusual advantage in Soviet matters, and he made the most of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is usually described as a journalist—which
is not wrong, exactly, but hardly suggests the scope of his political influence
on the anti-communist right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may
never have heard of this master co-opter of agendas, but he will surely one day
receive the major biography he deserves.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">DeLillo is a novelist, and
novelists tell stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Historical
novelists tell historical stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
“story” of <i>Libra</i> is a doozy, but in case you have not yet read it, as I
had not, I shall say no more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
smallest homage I can pay to so brilliant a vision is to avoid ham-handed
“spoilers”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I will venture to say
is that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Kennedy really did live,
and he really did die from horrible gunshot wounds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before that this very same man really did
lift his index finger in silent but significant communication with me, me
personally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How can it be that the
nearest thing one can find to an explanation of the thing is a work of
unapologetic fiction?</p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-51047735384702964792023-11-22T01:07:00.000-08:002023-11-22T03:49:58.154-08:00Collecting and Recollecing <p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW2yYCvxbuQtSQl-d0A9wo9J7r9pIEaJ6mvg7FBepGlE36m64Wb6WgKstKXrKDpbmpbxgAYSTBm-wXcTwy6D_guNiJwlCTtrcGr3jzjnUHioZJJfb39oktv4vNckp6ZmDJQRk3i00pZpbNFz-Hw-A1w9OZIrZ5HNI0h5pVJRswp0kZPPXcGLRpToRnoXXh/s391/COLLECT.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="129" data-original-width="391" height="106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW2yYCvxbuQtSQl-d0A9wo9J7r9pIEaJ6mvg7FBepGlE36m64Wb6WgKstKXrKDpbmpbxgAYSTBm-wXcTwy6D_guNiJwlCTtrcGr3jzjnUHioZJJfb39oktv4vNckp6ZmDJQRk3i00pZpbNFz-Hw-A1w9OZIrZ5HNI0h5pVJRswp0kZPPXcGLRpToRnoXXh/s320/COLLECT.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>On Sunday mornings Joan reads
aloud the collect of the day at the breakfast table.<span> </span>This week began with one of my favorites* and
set me thinking about both certain eccentricities of the English language and
the very powerful ways in which reading has informed my own life and the lives
of so many close to me.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>The noun <i>collect</i>,
denominating the introductory prayer with which the celebration of the
Eucharist has begun nearly since time immemorial, is a peculiar one.<span> </span>Like the verb of the same spelling, it
derives from the Latin <i>colligere</i>, which means “to gather together, to collect.”<span> </span>But the nominative <i>collect</i> has a vocal
emphasis on the first syllable and the verbal form on the second. <span> </span>Participants in the same church service will
pray a <b>col</b>lect and join in when they col<b>lect </b>the offering. In the
first instance what is being gathered are prayerful intentions, in the latter
pecuniary<span> </span>contributions.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS3km8wX7MmThMMjI2XSsbFCp00Y5_wA9FPnrYAcbzUgsjraZtMBQPeodDE0cEce222H4v4-zjvH002zsLDlMm5Bw2fDDsDZvXySKQ2Lxwi3WqtNYquBalcv6Z4GxiAAncpoPhZecXN5ETbgs7MfuYB5qKPidsoQpdsAGNP3Q87-cLZ34l8P8tmN4aTSft/s259/CRANMER.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS3km8wX7MmThMMjI2XSsbFCp00Y5_wA9FPnrYAcbzUgsjraZtMBQPeodDE0cEce222H4v4-zjvH002zsLDlMm5Bw2fDDsDZvXySKQ2Lxwi3WqtNYquBalcv6Z4GxiAAncpoPhZecXN5ETbgs7MfuYB5qKPidsoQpdsAGNP3Q87-cLZ34l8P8tmN4aTSft/s1600/CRANMER.jpg" width="259" /></a></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Thomas Cranmer</span></span></span><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>The verbal beauty of Anglican
liturgy is in part a resort of historical serendipity.<span> </span>Various early Latin versions of most of the
collects are abundant, but the English Reformation coincided with a great
increment in humanistic learning and vernacular enrichment that is evident in
ecclesiastical translation.<span> </span>Furthermore,
many Church leaders were accomplished writers, in particular Archbishop Thomas
Cranmer, the literary genius behind the <i>Book of Common Prayer</i> of 1549.<span> </span>Hilary Mantel’s <i>Wolf Hall</i> series of novels
(and plays) has popularized other less admirable aspects of the ecclesiastical events
of the age.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>The exhortation that Bible
readers should <i>read, mark, learn and inwardly digest </i>the substance of
Holy Writ would merit an essay of its own.<span>
</span>Particularly rich is the tradition of reading as providing a kind of
nutrition through <i>eating</i>.<span> </span>The famous
phrase “inwardly digest” from this collect became nearly proverbial in later
English literature.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJKv9_RDl3rP2092SPs-I2YHMO0JXFR0AsTKMwOAY-PzYXAjR8QdsJDd9EUavOv02pmoQG6eUdqCxR-pJA2u1SOF_DN0DxvciLONVWTmlFAa_N6Cnm4LxvgGgiEykZnLxPMBzvFZPW_bk5i4KFMNmkBubRXDITA21fjjJZ8imMFb9VjPMrPdU5h76HfwfD/s275/BOSWELL.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJKv9_RDl3rP2092SPs-I2YHMO0JXFR0AsTKMwOAY-PzYXAjR8QdsJDd9EUavOv02pmoQG6eUdqCxR-pJA2u1SOF_DN0DxvciLONVWTmlFAa_N6Cnm4LxvgGgiEykZnLxPMBzvFZPW_bk5i4KFMNmkBubRXDITA21fjjJZ8imMFb9VjPMrPdU5h76HfwfD/s1600/BOSWELL.jpg" width="275" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"> BOSWELL**</span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">and</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">HUME<br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfPjq6ucgNjNpmb_a4LEH8hg_LagV-rD8bjfZeV6vw48dPMjnChMUtWzJKBXQ60r9y20EQ0mV1y0lhXw3DEkEBedCc_yRE2HRsGaBeLGfu28Jm4KnAmXBNn3hksUB9fXDDSfL2lv5ItVfxN8Lf_ysuU3Iv2qc6bSH_1HfPyismz7b92IlDDxmQeHVz4Vbg/s218/HUME.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="218" data-original-width="180" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfPjq6ucgNjNpmb_a4LEH8hg_LagV-rD8bjfZeV6vw48dPMjnChMUtWzJKBXQ60r9y20EQ0mV1y0lhXw3DEkEBedCc_yRE2HRsGaBeLGfu28Jm4KnAmXBNn3hksUB9fXDDSfL2lv5ItVfxN8Lf_ysuU3Iv2qc6bSH_1HfPyismz7b92IlDDxmQeHVz4Vbg/s1600/HUME.jpg" width="180" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>But I realized, unfortunately
too late, that what I chose for literary and aesthetic interest compels me to
brush up against some dreaded heavy-duty theology</span>.<span> </span><span>That is
because what all the reading, marking, and spiritual manducation in the collect
is in aid of is the fostering of <i>hope </i>in one of the most mysterious of
Christian doctrines: the immortality of the soul, eternal life, “life after
death.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>James Boswell, the biographer
of Samuel Johnson, made a visit to his dying friend, the famous philosopher
David Hume.<span> </span>Hume was a radical religious
skeptic. Boswell, a conventional Christian who recited the Nicene Creed and its clause affirming his belief in "the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting" on a frequent basis, was perhaps hoping for a deathbed
conversion.<span> </span>If so, he would be
disappointed.<span> </span>Hume was utterly unphased
at the prospect of his impending death and, in his own expectation, the definitive
annihilation of his being.<span> </span>Both Hume’s
belief and his unbelief astonished and terrified Boswell.<span> </span>That meeting took place on July 7, 1776, when
the United States was three days old and perhaps five percent of <i>educated </i>people
then held ideas closer to those of Hume than to those of Boswell.<span> </span>I suspect that by the bicentenary of 1976 Boswell
would have had trouble getting five percent<span>
</span>among the same demographic.<span> </span>It
has been well said that the Enlightenment project was the “disenchantment of
the world.”<span> </span>The more that science could
explain, the less room there was for folkloristic legend and myth, however
endearing or even fascinating it might be.<span>
</span>Anthropologists were wont to speak of “primitive” beliefs, from which
the human species gradually emerged in its slow progress toward a fuller
rationality.<span> </span>In individuals this process
involved overcoming the infantile sensibility, putting away “childish things”
as the Apostle Paul himself called them.<span>
</span>But putting away childish things can be painful.<span> </span>Wordsworth was a child of the Enlightenment.<span> </span>“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” he
cried out—that dawn being the French Revolution.<span> </span>“But to be young was very heaven.”<span> </span>Yet one of his most profound and mature poems—usually
called the <i>Immortality</i> Ode<b>--</b> (“Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”)—begins with a lament for
a spiritual truth overhwhelmed by an inferior “science”:</span></span> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"> <i><span>There was a time when
meadow, grove, and stream</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span><span> </span>The earth, and every common sight,</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span><span> </span>To my mind did seem</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span><span> </span>Apparelled in celestial light,</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span>The glory and the
freshness of a dream.</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span>It is not now as it hath
been of yore…</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">It is commonly believed that the origins of our religions are to be found
in primal fears, especially the fear of death.<span>
</span>The Roman poet Statius put into the mouth of one of his less attractive
characters an opinion that became a set piece for atheists in our older
literature: “Fear first created the gods!”<span>
</span>It is a line that appears in Chaucer. I myself have come to a very different hypothesis and a more positive
one.<span> </span>The belief in immortality grows not out of fear but out of affirmation of the goodness of
life.<span> </span>This was Cicero’s opinion.<span> </span>He says that he could never deny the
immortality of souls even if its impossibility could somehow be definitively
demonstrated.<span> </span>In his view life itself
was so good that it could not possibly be subject to all the woeful limitations
endured by human bodies.<span> </span>I never used to
think about any of this too much.<span> </span>Funny
how octogenarian thought may differ from that of junior high school.<span> </span>But which of the two is actually more
childish?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>As the French say,--and of
course they have something snappy to say about practically everything-- “<i>Pour
être mort, il faut mourir.”<span> </span></i>In order
to be dead, it is necessary to die.<span> </span>But
one can quite honestly express a fearlessness of death while acknowledging the
dread potential of the dying part.<span> </span>On
this front the messiness of the possibilities become ever more obvious, and
they do tend to crowd the mind.<span> </span></span></span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>But so do many other things.<span>
</span>Hume was an empiricist, an empiricist being someone whose judgements and
actions are founded in actual observed experience.<span> </span>I think our worldviews are determined less by
what we “believe” than by what we see.<span>
</span>What we see is for me best captured in words by poets who have written
about their own observed experience in remarkable ways.<span> </span>Here, for example, is Hopkins:</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: -12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span><span> </span></span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The world is charged with the grandeur
of God.</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: -12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> It will flame out,
like shining from shook foil;</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: -12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> It gathers to a
greatness, like the ooze of oil</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Crushed…</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">This is in one way a rather conventional Victorian religious poem.<span> </span>That is what it seems to want to be.<span> </span>But the poet’s extraordinary imagery will not
allow it to be.<span> </span>The grandeur of God
cannot be captured in a simile, only hinted at.<span>
</span>It is bright; it is dynamic in </span><span><img alt="Cathedral with solid fill" height="15" src="file:////Users/johnf/Library/Group%20Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/TemporaryItems/msohtmlclip/clip_image002.png" width="15" /></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">its shining.<span> </span>All well and good.<span> </span>But then comes the seeing, the <i>deep</i>
seeing.<span> </span>“It gathers to a greatness, <i>like
the ooze of oil crushed</i>.”<span> </span>What an
amazing line.<span> </span>Read, mark, learn…</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">* TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER
PENTECOST: <i>THE COLLECT.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Blessed
Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant
that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them:
that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold
fast<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the blessed hope of everlasting
life, which thou hast given us in our saviour Jesus Christ; who liveth and
reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">**The are pluses and minuses in having an erudite readership. This post had been mounted for less than two hours when I received an email from Terry Seymour, once an undergraduate of mine and now (among numerous other achievements) one of the worlds leading experts on Samuel Johnson and his circle, suggesting that this painting, purloined for the usual decorative purposes from Google Images, is not of James Boswell but (probably) of Thomas Percy. My feeble reply to this is "<i>Who</i> is Thomas Percy?" But I don't need much research to conclude that he was better looking than Boswell, and since it's still pretty early in the morning, and since only God and Seymour are likely to know the difference, I think I'll leave him there. I also appreciate an email from God relating to other matters touched upon in the essay. But I warmly thank my friend Terry for giving me the opportunity of a little glad if embarrassed learning.<br /></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-47329938872882312302023-11-15T02:01:00.000-08:002023-11-15T13:51:56.473-08:00Special Aups<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxYN8Fj7i0n4ViY6WxVk9i9L93byrxiMj-qjrGY6BFxWMsdMcF5yy3owp406eKSXnjzE8jt_-TatZ3kEP1lZMl3o0f9hEl_dtdn7zlK_CaKjTD_k9vIAuQX_UjQQ9-F_lLJMs7nQszqunI0C5q8udgWkJMlGV1T0GDCCMVoUsqQvBdo9hsfbpI7MQAnHAV/s275/Vaduz.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxYN8Fj7i0n4ViY6WxVk9i9L93byrxiMj-qjrGY6BFxWMsdMcF5yy3owp406eKSXnjzE8jt_-TatZ3kEP1lZMl3o0f9hEl_dtdn7zlK_CaKjTD_k9vIAuQX_UjQQ9-F_lLJMs7nQszqunI0C5q8udgWkJMlGV1T0GDCCMVoUsqQvBdo9hsfbpI7MQAnHAV/s1600/Vaduz.jpg" width="275" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: small;"> Vaduz</span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: small;">Aups</span><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-jUSpCKBt8OjhW6_R4L7FOko5HK92ieTYGImXPU44I_Ubz-beE0VAsspXq8HA3JJzQFoLMnDK4l6GxJwte48iMUAP7PJPpOwjzrurWciu7GhdI1VLKHKZ3ltbRODReu28yh8AcvKr2s8X511g7d-O4gPdetqOQDlqRzCIMzM1kiXGG8YgnSSVjFCJMqPt/s264/aups.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="191" data-original-width="264" height="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-jUSpCKBt8OjhW6_R4L7FOko5HK92ieTYGImXPU44I_Ubz-beE0VAsspXq8HA3JJzQFoLMnDK4l6GxJwte48iMUAP7PJPpOwjzrurWciu7GhdI1VLKHKZ3ltbRODReu28yh8AcvKr2s8X511g7d-O4gPdetqOQDlqRzCIMzM1kiXGG8YgnSSVjFCJMqPt/s1600/aups.jpg" width="264" /></a></div><br /> <br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">A
few subjects of this essay will be our daughter Katherine’s travel itineraries,
the beautiful crisp fall weather we are enjoying, the philanthropy of Andrew
Carnegie, and the wit and wisdom of Julius Caesar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Saturday’s beautiful weather—bright,
chilly<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>crystalline air<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>rapidly warming beneath <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a brilliant rising sun—was particularly
splendid as experienced on the bluestone patio onto which the sliding doors of
our glass walled house open at the back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>From the front everything about the house is flat and uninteresting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It gives off the vibe of a small, windowless
warehouse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It does have the distinction
of having been designed by an eminent member of the Architecture School about
1960, a fact that gives me small comfort whenever I contemplate its gray,
windowless street front.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is because
its backside, which is for our purposes the living side, is almost
spectacularly beautiful. The yard slopes down gradually toward a nearly
acceptable workshop-tool house; behind that the view from the house includes
several beautiful yards of the extensive fieldstone wall I myself built in earlier days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beyond that a lovely path makes its way
through a field on which a younger generation once played baseball, and then
along a forested path that leads, after about a quarter mile of forested common
land, to a T-junction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There walking
paths in either direction follow the cliff side looking down on Lake
Carnegie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">This
lake is one of the ornaments of our campus and our town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to legend it was a great disappointment
to the university trustees, who had in the first decade of the twentieth
century been cultivating Mr. Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist,
in the hopes of a gift of some large and imposing public University building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Among the favorite gifts for which he was
noted were libraries and “science buildings,” both of which made them
salivate—in the very discreet manner in which Presbyterian elders might be seen
to salivate, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But fortunately
Mr. Carnegie had ideas of his own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the days when a dollar was a dollar, he gave away three hundred and fifty million
of them. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew that what Princeton really
needed was a long, thin water reservoir that could double as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a recreational site, with special emphasis on
the manly British sport of competitive rowing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">I’m
sure you follow the sequence here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
was on the bluestone patio looking down toward the path that could eventually
lead us to Carnegie’s aqueous bounty that we on Saturday enjoyed a whirlwind
visit of an hour and a half from our daughter. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All three of our children are notably dutiful
with regard to us, the APs (aging parents) but Katherine’s attentiveness can be
described only as heroic given the fact that her job, leading a major American
cultural foundation with its principal seat in Los Angeles, requires frequent
travel to major European capitals—and, as it turns out, at least one not so
major.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was on her way to hop a plane
to Zurich, the major airport closest to her actual destination—Vaduz.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Vaduz</i>???<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I faced the humiliation of having to learn
that it is the capital of Liechtenstein.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It turns out Vaduz is an actual place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You might describe it as a suburb of Davos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They apparently have Davos-style meetings
there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wouldn’t know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Look, I’ve been to the Sulphur Springs Fair <i>twice</i>,
but I never heard of this Vaduz place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To my credit I already suspected that Liechtenstein itself might be real,
and I was secretly glad to have confirmation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But our daughter was shocked, <i>shocked</i>, by my ignorance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>A European capital city!</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>You…a college professor?</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></i><span style="font-size: 16pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">In the long run this humiliation excited a competitive spirit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surely there must be somewhere on my own
itinerary that would stump her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
couldn’t think of one off the top of my head, so that my own eventual email
riposte probably reached her mid-Atlantic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I inquired how frequently she visited Aups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gotcha!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">Aups
is not exactly the capital of anywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is actually a beautiful little village in upper Var in Provence that
has been around for a very long time--a lot longer than this jumped-up Vaduz,
I’ll warrant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have been able to visit it a couple of times
thanks to its proximity (maybe ten kilometers) to our friend Andrew’s house at
Salernes, where we have spent several delightful vacations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, both of the APs are practically Aups
habituées.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any place so ancient is bound
to have some interesting associations, even if it has been in decline for a
couple thousand years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is, for
example, famous for its truffles, at least among trufflers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In an earlier century its Catholic peasantry
was badly bloodied up by a mob of Cathars, which is of interest given that the
Cathars were usually on the losing side of that equation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But its more interesting fame, for purposes
of an obscurity contest, is more ancient yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For thanks to Julius Caesar Aups has a credible claim to be the most insignificant
place in Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you know even a
little about Julius you are likely to know that he was much concerned with fine
distinctions of social and political hierarchies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked arrangements in which the
hierarchies were clear and he was at the top of all of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He happened to pass through Aups on his way
to conquering Gaul.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He probably regarded
the hamlet as nothing more than an inadequate watering hole for his men’s
horses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he is supposed to have made
his larger hierarchical attitudes clear by saying: “I would prefer to be the
Number One Guy in Aups than the Number Two Guy in Rome.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was an attitude likely to get him into
trouble one day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as an example of
imperious wit it was enough to establish little Aups as the world’s
quintessential Loserville.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I doubt that
my attempt to invoke its legendary obscurity can harm it though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The proper French pronunciation of the place
may sound like what an Anglophone might blurt out after dribbling soup down his
shirtfront, but Scandinavians now pay half a million for a decayed stable in
the area.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">Returning
to the Number One Guy ever to visit Aups, everyone knows that Julius Caesar was a man of parts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was among other things quite the wit, and
he seldom passed through any part of his expansive and expanding Empire without
making some memorable comment especially designed for teachers of Latin
101.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His most famous such remark of
course is a masterpiece of precision recording his activities when he strayed
with imperial intent into a part of the world<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>that wasn’t quite yet fully <i>pacified, </i>as the Romans like to put it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Veni, vidi, vici</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where, I ask you, would introductory Latin
students be without <i>veni, vidi vici</i>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“I came; I saw; I conquered.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Just popped out of his mouth, apparently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also has famous last words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Et tu, Brute</i>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> (Or was that Shakespeare?) </span>And into how many parts is omnia Gallia
divided?...</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgayMH4mHRpPOsolpylVRIWFNqcZniXBcHRmMjybdfIu12OKEzoM5wLL-Fn_yKCsbuXagajrVcxpXQ4eb7s0SDcWKYEQIwmtzLUTumhQgj_6hHcrPO8ByC7pLiM51U8Gj2qw2M6gXuAIIkeNF9iFSJFUPI7YnBWdn2NrbxDzay2alKtGzM93JB-xuDFEmaS/s290/CAESAR.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="174" data-original-width="290" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgayMH4mHRpPOsolpylVRIWFNqcZniXBcHRmMjybdfIu12OKEzoM5wLL-Fn_yKCsbuXagajrVcxpXQ4eb7s0SDcWKYEQIwmtzLUTumhQgj_6hHcrPO8ByC7pLiM51U8Gj2qw2M6gXuAIIkeNF9iFSJFUPI7YnBWdn2NrbxDzay2alKtGzM93JB-xuDFEmaS/s1600/CAESAR.jpg" width="290" /></a></div><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>tres</i></span><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">partes, of course</span><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> <br /></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-45953666201794273182023-11-08T01:38:00.001-08:002023-11-08T01:39:54.129-08:00History and Oblivion<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">This will be a very brief essay.<span> </span>No essay at all, really, more like a sad
mini-meditation on the ambiguities of history.<span>
</span>It has been hard to be anything but sad in the current historical
moment.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">I have spent most of my life studying
history.<span> </span>It has been history of a
special sort, since it has focused on old works of art, literary and
visual.<span> </span>My approach has been a fairly
common one.<span> </span>I have tried to understand
old verbal and visual constructs in terms of the likely intentions of their
creators and their intended audiences.<span> </span>Trying
to understand the past in its own terms is very hard work, because the past is
a foreign country, or rather many foreign countries. </span><span>We keep saying that we must heed the lessons of
history, that we must never forget this or that.<span> </span>Sometimes the <i>thises</i> and the <i>thats </i>are
of gigantic size, the evils of the Atlantic slave trade, the Armenian genocide,
the Holocaust of European Jewry.<span> </span>Who
possibly thinks that such enormities <i>should</i> be forgotten even if they <i>could
</i>be?</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>But historical memory has many uses, some of them more
conducive to human felicity than others.<span>
</span>My own paternal grandfather provides me with a monitory example.<span> </span>Though born in this country, he was a
fanatical pseudo-Irishman.<span> </span>His father,
who arrived in America as a youth about the time of the Civil War was for most
of his life a coal miner in southern Illinois, but I think my grandfather was
born in Detroit.<span> </span>He had a mediocre
career in various pockets of the lower, lower middle class.<span> </span>Its high point was a brief stint as a
recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War.<span> </span>The immigrant father (my great grandfather) abandoned
Catholicism in a dramatic fashion that I might recount another time.<span> </span>His son (my grandfather) turned the family religion
department over to his Northern Baptist wife.<span>
</span>His chief spiritual passion, so far as I could judge, was hating
England.<span> </span>I don’t know that he had ever seen
an actual Englishman, but I supposed he must have.<span> </span>However, he didn’t need to have done so in
order to hate them all with a fury.<span> </span>Thus
did the internalization of certain quasi-legendary iniquities of the
administrations of Viscount Melbourne and Robert Peel continue to sour the world
view of a man into the 1950s. <span> </span>And,
incidentally, some of his posterity.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>But
among the world’s active and malignant ancestral hatreds, that born of the
Irish famine was, if you will allow the irreverence, small potatoes compared
with many others.<span> </span>Some still active ones
were already virulent at the dawn of written history.<span> </span>When Joshua, who lived in the Bronze Age,
first crossed the River Jordan, the land in which he found himself, however promising
and indeed <i>promised</i> it might have been, was far from uninhabited.<span> </span>It was replete with Amelikites needing to be
smitten “hip and thigh”.<span> </span>The Amelikites,
sometimes called simply Amelik, were<span> </span>an
indefinite tribe, or race, or coalition, who appear widely but
indefinitely,<span> </span>(both in terms of
chronology and of geography) in early sacred history.<span> </span>What is definite is that they needed the hip-and-thigh
treatment, that is, ethnic cleansing, aka genocide.<span> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>Never
forget.<span> </span>Remember the three hundred at
Thermopylae.<span> </span>Remember the Alamo.<span> </span>Remember Treblinka and Sobibor.<span> </span>But for the love of God remember them in a
fashion more likely to lead to their effectual oblivion than their
repetition.<span> </span>John Kennedy performed one
of the most benign and brilliant achievements of modern history during the
Cuban missile crisis when he simply pretended <span> </span>that he never received a certain provocative
note from Nikita Krushchev.<span> </span>(To his
credit, Krushchev, having taken the time to think twice, went along with the
fiction.)<span> </span>This was an act of willful
oblivion that may have allowed the continuation of the human species.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-24590937874526881352023-11-01T02:12:00.001-07:002023-11-01T03:22:43.906-07:00Autumn Chill<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnCKxHhVQB75aXyBWDfY-PqHsR4tB7jr7OOxrwNwsE9ZiYQ-ta3l0lWSqu4-r_0NcnYVcQDYI5wTSuUEtC6oDig4Ljcxq4nOkahMWLNmFBlza1PIDkU30HLwPAtRneGRuvrgGnXmKENHgct6iAd6zNCqPMaH6ogV_nFEV-I0xqwDqywgwxdfld6-oWdFXs/s275/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnCKxHhVQB75aXyBWDfY-PqHsR4tB7jr7OOxrwNwsE9ZiYQ-ta3l0lWSqu4-r_0NcnYVcQDYI5wTSuUEtC6oDig4Ljcxq4nOkahMWLNmFBlza1PIDkU30HLwPAtRneGRuvrgGnXmKENHgct6iAd6zNCqPMaH6ogV_nFEV-I0xqwDqywgwxdfld6-oWdFXs/s1600/download.jpg" width="275" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>Autumn, serious autumn, arrived here on
Friday.<span> </span>By “serious autumn” I perhaps
mean “ambivalent autumn,” Keats’s season of mellow fruitfulness plus a rather
chill drizzle.<span> </span>The soggy colorful leaves
are now clogging the street drains and damming up in the gutters to make a
chain of nasty puddles.<span> </span>We have plenty
of clichés to cover the phenomenon.<span> </span>You
have to take the good with the bad; life is like a box of chocolates.<span> </span>But, especially as I grow older, I find the
bad is so <i>bad</i> that it is very difficult to savor the good to its fullest.<span> </span>A couple of weeks ago in my first response to
the murder and mayhem in the Middle East I turned to the famous psalm <i>Super</i>
<i>flumina Babylonis</i> (“By the waters of Babylon”), concerning which I had a
few years ago written a book.<span> </span>One of its
most memorable verses is this: “How can I sing the song of the Lord in an alien
land?”<span> </span>Thoughts surrounding this verse
have continued to tug at me.<span> </span>In its
historical context the psalm’s specific setting is the so-called “Babylonian
Captivity” six hundred years before the birth of Jesus, when many Jews were
carted off to slavery by their Babylonian captors after the sack of the Jewish
capital.<span> </span>But the song has for many
centuries also been interpreted metaphorically and morally. <span> </span>That alien land, which unfortunately is too
often and too frequently where we find ourselves, is a world blighted by human
hate, violence, and open warfare.<span> </span>“The
song of the Lord” is the humdrum life of peace and sufficiency for which all
surely must long and far too many cannot attain.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: -12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span><span> </span>But
we did obtain a nice thick slice of it over the weekend as we celebrated the
nineteenth birthday of our granddaughter Cora Louise, a college sophomore who
seems headed for a major in philosophy.<span>
</span>We were a restaurant party of five.<span>
</span>In addition to Joan, me, and the birthday girl herself, we were joined
by her eldest sister Sophia and Sophia’s husband Raymond.<span> </span>The venue was one of the better of several
Thai restaurants in our town.<span> </span>It is
called “Amazing Thai.”<span> </span>Amazing, well,
that might be pushing it just a bit, but the fare was indeed delicious, of high
quality, and certainly ample, just the right thing for the dark, chilly, and
rainy night that had nothing left in it of Indian Summer.<span> </span>Not that it would have mattered all that
much.<span> </span>The essence of family events at
their best is the natural feeling of shared affection, good humor, and easy and
wide ranging conversation.<span> </span>Old age is
not without its trials (not forgetting also the tribulations, if only for
rhetorical purposes), but it offers rewards one can only claim by growing old. We
are all individuals, but unless we are singularly unlucky, we are not
alone.<span> </span>We are a part of many families,
but most especially of our own family, sometimes called the nuclear
family.<span> </span>There are many forms in which
human community has been preserved and perpetuated, and I shall disparage
none.<span> </span>But the mode of<span> </span>overwhelming practice in the western cultures
of which I am both an historical student and a living part has been socially
sanctioned monogamous marriage.<span> </span>My own life
partner and I have had the challenges, obligations, responsibilities, high
privileges and unique satisfactions of bringing into the world three remarkable
children, each of whom now with a life partner has brought into the world
several more of their ilk.<span> </span>Children no
more.<span> </span>The oldest now nears sixty.<span> </span>Even if I lack the biblical grape vine and
the fig tree, we now have the unique pleasures of their camaraderie, and that
of their children, on our bluestone patio, and on rare occasion the Amazing
Thai restaurant.<span> </span>To fete young Cora
Louise in an atmosphere of wide-ranging, good natured, and often witty
conversation, is a pleasure literally priceless.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: -12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: -12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>But how to sing the Lord’s song in
an alien land?<span> </span>For Gaza was never far
from our dining table talk.<span> </span>The name
bubbled up from other conversations at other tables.<span> </span>In any event, we ourselves brought it with us
to the restaurant.<span> </span>Cora’s father is both
an Arab and a Jew, the son of Iraqi parents expelled from their ancestral
homeland by a Jew-hating government two long generations ago.<span> </span>That is a superficially "identity" way of describing him. His colleagues and students know him as an American sinologist of international repute who has done ground-breaking work on East-West cultural contacts in the period of early modernity--often called by us "the Renaissance." Cora's other grandparents live in
Jerusalem.<span> </span>She may well have immediate relatives
in jeopardy for all I know.<span>
</span>So even in the midst of a mellow and celebratory supper, there was the
sorry background music of the alien land.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: -12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span> </span>Most controverted issues, even ones on which intelligent
people must come down more on one side than another, and perhaps overwhelming
more, have some ambiguity and nuance.<span> </span>For
myself I find it very difficult to be an hundred-percenter on what has
traditionally been called the “Arab-Israeli Conflict,” of which the War in Gaza
is the most visible current manifestation.<span>
</span>Tolerating differences of opinion, even vehemently expressed opinion, is
part of the price of existence in a world of free thought.<span> </span>But what are we to make of widely bruited pronouncements
by a tenured history professor at one of our great universities?<span> </span>This man, a laureated expert in his
specialized field and following what I regard as a sacred profession as a guide
of young people, gleefully reports in a political pep rally before a bunch of
them that he is exhilarated—yes, <i>exhilarated </i>by an attack perpetrated by
barbarous fanatics with bullets and blades on women, children, geriatrics and a
crowd of young peaceniks at a musical event.<span>
</span><i>Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the
rocks</i>.<span> </span>Such<span> </span>was the barbarism of warfare in Palestine six
centuries before the Christian era.<span> </span>Still
current in 2023.<span> </span><i>Exhilarated</i>!</span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</font></style><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-55332276945180667132023-10-25T02:43:00.005-07:002023-10-25T14:27:33.390-07:00Constitutional Review<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjccHnDEXPZC30dVrzE4QFUVZCj__pF0qD4zxomRGlJhrtMmyqIeBpQuU4-eLLxaLIU5dFJzxv7G6tCn5t73SPYbmtxuv2Yj7qYr-lskbT6vGIltF0MFC6MPQhRD9wQd4Fdt1QfYZ4UnK5f_7ivFubOTIvqbec1dxGAs5Wux7VW73AXThvHsUPD2NIc6YC6/s207/download%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="79" data-original-width="207" height="79" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjccHnDEXPZC30dVrzE4QFUVZCj__pF0qD4zxomRGlJhrtMmyqIeBpQuU4-eLLxaLIU5dFJzxv7G6tCn5t73SPYbmtxuv2Yj7qYr-lskbT6vGIltF0MFC6MPQhRD9wQd4Fdt1QfYZ4UnK5f_7ivFubOTIvqbec1dxGAs5Wux7VW73AXThvHsUPD2NIc6YC6/s1600/download%202.jpg" width="207" /></a><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><br /></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">For many reasons, I am loath to write on political
topics.<span> </span>The chief reason is that I am
not an expert on politics, or even particularly “political” in the popular
sense.<span> </span>Furthermore, most of us are
already suffocating in the foul air of political commentary, most of it
evanescent and a good deal of it annoying.<span>
</span>But now and again I, like so many others, do get provoked by the
unintelligent, inefficient, and slothful actions of way too many of our elected
representatives.<span> </span>That so many such
people get elected in the first place is extraordinary.<span> </span>The history of our country, for all its failures
as yet to honor its original hopes, has been driven by intelligence,
innovation, and competence. <span> </span>But our
current Congress is by the standards of any self-respecting body requiring
reflection and cooperation to arrive at effective joint action, simply <i>incompetent</i>.<span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><span> </span>If we really revered the Founders, we might pay more
attention to the dangers that many of them saw in the excesseses of party
feeling.<span> </span>This particular mess was
principally (though not exclusively) the work of a few fanatically
self-righteous Republicans; but this few is enabled by the <span> </span>pusillanimity of many others in their
party.<span> </span>At the top of the agenda of the
piously invoked “people’s business” is self-preservation, holding onto office
at whatever price.<span> </span>Donald Trump is not
the cause of the enfeeblement of American democracy, but the result of it.<span> </span>What is wrong with American democracy is the
democrats.<span> </span>I do not refer here to the
members of a particular political party, though they do play their role, but to
the <i>demos</i>, the people, the electorate.<span>
</span>We have met the enemy, and it is definitely <i>us</i>.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><span> </span>It was never as though the continuing existence of the
United States, let alone its rise to world prominence, was a foregone
conclusion from the moment they cleaned up the battlefield at Yorktown.<span> </span>There is a famous anecdote concerning
Benjamin Franklin recorded in the journal of a Maryland delegate to the
Continental Congress. <span> </span>You probably know
it.<span> </span>I hope it’s authentic, though it
doesn’t really matter, because it is certainly true. <span> </span>As the Congress completed its work, </span><span style="background: white; color: #242424;">a Philadelphia lady ran into the sage philosopher on the
street and asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”–“A
republic,” was Franklin’s reply, “if you can keep it.’”<span> </span>Well, they did keep it for a while, but it
was often pretty touch and go, until by about 1858 it became obvious that for a
lot of influential and unhappy campers in the South it was likely to be simply <i>go</i>.<span> </span>Efforts to keep it had to become even more
strenuous.<span> </span>Was the idea of “democracy”
even realistic?<span> </span>In his immortal speech
on the battlefield at Gettysburg—a speech more consequential even than the epic
battle it memorialized, one sage auditor noted—President Lincoln characterized
the still young and embattled nation as one “conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to the propositions that all men are created equal.”<span> </span>He continued, “Now we are engaged in a great
civil war, testing whether that nation , or any nation so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background: white; color: #242424;"><span> </span>The
question remains current.<span> </span>History is
always enriched by myth, and if the myth can contain a little something lost in
translation, all the better.<span> </span>The Chinese
leader Zhou-en-Lai was supposedly asked what he considered the most important
consequences of the Paris student “revolution” of 1968.<span> </span>“Too soon to tell,” he replied.<span> </span>This banal comment has become an apothegm of
profound Confucian wisdom on the assumption that the question referred to <i>the</i>
French Revolution (1789).<span> </span>Because it
really is too soon to tell whether our country can long endure.<span> </span>The republican ideal can be kept alive only
if we keep trying to refine and expand it.</span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>“Democracy”
is an imperfect system<span> </span>of majority rule,
not a license for minority obstruction.<span> </span>In
fact, Kevin McCarthy’s principal crime, in the eyes of his extreme adversaries,
was the act of bipartisanship—a tepid and coerced one admittedly—that actually
broke a legislative logjam, temporarily resolved the immediate problem, and
allowed the House to function.<span> </span>His crime
was dealing with Democrats, who hold about 49% of the seats in the House and
51% of those in the Senate.<span> </span>Those
statistics are not of the sort to encourage any realistic, patriotic legislator
of either party to claim an overwhelming mandate absolving them of the
obligation of compromise, and serious compromise at that.<span> </span> <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>That
is what is required of elected representatives, but there is a prior
requirement for those who elect them.<span>
</span>That is a certain minimal knowledge of the structures of constituted
government and a certain minimal participation in their operations.<span> </span>I am not talking about what is needed for a
college degree in political science.<span> </span>I <i>am
</i>talking about knowing what the three constitutional branches of government
are and do, the distinctiveness of our bicameral legislature, the names and
broadly espoused policies of our own elected representatives, and at least
a little about the systems operating in our own state and local
governments.<span> </span>Study after study has
revealed vast swathes of the American electorate to be ignorant of these most
elementary of matters.<span> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>A
march of malcontent fascists with tiki torches spewing vile into the streets of
Charlottesville is hardly a good advertisement for the state of American democracy; yet I doubt that the Union troops at Shiloh would have found in them
the mortal threats to our national existence that a good deal of over-heated
rhetoric coming from the punditocracy now suggests.<span> </span>Those men knew what a real mortal threat
was.<span> </span>The tiki-torchers are at best, and worst, <span> </span>the emblems of serious political pathology.<span> </span>But there are upwards of three hundred and thirty millions of Americans.<span> </span>Surely you
can find three hundred of them to march in support of any benighted idea you
come up with, including axe murder.<span> </span>We
need a serious national “back to basics” political review.<span> </span>I think what we need is three or thirty
million of us marching in support of calling for a Constitutional Convention.<span> </span>A certain amount has happened in the
political, technological, and industrial world since the late eighteenth
century.<span> </span>You have probably noticed. The authors of the Constitution
hoped they were enshrining some immortal ideas, but not even the pious among
them aimed for a sacred book.<span> </span>The Founders
believed that amendment would be continuous and frequent.<span> </span>Some argued for a constitutional convention
every five years by statute for purposes of review and probable updating.<span> </span>For many civil libertarians the most important
part of this most important document is the so-called “Bill of Rights,” the
first ten amendments added to the document virtually while its ink was still
tacky.<span> </span>You might say the sainted
Founders forgot the most important part their first try.<span> </span>But all too soon a brilliantly original and
experimental document became for many a kind of textual fetish.<span> </span>One of the grievances of the so-called
Russian Orthodox “Old Believers” was the orthographic modernization of the
spelling of the name of Jesus in a seventeenth-century Bible.<span> </span>So easily can the letter stifle the spirit.<span> </span>We can do better—which is the meaning of the
word amendment—but will we?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</font></style><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br /></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-86966177834540323402023-10-18T03:10:00.002-07:002023-10-19T02:25:41.634-07:00Sit and Weep<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFDtjAVIShL-FRF_TLrB8PQyvQcJPgJqidhU5zSh77fhhbHMudKLUMv5qsHqmyBCy8iwjs2YEa9tI_bzPA9AXZTPM2n9gCKpqkMbE6fPUOj-d6_cKVXxuTFtj6JlwWkksh1vOdQO7dV3orwv577Lf78YM99Sqinkz6KiztiOwwAljfynJc85l3okgW0n2R/s246/DAVID%20WITH%20HARP.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="246" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFDtjAVIShL-FRF_TLrB8PQyvQcJPgJqidhU5zSh77fhhbHMudKLUMv5qsHqmyBCy8iwjs2YEa9tI_bzPA9AXZTPM2n9gCKpqkMbE6fPUOj-d6_cKVXxuTFtj6JlwWkksh1vOdQO7dV3orwv577Lf78YM99Sqinkz6KiztiOwwAljfynJc85l3okgW0n2R/s1600/DAVID%20WITH%20HARP.jpg" width="246" /></a></div><br />
<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">After a week of screaming headlines
and an inundation of appalling, indeed frightening newspaper articles, gruesome
photographs, and television reports, we still have no coherent sense of the
disasters playing out in the Middle East, and no confident sense of likely
developments in a setting of such volatility and unknown unknowns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just at the moment the focus is on the
horrendous death and destruction being visited by Israeli air power as the ground
forces of the IDF stand by<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>near the
barrier fence for an expected massive land invasion of Gaza.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The barbarous acts committed by
Hamas against young children, including babes in arms, have incited a special
revulsion in many, and what I regard as a perplexing silence or even
semi-justification among others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
is every possibility that open warfare could expand to Israel’s northern border
(with Lebanon).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are many other
dangerous complexities.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">A few years ago I published a book
on a topic that is likely to seem to most people arcane rather than simply
specialized.*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The subject was a
brilliant religious poem by the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões, who died in
1580.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem is a commentary in 365
lines of polished verse on the nine verses of the psalm <i>Super flumina
Babylonis</i> (“By the Waters of Babylon”), number 137 in most English
bibles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The psalm is in the voice of a
Hebrew captive, part of a group being transported by their captors from their
sacked capital to Babylon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At some point
along the river the captors ask (or order) the Jewish captives to perform one
of their traditional songs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the
speaker declares this impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">For there they that carried us away
captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth,
saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right
hand forget her cunning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I do not
remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not
Jerusalem above my chief joy</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I provide the full text of the
psalm in a modern English version (New International) at the bottom of the post.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Portuguese literary scholars have often called this poem “Zion and
Babylon,” the two cities (Zion being another name for Jerusalem) constituting a
binary opposition with obvious moral dimensions—and some not so obvious ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has been very highly praised. The Spanish
poet<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lope de Vega (d.1635) called it
“the pearl of all poetry.” As the psalm is itself a beautiful song about music,
it is hardly surprising that is has captured the interest of dozens of
musicians from Palestrina to Bob Marley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I well remember when I first saw the poem. It was on a long flight from
California to New York.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had been
reading Camões’s famous imperial epic (the <i>Lusiads</i>) in the splendid
verse translation of Leonard Bacon (Hispanic Society of America, 1950).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In order to give his readers a demonstration
of the poet’s prowess in forms other than the epic, Bacon appended at the back
of his book “A Note on ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’” along with his own translation of
the poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reading it had an electrifying
effect on me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the popular expression,
I was <i>blown away</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I spent several
hours of the flight studying the English text.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Expanding nine verses of biblical Latin into 365 lines of Portuguese <i>redondilha</i>
gave Camões a pretty free hand. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So
different are the techniques of medieval exegetes from modern practice that
following its thought is not always easy for us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They prefer the allegorical, hidden meanings
of Scripture to the apparent literal meaning of the text.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any modern reader of <i>Super flumina</i> has
to be startled if not repelled by the psalm’s final two verses celebrating
infanticide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bacon wrote thus:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The poem is, of course, an expansion of the
137<sup>th</sup> Psalm, every verse of which, with one exception, is quoted in
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That Camões left out the conclusion of
the psalm has an interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is apt to
believe that his mind and heart were revolted by the barbaric savagery of the 6<sup>th</sup>
Century before Christ, but in any case such a piece of sadism would not have
harmonized with the Poet’s visionary ecstasy.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Actually, the poet spends eight ten-line stanzas “translating” these
lines! But as he regards them as <i>allegorical</i>—betokening the obligation
of all believers to root out and destroy all the <i>moral imperfections</i>
within their own souls by smashing them against “the Stone that was Christ,”—he
pays scant attention to the literal sense certainly intended by the psalm’s
unknown author.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I say “unknown
author.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some Renaissance exegetes
insisted that King David was the author.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They knew David died centuries before the Babylonian Captivity, but claimed
that he had written this song as prophecy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And prophecy of a sorry sort it is.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Today we look on, appalled, </span>at the Slaughter of the Innocents in
the kibbutz villages of southern Israel and in the bombed-out buildings of Gaza
City.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Twenty-five hundred years without
much moral progress to show.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How long, o
Lord, how long?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvAAuxq1CHFFlMerQKjHuhupSx0KBzCToL8Jn2aBz_mO9qm-j9ETRrCekl8EvjTh_Qo4L2jV4Kj3FcS33rYOWHQiRY1QPEa9GKnkcysXi2CZJjfGN82u7ZDKvtjnXRrIAelt6X3LWVufc2kgp9CFsDCi2Skv7tUSwfbcTcO-J3wmNKXm1KUpV9ou_8O7A/s1000/382102.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="613" data-original-width="1000" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvAAuxq1CHFFlMerQKjHuhupSx0KBzCToL8Jn2aBz_mO9qm-j9ETRrCekl8EvjTh_Qo4L2jV4Kj3FcS33rYOWHQiRY1QPEa9GKnkcysXi2CZJjfGN82u7ZDKvtjnXRrIAelt6X3LWVufc2kgp9CFsDCi2Skv7tUSwfbcTcO-J3wmNKXm1KUpV9ou_8O7A/s320/382102.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">*<i>Luís de Camões as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Scriptural Exegete</i>
(Tamesis/Boydell and Brewer: Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester NY, 2017)</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 8pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Psalm 137 [<i>Super flumina Babylonis</i>]</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">1 </span></sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">By the rivers of
Babylon we sat and wept<br />
when we remembered Zion.<br />
<sup>2 </sup>There on the poplars<br />
we hung our harps,<br />
<sup>3 </sup>for there our captors asked us for songs,<br />
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;<br />
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">4 </span></sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">How can we sing the
songs of the <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Lord</span><br />
while in a foreign land?<br />
<sup>5 </sup>If I forget you, Jerusalem,<br />
may my right hand forget its skill.<br />
<sup>6 </sup>May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth<br />
if I do not remember you,<br />
if I do not consider Jerusalem<br />
my highest joy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">7 </span></sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Remember, <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Lord</span>, what the Edomites did<br />
on the day Jerusalem fell.<br />
“Tear it down,” they cried,<br />
“tear it down to its foundations!”<br />
<b><sup>8 </sup>Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,<br />
happy is the one who repays you<br />
according to what you have done to us.<br />
<sup>9 </sup>Happy is the one who seizes your infants</b><br />
<b> and dashes them against the rocks.</b></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-86076841825220878162023-10-11T01:56:00.003-07:002023-10-11T01:57:33.623-07:00The Reading Group<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj44VcmRMY1wWsStAk4LGf4NEUJWPfN7AJkUzga5hZTNc6pEM5j0Nzn8dn7QG7NgmZyh36GwYnIreVtldMtEIVZFkh9AskGHHvXlXd-BVUKj98imaEkpSxauL_I2khrsXQW2R0jhQIY85sE17NQi4Wtgz7zH3CUr1laWR6dHuosT0DIPACvP0LJOwW5iIbH/s275/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="183" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj44VcmRMY1wWsStAk4LGf4NEUJWPfN7AJkUzga5hZTNc6pEM5j0Nzn8dn7QG7NgmZyh36GwYnIreVtldMtEIVZFkh9AskGHHvXlXd-BVUKj98imaEkpSxauL_I2khrsXQW2R0jhQIY85sE17NQi4Wtgz7zH3CUr1laWR6dHuosT0DIPACvP0LJOwW5iIbH/s1600/download.jpg" width="183" /></a></div><br />
<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Youth is wasted on the young.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said that,
and I suppose he probably did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it’s
one of those supposed “quotations” that I have seen only as a quotation, and it
has no firm location in a primary text that I can cite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have a heretical addition to this thought: <i>Education</i>
is wasted on the young.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s sort of a
joke, obviously, and hardly an idea that someone like myself, whose life career
has been teaching young people, is likely actually to believe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it points to a truth of which I have
become ever more convinced over the years, and especially since I retired from
teaching.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is
this:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the four-year liberal arts
curriculum that a large number of Americans have experienced is a beginning,
not an end, a foundation, not a finished edifice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How many clichéd graduation talks each year
have as their structuring cliché the fact that the word Commencement means
“beginning”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The thing about clichés,
though, is they are mostly true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
you learned in college demands continual renewal and replenishment, sort of
like putting more money on your Metrocard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Take <i>Hamlet</i>, for example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I think it is important work of English literature, and everybody ought
to read it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have spent a lot of time
teaching it to eighteen-year-olds, and reading their sometimes brilliant essays
about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what is an
eighteen-year-old really likely to know about the “the slings and arrows of
outrageous Fortune”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is only when you
yourself personally encounter some of life’s hardest knocks and most painful
abrasions that you really begin to see the bigger picture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least that has been my experience.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I have been
moved to think about all this because of a pleasant experience I had about a
week ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I retired at the age of
seventy mainly for my own personal reasons, but I still want to claim a little
civic virtue in the decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may be
aware that for many years now young Ph.Ds in the humanities have had
difficulties finding faculty positions commensurate with their training, or
perhaps any positions at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think
it is often self-indulgent, and in many instances simply selfish, for
professors to hang onto their tenured positions into their later seventies, and
in some instances, their eighties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
of course I did miss teaching, and welcomed incidental opportunities as they
came along.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obviously, I was already aware
of various civic “Adult Schools” and other organizations in our town devoted to
“Continuing Education” or “Life-Long Learning”—the monickers vary—and had
taught in several on an occasional basis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But I had been unaware of the scale of these activities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Princeton Adult School claims to offer
250 courses a year to a total enrollment of about four thousand!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was approximately the size of the
Princeton undergraduate body during most of my career.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was attracted to a slightly smaller but in
my view classier operation called the Evergreen Forum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In it I taught numerous courses, some of them
related to the particular book I had most recently published, but others
devoted to major authors like Dante and Chaucer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just about the time I was already beginning
to think that I was a bit long in the tooth for this kind of teaching as well,
fickle Fortune made two malign interventions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I fell seriously and for a time alarmingly ill; and then the whole
country, indeed world, became the victim of a protracted viral epidemic.
Teaching days really were over.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But I had by
then reflected on what was so pleasurable about my experience in teaching
fellow “seniors”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Partly it was simply
the confidence that they had heard about World War II and knew who the
principal combatants were.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, they
tended to have knowledge based in an already comparative longevity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it is also a matter of attitude. These
people do want to be there; they are interested in the subject, or sincerely
interested in getting interested.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
also are nice, genuinely amiable people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The nice experience to which I earlier alluded was an invitation from the
well-named Reading Group, a local club of well-educated, dedicated readers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The club seems now to be composed entirely of
women, though not, I think, by statute or design.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Few of the members are as old as I, but some are, and all are seriously “adult”.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Their mode of procedure is as
follows. They pick a book,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>some agreed
upon title of general interest that has created a buzz in the book reviews or
otherwise become prominent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone in
the group reads the book. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I presume
there is general chit-chat about this book among members; but some if not all
of the selected books become the subject of a general meeting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At it some allegedly knowledgeable person gives a short talk about the chosen title
and/or broader literary and historical issues it may raise. Sometime last year a friend who is a club
member asked me if I would give a talk relating to a new Princeton University Press
title that was enjoying a large degree of “crossover” success in book stores:
Marion Turner’s <i>The Wife of Bath</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Marion Turner is a famous Oxford professor, author of an impressive
biography of Chaucer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Wife of Bath
is probably even more famous—one of the most memorable characters in English
literature, and certainly in the <i>Canterbury Tales</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of
course I agreed, and as the proposed date was months in the future, didn’t
think a lot more about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had given
such a talk to this group once before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although
I do not remember much about the event, it would have been the early 2010s
because the book I was talking about was Stephen Greenblatt’s <i>The Swerve:
How the World Became Modern</i>, published in 2011.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But time does move on, and by the
last week in September I had to turn my mind to the task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think it was a pretty decent talk; it was
certainly generously received.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it
wasn’t dumbed down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are going to
talk about the Wife of Bath you have to face up honestly to some very
complicated aspects of the medieval literature of asceticism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is nearly miraculous that Chaucer could
make a masterpiece, at once comic and profound, out of such materials. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My audience was not a graduate seminar in medieval
literature, but a group of mature, very well read general readers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were not merely capable of tolerating
some rather arcane “background”, they seemed eager to engage with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reading is a cooperative venture between
author and reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A good read is much
less like eating lunch—like it, don’t like it—than like having a conversation
with an interesting friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We all want
to get something out of a book we read; but the degree to which we can do so
depends in part on what we ourselves are willing and able to put into it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that in turn depends in part on the wisdom gained
from life experience and the reading of many other books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I guarantee you that reading <i>Hamlet</i>
when you are fifty-eight is a different experience from reading it at
eighteen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And giving a lecture at
eighty-seven is a different experience from giving one at twenty-seven.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, a lecture is like a mini-book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The word<i><u> l</u>ecture</i> itself is
French for “reading” and preserves the memory of the teaching methods in the medieval schools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyway, my thanks to the Reading Group and to all reading groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> That there are hundreds, possibly thousands of such self-animating reading clubs and study groups throughout the land</span> is a comfort in what so often seems a coarsening national cultural landscape. Indeed "Reading Group" sounds like a fair title for civilization
generally.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-72245588565180233172023-10-04T01:05:00.001-07:002023-10-04T14:11:01.054-07:00Tea Party<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcg0fuC8WMKSD6PoelhyphenhyphenBj7GXjeeWhh9JI__FKWso4InCwPRjOZ0EjczZ7XJfvCjEc-Vo1cjgWkSBZ5cnsue83LHZ8BJb9FYTj7LzI-WaUFhxZ3xVkSr13LVwobOqxEMV8uk4qkZm_RbKrYteg8Mn6mPjJqiZAVK_QSzUeuthGaCS3b-xYaIs_JS-8s80B/s225/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcg0fuC8WMKSD6PoelhyphenhyphenBj7GXjeeWhh9JI__FKWso4InCwPRjOZ0EjczZ7XJfvCjEc-Vo1cjgWkSBZ5cnsue83LHZ8BJb9FYTj7LzI-WaUFhxZ3xVkSr13LVwobOqxEMV8uk4qkZm_RbKrYteg8Mn6mPjJqiZAVK_QSzUeuthGaCS3b-xYaIs_JS-8s80B/s1600/download.jpg" width="225" /></a></div><br />
<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I
don’t believe that I had ever downed a cup of hot tea before I set foot on
English soil, by which time I was already an adult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Iced</i> tea there had been aplenty,
especially in the heavily sweetened<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>form
once (and still, for all I know) common in the South.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, I have made up for my earlier abstemiousness
with a vengeance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, I have become
nearly addicted to Lipton tea, seldom beginning any early morning without
downing two huge mugs of the stuff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
got on to Lipton because as it says right there on the package, it’s America’s
favorite tea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also remember it as
rather cheap, though that is no longer conspicuously true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the same money I could probably be
drinking a high quality boutique Earl Gray if I just cut back a bit on the
quantity.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For I have no illusions concerning the actual quality of
“America’s Favorite Tea.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I ever did,
they were dispelled in 2013 on a visit to Sri Lanka.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I say this very casually, as though I travel frequently
to exotic places.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact this trip was
unique and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for us a big deal at the
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is my only experience of Asia,
assuming that Turkey, where we had a wonderful trip in celebration of our
fiftieth wedding anniversary, doesn’t count.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In 2013 Luke and Melanie, with the newly arrived <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>infant John Henry, were on research leave in
Sri Lanka, residing in post-imperial splendor in Colombo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Luke, a linguistic anthropologist, was
fascinated by various aspects of the linguistic scene.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The population of the country reveals the palimpsest
of its colonial history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first
Europeans to arrive in large numbers were the Portuguese.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today many of the Sinhalese natives of the
cities have surnames like De Sousa, Barros, Gomes, and Oliveira.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was an important Dutch period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One still saw on the streets occasional
striking Eurasians looking to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>me like
characters from a Conrad novel as I have imagined them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A huge old stone Dutch Reformed church,
beautiful in its unexpected vastness, rises on the Colombo waterfront.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But of course it was the traces of the
British presence and the lingering whiff of Victoria Regina that provided the
heaviest Western overlay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are
everywhere, and one Sri Lankan intellectual told me, casually, that colonial
remnants of the civil services are “the only things that work in the country now.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was perhaps having a bad day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>English, the “link” language between the
majority Sinhala and the minority Tamil (the two official languages) seems to
be spoken by almost everyone in public or commercial life. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPpUTdh-jPpZVqY96oIFsznMkXvlkjIZ4aE6Oc8wUOnMbMzsNd9c9kt9Yt9jnUkJAos8ZVDg087uUobdeAeZRbbJ5Ea56jUU8xG_LYrIFWJ00lXpnJo1_6SKu3B03HQ9YXmVAMOGF23Kk1PihPFidGLSo2BNA4P59gAppwl6thEg5dWpvslGZ8tmatu-Ss/s249/elephants.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="172" data-original-width="249" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPpUTdh-jPpZVqY96oIFsznMkXvlkjIZ4aE6Oc8wUOnMbMzsNd9c9kt9Yt9jnUkJAos8ZVDg087uUobdeAeZRbbJ5Ea56jUU8xG_LYrIFWJ00lXpnJo1_6SKu3B03HQ9YXmVAMOGF23Kk1PihPFidGLSo2BNA4P59gAppwl6thEg5dWpvslGZ8tmatu-Ss/s1600/elephants.jpg" width="249" /></a></div> <p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Luke
and Melanie had invited us to spend a week with them on a private hired van tour
of some of the island’s major attractions, and a fascinating week it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was in some ways a staggering experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oddly enough Sri Lanka, under the name of
Ceylon, was a distant Asian land about which I had fantasized as a child.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The springboard of my interest was a set of
beautifully engraved postage stamps from the early 1940s featuring George VI’s
cameo head against a variety<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of
picturesque backgrounds, one of which was an elephant herd.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Miraculously. I still have the stamps, of
scant financial value of course though forever a young boy’s treasure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found in Colombo a <span style="mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">fascinating, hyperkinetic, dirty city almost
overwhelmed by the internal combustion engine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Though everyone told me that the density of population of the place was
as nothing compared with their experience of India and China, it was enough to
overwhelm me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Genuine squalor is not far
to find, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but so also are many elegant
sights and private residences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Americans
no longer deserve the right to comment on huge and obvious disparities of well
being.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">It
is not easy to get the sense of a place on a short visit, especially under the
privileged circumstances we enjoyed, but there was still a slightly disturbing
feel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A single sprawling family, the
Rajapaksas, long held most of the power in the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their stranglehold may have been ended by the
crisis of the summer of 2022.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the
time, there seemed to be a general awareness and begrudging acceptance <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of the inevitability of a corrupt government—one
sensed this instinctively in the air rather than by vivid personal
experiences-- and perhaps even still some hint of the violence with which the
Tamil rebels had been slaughtered in the civil war hovered over the place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Melanie, as a Tamil specialist and Tamil
speaker with many personal and scholarly friends among Tamil experts, perhaps
felt this more keenly than others.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">We
saw many beautiful things, natural and man-made, in Sri Lanka.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A visit to the temple of Kandy, in which the
great relic of the tooth of the Buddha was being ceremonially venerated, was
necessarily one of the highlights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
cascades of flowers that seemed everywhere a feature of Buddhist devotion were
almost overwhelming in their effect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
stayed<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>overnight at classy resorts,
where Chinese tourists have replaced my countrymen and assorted eastern
Europeans as the obnoxious loud-mouths of international travel, and where I
earned the gratitude of a young doctor in her medical sari by giving her a few
tablets from a prescription bottle containing something vital for one of her
patients but unavailable in her country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But we also spent time in the lovely countryside, and especially in the
“tea hills,” so-called, of course, for the many tea plantations undulating over
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of these, we were told, were
at least the remnants of the vast holdings of Victorian Scottish
entrepreneurs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A visit to one of them
was a part of the tour, and remembering it allows me to return to the
ostensible subject of this essay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
visited a large tea factory which consisted of one huge sorting or grading
machine that gave off the vibe of a long toy railroad which, with every shake
and jerk of its serpentine progress shook off differing grades of the dried tea
leaves constantly being cast by the bushel upon it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The machine itself, powered by electricity, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was a work of art, its flawlessly burnished teak
bars looking like museum pieces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surely the
date of its creation had been nearer to 1880 than to 1980?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The
guide at the factory was a beautiful young woman wearing a beautiful sari, the
classiness of which derived from the fact that the gold from which it appeared
to be made was so tastefully <i>un</i>burnished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She obviously knew everything there was to
know about discriminating among the qualities of teas, and displayed her
expertise in a voice that would not have been out of place in a drawing room of
Lambeth Palace or at a seminar led by John Ruskin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never had I encountered a commercial pitch so
upper-drawer, and it was impossible to leave without purchasing a specially
prepared and outrageously expensive house selection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What she said at the end of her<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>spiel sticks in the mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was concerned to stress the ecological
purity of the enterprise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything was
perfectly natural (or “organic” as we ludicrously say in this country), and
everything usable <i>was</i> used.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
was no waste.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She had given a long list
of the European tea retailers to whom they sold their product, few of whom I
had heard of before. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“And we keep
perfectly clean even the <i>leavings</i>.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She explained that the leavings were the tiny bits of crushed leaf and
stem incidentally caught up in machine parts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Nothing is wasted,” she said proudly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“We sell the leavings to Lipton’s.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzX8MZgAwtfbv7kN-CjO3liFonf5RkR0_8EEnQbgvWFPfPNw3oWYu8GqWh_MgGTwYTRinbFDGlbJaGA55SyAcgfmCgZFB4iDu_vb004rylumwftx641hWC-UGgbj28wKH60-2-2diI-5n97FW-5i1IXM1WQTJtQ7DfaomTsLZpLJWNraF_6tagzshAhm4E/s275/images-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzX8MZgAwtfbv7kN-CjO3liFonf5RkR0_8EEnQbgvWFPfPNw3oWYu8GqWh_MgGTwYTRinbFDGlbJaGA55SyAcgfmCgZFB4iDu_vb004rylumwftx641hWC-UGgbj28wKH60-2-2diI-5n97FW-5i1IXM1WQTJtQ7DfaomTsLZpLJWNraF_6tagzshAhm4E/s1600/images-1.jpg" width="275" /></a></div><br /> <br /><p></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907071700721966011.post-4599761787741103912023-09-27T01:37:00.003-07:002023-09-27T03:49:45.510-07:00So Long to Solon<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf7G9C_ieI242fUWag5t0Nz4C4z5BQ_7c7Ufz2RTSico6Oeui2LtWhA1gC4I1HRvNfS6ztvYc6H-oD5u4eANynSzNplptqQ3atSVNVsYeTNjAQIAL6mTU9ekEdCfGySLQQbvVBXLyF7AJL543iMzfPcAqOhq3YU94ZJ0aRwB6miBO6FRCxF4QR69aJdNxV/s768/SURPRISED.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="768" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf7G9C_ieI242fUWag5t0Nz4C4z5BQ_7c7Ufz2RTSico6Oeui2LtWhA1gC4I1HRvNfS6ztvYc6H-oD5u4eANynSzNplptqQ3atSVNVsYeTNjAQIAL6mTU9ekEdCfGySLQQbvVBXLyF7AJL543iMzfPcAqOhq3YU94ZJ0aRwB6miBO6FRCxF4QR69aJdNxV/s320/SURPRISED.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;">Newspapers
need “lead” stories, and it is often difficult to assess whether they are
really important stories or simply the closest thing to something important
that some editor could come up with on a slow day.<span> </span>Despite the fact that the United Nations
General Assembly was in session, this week’s blockbuster would seem to be the
criminal indictment of Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) on charges of various
acts of corruption.<span> </span> <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;">In
response to his indictment Senator Menendez has been vigorous in indignant
denial.<span> </span>He immediately played the race
card.<span> </span>I didn’t know that there even <i>was</i>
a race card for Cuban-Americans, but I should have known.<span> </span>According to the Senator, he was being
persecuted by unidentified enemies indignant at the achievements of an uppity,
up-by-his-bootstraps Latino.<span> </span>Even <i>my</i>
Menendez, <i>Lyle</i><span> </span>Menendez, a former
Princeton student of mine (presumably no relation to Senator Bob), a man of Cuban “heritage” who
in 1989 murdered his own parents with a Mossberg shotgun fired at point blank
range in the living room of their Beverly Hills mansion, didn’t try that one.
(He went with paternal sexual abuse.<span> </span>And
so far as I know even Representative Santos is not alleging
anti-Luso-Americanism).<span> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;">Are we to
believe that the senator is really guilty? The time- honored<span> </span>presumption of innocence is a legal fiction
that sometimes is very fictional indeed, as it seems to be in this
instance.<span> </span>Senator Menendez himself appears
to have pivoted from the preposterous theme of racial persecution to that of
“rush to judgment,” which is nearly as preposterous given the average time
elapsing between criminal indictment and trial jury verdict in well-lawyered
cases.<span> </span>But is Menendez guilty as
charged?<span> </span>Probably.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;"><span> </span>Everyone seems critical of trying cases in the
newspaper, but that mode of proceeding does have one clear advantage over the
regular judicial system.<span> </span>Unlike that
system, it usually honors the guarantee promised<span> </span>by the sixth amendment to our Constitution
that criminal defendants be provided with a <i>speedy</i> trial.<span> </span>The newspaper reports are practically
billowing dark, acrid smoke.<span> </span>I doubt
that the <i>Times</i>’s lawyers would have let the story be published were they
not pretty certain of the blazing fire the smoke temporarily obscures.<span> </span>It’s been a while since such succulent
corruption in which New Jersey specializes has appeared on the congressional
crime blotter.<span> </span>George Santos (R-NY) has
been more conspicuous in his mendacity, but Menendez wins the prize for the
classiness of the evidence for the criminality involved, which includes gold
ingots, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, and a strangle-hold on the halal meat
concession for the whole state of New Jersey.<span>
</span>There is also a cupidinous Lady Menendez, not quite up to Lady Macbeth
standards, but apparently aspiring.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;">Several
weeks ago, in a post praising Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose staff helped me
get my passport renewed in time to allow our recent and wonderful trip to
France, I wrote the following: <i>Of course, in a state where the baseline for
satisfactory senatorial performance is simply to remain unindicted, [Booker]
would be a natural superstar under any circumstances</i>. The exaggeration
in that sardonic remark was meant to be humorous; but as a constituent who in
my layman’s role was pretty sure that Menendez was guilty of the crimes for
which he was tried and <i>not</i> found guilty in 2017, I certainly had him in
mind when I wrote it.<span> </span>So if I failed as
a humorist, give me credit as a prophet.<span>
</span>And Senator Schumer (D-NY), leader of his party in the Senate, reminds
us that “</span>Bob Menendez has been a dedicated public servant and is always
fighting hard for the people of New Jersey. He has a right to due process and a
fair trial.”<span> </span>One can certainly get
behind that second sentence.<span> </span>And for all
I know evidence of Menendez’s agonistic efforts on behalf of “the people of New
Jersey”—even those not trying to corner the market in halal meat—may actually exist
somewhere.<span> </span>But one doubts somehow that
the people of New Jersey for whom this dedicated public servant is always
working hard are the intended beneficiaries of the $480,000 in cash discovered
by investigators in the Menendez domicile, “ ‘much of it stuffed into envelopes
and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe’.<span>
</span>Agents found envelopes of cash inside jackets bearing Menendez’s name.”<span> </span>I honor the distinction between conviction in
a criminal court and the appearance of impropriety, even here where the circumstances
stink yet worse than they look.<span> </span>The Democratic
governor of our state, along with two Democratic senators and six out of nine
of the New Jersey Democratic House members (who outnumber their Republican
colleagues three to one) have “rushed to judgment".*<span> </span>Caesar divorced Pompeia for allowing herself
even <i>to fall under suspicion</i>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWxhooaP7DFfVHOf9ctX3Hzp0xQ4vbqTpO-AA32pi8sAJSQI_o9b9AEd8gJZZ6voV5A7lHrWUGGdZQj1RY32wNkxX4y-hlH5W1UZaiX6xXnld1Q4ziF5rtPWquuxHki53yKjrGDbZcFD0JqCizCkRssvdesa2RiTH2kRf-MisM-9TsVYmMyVwushqtVAVY/s271/GOLD.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="186" data-original-width="271" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWxhooaP7DFfVHOf9ctX3Hzp0xQ4vbqTpO-AA32pi8sAJSQI_o9b9AEd8gJZZ6voV5A7lHrWUGGdZQj1RY32wNkxX4y-hlH5W1UZaiX6xXnld1Q4ziF5rtPWquuxHki53yKjrGDbZcFD0JqCizCkRssvdesa2RiTH2kRf-MisM-9TsVYmMyVwushqtVAVY/s1600/GOLD.jpeg" width="271" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;">Power<i>
tends to corrupt</i>, said the great nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton.<span> </span>The corruption of politicians is ageless,
international, and in our own country among the last remnants of the genuine
bipartisan spirit.<span> </span>The more the power,
the more importunate the temptations and the higher the stakes for the
powerless.<span> </span>Menendez has been the chair of
a very important Senate Committee, that on Foreign Relations,<span> </span>Among the suggestions arising from his latest
indictment is that he may have influenced American policy toward Egypt from
corrupt personal motives.<span> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;">I know
this isn’t really very funny, but as with so much of the political life of the
country in recent years, one has to choose between tears and chuckles, and the
latter are probably better for one’s health.<span>
</span>I thought that American policy in the Middle East was complex and
challenging enough even without having to factor in a senator’s wife’s lust for
a convertible.<span> </span>Mr. Menendez has resigned
from the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee but is for the moment
emphatic in his denial that he will resign from the Senate.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;">Among the
most famous lines in literature is Francesca’s lament in Dante’s <i>Inferno</i>:
“There is no greater sorrow<span> </span>than to
recall our time of joy in wretchedness”.<span>
</span>But to an extent it works the other way around as well: “wretched”
events, if you are not too close to them, can invite happy memories.<span> </span>The committee chairmanship from which Menendez
has at least temporarily stepped down has been filled by some distinguished
senators from both parties.<span> </span>Indeed it
was long held by the only senator I have ever known personally, and someone I
long admired.<span> </span>I refer to J. William
Fulbright (D-AR), who died in 1995 at the age of ninety.<span> </span>Fulbright was very interested in higher
education, and especially in the many dimensions of international study.<span> </span><span> </span>He was
in his day the youngest college president in America, and his name lives
on<span> </span>in educational circles in the
Fulbright Scholarships, designed for Americans wishing to study abroad.)<span> </span>He himself had been a Rhodes Scholar in the
1920s, and he took a special interest in Rhodes Scholars-elect from Arkansas,
the most famous of whom was Bill Clinton in 1968, but the most grateful of whom
must surely have been I myself, in 1958.<span>
</span>It was through Fulbright that I got a patronage job in the summer of
that year, before sailing for Europe in the fall.<span> </span>The job, working as a clerk in the Senate
Document Room, was a bit more than a sinecure but hardly high stress.<span> </span>I doubt that the Senate Document Room still
exists, but in those pre-computer days every bit of proposed legislation
originating from either legislative house was printed in all its successive
amended versions and was available for distribution upon request by any
legislator’s office. <span> </span>There was a
significant volume.<span> </span>A single proposed
bill could go through ten or even twenty versions in successive amended forms.<span> </span>The documents were identified by branch of
origin (HR or S) and number.<span> </span>The phone
was always ringing with requests, which would usually be handled immediately by
dispatch in interoffice mail, which was sent out several times a day.<span> </span>Now and again an importunate congressional
staffer would show up to fetch a document personally. The business was fairly
brisk at times, but there were a lot of semi-official “breaks”.<span> </span>The physical location of the Document Office
was very near to the door of the<span>
</span>entrance to the Public Gallery, where we all spent plenty of time and
whence as an observer I gathered a lifetime supply of anecdotes involving the lords
of the Senate.<span> </span>It was the heyday of
William Knowland (R-CA) and Lyndon Johnson (D-TX).</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;">There
were a lot of “temps” like me working in the Senate Document Room, but also a
certain number of full-timers who greeted each summer temp with a
riddle upon our arrival.<span> </span>Why is it, went
the question, that in the House of Representatives there is a Committee on
Foreign <i>Affairs</i> and in the Senate a Committee on Foreign <i>Relations</i>?<span> </span>I had no clue, of course.<span> </span>The supposedly hilarious answer was that the
senators, who as a cohort tended to be considerably older than the
representatives, lacked the sexual vigor to conduct affairs and had to be
satisfied with occasional relations.<span> </span>Even
though the mustard-cutting capacities of our aging leaders continues to be a
lively topic, that’s not what you might call a really great<span> </span>joke—nor as offbeat in its humor as getting
rich through the certification of halal meat.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNtXBTsoNvrs8L8shhOuqRKkLD2VBDhRNmqVd8yZ_U0IYQ-fRDwkqccS__y1mcsMeCoMUPnT2jxs8yldm--aenv2i_e3xpLthb2zGwWzR5YXeqQ0dgsz8cpLhqYKzZHNvc82-HRxd9Fha7Ve-Mm7J9Y6aNkJCbmLfpPr2iILR08F88UGd2t19nOx4Q8jiy/s300/GRUMPY.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNtXBTsoNvrs8L8shhOuqRKkLD2VBDhRNmqVd8yZ_U0IYQ-fRDwkqccS__y1mcsMeCoMUPnT2jxs8yldm--aenv2i_e3xpLthb2zGwWzR5YXeqQ0dgsz8cpLhqYKzZHNvc82-HRxd9Fha7Ve-Mm7J9Y6aNkJCbmLfpPr2iILR08F88UGd2t19nOx4Q8jiy/s1600/GRUMPY.jpg" width="300" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /> <br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: black;">*</span></span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="color: black;">I wrote
this yesterday afternoon (9/26). <span> </span>As I slept,
apparently, the dam of damnation was bursting, and many other legislators are
now calling for Menendez’s resignation from office.<span> </span>Crucially among their number is the
soon-to-be-promoted <span> </span>junior senator from
New Jersey, Cory Booker.<span> </span>Well, I was in
need of a catchy title.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span> </span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>John V. Fleminghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17136533410768061217noreply@blogger.com0