Oxford Reunion

Jesus College, Oxford: my old room was on the ground floor in the corner

This weekend past Joan and I attended a “North American Oxford Reunion” at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. It is not without its irony that I have in fact become pretty enthusiastic reunioneer, since I spent the first three decades of my professional career making light of the annual Princeton class reunions. The Princeton reunions, which take place just before Commencement each year, are famous for their exuberance, and especially for the wackiness of the “P-rade”, the hours-long parade of the costumed alumni in their chronological phalanxes.

For many years we lived at the very edge of the campus, in a vast Victorian house that had belonged to the Class of 1914. One eminence of that class was Allen Dulles, an early head of the CIA, and legend has it that during reunions he would erect a temporary radio tower in the back yard of 39 University Place to facilitate the execution of his spooky duties. By the time we moved in, the classmates were nearly sixty years out and too thin on the ground to make use of the house; but its sprawling basement was full of poignant memorials. They included a half dozen maple wood tables of a rathskeller sort, and a luxurious twenty-foot mahogany bar with brass railing. There was one very moving trophy: a huge photograph, probably five feet across, of the youthful class gathered before Nassau Hall in June, 1914. How many of them would be claimed by the great slaughter announced by the guns of August only two months later?

The world of Princeton reunions seemed fascinating to me, but also anthropologically distanced. In fact, I thought it was fairly ridiculous. Then two things happened. I became active in APGA (the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni), and for the Centenary of the Graduate School in 2000-2001 the graduate alumni themselves started getting serious about participating in the P-rade. Shortly thereafter (2004) I attended the fiftieth reunion of my high school class in Mount Pleasant, Texas, and then (2008) my fiftieth class reunion at Sewanee. Both of these were terrific events, and I emerged from them a convert. Thus “fools who came to scoff, remain’d to pray,” as Goldsmith says in a slightly different context.

The venue for the reunion: the Waldorf Astoria

The Oxford North American Reunion is a very classy affair, and it is appropriately located in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. For me this has a private significance. My parents, neither of whom ever saw New York, were nonetheless sufficiently aware of its fabled luxuries that they regularly referred to the outdoor privy as “the Waldorf”.

The Waldorf, Baxter County, Arkansas

We ourselves are now half a century away from our undergraduate days in Oxford and could hardly expect to run into many—or any—of our contemporaries. But we did have a chance to meet and talk at some length with the “new” heads of our two colleges. The current principal of Jesus College is Lord Krebs, an eminent civil servant, and about as cool and unhaughty a peer as one is likely ever to encounter. Joan’s college, St. Anne’s, an all-girls band in her day, is now headed by one of Britain’s great journalism experts, Tim Gardam.

The British universities have been going through a bad patch. So far as the two ancient universities go—I mean of course Oxford and Cambridge—there has been a particularly bruising confrontation of ancient evolution and contemporary fiscal challenge. There is unquestionably a process of “Americanization” going on, but I had just about concluded that the Brits seemed to be adopting all the worst aspects of the American academic model and none of our best ones. If such things interest you, you will probably want to search out the recent essay in the New York Review of Books by my colleague and friend Anthony Grafton. It’s entitled “Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities.” In this context the reunion proved very reassuring. The Oxford presented by the reunion struck me as confident and energetic, its spiritual eye fixed on the challenges of the future rather than the hoary comforts of the past.

Perhaps as many as a third of the Oxford faculty and administrators whose names had been printed in the program were unable to travel, victims of the abrasive clouds of Icelandic volcanic ash. This meant that those who had escaped in time had to do double duty. One such was the new Vice-Chancellor, Andrew Hamilton. He pretty well typifies the new Oxford outlook. He is a distinguished chemist, British born, but with a rich experience in North American institutions, most recently as provost of Yale. He was very impressive, though in one respect rather annoying to a Princetonian. I heard him in two venues, and in both he did go on and on about how Oxford had just successfully lured Andrew Wiles, who may be the most famous of living mathematicians, back to his native England. This would be Sir Andrew John Wiles, KBE, FRS, the guy who solved Fermat's last theorem. The annoying part, of course, is that the place he lured him from is Princeton. Yes, I know, this guy proved Fermat’s last theorem. But remember—mathematicians are over the hill by age twenty-three.

The new V-C against the Dreaming Spires

The Rightful Duke of Cordova, in Spain

Effects of the wind in a nearby village

Once years ago in England I had to fill out a form on which it was required that in addition to my name I list my “titles and appellations”. This demand was traumatic, as of course I had no titles and, as for appellations, only ones that were informal and unflattering if not unprintable. I thought about claiming to be "the rightful Duke of Cordova, in Spain", but thought better of it. I date the beginnings of my acute “title envy” to that experience. I revel in what I can get. For example, as I recently boasted on this page, I am the Orator of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America. That’s pretty good, but everything is relative. The subject of one of my brief obituary orations this year was the recently defunct Corresponding Fellow Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler. Cardinal Stickler was “Pro-Librarian of the Holy Roman Church and Titular Bishop of Bolsena”. Now that’s a real title, though still not the object of my most intense envy, which is reserved for one of the titles and/or appellations of my old friend and Oxford classmate Michael Nicholas. Nicholas is among the most distinguished church musicians in the world, having held such posts as “Organist of Norwich Cathedral” and “Chief Executive of the Royal College of Organists.” But in the earliest years of our acquaintance he held a title more imposing yet: “The Organ Scholar of Jesus”. If you can’t get no respect with that title, you can’t get no respect, period.

Downed trees on the Common Ground

But the title of the moment, and the one that just blew up in a storm of trouble for me, is “Co-Chair of the Grounds Committee of the Gray Farm Neighbors Association”. The Gray Farm is a faculty housing development in Princeton, New Jersey, that dates from about 1960. It consists of about seventy houses nicely distributed along three curving roads on an old lakeside farm. In its center is a large plot (probably fifteen or twenty acres) of permanently undevelopable fields and woods called the Common Ground. Many of the houses back onto the Commons, and all have easy access to it along well-established paths.

Daffodil cultivation raised to an entirely new level

The original Gray Farmers had something of the spirit of kibbutz pioneers, and they cultivated a strong sense of community cooperation and participation in joint projects, especially the maintenance of the Common Ground. But practically all of the founders are dead or in nursing homes, and “newcomers”—meaning now most people in the neighborhood—have little or no sense of the original vision, which was already mostly a tribal memory when I myself moved in a little over twenty years ago. During the last two decades the Commons—originally carefully planted with flowering trees, evergreens, and shrubs—has been doing its best to revert to the semi-jungle conditions that characterize untended woodland in central New Jersey. Under these circumstances the Grounds Committee—meaning yours truly and one or two other septuagenarians—have mainly concentrated on trying to keep the paths cleared of arboreal debris and rampant vines, though I am proud to say that under “my” regime we have started a fairly ambitious bulb-planting program.

Some of the new daffodil plantings survived

Georges Lefebvre described the state of the French peasantry at the dawn of the Revolution with a striking image. The peasant, he wrote, was like a man standing in water up to his lower lip. So long as things remained absolutely calm he could continue to subsist, barely, but the slightest perturbation of the water was for him fatal. That roughly describes the condition of the Grounds Committee about March 10, 2010. On the immediately following weekend a violent windstorm, accompanied by flooding rains, ripped through our area. There were protracted power cuts over a very large terrain. In the Common Ground of the Gray Farm Association more than a dozen large trees, most of them shallow-rooted pines, were flattened. The main path through the woods was completely blocked. Our so-called “picnic area” was particularly devastated although, miraculously, the actual picnic table and benches were spared. I note that all the trees fell in the same direction—westward—suggesting that a blast of hurricane strength had come out of the coast.

Until yesterday, this tree was blocking the main path

Mr. Pedro Chavez and his crew of landscapers have made amazing progress with the first part of the necessary cleanup. But the costs of addressing the devastation far exceed our modest committee resources, and this means that I, too, have been out there with a chainsaw and will be again, off an on, probably through the winter. It is, as they say, an ill wind that blows no good. Mr. Chavez is smiling, and even the co-Chairman of the Grounds Committee has a unique opportunity to play a poor man’s version of Capability Brown. At least I might be able to plant a couple of dogwoods. But I have to say that the pain being inflicted on the Grounds Committee dwarfs any faint exhilaration of possibility. Just at the moment I’d give anything to be the Organ Scholar of Jesus, instead. Even “Titular Bishop of Bolsena” would be a huge promotion.

Spring Break

Yesterday's blog has been temporarily rusticated for technical reasons while the blogger himself is temporarily at an academic conference in Tennessee, where, I am happy to report, the dogwood and the redbud is everywhere in bloom.

From Bundren to Bodoni and Back

The French revolutionaries found it easier to overthrow the political arrangements of the Old Regime than to transform by legislative decree the old rhythms of life. From time immemorial they had been linked to the liturgical cycle of Christian experience. To change that would require a new calendar. They made one, and it had the virtues one would expect from a document composed by a committee of the Enlightened: logic, tidiness, coherence. The orderly decade trounced the mystical heptad. There would be twelve months of awesome regularity, each with three weeks of ten days each. The committee chucked out the old names of the months—admittedly a rather incoherent hodge-podge—and replaced them with a rational system of dull meterological and agricultural stereotypes. So you got Winey Month, then Foggy, Frosty, Snowy, Rainy, Windy, etc. As the earth’s revolutions around the sun did not perfectly coincide with the mathematics of the revolutionaries, there were five days left over for secular festivities of an uplifting and politically correct sort. Today would I think be Septidi, the 17 Germinal (Seedy) of the year CCXVIII. Except that fortunately Napoleon made a deal with the Pope about the year XII; and they decided to return to the Christian calendar, which had the advantage of relating not merely to the seasons of the year but to the seasons of human life, and to spiritual and mythic as well as meteorological and agrarian experience.

Last week, Holy Week, for those who enter it imaginatively a kind of calendrical roller-coaster, culminating this year in one of the most beautiful Easter Sundays in my memory, has put me to thinking about times and seasons and cycles. So has another circumstance, which will eventually become the subject of this blog. That might be defined as the special contours of love among family members. To be a little more specific, the subject will be our parental joy at the approaching marriage of our younger son Luke and his wonderful fiancée Melanie.

Luke and Melanie

Half a dozen extraordinary books read in my teen years were enough to encourage me to contemplate a life devoted to the study of literature. Among the American writers I knew, I thought Faulkner was the greatest. He was then still alive, still writing, still living just across the river from my own state.

His first book to hook me was As I Lay Dying. I didn’t exactly understand it. I felt better much later, after years of professordom, when I came to realize that nobody else exactly understands it either. But I knew it was great. As I Lay Dying is about a seriously Faulknerian outfit called the Bundrens. The Bundren who lies dying is Addie, the mother. Insofar as there is a plot, it is the story of her death and the grotesque and heroic effort of her children to cart her body by wagon to a town named Jefferson for burial. The oldest child, a man named Cash, is an expert carpenter. The reader hears him before meeting him. The first sound recorded on the first page is the rasp of sawing, then the “Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. of the adze.” Cash is constructing a coffin for his dying mother, as she listens from her sickbed.

There are times, perhaps, when true depth of love can be best expressed through the medium of careful craftsmanship. Cash Bundren had a Good Friday task. Thank God there are also Easter ones. For Luke and Melanie had asked me to print their wedding invitations—a task I completed yesterday.

As they lay drying...

I have been an amateur letterpress printer for forty years, though precious little has come off the presses recently. Luke and I have had a few joint printing projects in our time, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to find the most important printing I had ever done for him. It took a fair amount of rummaging around in half-forgotten files of child-memorabilia. One advantage of such rummaging, perhaps the only advantage, is that one uncovers stuff one didn’t know existed. In this instance, I uncovered quite a cache of Luke’s artwork. He was, and is, a talented artist, as is obvious in this miraculously preserved piece from his affreuse period. The exact date is uncertain, but most art historians place it in the second term of the Reagan presidency.

C.L.O. Fleming (1979- ) untitled Mother's Day Card--affreuse period

At last I did find what I was looking for—to wit, the announcement I had printed in 1979, to share our parental joy with friends and relations throughout the world. Joan and I wanted to name him Christopher—hence the technicality of the birth certificate and the iconography of the birth announcement—but we had already been told in no uncertain terms by his sister that she had no intention of honoring any “sissy” names like Christopher. (You know, as in Columbus, Marlowe, and other sissies of that ilk.)

Does he look like a "sissy" to you?...

I had set the birth announcement in the beautiful, large, fresh fourteen-point Bodoni I had acquired for the printing of the Latin texts in Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore. I clearly remember the look and feel of the pristine types in their cases. I can also remember, though barely, that thirty years ago I could without difficulty or magnifying glass set the six-point type of the psalm text! That old Bodoni type, considerably reduced by service in several book runs, and even at the cost of tolerating a dinged letter or two, I simply had to use for the wedding invitations!

There are a few passages in the Bible that might be called “Bible Passages for People Who Haven't Actually Read the Bible.” Perhaps the most famous of these is the third chapter of Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…a time to love…” Well, this is indeed the time for love. I love you. That's why I gave you this.

I placed the finished text of the invitation cards out on the dining table to dry for a few moments—it doesn’t take long—and returned to the press to work on the much easier task of the envelopes. With each revolution the old Chandler and Price makes a distinctive, rhythmic sound. I would be hard pressed to give it graphic representation—but “Chuck…chuck…chuck” is at least in the ballpark. So as the sheets lay drying, I thought of As I Lay Dying, and of times and seasons and cycles, and of the great wonder and mystery of it all.

Naughty Pleasures of the Aging Parents

Among the numerous benefits of having an all-star daughter—a topic touched upon in this space a couple of months ago—is that the APs from time to time have the use of a Manhattan apartment. So it was that for the first part of the week-end just past we were able to throw ourselves with abandon into a cultural orgy of the sort possible only in a few of the world’s great cities. It took me most of a lifetime to overcome my hillbilly prejudice against New York; but I now practically froth at the mouth with the zeal of the convert.

The Opera House: Brookly Academy of Music

On Thursday night we trundled via the number six line over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to view an amazing production of Henry Purcell’s amazing opera, The Fairy Queen (1692). The title, like most things about the piece, seems designed to confuse. The subject matter is not that of Spenser’s Faerie Queene but of (parts of) Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which supplies also the dialogue. You remember—the queen of the fairies, Titania, gets some magic love pollen in her eye and falls head over heels for the country bumpkin Bottom, who has himself acquired a donkey’s head through similarly mischievous magic.

William Christie: Musical Genius

The conductor was the brilliant William Christie with his famous early music group “Les Arts Florissants,” which usually hangs out in Paris. I have a recording of one of his earlier versions (Harmonia Mundi 901308.09); but the difference between the live performance and the two CDs is approximately that between taking a shower in the buff and taking a shower in a raincoat. Seldom have I realized so clearly how much the architectural and decorative magnificence of a theater and the imaginative dramaturgy of a director actually control the musical experience of opera.

The original audiences of baroque opera didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of other claims on their time, and this rambunctious production ran just under four hours. (So much for the “two hours’ traffic on our stage”.) About a third of the audience never reappeared after the intermission, which began roughly at the two-hour mark. Most of the early leavers probably simply succumbed to artistic fatigue—it certainly couldn’t have been boredom--but a few of the younger and more suggestible ones may have been inspired to hurry home by a remarkable scene, of which old Purcell must be found innocent, featuring a dozen or more gigantic copulating conies. I won’t even try to explain…I guess you just had to be there.

We managed to catch what must have been the night’s last train out of Brooklyn, and as we ourselves were for the moment living the life of Restoration or Queen Anne aristocrats we were able to recoup in leisurely fashion on Friday morning. Indeed I even did a little of what I laughingly call “work” in the Bobst Library of NYU while Joan tracked down some hiking gear to be used on her next stage of the Compostella pilgrimage later in the spring. We then headed north to the Metropolitan Museum where, by two sets of unique circumstances, there are two concurrent, once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions in the medieval galleries.

Alabaster Mourner

The Musée des Beaux Arts in Dijon, housed in the old palace of the Dukes of Burgundy, is one of the great provincial museums of France. It has been closed down for a period to allow for a major renovation. This unique circumstance has allowed its most precious treasure to go on an American tour. That treasure is the collection of exquisitely carved alabster “mourners”, each, with the exception of a child-chorister, about sixteen inches tall, created to decorate the tombs Philip the Bold (1342-1404) and his son John the Fearless (1371-1419). Tragically little of aristocratic funerary art of medieval France survived the ideological fury of the Revolution; but these extraordinary pieces escaped. They originally decorated the bases of the actual ducal tombs; in the Met they are displayed in amazing ensemble as a long and lugubrious liturgical procession of mourners. They will be in New York until late May, then later in Saint Louis, Dallas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Richmond. For many, it will be the chance of a lifetime.

The Riches Heures interrupt this blog with a most important announcement.

Some books are so precious that they have rightly been removed from the inspection of any but a small number of professional scholars and curators. Such are many of the most famous medieval books of hours, especially those executed by the brothers Limbourg. Even if you happen to be in that elect number of professionals, you are no more capable than any ordinary reader of examining more than one folio opening at a time. Only with the aid of photographs have students been able to study the often copious illustrations of medieval books in a comparative manner. A remarkable circumstance—like the temporary closing of the Dijon Museum never to happen again in the lifetime of any living person—has led the Met curators to unbind their greatest manuscript treasure, the “Belles Heures” of the Duc de Berry. This fabulous book usually resides at the Cloisters, the medieval “colony” of the Met way up at the top of Manhattan. But for the moment its meticulously disbound and uninjured sheets, which will of course, like the Burgundian mourners, soon be put back together in an improved and renovated housing, are available for viewing as individual sheets. This is the only known book entirely executed by the Limbourgs; and even they will never have had the opportunity to view it as you can—provided you hurry.

Not to be outdone, the Morgan Library, owner of the fabulous “Hours of Catherine of Cleves” has metaphorically taken a leaf out of the Met’s book—meaning that they literally took a hundred or so out of their own. The paintings of the disbound Cleves Hours, spaciously distributed throughout one of the Morgan’s most elegant galleries, are there for all the world to view. A recently produced facsimile of the whole book—extraordinarily accurate in its reproduction both of the parchments and the binding—lies open for general handling. Facsimiles of this quality now cost more than Mr. Morgan once paid for many of his sumptuous originals; this one is invaluable in giving you a sense of the engineered whole of the magnificent original parts displayed throughout the gallery. We did that on Saturday morning before having a tasty bite of Thai food on Thompson Street. Then, deeply grateful to two Catherines, we headed back home. Any more excitement so intense might have thrown my pacemaker out--if I had one, that is. But you can eat only a pound or so of fudge at one sitting. Had I known that retirement would be this great, I might have forgone the preparatory decades spent working.

A joyous Passover and blessed Easter to Catherine of Cleves and all our readers

Medievalissimus

There are certain jobs that have always seemed to me from a distance to be rather dreadful, especially ones involving cars. For instance I have shuddered at the thought of being a toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike or an inspector for the Division of Motor Vehicles. Then one day at an open-air flea market I fell into conversation with a seller of antique tools whose regular job was sticking his wand up peoples’ exhaust pipes in some DMV shed in Hunterdon County. This highly intelligent fellow described his job as “fascinating” and “educational”. “Every day,” he said, “there’s something new.”

Some academic medievalia

The truth is that unless you have done a job, it’s not all that easy to imagine what it’s actually like to do it. For nearly half a century I was a professional scholar, and I soon discovered that few people outside the guild of professional scholarship had an accurate view of the nature or rhythm of my work. I use the word “guild” advisedly. The university is one of the modern social institutions most visibly connected with its medieval origins. We see this in terminology—doctors, masters, degrees, deans, sabbaticals—in the funny academic regalia in which we strut around on ceremonial occasions, and in the very expensive architectural penchant for cut stone and ogive arches. No feature is more “medieval” than the system by which professional scholars perpetuate their craft by what is still essentially apprenticeship, and safeguard its supposed mysteries and standards through complex procedures of accreditation. The rigor of medieval pedagogy is perhaps suggested in the common iconographic image of the school master as a man with a whip. Things are less violent now, but every professional scholar must be profoundly aware of his place as the student of great masters who have gone before him and of her obligation to a generation of intellectual progeny who will succeed her.

A medieval professor

I have just returned from an academic meeting at Yale University that gave me cause to meditate both upon ancestry and posterity. If all college professors are a little medieval, there are some among them who are very much so: the medievalists, natch. And in my retirement I have a job that must surely compete for the title medievalissimus. I am the Orator of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America. The Medieval Academy is just what it sounds like. The Fellows are its most distinguished senior members, strictly limited in number and elected by arcane guild protocols designed for elite self-perpetuation. One of my colleagues (who is one) calls them simply The Old Guys. The Orator has two jobs. The Orator delivers brief obituary memorials of recently defunct Fellows and slightly more expansive encomia or laudationes of new Fellows to be inducted.

To prepare even brief obituaries worthy of famous old scholars is no easy thing. Some of these people were actual friends or acquaintances. Others have been known only through books or library catalogues. Still others have built up stately edifices of learning wholly outside my competence. The experience is genuinely humbling, and even for people who have been to me but names, genuinely personal. Two years ago I attended a reunion of the Sewanee class of 1958, fifty years out. I had a great time, and I wrote about it somewhere. One private experience was particularly moving. Sewanee is a hamlet set upon a beautiful mountaintop. Its old graveyard is hardly a stone’s throw from its new library. In it are buried many of the great people of its institutional history, from its impoverished post-Confederate refounders to some of its most generous contemporary benefactors. On one of the reunion days, as the rising sun blazed through autumn foliage, I took a solitary stroll through the cemetery. I walked quite literally among the dead professors whose awesome civility, whose love of literature, whose seemingly miraculous erudition and wisdom ignited my own ambitions to master the craft. I have something of that feeling in my role as necrologist.

The old cemetery: Sewanee, Tennessee

My other role, to welcome newly elected Fellows, is more exhilarating and less plangent—less plangent, but perhaps no less poignant. The genre of the “citation” or the laudatio (praise) will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen the formal presentation of an award. The traditional laudatio at the Fellows’ session of a Medieval Academy meeting is reasonably elaborate. It takes about five minutes to read and even then, so accomplished are the scholars being inducted, it often can barely touch upon all aspects of their distinction.

This year there were six new Fellows, and I will tell you about two. If you have not already deduced the principle of selection, I’ll make it explicit presently; but do bear in mind that I am talking about the newest of “The Old Guys”. The first is Anne D. Hedeman, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Illinois. She has done groundbreaking work in the study of medieval book painting. A particular focus of her scholarship has been the aristocratic book culture of early humanism. It may be hard for us to imagine a world in which its most powerful men and women thought that commissioning and owning splendid books was an excellent exercise of their magnificence. Anne Hedeman knows their world intimately, and she has introduced thousands to it through her lectures, her books, and her crafted museum exhibitions. If you’re going to be out on the West Coast next winter, do take in the Getty Museum show called Imagining the Past in France: 1250-1500, of which she will be the co-curator.

Professor Anne D. Hedeman

The other is James J. O’Donnell, Professor of Classics at Georgetown University, and Provost of that institution. Professor O’Donnell is one of the world’s greatest authorities on Saint Augustine, who just happens to be the most important intellectual figure of the entire Middle Ages. O’Donnell has among much else published the definitive edition of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, which is among the three or four most important books in medieval literary history. This just scrapes the surface, of course; but then there’s the Provost bit. This is a nice medieval title for a job that—depending upon the institution involved—demands the energy and capacities of either the CEO or the Chairman of the Board of a major industrial enterprise.

I have chosen them for purely exemplary purposes. Both of them were “my” undergraduate students at Princeton in the early 1970s. And if you don’t think that makes me feel proud, think again. You see in my line of work there are The Old Guys and the really Old Guys. And the important ones are those yet to come.

Professor James J. O'Donnell with Old Guy

The Dark

This week was all about the weather. Here in central New Jersey we had terrific storms that have left in their wake dramatic devastation. Many roads were made impassable by floodwater or fallen trees uprooted by hurricane-like winds. Arboreal debris is scattered everywhere. The big wind and rains began on Friday and continued, with some intermission, for more than two days. Our electrical power was cut mid-morning on Saturday. Much of Princeton Township didn’t get it back until Tuesday afternoon. We were luckier. Ours returned on Monday afternoon, after two highly instructive days, and especially nights, that offered much food for thought.

I have spent much of my adult life trying to imagine with some particularity the actual texture of human life in the Old World, before modernity. My particular focus has been the European Middle Ages; but I use the term Old World for a much more vast expanse of time that in no small part of the world continues to this very day. I have tried to convince my students that much of what makes our own world so very different from that of Homer or Dante or Milton is of quite recent origin. The “alterity” of the past—a fancy historical term meaning, roughly, differentness—is everywhere connected with often forgotten changes in material culture less than a century old. Our ancestors no more than three generations back could intuitively and naturally understand things in Chaucer that today need tedious footnotes to explain.

One example I have used is that of animal husbandry. The Old World was overwhelmingly agricultural. Most people lived in intimate association with the land, with its crops, and especially with the animals on which they depended for food, clothing, and labor. Cows, sheep, pigs, poultry—these were the necessary and ubiquitous extensions of human community. There is a big difference between a milk cow or a porker shoat and a family pet, the only domestic animals known to most Americans, and only to some of them at that. People in the Old World typically demonstrated an attitude toward animals, as well as a detailed knowledge of their characteristics, very different from our own. Some years back I read that an ordinary farmyard chicken had been placed in the Bronx zoo. I suppose, in fact, that the vast majority of living Americans, despite a huge national consumption of what Frank Purdue is shameless enough to call “chicken”--have never actually seen a barnyard full of squawking poultry. But Chaucer had seen many such barnyards. His story of the rooster Chaunticleer and the hen Pertelote in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale absolutely assumed that you have too. Otherwise all the chicken singing, all the chicken sex, and above all the chicken oneiromancy loses half its humor. (Even at fifty percent power, it’s still a scream.)

A yet more dramatic example, perhaps, and one more relevant to my recent weekend, was the experience of the dark. When the sun set in the Old World, people were in the dark. They perforce “went to bed with the chickens”, in a phrase still used in rural communities. Most could afford no candle or oil lamp; for a few there might be at best a faint glow from the expertly banked embers of a hearth fire. Practically nobody in our modern world is in the dark they way that everybody then was in the dark. I mean really in the dark—no circuit breaker, no flashlight, no matches, no blue cell-phone glow, no vaguely lucid penumbra of distant city’s lights. The electrification of rural America was still in progress in my youngest days, spent on an Ozark farm where the only nocturnal illumination came from kerosene lamps. And that was in the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt! There was electricity in the little town six miles away, and among my earliest memories was the awe of first seeing a Christmas tree decorated with lights. The social revolution that came with electricity is enshrined in one of the obiter dicta of the last century’s most famous revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

Two rather scary, stormy nights illuminated only by a couple of candles and flickering hearth flames reminded me how utterly and unthinkingly dependent we are on we so blithely call “energy”. The experience reminded me, too, of what must necessarily be for us the diminished power of the recurrent images of light and dark that everywhere thicken and enrich our early literature.

Think, for instance, of the opening scene of the Divine Comedy. It presents us immediately with a an uncertain and fearful wanderer:

Nel mezzo del camin de nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood
for the straight way way was lost.
(Hollander and Hollander)

The very thought of this dark wood is so fearful to the narrator that (he says) even death itself is hardly more frightful than its memory. Now it is obvious that the scene is "allegorical". The pilgrim is morally "lost"; his indecision and fear are obvious elements of an infirm moral condition that the poet presents as the large problem to be addressed in his poem. But the justest image the poet can find, and one he knows will have a universal resonance with his readers, is the image of darkness. What "perdition" means is being lost in that hellish realm described by Milton as "darkness visible."

Another great poet of the Old World, two centuries later, seems at times nearly obsessed with the dread power of darkness. I refer, of course, to Shakespeare. There are literally hundreds of moral images of light and dark in his plays, but no scene is more pregnant nor more horrible than the murder of Desdemona (Othello, V, ii). Othello is a Moor, his young wife Desdemona the daughter of a Venetian senator. A racial theme is not entirely absent from the play, but it is incidental and decorative. A modern historical predicament of which Shakespeare could have had no inkling usually distorts contemporary productions of the play at the expense of its actual and universal moral themes.Othello is a great military officer but also a jealous fool pitifully manipulable by Iago, who persuades him of his innocent wife's infidelity. What he himself only too late comes to see as madness drives him to murder her. In one of the most terrifying moments in our literature Othello, carrying a candle, enters his sleeping wife's darkened bedchamber. Understanding his remarkable soliloquy requires a little philology. The principal meaning of "light" in early English was not abstract but concrete. It meant candle or lamp.

Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can by light relume.

The first "light" is of course the candle; but the second "light" has a double valence. Othello principally means by it Desdemona's life. That is the "light," impossible to "relume", that he will extinguish. But it is also the light of his own reason, the deiform faculty that the Old World believed was the image of God in humankind. Shakespeare is distant from Dante in some superficial ways. On the essence of moral reality they are twins. They naturally turn to the same powerful images already ancient in the Scriptures. "The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended [overpowered] it not," writes Saint John. Pick up any book published by the Oxford University Press. Look at the logo, which they still have not quite had the moxy to discard: Dominus illuminatio mea, "the Lord is my light."

For Goya, "the sleep of reason produces monsters". In perhaps the most famous of his terrifying Caprichos a whole dark world is invoked by sinister night birds and a cat--an animal believed in the Old World to be able to see in the dark. For a couple of nights, lying in a cold bed at nightfall, suddenly deprived of every distraction and comfort brought by electricity, listening to the wind howl through trees that I reasonably feared might at any moment be felled upon my roof, I briefly had a few Old World moments.