A farewell, and an open call.

Richard Fleming here, firstborn son of Professor John V. Fleming, writing uninvited in the shadow of greatness. It is with deep sadness that I report to you, the readers of gladlylerne, the passing away of my father on May 30th, ten days after his 90th birthday. He is desperately missed by his three children Richard, Katy, and Luke, and by his wife of 62 years, Joan.

Princeton University, where Dad taught for more than forty years and inspired multiple generations of students with his unfathomable erudition and enthusiasm, has published a moving obituary, here.

Please join us for a memorial in the Princeton University Chapel on Friday, September 25th at 1:30 pm.

If you have a memory of my father, an anecdote or story you would like to share, please send it to richardarthurfleming@gmail.com.

War Years in Denver

                                       Denver: the Mile-High City Today
 

Katherine Fleming, who somehow finds time around the edges of her bi-coastal, intercontinental professional life to be an exemplary wife, mother, and daughter, is encouraging me to go full-bore autobiographical in some of my blog posts.  Though my protestations of a poor memory are sincere and appropriate, I am willing to give it a try, as I did in a previous post dealing with two or three fugitive memories of my birthplace, Gary, Indiana.  The next acts were played out in Baxter County, Arkansas, in the Ozarks, which I would come to speak of as my home, to the degree I had one, and in Denver, Colorado, where I spent the War years living with my maternal grandparents in a house, still extant when I last checked about twenty years ago, at 1600 Albion Street in Park Slope on the east side of the city.

 

My mother’s family name was Janet Elizabeth Davidson (1909-1979).  Her father, James Alexander (Alex) Davidson, was a railroad engineer who spent many years working for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Company on a narrow-gauge line that began in Salida, Colorado, and ran down, eventually, to Lordsburg, New Mexico.  This is probably among the most scenic railroad geography in the world.  And in his day, it could be exciting.  He told me that on his very first trip to that destination, he found most of the town’s citizens industriously engaged in hanging a man.  Grandad Davidson was a native-born American of immigrant Irish parents.  Janet’s mother, Cora Louise Nelson, of English stock, was an orphan girl born in Vincennes, Indiana, but mainly raised by a great aunt on the Red River in northeast Texas.  This woman, whom I of course never met, was named Montgomery, and referred to by my grandmother, with affection, as “Auntie Gommer”.  I do not know how Cora Louise came to be a school teacher in Salida, but it was there she met and married Alex.  The eldest of the four offspring of James Alexander and Cora Louise, who must have been born some years before 1900, was Vincent, to whom I owe my own middle name.  He was for my grandmother a never-ending grief, a perfect first-born young man struck down in youth by dread disease (poliomyelitis?), living first on crutches and then with an amputated leg.  He died before quite having come to his majority.  As a father I can but speculate about the effect of this loss on the parents, but it seems to have been an indelible sadness, and perhaps unhealthily repressed.  To my grandmother Davidson I owe many debts, but especially my serious, if unfortunately slacking and intermittent, engagement with Christian church life, which continues to be an important aspect of my world view.

 

These were the heady days of democracy in America.  My grandfather, a railroad engineer, was (with several other proletarians) an elected member of the state legislature.  When his second child, a female,  was born, she was officially given the unusual Christian name Heartz by legislative act.  A Mrs. Heartz had been the first elected female legislator in the new state, and I believe was still serving at the time.  About twenty-five years ago, at one of the fancy dos I used to attend, I met a high official in the current Colorado legislature who was interested in this story and later did a little research and sent me the confirmatory results.

 

There are mysteries surrounding my mother.  Physically, she was striking, slightly more than six feet tall.  She had been married to, and divorced from, a man referred to as Van.  His full name was VanDeventer, and he was a native of Elberon, New Jersey.  (This coastal place appears to be about forty miles due east of where I now live, and may now be a neighborhood rather than a geographical entity.)  But around 1928 Van was trying to find a gold mine in the Rockies.  There is a Vandeventer Street in Princeton, which I ought to try and research a bit.  Van was the biological father of my elder brother—so technically half brother--Peter, though neither Pete nor anybody else had any sense of “halfness”, and never expressed interest in exploring it.  There is much that is opaque about this first marriage of my mother, which played no part in her later life.

 

The war had hardly begun before my father (Marvin Dale Fleming) enlisted in the Navy and it was decided that my mother, my two brothers, and I would take up residence with my maternal grandparents in Denver.  Here precise memory fails me.  All I actually remember is that one day I was somewhere and another I was in Colorado.  In all the years I knew him, that is, the War years, my grandfather Alex was already very old and totally blind.  He seemed to me infinitely noble, patient, heroic even.  He spent his days in a living room armchair endlessly listening to the news, practically all of it war news.  The radio was huge and somehow rather ecclesiastical in appearance, topped with a Gothic arch.  He moved about a bit, having memorized the route to the bathroom with such perfection that he always made the trip with the same number of counted footsteps and the precise repositionings of his  walking stick.   He became expert at lighting and relighting his unseen pipe with unseen matches, and we simply learned to live with the daily fire hazard.  The house is still there: still 1600 Albion Street.

 

One day I had the following strange encounter.  After ascertaining that nobody else was in the house, Grandad asked me, “Johnny, do you ever play with yourself?”  I was puzzled.  “Yes, I guess, if there is nobody else to play with.”  I had in mind that vast imaginative world to which all young children have access, in which they by an interior magic become explorers, inventors, war heroes. Only years later did I realize that my grandad was talking about masturbation, concerning which, at the age of eight, I was innocent and of course uncomprehending.  But though I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, I was nonetheless shocked to hear the confidential attribution of his blindness to having played with himself seventy years earlier.

 

Our neighborhood was surprisingly “multicultural”.  Just across the way was a sweet old couple of Italian speakers.  A German-American neighbor named Geiseking, an enthusiastic ham radio guy, had set up in his back yard a kind of miniature Eiffel Tower.  There were several Jewish families living in the neighborhood.  I remember being nearly awestruck by the old, bearded grandfather of one acquaintance who in the summer sat endlessly reading on his side porch, eye glasses a half inch thick, hair wild like a woman’s.  I also came to realize that the Jews, like the Christians, came in different denominations.  One Jewish contemporary of mine, speaking scornfully of another, said “He calls himself a Jew, but he…” (unfortunately I cannot remember the specific disqualifying vice practiced by the pseudo-Hebrew.)  Funnily enough, one of the Jewish kids in the group sort of blipped across my radar fifty years later as having spent a long career as a teacher of Dante’s Commedia at Wesleyan University and a fellow Rhodes Scholar of 1958.  What are the chances?

 

At the time I was unaware of the tensions and frictions that our invasion of four had inflicted on my already elderly grandmother, but I later came to realize that they had been substantial and contributed substantially to the already difficult situation in which my mother was living during the War years.  The house on Albion Avenue was large enough provided that my elder brother and I slept in the attic, which was a pretty spooky and chilly place, necessitating what seemed a long walk up a dimly lit staircase.  We fought against the winter chill with ceramic hot water bottles in the shape of pigs.  These strange warming devices had to be handled very carefully, and more than once one of them would leak, so that we were not merely sleeping in the cold, but in the wet cold.  A child’s view of life is often vivid, but of course very partial.  Only eighty years later have I come to understand the force of the famous French maxim attributed to Mme de StauuStSSSS  lStael, tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner.  To understand everything is to forgive everything.  And though it is never possible to “understand everything,” I can but hope our own children can understand and, understanding, forgive, most of it.

Rabelaisian

François Rabelais (d. 1554)

 

One sign that a writer has attained truly classical status is the assignment to him or her of an individual identifying adjective of eponymity: Chaucerian bawdy, Shakespearean majesty, Miltonic grandeur, Hardyesque pessimism, Woolfian subtlety, whatever.  (Please do not be put off by this florid introduction; I am practicing for a “Most Pretentious Sentence of the Week” contest in which I hope to compete.  If “eponymity” isn’t a word, it ought to be one—meaning, of course, “that which gives its name to a habit, style, custom, or practice”.)

 

But it is true that I am perpetually reading such authors—meaning reading and rereading them in snatches, with no sense or desire of actually finishing them or even controlling a confident sense of where I am or where I am going with them or what they said the last time I picked them up.  A few such works are generally lying around my bedstead, and when I wake up in the middle of the night and feel a little too awake to just roll over on my pillow I turn on the bed lamp and, with minimal comprehension, pick up one of my interminables, and spend a half hour with it.  By then a renewed powerful somnolence has generally returned.  The interminable of the moment is the works of Rabelais, five volumes in obsolete French, so the going is very slow, the prospect of completion very remote. Alternatively, I have an anthology of three books of Rachel Carson, a beautiful writer of English prose, The Sea Around Us.  Carson is extraordinary in the scope and precision of her vocabulary.    But her popular oceanography is still very much science, and often beyond my sure grasp.  Yet I read on, and with enjoyment if not total confident comprehension.   

 

But getting back to Rabelais, he is very much a writer who commands his own adjective.  What is Rabelaisian is big, bold, boisterous, and bawdy.  This is all true, though too many of his readers, including not a few experts in the field of Renaissance literature, even several of the contributors to the Rabelais Encyclopedia (2004), have in my opinion missed the forest in the trees.  Rabelais is a satirical Christian moralist.  His learning is immense, but the frequently ironical nature of its deployment is startlingly original and seems anything but pious.  Yet as a default Christian believer he seems never to have entertained any other vocational ideal than that of the religious life.  Here he got off to a false start by entering the Franciscan Order which, though it produced many important theologians, did not on the whole foster cloistered erudition.  He was happier for a time with traditional Benedictine monachism, but eventually developed his own largely independent interpretation of the ascetic life, as so also did Erasmus, Thomas More, and several other eminent intellectuals of the period.  At the center of the learned life of such men was a unifying and traditional intellectual quest: the study of the Bible.  They believed the Bible at once to be transparent in its central historical presentation and moral doctrines and infinitely subtle, profound, oblique and challenging in its allegorical presentation.  It was a gentle brook in which the lamb could safely wade, and a mighty river in which the elephant could plash and swim.  So had said Gregory the Great.

 

Throughout the length of his own huge book or (books) Rabelais refers repeatedly to the biblical model: narrative with both a surface meaning and a hidden one that must be coaxed out with labor and ingenuity.  Furthermore there are in his work literally hundreds of biblical citations and allusions, many of the latter of which are artistically purposeful and wittily constructed.  Rabelais was of that stripe of traditional author who demands much of a reader.  If you were reading his book, he seems to assume, you must have read many others before.  I have in a long lifetime covered a good deal of his implicit reading list, but obviously not enough of it.  While he was no ordinary churchman, Rabelais’s satirical attitudes are consistent with a major strain of Christian polemic as found in many of his famous predecessors including Dante and, especially, Jean de Meun in the Roman de la Rose.  But I must not get lost in the weeds.  Few things are more annoying than being told that you must read some book you have never heard of in order to understand some other such book.  But any adventurous reader with a healthy sense of humor can enjoy Rabelais’s books.  If you have an unhealthy sense of humor, you are guaranteed to enjoy them.

 

His five books deal with the lives and adventures of two giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, father and son.  The books combine studied, comical crudity with a remarkable erudition, social satire, and learned anecdote.  Rabelais was among the first generation of European humanists for whom a command of the Greek language would be an expectation, and his Greek erudition is often on display.  But he was no less deeply immersed in the living experience of his own times.

 

Rabelais’s theological anthropology is traditional, though uniquely expressed.  As members of the human race we are all bipartite creatures, composed of both body and soul, flesh and spirit.  And though the spirit may be willing, the flesh is weak.  The moral paradox is that the base flesh wars against, and usually conquers the spirit.  Critics long ago settled on the adjective carnivalesque to describe the Rabelasian style.  Caro is the Latin word for flesh.  The adjective carnal comes from this word.  Human nature wants every day to be a Mardi Gras, a “fat Tuesday.”  The literal and metaphorical expression of this sad truth is evident in every act of gluttony, eructation, dipsomania, and lasciviousness in the book—of which there are many.  It is made real in the strange male sartorial acoutrement of the cod-piece.  It is made real in what I can only call the author’s obsession with sausages.  (One book chapter is little more than a nearly endless list of the various names of different sausages available in France!)  He seems particularly partial to the andouille.

 

Around the edges of Rabelais a reader finds a mother load of fascinating detail concerning the material lives of our European ancestors half a millennium ago.  The author intends to be outrageous and succeeds in his intention.  Several of his attitudes, especially those exhibiting premodern clerical misogyny seem to be, and are, offensive to our sensibilities.  Yet though they are obviously designed to shock, they bear the stamp of truth.  The past is a foreign land, very foreign indeed; but like other lands, it can be visited.    Should age or infirmity ever so oppress you as to forbid actual foreign travel, you probably already have the next best thing but an arm’s length away right there on a bookshelf.

 

 

Jeffrey What's-His-Name

 

When troubles arrive, they tend to arrive in cohorts, gangs, and conspiracies.  I would have though I already had enough difficulties in my life without these latest accusations.  But apparently nothing is too absurd for our malign press once their flaring nostrils have sniffed out what they think is a juicy story.  So, loathe though I am to dignify preposterous allegations by seeming to take them seriously, I am going to face these latest ones head-on.  Essentially, there is no truth in them whatsoever.  I barely knew Jeffrey Epstein.  Sort of sallow and shifty-looking, as I recall.  I am not even sure that I am spelling his name correctly.  Maybe it’s Epstien.  I knew a guy named Epstien once.  I can scarcely remember what the man looked like.  What limited contact I had with him, including all seven of my visits to his estate on Little Saint James, were related to the fortuitous coincidence of our shared interest in conchology.  Mr. Epstein maintained at his Caribbean estate a remarkable collection of seashells.  In that very misleading photograph of me with Mrs. Ambercrombie, which has repeatedly been published in the gutter press, we were jointly examining a rare specimen of a shell of the greater spotted whelk.

 

I came to know Mr. Epstein—if you can call an association so superficial “knowing” someone—only because he sought out my opinion on a matter apparently of interest to him, namely alchemy.  Somehow he learned of my work devoted to Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.  Whether you are familiar with this particular tale of the great poet, you are probably aware of the science, or rather pseudo-science, of alchemy.  The aim of alchemy was the transmutation of base metals (iron, tin, copper even old tinfoil cigarette wrappers) into gold.  This fantastic project, which captured the attention of even some of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, had many deluded adherents.  In one of my own books on intellectual history I have devoted several pages to this strange phenomenon. Though rather cagey about the matter, Epstein seems actually to have believed that some similar process, adapted of course to the economic and social realities of modernity, was operative in our own world.   

 

“The so-called ‘Midas Touch’,” he once told me, “is an actual thing.  And I have got it.  A few years ago I was a high school teacher.  Yes, a f------ high school teacher!  Now Bill and Hillary send me birthday cards.”  I have not the slightest idea why he would tell me stuff like that.  I mean,  I barely met the man.  Didn’t really know him at all.  So where all this crap about me and Jeffrey Epstein came from I honestly cannot say.  Most of the time I was down there on the island, he wasn’t even there.  Or if he was, I never laid eyes on him.  There were just all these flunky-types wandering around with platters of hors d’oeuvres.  But my only interest, really, was the sea-shells.  I do have to admit that he had a fantastic collection. Probably the best I have ever seen, actually.  I’ll give him credit for that.

 

Somebody said about Whittaker Chambers that simply knowing the man was an indiscretion.  That’s certainly true as regards Epstein, which is why I am so glad I never knew him, not at all, really.  And of course I have absolutely no idea about the way he died.  Given the least opportunity, and I mean the very least, people will come up with the wildest conspiracy theories.  So naturally you have all this crap now about his death being “suspicious” because he was (supposedly) under continuous surveillance.  He was on so-called suicide watch.   Well…In the first place there is no such thing as “a twenty-four hour suicide watch.”  I mean, people do have to go to the bathroom and such.  Watching somebody, I mean really watching them, is harder work than you might think.  I mean, you really have to keep your eyes open the whole time.   And how long, actually, does it take you to hang yourself, especially when the rope is right there and all?  Now that was a bit of serendipity for Jeffrey.  I bet you could do it in under fifteen minutes, especially if you were really motivated.  And that man was really motivated.  Not that I actually know, of course, but it’s only logical that he would be.

 

From what the papers say, it looks as though there is going to be a lot more stuff coming out.  Why can’t people let sleeping dogs lie?  Why should dozens of more totally innocent people, men whose only fault was the indiscretion of knowing Geoffrey Epstein, be subjected to further embarrassment?  Look at Prince Andrew, for example.  Why that poor guy has been practically ruined simply because he had the bad luck of having Epstein pimping ‘teen-aged girls for him.  Did you listen to his long interview on the BBC a while ago?  They were out for blood, and they got it.  Guilt by association, that’s what it is.  Very un-American.  Likely to be un-British, too.

 

The gossip, innuendo, and baseless rumor is only likely to increase.  I am hoping for a presidential intervention.  Mr. Trump could cut this Gordian knot.  He seems to like to pardon people—selectively of course.  He ought to get Ghislaine Maxwell out of the clink and send her back to England on condition that she never speak, let alone write a word about Jeffrey Epstein for the rest of her life.   I mean, never mention the man’s name, whatever that was.  Slips my mind at the moment.

Extra

 

A VERY SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

 

I shall hope to continue some semblance of the weekly blog on Wednesday, February 4.  In the meantime, I have an announcement of cardinal importance.  Shortly before midnight last, February 1, 2026, at the NYU Langone Hospital on First Avenue in New York City, our eldest granddaughter, Sophia Fleming-Benite gave birth to a strapping boy, rumored to be name Oliver.  Sophia and her husband Raymond Wang are reported to be in an ecstatic state, while young Oliver demonstrates the appropriately boisterous combination of wonderment and indignation at having been thrust into the World as We Know It.  Unto us a child is born!  Please join us in welcoming him.  My own entirely passive role in this blessed event in my instant transition (let’s call it a promotion) to great-grand-parental status.  I now have a title consonant with the antiquity I feel.

Blizzard of '26

 

The Blizzard of Twenty Six seems to have reached a point of significant remission.  I am going to at least pretend that it has, even though I won’t really know until daylight arrives. And so I am declaring a personal remission as well.  The last ten days have not been without their difficulties on the health front, and my health aide Christie Kadelu and I have been—in the absurd phrase reserved for such occasions—holding down the fort in a kind of unsplendid isolation.  As you may be aware, there has been snow in these parts, quite a lot of it, and no small amount of ice.  Joan is for a while tucked into a rehab facility a few miles up the road.  Our telephonic communication, though frequent, is inevitably a bit wistful.  Not quite Pyramis and Thisbe, but getting too close.  My great buddy Frank is probably at this very moment surveying the Great Pyramid and the Giza Necropolis in Egypt.  He beat the blizzard by about twelve hours, and I won’t be watching any movies with him for the next three weeks.

 

In many ways the big snow is a pleasing distraction.  The tone of our national political life is rarely inspiring, but the current atmosphere seems especially poisonous.  I am loathe to contribute to the near hysteria.  I do not believe that it is 1858, but I do increasingly fear that the spirit of American democracy, if not its actual institutions, is being coarsened and cheapened by fruitless and polemical self-indulgence and self-righteousness.  The Question of America, it seems to me, has always been this: can we possibly live up to our own hype?  This is just my clumsy version of the question famously raised by Abraham Lincoln in his address at Gettysburg.  Can a nation founded on truly democratic ideals actually endure?

 

The explosive atmosphere of mutual distrust and political loathing in Minneapolis is the context in which two of our fellow citizens lost their lives.  Police agents have difficult and dangerous jobs.   They also frequently have big guns.  The principal purpose of big guns is to kill people, so that it is hardly surprising that they frequently do so.  But the pity of it all.  The waste of it all.  The madness of it all.  The two deaths differ in particularity but not in their shared moral insult.  And perhaps reflection over time will acknowledge the madness, and the nation will try to step back from it in honest penitential reflection, though what I see so far is mainly absurd tribal spin.

 

I am moved once again to invoke the Goheen Principle, which I derive from the late and much admired Princeton President Robert Goheen: never be sure that you are more than about eighty per cent right.  The number of hundred percenters seems ever on the rise.  Yet we can, though not without humility, strive with Lincoln, to advance “with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”

 

I hope that this brief place-holding post might at least serve as the expression of an intent to return to business as usual next week, by which time I hope to be ambulatory and reasonably compos mentis.  Even have some hopes for the corpus part.

 

Inauspicious

I have been quite ill in the hospital since Christmas, home as of yesterday but still feeling very feeble.   Diagnosis macro flu.  Very debilitating.  Joan is still at the Stonebridge Rehab but doing well.  Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.  I may well pause the public blog postings.  Heroic help from friends and family.  Happy New Year to all. 

Mayhem and Mystery

    I continue to flatter myself that I am a reasonably informed person. I cursorily scan the newspaper each day, and until fairly recently Joan and I were regulars in watching the PBS Newshour. But I apparently don’t take all that much in, or at least don’t retain it. One evidence of this is that I am frequently blindsided by events involving eminent Americans of whose existence I have apparently been unaware. Being murdered seems a grotesque way of coming to my attention, but it has happened a couple of times just recently. I seem to have been one of few Americans who learned about the existence of the Republican Party activist Charlie Kirk only from the news of his brutal extinction. Just this week, in similar fashion, I was unaware of the name of an obviously very important movie director, Rob Reiner, even though I had seen a couple of memorable films he had produced, until he too was murdered, along with his wife. The most immediate shooting took place at Brown University in Rhode Island, and one of the random victims was an undergraduate student who by chance was also a Young Republican. This factoid invited, and received, predictable speculation. It is the nature of the human mind to resist the idea of random mindlessness and to impose upon chaos a purposeful surface.

     The frequency of our American mayhem makes it difficult to really get into the Christmas spirit. Murders never have much to recommend them, but these are acts of evil that perhaps cannot fail, and most assuredly have not failed to become political emblems of our national discontent. Charlie Kirk was an effective political operator within the political apparatus of the more conservative circles of Republicans. He either actually was, or  and plausibly became, a virtual emblem of the American far right. Rob Reiner, a movie actor, director and prominent Hollywood personality, was a conspicuous artistic and financial success. He was also an outspoken dispenser of liberal political opinions and an Obama schmoozer. Perhaps this was enough to make of him in minds so inclined an emblem of “the left.” For purposes of what follows I will dispense with such ordinarily prudent words as alleged and reported, as the crimes alleged and reported did happen. I can only assume that the killers are literally madmen whose mental pathologies are probably so severe as to render their sanity questionable. This seems manifest on the surface in one of the cases. Certainly the killers in each instance have disturbing qualities almost requiring allegorization. But they do not require the crudest form of politicization, which is what they are getting.  

    Mr. Kirk’s killer is a furry, or perhaps only furry-adjacent. If you didn’t know what a “furry” is, join the club. I learn from an on-line dictionary that a furry is “an enthusiast for animal characters with human characteristics, in particular a person who dresses up in costume as such a character or uses one as an avatar online”. The typical misuse of the noun avatar suggests the quality of online dictionaries. Furriness or furdom thus is apparently a lifestyle, presumably a niche lifestyle. At least I had not before this heard talk of it. Mr. Reiner’s killer was his own thirty-something son, who made a clean sweep of things by killing his mother at the same time.  Parricide is a rare crime that must always challenge our very concept of human personality. These murders certainly do. The Reiner family was wealthy and moved in important social circles. The report that that killer-son was “troubled” may seem something of an understatement. He was “battling” addiction to “substances” for many years. He had received official rehabilitation nearly twenty times. The manifest pathology of the situation demands the stilted language for its description. 

     My stiff tone is not meant to disregard the pathos and human suffering that are the substratum of journalistic gossip. Narcotic addiction is a terrible scourge. It is terrible for the addict, and terrible too for widening concentric rings of the addict’s associates. It is terrible for our body politic as a whole. And it is no respecter of persons. Just like all those other annoying things your mother used to tell you, it is sadly true that money cannot buy happiness. But it can pay for a strong and competent legal defense. So although Nick Reiner has yet to be arraigned, there is already a buzzing conversation about the high legal fees to be paid to a celebrity defense attorney from the patrimony of the parricide. Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. I read that in a book somewhere. 

    It is difficult to think about such matters with unstinting honesty. Among the most memorable of the of the Maxims of Rochefoucauld is the following zinger: “In the misfortunes of our best friends, we always find something which is not displeasing to us.” The celebrities whose stories are the stuff of newspapers—a celebrity being someone who is famous for being famous—have much less psychic purchase than our friends. True enough, the annals of the rich are perhaps often more lengthy and complex than those of the poor, but they are often just as tragic. Their pathologies should be comforting to no one. But for the grace of God… If you don’t believe in the grace of God—and you ought to—you can imagine it is just good luck. 

    What I most dislike about winter is not so much the cold as the dark, and as I write this, we are already two days past the year’s longest night. This fact, based in a stable astronomy, is the likely reason for the traditional calendrical dating of Christmas, the allegorical date to which the birth of Jesus Christ is assigned. The event is theological even before it is calendrical. As my namesake John famously put it, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not blot it out.” So neither the cold nor the dark will finally prevail. That’s the gist of it. Merry Christmas—merry and bright.  Peace on earth, and good will to all.

Calibri Controversy

Gothic "book hand"

 

            It took thirteen pages of last Thursday’s Times before I found anything sufficiently stimulating to contemplate as a possible blog topic; but it was worth the wait.  At the heart of an article on page thirteen was Calibri.  As a one-time active amateur letterpress printer, I was nearly thrilled to come upon an article that captured the passionate potential lurking in typefaces.  For Calibri is the name of a typeface launched about a twenty years ago by the Dutch typographer Lucas de Groot.  I don’t know how many typophiles are likely to read my blog, but in case there might be one or two I will say that Calibri is one of the newer “C” fonts, which also include the one I usually use on my own computer, Cambria, fonts that are generally elegant, conservative, unfussy, and maximally legible.  But apparently in the eyes of the current presidential administration Calibri is also suspiciously woke.  Marco Rubio has ordered the State Department to stop using it and to return to the allegedly less edgy Times New Roman.

 

            We now tend to call the original Gutenberg font, that used in the famous forty-two line Bible, “Gothic” or black letter.  It was in fact based on the common “book hand” of the professional scribes of late medieval manuscripts.  Gutenberg, even in the revolutionary act that was letterpress printing, was entirely traditional in his type face.  That is, he tried to make printed text look exactly like hand-written (i.e. scribal) text.  For many years most printing remained “black letter”.  Even when I was in graduate school a large number of German language books I had to consult were in a “Gothic” face.  The modernization of German language printing type faces came about by German governmental policy in 1941, a date at which one might be forgiven for thinking the Germans had bigger things to worry about.  But a modern political movement wanted to make a modern presentation.  The Nazis really looked sharp.  If Calibri is woke, fifteenth-century black letter must be—what?  What is the opposite of woke?  Somnolent, perhaps, or drowsy?

 

            I alluded in my last essay to the twin aims to which poetry should aspire according to the poet Horace: utility and beauty, instruction and pleasure.   Many other social habits combine similar goals.  That the mechanical reproduction of writing was useful was perhaps too obvious to talk about; almost immediately typographers began the competition to make it ever more beautiful as well.  Everyone I suppose is familiar with the distinction between Roman and Italic faces, though if you think about Rome as a city in Italy things can become confusing.   In the great age of the Scholar-Printers the rebirth of learning demanded also a rebirth of scribal form.  The artistic impulse of typography began even before Gutenberg.   A picture being worth some large number of words, I recommend you make a visit to the Letterform Archive museum in San Francisco, which you can do either in person or (as I myself do) via a computer screen.  I don’t know whether, as Secretary Rubio seems to suggest, typefaces vary in their political or cultural wokeness, but surely San Francisco would be the place to find out.

 

            In Gothic book hand—the term often used of the common learned calligraphy of the fifteenth century—the letters i, j, l, m, n, u, and v were composed of what look at first glance like similar if not identical straight vertical strokes.  The technical term for this mark is a minim, also used by musicians to indicate a half-note.  A minim is definitely minimal, sort of the least thing that can be done, calligraphically or musically speaking.  The minim invites visual ambiguity.  The ambitions of verbal communication, on the other hand are maximal, and such early printers as Manutius Aldus in Venice supervised the creation of new fonts (based in ancient classical

monumental sources) both beautiful and precise.

 

            Even in the weird political climate which we are forced to endure, I find it curious, to say the least, that grown men can find the sustenance for their political outrage in the inconsiderable differences between two popular and undramatic modern type fonts.  But of course nobody can really believe that typography has much to do with it.  Our politics have become so fundamentally polarized as not even to require identifiable poles.

 

            Perhaps the English-speaking world, or at least the dominant American parts of it, should adopt an official national typeface.  That might be accomplished without political controversy because of the blandness of the creator of the typeface and its role in our revolutionary history.  It was the typeface of our own sacred foundational documents.  It has been around so long that no one could accuse it of being the slightest bit woke.  Semi-somnolent, perhaps, but that is a different matter.  The natural candidate typeface would be Caslon.  We know quite a bit about William Caslon, who supervised the casting for the punches.  He flourished, to use the old phrase, in the first half of the eighteenth century in London.  The early printers included many rather bold and politically engaged men, but so far as I can tell Caslon was not one of them.  He was a stolid, practical businessman, a fine craftsman, and the founder of an incipient dynasty of typographers dominant in the London trade for more than a century.  Historians have perhaps exaggerated the aesthetic aspect of the early printing industry at the expense of the economic.  Caslon did well.  Yet one will not find a single memorable fact about him in his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography  that might make him stand out as a personality.  His solid, stolid, beautiful, and unwoke typefaces long dominated English-language typography, and they are still around.  Familiarity and legibility are hallmarks of Caslon, or would be if types had hallmarks.  The face presents but one danger and that a minor one.  One form of the lower-case letter s, called the “long” s, has a vertically lengthened form that can sometimes be confused with lower-case f.  In an era in which the f-word was still transgressive, this typographical curiosity was once the source of great hilarity to the students in a graduate seminar meeting at which I was present more than sixty years ago.  But social mores evolve in history no less than does printing  technology.  The only verbal transgressions likely to be noted today are heresies involving class, race, or gender.  But not to worry.  There is an abundant supply of them.  We cannot soon run out of outrage.

 

 

Comfortable Caslon
 

Blueberry Pie

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

           

Kingwood Thanksgiving

 

Kingwood Forest, not quite primeval but pretty ancient

We managed to spend the Thanksgiving Holiday in a way that accommodated the reality of Joan’s current residence in assisting living facilities at Stonebridge in Montgomery township with a major feast at Richard’s beautiful old colonial mansion in Kingwood township in Hunterdon County.  This beautiful property is far from what you are likely to think of if your concept of the state is constructed around turnpike exit numbers. The surprising truth is that New Jersey, though it ranks at the top of the list of states for population density, has an extensive amount of sparsely populated rural land and even some heavily wooded forest land.  It is of personal interest to me that the county seat of Hunterdon County, Flemington, was founded by an early settler, Samuel Fleming (mid-eighteenth century) whose surname I share.  I think of Samuel as a rather old-fashioned name; certainly my own long deceased grandfather Samuel Fleming now seems to me to have been from another world rather than merely from another generation.  One of the oldest buildings in Flemington still exalts in the rather pretentious name of “Fleming’s Castle,” though it is hardly more than a rather modest frame house that in its present configuration may disguise even more humble origins. 

 

Flemington, N. J., did have one moment of national, perhaps even international fame.  It came in 1935, when its courthouse was the venue for “the trial of the century”.  True enough, in our country trials of the century usually come around at least once a decade, but this one was special because it addressed the “crime of the century”.  A German immigrant carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann, was convicted of having kidnapped and then murdered the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh.  Lindbergh was perhaps the most universally admired hero in America.  In May of 1927 he had performed the astonishing feat of having made the first ever solo flight across the Atlantic, leaving from Long Island in New York and arriving in Paris about thirty-five hours later.   Lindbergh was handsome, courageous, articulate, and highly photogenic.  There was in historical retrospect a downside: he was a voluble philo-germanic antisemite at the time Hitler appeared on the international scene.  Hauptmann’s trial, which was held in the courthouse in Flemington, focused international attention on the place for more than a month.  

 

One of the automobile routes from Princeton to Kingwood takes you through the small village of Rosemont.  Only somewhat confusingly, there is also a place of that name nearer to Princeton, and for all I know there could be a dozen other New Jersey Rosemonts and half a hundred in the country.  Rosemont today seems to consist of perhaps a dozen houses spread out along the right angle of a turn in the inland road between Stockton and Frenchtown.  I say “today” because stretched along the margin of that road is a quite extensive cemetery, fenced in with well laid stone and carefully tended, that testifies to what must have been a much more substantial local population in years gone by.  But of course like destination weddings, destination interments are not uncommon.  The considerable extent of still cleared fields in this part of Hunterdon County suggests that the whole area has long been under cultivation.  So although New Jersey is our most densely populated state, parts of it are considerably less populated now than in previous decades.  Even between the large cities of New York and Philadelphia there are stretches of countryside that suggest in the comparative sparseness of their rural contours the “wide open spaces” usually thought of in relation to the West.  It took me many years of residence in the state to discover and enjoy this pleasing feature.

 

There are two Katies in our immediate family, one daughter and one daughter-in-law.  They are textually distinguished by a small difference in orthography, but orthography doesn’t help with oral homophones, and so for clarity we refer to the daughter-in-law, Richard’s wife, by her fuller name, Katie Dixon.  This is the same means  used in the old ballad to distinguish among an abundance of ladies named Mary: There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton, and Mary Carmichael and me.  In any event Katie Dixon, among her other virtues and talents, which are many, has become the historian of her Kingwood property, tracing its ownership at least as far back as the Revolutionary period, when one of its occupants was a proto-American French Huguenot named Lequere.  And if George Washington didn’t sleep in her house, it can only have been due to insomnia.  That’s the vibe the place gives off.  Furthermore, I have a couple of times seen actual native wild turkeys around those parts.  So, a Thanksgiving feast in Kingwood seems about as “historical” as it can get.

 

The name “Kingwood” itself incidentally reveals a typical colonial attitude.  I recently viewed the latest Ken Burns documentary series, “The American Revolution.”  It reminded me of the extent to which colonial populations have been doggedly loyal to the mother country up to the point that they abruptly cease to be.  Many of the place names in the original American colonies are homages to British royalty.  The town in which I have now spent most of my life, Princeton, is one of a chain of villages which included a Queenston and a Kingston.

 

Though timber is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the American East Coast today, its forests were formidable.  There is still much evidence on both sides of the Delaware River of what must have seemed in colonial times the utter vastness of its forested lands.  Though Pennsylvania (literally William “Penn’s forest’) now refers to lands west of the river, the man at one point owned thousands of square miles of what is now New Jersey, including the spot on which I am writing this essay.  Hardly a mile east of my house, where US 1 meets one of the three east-west arteries into our town, and now buried in the mess that Route 1 has becomes, lie the scattered remnants of the one-time village of Penn’s Neck.  An old Baptist church now overwhelmed by the super-highway still boldly evangelizes via billboard.  One recent and memorable message: “Despite Inflation, Death Still Wages of Sin”.  Some verities are indeed eternal.  An old cemetery, walled in probably sometime in the nineteenth century but almost certainly of earlier founding date, is now just an extension of  Princeton’s sport fields.  But William Penn once owned it all!