The Patriot's Library

          

As the term "liberty of the press" is adopted in this country without being understood I will state the origin of it and shew what it means.*

Last night on Channel Thirteen I watched the concluding episode of “The Abolitionists.”  Like most of “The American Experience” offerings, it was excellent.  It had the usual wonderful old photographs and the usual rainbow coalition of American historians offering commentary.  Their fad of speaking in a chatty historical present—“So Lincoln reads this letter, and he goes ballistic…” sort of thing—annoyed me, or perhaps annoys me; but that is a mere quibble overwhelmed by the quality of the information conveyed.

            I noticed that the National Endowment for the Humanities was on the list of financial supporters for the program.  That caught my eye, perhaps, because like many liberal arts professors I myself have enjoyed the support of the NEH in years past.  I did receive a fellowship from the Endowment one year, but my more extensive experience with the organization involved teaching several summer seminars, some for high school teachers and some for college professors.  Some of my happiest experiences in a long teaching career relate to those seminars.

            I am a patriot—that is, a lover of my native land—as I would hope that most of my far-flung readers are.  I can imagine few activities more truly patriotic than studying the history of my country—seriously, honestly, and with that kind of moral intentionality that compares the words of our founding documents and the lives of our acknowledged national heroes against the background of the actual social realities of the “American experience”, past and present.

            It was therefore discouraging to me to hear a self-proclaimed patriot in our Congress, when asked for concrete ideas as to how to attack an eminently unpatriotic sixteen trillion dollar national deficit, offer as his sole specific suggestion, defunding the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The budget request made by the NEH for 2013 is, I think, about a hundred and fifty million dollars.  For that amount of money the government could get about three-eights of one F-22 fighter plane, according to the most recent figures I’ve seen.  How I do wish H. L. Mencken were still with us.  We at last have achieved a congressional boobocracy fully worthy of his scorn.

            However, the purpose of this post is not to bash the benighted but to energize the enlightened.  It is my annual call to patriotism. Among the worthy groups that have enjoyed some very modest support from the NEH is the Library of America, the non-profit publishing enterprise with the mission of making available in scholarly and beautiful editions the works of important American writers.  I cannot imagine a more patriotic mission than the preservation and dissemination of our extraordinary American literary culture, and the chaste dust jacket of every Library of America volume discreetly but proudly is banded in red, white, and blue.

            My blog has apparently gained a readership far greater than I could have imagined.  My chief evidence for this claim, though circumstantial, is to me quite convincing.  It is the increasing frequency and urgency with which I am encouraged to “monetize” the blog—meaning make money off it by opening it to commercial advertisements.  Such a suggestion is of course highly gratifying to me.   First it means that somebody out there in cyberland who knows how to count readers has counted enough of them to offer me a little money to go commercial; second, because the money proposed is so little, I can safely scorn it, and with a deeply satisfying high-mindedness.  So I continue to promise my readers: as you scroll through Gladlylerne, you will not be encouraged to drink Pepsi or undergo liposuction, even at the hands of our board-certified plastic surgeons.

            The Library of America is another matter.  I will continue to make an annual appeal—entirely unsolicited by the librarians, needless to say, or even known to them--on the library’s behalf.  If you are an American, I urge you to visit the Library’s website.  If you are a literate American, I urge you in a spirit of patriotism to join as a subscriber.  We will grant a pass to semi-literates, for whom ordering merely one or two of the current specials will suffice.  I note that Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales is among them.  If you’re the kind of patriot who specializes in musket-lore, that’s the one for you.

*Thomas Paine, Collected Writings (Library of America, 76), p. 429.

Poor Little Rich Girl

 

The Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (1798-1860)

Of all famous quotations usually misquoted few are more popular than what Scott Fitzgerald said about the difference between rich people and “us”, meaning the not-so-rich people.  In a fictional voice, in a short story called “The Rich Boy”, Fitzgerald wrote thus:  Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.

            Being one of “us” I don’t know whether those sentiments are true, but they are very modern and very American and, let me add, very different from some attitudes of our ancestors.  Fitzgerald was one of the great literary theoreticians of the American aristocracy of wealth.  Our model differed from the old feudal model of an aristocracy of blood and rank in many ways, but in no way more noticeable than in its neglect of a sense of obligation.

            This point has been driven home to me by some of my recent general reading, which has been roaming among the Romanovs.   A more dutiful bunch of autocrats would be hard to find.  In particular, I came upon a charming mini-memoir* written by the Empress Dowager Alexandra Feodorovna (1798-1860), the widow of Nicholas I and mother of Alexander II, the “tsar-liberator”.   (Incidentally, is it at all embarrassing that the Russian czarist Manifesto of Emancipation antedates the American presidential Emancipation Proclamation by two years?)  This beautiful and virtuous lady spent her girlhood as a Prussian princess named Charlotte, but everything had to change, including her name, when she fell into cahoots with the Romanovs.  Her memoir, written in French in her widowhood, deals with her early years of married life (1817-1821).

            There is a solid historical explanation for the plots of Jane Austen’s novels and most others worth reading.  I suppose that the Darwinian imperative of sexual mating is too obvious to argue.  But if you add to it a powerful religious rationale and even more powerful political, social, and economic motives you pretty much have the history of Western literature from the Iliad to Downton Abbey.

            The chief reason that the royal houses of Europe ended up in such a mess of mediocrity, idiocy, and congenital disease was what might be called the “stale blood” problem: royalty had to marry other royalty.  That had been a demographic challenge since the Middle Ages, but it became particularly acute after the French Revolution.  The chief occupation of the royal youth of the age was checking out or being checked out as a potential spouse.  Nicholas met Charlotte (Alexandra) in Berlin in 1814.  He was 18, she 16; but the families closed the deal more or less on the spot.  They were married in 1817.

            As a ruler Nicholas I can fairly be judged as a disaster, and one of the worst kind, meaning a well-intentioned disaster.  The first thing he did, on the very day of his accession to power in December, 1825, was to slaughter a few of those noble and romantic rebels henceforth known as the “Decembrists”.  In macro-historical terms that was rather like fighting for the wrong guys at Bunker Hill.  One of the last things he did was to lose the Crimean War in humiliating fashion.  But the disasters had been thrust upon him.  Like George VI a century later, Nicholas was an accidental monarch.  His elder brother Constantine had been next in line for the throne, but when the time came he abdicated for a reason far more plausible than Wallis Simpson—cowardice.           

            Before his marriage Nicholas had gone on a number of educational tours, one of which was a fairly protracted stay in England, the nation recommended to him by some enlightened advisers around the court (and there actually were some) as a beacon of “representative government”.  His host and cicerone in the industrial Midlands was the Duke of Wellington.  It will tell you something of Nicholas’s political primitiveness that what he took to be the dangerous liberalism of the Duke and of the whole setup in pre-Reform Britain simply confirmed his belief in the sacred necessity of absolute autocracy.

            Almost everything the imperial couple did was undertaken out of a sense of obligation, and sacrificial duty is actually the main theme of the Empress’s recollections of her early married life.  Poor little rich girl, indeed!  In the middle of June, accompanied by a military guard but with little you could call “emotional support”, she was sent off from her native palace in the direction of the Russian frontier, where she arrived about a week later to be met by her betrothed “with drawn sword, at the head of a guard of honor” and accompanied by various Orthodox ecclesiastics with lots of hair and weird hats.  Part of the deal of being a Russian Grand Duchess was a crash course in the Orthodox faith.  She was a Lutheran, and a serious one; but now she was closeted for five days with a priest named Moussowsky for an emergency spiritual transplant.  Five days!  Moussowsky must have been quite a guy.  I’ve been working away at the works of John Chrysostom and Basil the Great for half a lifetime, and I’m nowhere near done.

            For the whole week’s run-up to the elaborate formal announcement of the betrothal, she writes, “I did nothing but cry whenever I found myself alone; the change in religions cost me a lot and weighed upon my heart….On the 24^th June I was taken to church by the Emperor.  As well as I could I made my profession of faith in Russian.  Beside me stood a black-robed Abbess, while I, dressed in white, with a little cross at my neck, looked like a sacrificial victim.  This was the impression I produced on all our Prussian attendants, who with feelings of compassion and eyes full of tears watched their poor Princess Charlotte take part in a ceremony strange and mystical to the minds of Protestants.”  But protest made she none.

*A Czarina’s Story, trans. by Una Pope-Hennessy (London, 1948)

           

In Re: The United States versus My Grandchildren

 

After a long hiatus in grandchild production, a blessed industry in which our daughter held a family monopoly for nearly two decades, her two brothers began in the second half of the last calendar year to redeem the time.  For the roughly five months since jolly John Henry arrived in lower Manhattan followed roughly six weeks later by radiant Ruby in Red Hook, Brooklyn, their pixilated paternal grandparents have been spending as much time as possible adoring them, an activity that has had a particular appropriateness as the season of Epiphany ran its course.  Should any friendly pagan need an explanation of my allusion, it refers to the liturgical memory of the legendary visitation of the three magi kings (Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior) to the newly born infant Jesus.

            Unlike the magi our mode of travel is not stellar.  We travel at the sufferance of the New Jersey Transit Corporation, and we must open our coffers to their hungry ticket machines.  For your bloguiste there is one other slight inconvenience.  Should visiting day fall on Tuesday, that is to say yesterday, with a New York overnight, he is unlikely to start thinking about his Wednesday post, let alone writing it, until he’s well south of the tunnel on the return trip.

            Such is the present circumstance, though “current events” practically dictate the subject.  For what we have just witnessed as the New Year began—the orgy of fecklessness, incompetence, and poltroonery summarized under the general rubric of “the fiscal cliff”—relates to my newest grandchildren in a very poignant way.  It means that little John Henry and even littler Ruby will spend the first years of their American citizenship in a land where the rising public debt is already greater than the annual gross domestic product.  Along with their birth certificates each one picked up a congressional Visa bill of about sixty grand.  Head start?  No child left behind?

            The disgrace of our federally elected officials is fairly ecumenical, but I have to say that the spineless Republicans take the cake.  Can a political party that preaches fiscal responsibility and then proposes Mitt Romney for the presidency and actually re-elects John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives have any claim on serious men and women? 

            Some of you will be old enough to remember Spiro Agnew, one of our most disgraceful and disgraced of Veeps.  Long before he was exposed as a crook he had been widely recognized as a dolt.  But when publicly taxed for his “mediocrity,” he in no wise contested the charge.  On the contrary, his view was that the large numbers of mediocre people in the country deserved to have their representative too.  He must have alluded to that large majority of our fellow citizens who have come to the consensus that every American has a natural right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—and, oh yeah, a free lunch.  Lest I seem to speak obscurely, I mean an unfunded welfare state.  Perhaps Agnew had a point.  Such people do need representation.   But do we need four hundred of them in the House alone?

            Sadly, we probably have the Congress we deserve.  We have an electoral system that does an excellent job of pre-screening out intelligence, moderation, imagination, and any traditional sense of public service.  Once elected, most Congressmen soon reveal by their actions their one unfailingly constant motive: getting elected again.  As we voters seem happy enough to collude with this system, we perhaps have merited our loathsome reward.  But surely the children of our nation deserve something better.

            My own grandchildren will, I devoutly hope, survive the malfeasance of their government, for they enjoy some powerful advantages.  They all live in stable homes with two loving parents who are committed in marriage to their well being, their education, and their moral training.  They will do some family travelling.  They will have books in the house.  At the family table where they will regularly take their evening meal, they will join in intelligent conversation sometimes characterized by complete sentences and disyllabic words.  They thus will find themselves endowed with a certain amount of what is called “social capital”.  That fact alone may make them members of a generational minority, but it should help them to seize such opportunities as appear on the constricting horizons of our national life, as in happier and more generous times their meritocratic forebears of earlier generations once did.

            It is the fantasy of a large swath of one of our political parties that “government programs” can do nothing to replenish the sadly depleted social capital of millions of our children, and the fantasy of a large swath of the other that they can do everything.  Perhaps one early locus of the compromise which will be imperative for any real progress might be an agreement that at the very least we will not bury the newborn under a mountain of prenatal debt.

           

Les Miz.02 Finds God

 

 Victor Hugo (1802-1885): among the great ones

Though I am not much of a movie-goer, over the last few months, I have actually seen several of Hollywood’s more recent and talked about efforts, including Argo, Lincoln, and Anna Karenina.  Just before we went up to New York to see the New Year in with a group of old friends, we went down to Princeton’s sole and seedy cinema house and took in Les Misérables.  I am very glad we did, as the experience has helped me clarify in my mind an incipient field theory of modern fiction.

            There are whole continents of popular culture of which I am shamefully ignorant.  We don’t go to Broadway shows, as I am unprepared to take out the second mortgage the habit would demand.  I am therefore one of what are probably comparatively few suburbanites who over the last couple of decades have not shelled out a hundred and fifty bucks to watch a stage full of urchins in rags cavort their way through the fantastically successful show called “Les Miz.”  This is relevant because the current film Les Misérables is a version not of Victor Hugo’s masterwork Les Misérables but of the Broadway musical “Les Miz”.  That is, instead of talking the characters mainly sing to each other.  Sort of.

            Artistic “adaptation” has a long and noble history, but its parasitism must be frankly acknowledged right up front.  As the great classicist Richard Bentley said of Pope’s version of the Iliad, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”  So let us agree not to call this thing Hugo; call it Les Miz.02 or some such, and you will enjoy it greatly.  The stage sets, the costumes, the architectural detail—all that is fabulous.  Much of the acting is very fine.  Although there are notable exceptions, for the most part the singing ranges from the mediocre to the misérable; but this somehow often seems appropriate to the material.  Russell Crowe once made a film on the Princeton campus (“A Beautiful Mind”).  His public deportment on that occasion suggests that his role as the horrible Inspector Javert was an instance of casting by type.

 Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert: cool hat

            This leads me toward my field theory.  I long ago concluded that what is so thin about modern fiction is the absence of God.  I do not refer to God as a literary character with a speaking part.  Once you get past Milton’s Paradise Lost God doesn’t get all that many speaking roles.  I refer to the moral gravity that becomes available to a work of fiction when it engages with the great question of a Providential Order, the question that animates the fiction of Rabelais, Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens, Tolstoy—not to mention Les Misérables of Victor Hugo.   

            I do hope this film will stimulate a certain number of its viewers to read Hugo’s novel.  Hope is of course a different thing than expectation.  Les Misérables is half a million words long, within spitting distance of War and Peace.  It is a skein of multiple plots, and its characters are sufficiently numerous to fill a small town’s phone book.  Like much of the great fiction of the nineteenth century it is awash in sentimentality and coincidence.  But, boy, is it ever “on message”!

            Years ago a student said something very surprising to me.  He was comparing two fine novelists, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James.  Both, he agreed, were very great writers; but he was forced to grant the priority to Hawthorne.  This was to me a rather surprising judgment, and he expressed it in an unforgettable way.  “You see,” he said, “Hawthorne has more of the old eternal verities going for him.”  It was easier to chuckle at the form in which the judgment was phrased than to contest the judgment itself.

            Although there is a great deal in Hugo’s Les Misérables that is not in the film of Les Miz.02, I detected very little in Les Miz.02 that is not in Les Misérables.  There is so much of Hugo, indeed, that it can hardly escape being an impressive work of art.  I think it would be impossible to see this film without realizing that it is pregnant with the old eternal verities: sin and redemption, the vivacity of the spirit and the deadness of the letter, the debility of law and the power of grace, the vivid possibility, never entirely effaced even by the cruelest of material realities, of genuine moral change.

            Les Misérables is a great work of Christian literature.  This is not because Victor Hugo was particularly pious.  Far from it.  He was a free-thinking political radical who scorned the comfortable and often hypocritical Catholicism of the re-established ruling classes of post-Revolutionary France.  All this is clear in Les Misérables, and quite explicit in some of his other works.  Like his contemporary Karl Marx, he nurtured a passion for social justice—a fact obvious even from the very title of his book.  Unlike Marx, he was not a materialist.  There was an ideal moral order to be searched for beyond the random play of the molecules.  His hero Jean Valjean searched for it and found it, and neither Broadway nor Hollywood could conceal it.

Spenglerian Gloom

 

Many of the world’s great books seem to consist of every damned thing that entered their author’s minds laid end to end in captivating fashion.  I’m thinking about books like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Arabian Nights, Rabelais’ Pantagruel, Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, or Pynchon’s V.  You will undoubtedly have your own favorites of the genre.   These are all works of what might be called “the higher realism,” as they so perfectly imitate life in the compelling randomness of their subjects and associations.

            I must invoke some such concept if I am get an essay written this morning.  We have been in New York these last few days celebrating Christmas with two-thirds of our offspring and their families, the third having temporarily vacated Gotham in favor of South Carolina.  That was our official agenda.   An added benefit was to get away from the perils of small-town America to the comparative safety of the city streets. 

            The pace has been pretty hectic.  The gift-swap took place on Christmas Eve at Katherine’s (Katy’s*) welcoming apartment on Washington Square.  Zvi had prepared a real feast: some species of Middle Eastern vegetarian paella, from which we waddled to our places around the “ecological” tree.  It is actually the word “tree” that deserves the quotation marks, as it was a French-made construction of recycled soda bottles.  Don’t ask.  Autres pays, autres moeurs.  Walking through a feeble, spitting snow to Midnight Mass at St. Luke’s in the Fields on Hudson Street was a struggle, but a struggle well made: great musical settings by Giacomo Carissimi and a nearly endless liturgy that took no prisoners and spared no horses—though I suppose most liturgies never do either of those things even under normal circumstances.  There amid magnificent tranquillity I did not fail to hold up in prayer my far-flung relatives and friends in many lands, not excluding the readers of my blog.

 

            Christmas Day was mostly bright, and in the afternoon everybody went over to Brooklyn to the Red Hook digs of Katherine (Katie*) and Richard for some babyolatry and a second delicious feast, this one the product of Rich’s day-long labors in the kitchen, and centered upon the perfect turkey.  It was a memorably mellow evening.  There, gazing in my geezerdom upon the tiny face of a one-month-old granddaughter, I could feel the full force of the prophecy of Micah: “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid”.

            That was last night.  Now it’s Wednesday, blog day, and I turn for inspiration to the Internet news.  The first story that meets the eye concerns a new gun atrocity, one that in my recent preoccupation with celebrating the anniversary of the birth of the Prince of Peace I seem to have missed.  The story involves a small lakeside neighborhood in the suburbs of Rochester, N.Y.  In this place (Webster) on Christmas Eve a man murdered the sister with whom he shared the old family house, which he then torched with her remains apparently still within it.  When the volunteer firefighters arrived, summoned by his telephone call, he shot two of them dead and wounded two others.  He then killed himself as the fire, uncontested, burned down six additional adjacent houses.  A lot of bad things do seem to happen in our country, but we can perhaps learn something even from something as bad as this one.  In our continuing national quest to answer the question “What does it take to stop a bad guy with a gun” we can strike from the list of possibilities “Four good guys with fire hoses.”

            Concerning the dead arsonist-murderer, said to be “possibly” suffering with “mental health issues,” a journalist had written thus:  “Spengler had served 17 years in jail for killing his grandmother with a hammer but had done nothing to attract the authorities' attention since being granted parole in 1998.”  This is a curious sentence, but two of its features in particular attracted my attention.  The first is perhaps syntactical, perhaps penological.  Why should killing one’s grandmother with a hammer earn you seventeen years in prison?  What’s the tariff for a great aunt with a hacksaw?  Why have we heard nothing from the hardware lobby?  “Hammers don’t kill people; carpenters kill people.”

            But the more obvious jolt came from the poor madman’s allegorical surname: Spengler.  Spengler is not in my experience a common name.  In fact so far as I know I have encountered only one other Spengler: Oswald Spengler, the once famous (he died in the month of my birth) philosopher of history.  Spengler was, to put it mildly, a very gloomy thinker.  His most famous book (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918-22) is usually translated as the “Decline of the West”.   But “decline” is a little mild.  Spengler actually believed that European Christian culture was finished, kaput.  And that was around 1920, before the twin political pathologies of the twentieth century, Bolshevism and National Socialism, had as yet strutted their stuff. 

            Some of Spengler’s analysis has proved errant.  Western economic dynamism has in the long perspective remained impressive, and as political power seldom trails far behind economic power Spengler’s view of Western material “decline” was to say the very least exaggerated.  But as I observe our current political impotence I have to admit that long-term developments in the moral life of the West, and especially in the American part thereof, come closer to justifying one of his more celebrated remarks: “Optimism is cowardice.”  Then, again, I wonder if the man who said that ever could have looked into the face of a sleeping month-old baby as illuminated by Christmas lights.

*Only by orthographic finesse can I now distinguish (in writing) my wonderful daughter from my wonderful daughter-in-law.

A Constitutional Proposal

2^nd: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

            According to the Gospel of Matthew the Roman satrap Herod the Great, having heard through the magi that a great king was to be born in Bethlehem, and willing to brook no competitor, ordered the killing of all male babies in that village.  The feast of the “Slaughter of the Innocents” falls in most western churches just after Christmas, and it has been the subject of famous works of art, including the well-known paintings of Breughel and Poussin, among many others.  There is no other evidence of the historicity of the supposed event, allowing us at least the hope that it might be emblematic rather than literal.  But its horror, alas, is not inconsistent with actual known realities concerning the exercise of power in the ancient Near East.  The final verse of the beautiful psalm Super flumina ("By the Waters of Babylon") expresses the fervent wish of the psalmist that the infants of his oppressors have their heads crushed against a stone wall.

Herod's men bearing arms: Breughel

            Of Herod it can at least be said that he had an identifiable rational motive.  He was not a vaguely “disturbed youth” or “troubled loner”.  The arena of most moral analysis, surely, is the relationship between means and ends.  Herod used unspeakable means in pursuit of an ignoble end, but there was some connection between means and ends.

            We have a very big problem with guns in the United States.  I will spare you the bit about growing up out in the country, of sensing for as long as I can remember that guns were ordinary machines, though perhaps demanding even more respect than such other dangerous machines as automobiles, chainsaws, mowers, or engine block hoists, or of assuming that shooting birds and small animals was a universally practiced mode of improving a family’s protein intake.  That’s all true, but also quite irrelevant to the pre-Christmas slaughter of innocents in Newtown CT.

            The gun problem in America is complex and of long duration.  It is probably not susceptible to solution, but that does not mean it is beyond amelioration.  One index of intelligent organization, surely, is a reasonable correlation between theory and practice.  Take a look at the second amendment to the Constitution.  The second thing to notice about it is that there is not a person alive who can parse its grammar.  If the absolute phrase with which it begins is a justification for “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” the amendment is at the very least obsolete.  The national defense has not depended upon private arms for most of the history of the republic.  But the first thing to notice about the second amendment is that it is an amendment.

            Our Constitution makes no claim to perfection or immutability.  How could it?   Our adulation of the Founders sometimes does not stop short of idolatry.  Would such men be so stupid as to fail to anticipate the probable need for future changes, or to fail to provide a vehicle for their accomplishment?  Of course not.  Almost immediately people saw the need to make ten such changes, and made them by amendment.  We call them the Bill of Rights.  Yet everything legal was not in fact always right.  For example the Constitution clearly recognized the legitimacy of chattel slavery.  Chucking out the constitutional “right” to enslave human beings turned out to be a rather controversial and strenuous business, but the nation eventually got around to it by amendment.  What amend means is “to change or modify for the better;” and it can be accomplished by subtraction no less than by addition.

            Though I lack specific social science data I will venture the guess that alcohol abuse has racked up an even sorrier record of disaster in our American domestic society than has gun abuse.  It certainly has in my personal, anecdotal experience.  I know of no gun accident or atrocity among my own family, my neighbors, or my college classmates.  I could point to a dozen alcohol disasters among that same group.  Thus I can sympathize with and understand the motives of those who, after decades of struggle, succeeded in prohibiting alcoholic beverages in 1920 by means of the Eighteenth Amendment.

            Of course the Eighteenth Amendment itself soon turned out to be a disaster.  When enough people came to that conclusion, they repealed it in 1933 by means of the Twenty-First Amendment.  It took only a brief time for the well-intentioned prohibition of alcohol to reveal its unfortunate unintended consequences.  It has taken the Second Amendment a couple of centuries longer, but they now seem to me sufficiently clear.  What was once intended to extend our liberties has become, in Paul’s terms, “a cloak of maliciousness”. 

            I propose the repeal of the Second Amendment.  Let firearms and their possession go unmentioned in the Constitution.  Let firearms be like trains, planes, automobiles, chainsaws, commercial explosives, electrical wiring, potable alcohol, and thousands of other items of our material culture—stuff that may be very useful, but still potentially dangerous to a degree that invites periodic review and regulation by the duly constituted authorities charged with preserving the general welfare.

A Theatrical Evening

 

            This is not a “literary” blog.  It is certainly not a Shakespeare blog.  And by no means whatsoever is it a blog devoted to “Productions of King Lear I Have Seen”.  It is thus by the merest of chances that about eighteen months ago I devoted a blog essay  (Ripeness is All—Most of It, July 19, 2011),to a remarkable production of King Lear that I had see at the Armory in New York, and that my subject today is a remarkable production of King Lear that I saw at the Class of 1970 Theater in Whitman College, Princeton University, on Saturday last.  And as I seem to be overusing the adjective remarkable, I’ll point out something further along those lines.  The Armory Lear was mounted by the hyper-professional Royal Shakespeare Company, the Whitman College Lear by the all-student Princeton Shakespeare Company.  They were of roughly equal quality.  Remarkable, quite remarkable.

            One of the joys and privileges of the academic profession for me has been constantly to be surrounded by golden youth.  The student generations are always different—yet ever the same in their brightness, their enthusiasm, their optimism, their talent, their strange naiveté and even stranger sophistication.  The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus reminds us that one can never wade into the same river twice; for though the stream may be there forever, its waters are in continual flux.  There is a plangent side to this.  “Time, like an ever rolling stream,” wrote Isaac Watts in his famous paraphrase of the ninetieth psalm, “bears all its sons away.”  But there is also a comforting, even inspiring reassurance of the continuity as well.  Several circumstances surrounding my most recent visit to the theater reinforced this happy aspect

            I came to know a lot of the first women undergraduates at Princeton because many of them were housed in Wilson College, of which I happened to be the Master at the time of their arrival.  Several of the friendships we made at that time have stayed the course, among the most cherished of which is that with M. Christine Stansell of the Class of 1971, whose name has appeared in this blog on an earlier occasion.  She is now an eminent professor of American History and Women’s Studies.  Her published books include City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860; Powers of Desire: the Politics of Sexuality; and American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century.  Her present exalted title is “the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in United States History and the College” at the University of Chicago, but since she has been an honorary member of our family since about 1969, we all claim the liberty of calling her “Chris”.  You get to do that if you have all camped out together for weeks on end in a tick-infested Ozark wilderness.

            Anyway, Chris has been on an academic leave up in New York, allowing us to spend a little time together, and she was our houseguest this past weekend.  Naturally she joined us in going to see Lear.   She should have felt at home, for in a certain way it was an “All Seventies” evening.  The venue was the Class of 1970 Theater in Whitman College, the newest of Princeton’s residential colleges and the gift of Meg Whitman of the Class of 1977.  (I hope the fiscal cliff-dwellers will think long and hard before messing about with the tax deductions for charitable donations.)  The college theater is beautiful, and I confess to a little pang of jealousy when I think back to the subterranean “black box” of Wilson College in my day. 

 Whitman College, Princeton University

           

           I well remember the founding of the Princeton Shakespeare Company in 1994.  I had no part in it, but I knew several of the student organizers; and it seems “like yesterday,” as the saying goes.  But time does pass, and student generations pass rapidly.  The role of Lear in this current production was played—and even choosing the adverb with care I would say played brilliantly—by a prodigy named Jake Robertson.  This man is a current sophomore, meaning that it must be a close call as to whether he had even yet been born when the Princeton Shakespeare Company was organized.  How such a stripling youth could convey such a sense of decaying and confused old age is a wonder not to be explained even by the technical genius of the production’s make-up gurus, which was considerable.

 Class of 1970 Theater

            I hardly need remind you that the matter of King Lear concerns the troubled relationships between an aging father and his three adult children.  All great literature must necessarily command some degree of universal resonance, and I cannot imagine that anyone could have seen this production without being engaged by it.  But I can guarantee you that should it just happen that you are an aging father of three adult children, you would certainly have sat up and taken notice.  A couple of Lear’s children are so conveniently wicked that for many years I was able to avoid the implications of the king’s own tragic realization:  “I am a very foolish fond old man.”  This wonderful college production forces the realization upon you, and with it, some meditation upon the interplay of continuity and disjunction among the generations.