The Golden Age

                                            Peaceable Kingdom of Edward Hicks
 

If you’ve read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, you will know—or at least be forced to deny in the face of overwhelming if dull statistical data—that the larger trends in global human felicity are on the upswing.  I refer to such major factors as the ravages of war, famine, and disease.  The number of our fellow humans who have fairly recently “been brought out of abject poverty” is astonishing.  Pinker’s book is in line with a major though historically fairly new trend of optimistic thought—mainly since the Enlightenment—progressivism—documented in another once-famous book by the Cambridge historian J. B. Bury*.  Yet one would hardly guess the world’s good news  from reading the daily papers or watching the PBS News Hour.  There one gets the impression that major world trends have probably never been worse since the time of the Golden Horde, and that in our own country “democracy is imperiled” about the same way it was in Bloody Kansas in 1858.  Do not misunderstand me.  It’s not that I think everything is just tikkity-boo.  I think a lot of things are pretty bad—just not 1348 or 1793 bad.  But as a student of earlier periods of history I am aware that the human struggle has in fact been unending.   Twice in my own lifetime the pessimism has been tinged with apocalypticism.  When I was a child in school the terror was Nuclear Winter.  For my young grandchildren it has been Global Warming.  We are born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, as the Good Book says.  What interests me in this essay is the alacrity with which spokesmen of the human race have embraced historical pessimism and continue to do so.

 

Having too little to do as he lolled around the Tower of London while awaiting eventual execution, the Elizabethan courtier and swashbuckler Sir Walter Raleigh dashed off an 800-page History of the World animated by his imaginative etymology of the word world: “that which groweth worse as it groweth older”.  Retrogressivism.  It is Raleigh rather than Pinker that my week’s reading in old poems has brought to my mind.

 

Among the great world myths, to be found in the lore of the most “advanced” of ancient peoples and in the least technologically developed of contemporary indigenous groups, is that of a Golden Age from which the human race has gradually declined or precipitously fallen in its ethical stature, moral grandeur, and state of felicity.  Usually, perhaps always, the transformation is the result of moral lapse.  Most famous of such myths is that in the Hebrew Scriptures—the story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent and the forbidden fruit tree.  In the early centuries of the formation of Christianity brilliant exegetes derived from this story in the early chapters of Genesis complex doctrines of human nature, the construction of the human psychological apparatus, refined philosophical concepts of the nature of human offense against God (sin), and the consequences of its supposed inheritability, often called Original Sin.  In the seventeenth-century the English poet John Milton, probably the best-known epic poet in our tongue, published Paradise Lost, announcing as his theme “Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World, and all our woe, with loss of Eden…”  For just as the human race was corrupted, so also did living conditions in our world become harsh and adversarial, and life itself a brutal struggle: vineyards into briar patches, so to speak.  The “peaceable kingdom” became the arena of human life “nasty, brutish, and short” in Hobbes’s famous phrase.

 

The pre-Christian myth of the Golden Age is alluded to by many of the classical Latin writers and treated at some length by the two most important poets among them, Virgil and Ovid. So consonant was it with the account of human origins in the Bible, the Roman myth needed only the slightest humanistic tweaking to enter the mainstream of Christian Latin literature, which it joined via various channels, but especially by way of a magnificent poem (early sixth century) by the brilliant poet-philosopher Boethius.  His greatest book, The Consolation of Philosophy is a prosimetrum, a work in which poems and prose passages often work in intellectual symphony.  One of the most famous “meters” (poems) in the Consolation begins “How much happier was that earlier age when contented men depended on the faithful fields and, not yet sunk into luxury, satisfied their hunger with easily gathered acorns.”  Felicitous, peaceful simplicity of life became deformed by the invention of navigation, leading to trade, and universal avarice.  The next steps toward depravity were bloodshed, wars of conquests, and the frantic digging for gold and precious gems.

 

  This short poem (thirty lines) of Boethius had a long afterlife.  It was translated or adapted by early poets in most of the European vernaculars—Chaucer included.  Chaucer’s “translation” is double the length of that of Boethius, and doubly pessimistic: by its final three lines the moral decline is so bad that nothing is left in the world but “covetousness, duplicity, treason, and envy, poison, manslaughter, and murder in several varieties.”

 

Boethius’s Golden Age meter of course derived from earlier Latin literary tradition.  The most influential of the classical versions are those of Virgil and, especially, Ovid.  Very early in the Metamorphoses Ovid traces universal world history from a Golden Age, ruled by Saturn under Astreia, goddess of justice, through its gradual decline into ages of less precious metals.  Things really got tough in the Age of Iron.  “Immediately every species of crime burst forth…modesty, truth, and honor took flight; in their place succeeded fraud, deceit, treachery, violence, and the cursed hankering for acquisition".

 

painful end of an era

 

The correspondences Christian theologians found between Moses and Ovid were not simply factitious.  Legends of the ruination of our once paradisal planet through human moral depravity are part of the shared stock of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern lore.  Virgil, widely believed to have foretold the birth of Christ in his Eclogues, could almost naturally become Dante’s guide to his imagined Christian underworld.  The end of the Golden Age and the loss of Eden are fundamentally the same old story of desire and rebellion-- drugs and rock-and-roll being long delayed afterthoughts.  The violent end to the Age of Gold came about in this wise.   Saturn’s revolting son--“Lecherous” Jupiter as Chaucer calls him—revolted against his father in a most revolting way.  He cut off his dad’s private parts and dropped them into the Mediterranean drink.  The result this aberrant act of coitus, after a certain period of foaming and bubbling, was the birth of the goddess Venus at Paphos on Cyprus.

 

Venus on the half-shell

Most readers probably consider it inappropriate if not blasphemous to find anything humorous in the scriptural version of the Fall of Man.   I do have to say that I find it hard not to smile when I read of  the first thing Adam and Eve did following the disaster.  They tried to get some underwear on, and quick: “and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”  Maybe it’s just the Elizabethan use of the word aprons.  Once the goddess of love got loose in the world, all hell broke loose, especially when her very naughty kid Cupid was around.  It’s more like a belly laugh in Ovid, where one of the first events in the fallen world is Apollo’s mad pursuit of Daphne, the beautiful daughter of a river god.  You know about Cupid’s arrows, of which there were two kinds: aphrodisiac and anaphrodisiac.  The first inspires a burning sexual passion in its victim, the latter a terrible headache and revulsion at the very idea of sex.  Just for the fun of it, Cupid shot Apollo with one of the former and Daphne with one of the latter and sat back to enjoy the fun.  This led to a frantic pursuit and many great works of Renaissance art.  Just as she was about to be captured and ravished by Apollo, Daphne uttered a desperate prayer to be saved.  Salvation came in the form of her miraculous transformation into a tree—the laurel tree, thereafter the Apollonian symbol of poets and poetry.  As her tender flesh turned to bark in his hands, and her lovely hair a tangle of leafy twigs, Apollo was forced to reconsider his options.  “Well,” he said in effect, “if you won’t be my girlfriend, will you at least be my tree?"

 

Arboreal Daphne 

*J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1920).  A timely study: 20 millions, half of them civilians, had just been killed in the Great War.

Camões--and a Little Chaucer--at Harvard

   

 

 

    

 Watch out, Geoff.  I've got my eye on you.

 

 If I declare our visit to the Camões Conference at Harvard a great success—and I do—the credit for our personal comfort goes primarily to Leah and Brian, our generous hosts, who with what appeared to be ease balanced busy professional careers and the demands of two adorable children with the care and feeding of a couple of octogenarians.  On the academic side, on the Harvard campus, the treatment was likewise most welcoming, and the intellectual feast quite rich.  Many of the principal scholars in this field, including the Portuguese ones, were there; others made presentations via Zoom.  Rita Marnoto came from the University of Coimbra, the ancient academy at which Camões himself must have acquired some large part of his enormous erudition.  It is rather as though Davy Crocket had picked up a Yale doctorate on his way to the Alamo.  She gave the introductory talk, a bibliographical tour de force concerning the poem’s first edition(s) of 1572.  Around the edges there were pleasant group meals full of friendly and informative talk; Joan sneaked off for half a day at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and offered a report on some of the marvels viewed.

My belief concerning the European Renaissance, a belief by no means widely accepted by my colleagues, is that in most essentials it continued in the philosophical and theological traces of high medieval culture.  Historians are more interested in change than in stasis, and there of course appeared in the sixteenth century major stylistic changes and intellectual innovations for us to talk about.  My talk, indeed, in part concerned possible “medieval” relationships between Camões and Dante.  Such relevance as the digressive comments about the Middle Ages in this paragraph might possibly have  concern my welcome of two unexpected fourteenth-century Chaucerian interventions into our sixteenth-century Camonian event.

At the Houghton Library, where some of Harvard’s fabulous bibliographic treasures are stored, experts had mounted a small collection of first and other editions of the Lusiads.  The Harvard library is among the richest in the world in this as in so many other subjects.  But there is hanging in an elegant room not far from the exhibition space what is probably the most famous, and possibly authentic , portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer.  I had seen a hundred reproductions of it, but never it.  The Librarian of the Houghton, knowing that I had taught Chaucer for many years, took me aside for an unscheduled private viewing.  It was a very memorable kindness.

                         The Houghton Rare Book Library, Harvard University

A second way the Middle Ages intruded into our very Renaissance conference was via the front page of the New York Times, which reported that two major Chaucer experts had discovered new evidence concerning a mysterious episode in the poet’s life.  Though Chaucer’s life records, when sufficiently spread out and annotated, occupy a pretty thick book, there is a great deal we do not know about him, including practically anything that might shed light upon his “personality”.  One intriguing document, however, has garnered a great deal of attention and much speculation.  It is a legal affidavit attesting that a woman named Cecily Champagne absolves Chaucer of any charge of raptus against him.  This document has sometimes been used by feminist scholars and others to impute patriarchalism, misogyny, and other unpleasant medieval attitudes to the father of English poetry.  What is new in the Chaucer scholars’ discovery is that Cecily and Geoffrey were allied in a legal action denying the charge.  Any scrap of evidence about Chaucer is a major discovery, and the discoverers of this one merit high praise.  But there is no particular illumination of Chaucer’s character in it.  Anybody with access to the Du Cange dictionary of medieval Latin would know that it is quite unlikely that raptus in the context of the original document means forcible sexual possession.  Hardly more likely does it mean that he secretly married her.  No form of “kidnapping” or “false imprisonment” or other coercion is likely.  Secondly, and without the slightest ambiguity, what the document says is that Chaucer did not commit raptus, whatever raptus means.  Only in places like Park Slope has inveigling away somebody’s cleaning lady with an offer she cannot refuse risen to the level of a crime.  Somewhat strangely, one of the discoverers of the supplementary document was quick to add that nothing in this episode undermines certain previous scholarship concerning it.  This is a little like saying that nothing in Copernicus undermines anything in Ptolemy.  That is one of the current stylistic differences between scholarship in the humanities and scholarship in the natural sciences in America.  The study of past ages can be very rewarding and indeed instructive.  But the past is a series of unique ages, each with its own inherited cultural patterns each with at least some cultural innovations.  It cannot be true that “to understand everything is to pardon everything.”  Still it does little to divvy up the past into convenient but inadequate categories for flagellation among our own current moral and political certainties, many of which would seem novel if even comprehensible to our not too distant ancestors.

Traveling by train worked out very well.  It took about five hours.  Flying would not have required less, though it would have involved a great deal more difficult walking and the general hassle of security lines.  There are far worse fates than to sit in a comfortable, roomy seat with a good book for a few hours. 

Still I was once again struck, as I so often am, by the disparities between the private and the public in our country.  Everything I saw on the Harvard campus was elegant, functional, imposing, inviting.  It was clean.  It was tidy.  You might never guess that the institution’s endowment is less than sixty billion dollars.  Boston South rail station, where we arrived and whence we departed, is a civic disgrace.  The area from which the trains arrive and from which they depart has the air of a long-abandoned steel mill.  The vibe of the interior waiting room, where I was able to buy a pint bottle of soda water for $3.84, is decayed inelegance.  And though the Amtrak train did get us to Trenton, and on time… How are you going to keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?  The distance between Marseilles and Paris is greater than that from Trenton to Boston.  The TGV (very fast train) covers the distance in three hours and twenty-seven minutes, and you can safely place your bottle of soda water on the little-fold down table without fear that it will be bounced into your lap within the first quarter mile.  Of course my weekend thoughts were full of other cities: Lisbon on the Tagus River, and others I shall never see, Mombasa, Malinde, Goa.  Forget the train stations for the moment.   In this country I have actually been paid good money to read, teach, love, talk, and argue about old books that I love with a never-failing succession of inspiring young people.  And hang out at Camões conferences for down time.  What a privilege.  What an honor!

A Daring Journey

Vasco da Gama (maybe)
 

        In 1497 Vasco da Gama set out from Lisbon with the mission of finding a maritime route to what I shall call actual India—Columbus having just a few years earlier convinced himself and a good deal of the European learned world that he had reached India in the Caribbean.  He spent a long time on the trip, which included numerous European “firsts”, or at least “first recordeds”.   He navigated the treacherous waters off the Horn of Africa, the continent’s southern tip.  He spent a certain amount of time investigating some of the lands on both the western and eastern flanks of the continent.  These landings were the origins of Portugal’s African empire in Angola and Mozambique, among other places.  Most important of all he did make it to “real” India, where he raised a good deal of hell and scouted out the the possibilities of a  Portuguese colonial presence destined, in Goa, to create one of the teeming multicultural cities of the Renaissance.  In economic and cultural terms he challenged the Muslim maritime monopoly in the Indian Ocean and “opened up” the East for the lucrative commerce of Europeans.  Vasco’s voyage was epoch-making and epic in its statistics,  taking roughly three hundred days at sea, travelling roughly twenty-four thousand miles, and losing most of his crew (including his brother) before landing once again on Portuguese land in 1499.  Fifty years or more later—we really are not sure when--a somewhat mysterious countryman of Vasco’s, an erudite Latinist, a soldier, an adventurer, a disappointed lover, but above all a magnificent poet wrote (in an elevated form of the Portuguese vernacular) an epic poem about the voyage.

The poet’s name was Luis de Camões.  His poem is called the Lusiadas (Lusiads in English), which means roughly “the adventures of the sons of Lusus”) as Æneid means roughly “the adventures of Æneas.”  The connection with Virgil’s Æneid is crucial.  Camões lived, breathed, and presumably bathed in the poems of Virgil, which he appears to have more or less memorized.  Lusus is a highly iffy mythological character, probably the son of the god Bacchus, and the legendary founder of the nation of Portugal, the Latin name of which is Lusitania.  Most people have heard of Lusitania, or at least the Lusitania,  for a somber reason.  It was the sinking of a British passenger liner of that name by the Germans in 1915 that was the immediate “cause” of America’s entry into the First World War.  But if you think any poem that requires this much explanation just to understand its name is a pretty fancy poem, you are right.  It is.  It is also very long.  Nonetheless it did find a publisher, who brought it out in Lisbon in 1572.  The rest is history, and as historians love anniversaries, it has not gone unnoticed that 2022 is the 450^th anniversary of publication.  Under these circumstances, a group of enterprising young scholars at Harvard decided to put together an academic conference to celebrate the occasion.

                                                        Camões (maybe)

 

As Chaucer’s Friar said after listening to the Wife of Bath’s extensive remarks introducing the actual story she is preparing to tell, “This is a long preamble to a tale!”  That is not the sole resemblance between the Wife’s introductory remarks and my own.  In both instances the prologues are more interesting than the tales themselves.  Nonetheless, I must continue with my own tale.  I am quite interested in Camões, and I published a short book about one of his poems a few years ago.  The proposed “Camões at Harvard” conference was a chance to take a shot at his greatest work, the epic Lusiads.  So I sent in a proposal to the organizers, and more or less forgot about it.

 

During the time the idea for the conference was being hatched, the pandemic was raging.  Covid has had a major dispiriting effect on all of education, including higher education.  Many institutions felt they had to abandon “in person” teaching in favor of various more or less unsatisfactory on-line techniques.  The Age of Zoom had arrived.  Even in normal times conventions, conferences, and group meetings were known as possible spreaders of infectious diseases.  You will recall the infamous Legionnaires Disease, so named because of its first identification in relation to a meeting of the American Legion.  I once left a scholarly conference sick as a dog.  During the height of Covid many long-scheduled meetings were cancelled or indefinitely postponed.  But with the reasonable hope that things were improving, the planners of the Camões conference came up with an innovative plan.  The conference would be “hybrid”, part on-line, part in person, depending on circumstances and the preferences of individual participants at the time, which is—now.

 

The best part of academic meetings, from my personal perspective, has always been the informal conversations among participants.  Having signed up, I was willing to give my talk by Zoom from my home library but without much enthusiasm.  I was greatly relieved when Covid conditions improved sufficiently to move forward.  What sealed the deal for us was an invitation from a delightful friend on the Harvard faculty, once a graduate student at Princeton and now a rising scholarly star, to stay for a couple of nights with her and her husband in their house in Cambridge.  So later today Joan and I will be at the Trenton station to catch an Amtrak train scheduled to be in Boston South Station in the late afternoon.  This is a big deal for us.  We have become timid fuddy-duddies when it comes to serious travel.  I doubt that any of Vasco da Gama’s crew could have felt more edgy.  I am hoping to travel little more than five hundred miles in the semi-luxury of “distanced” business class, spend no more than three days doing so, and lose none of my crew.  But you never know.  It is embarrassing to be timorous in anticipation of a short and comfortable trip to hear about the memorials of one of the longer and most dangerous trips documented in world history; but travel mishaps do occur.  The extraordinary maritime empire of tiny Portugal spread across the world.  One of the established genres of the nation’s rich Renaissance literature is the history of maritime disasters.  To be fair, the Portuguese had so many disasters only because they always had so many ships at sea undertaking so many ambitious and dangerous voyages.  Wooden ships but iron men.  So I’m looking forward especially to hearing a scholar give a talk entitled: “The Lusiads: Flipside of 15^th Century Maritime Disaster Literature.”  I find the word flipside in the title particularly intriguing, and possibly disconcerting.

 

 

More Light!

            For many years now I have noticed that each new approach of autumn brings with it a heightened feeling of solemnity, of melancholy really.  It is perhaps a part of the aging process.  I suspect that many if not most elderly people might recognize the phenomenon of which I speak.  This year’s gloom-ward turn was quite marked, and very abrupt.  It’s not quite yet a Stephen King novel, but it tends in that direction.  The first few days back from Europe were bright, sunny, clear, and crisp.  October and early November are usually quite beautiful around here.  I can remember in at least one recent year, and perhaps two years, when I felt obliged to write a few words about Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”.  It’s one of the language’s truly great poems, and while it captures something of the atmosphere of life’s narrowing constriction and even decay, it is  the “mists and mellow fruitfulness” and the “beaded bubbles winking at the brim” that carry the day.  Above all there is a sense of gradualism, a time to prepare for something unwelcome.  But this year’s crossing of the autumn equinox has seemed like a sudden leap into the dark.

 

I am not partial to “significant” acronyms—but SAD (seasonal affective disorder) really nails it.  Everywhere and always the gateway of life is light.  The light shined in the darkness, and the darkness did not overwhelm it, and the light was the life of mankind.  Is there a more important line in the Bible?  If you prefer a more secular text, there’s a beauty in Shakespeare.  Just before he stifles Desdemona, Othello says “Put out the light and then put out the light!”  The first light is, of course, the candle that has lighted the way to her chamber.  It is the second that is the more terrifying.  The light that he will put out is the life of a beautiful and innocent young woman; but to accomplish such a dark deed he must first have extinguished the light of his own reason.

 

Certainly seasonal affective disorder is a kind of shorthand, or maybe  longhand, for light deprivation.  That, in any event, has been my perception this year.  The more normal indicators of autumn are there, to be sure, but they are not yet prominent.  The general sense of the vegetation is still that of jungle and indiscipline, entangling vines hardy and ubiquitous everywhere in the woods.  The coloring of the leaves has begun in a few places, but the overwhelming sensation of sunny daylight hours is still that of “green mansions”.  But suddenly with our return to America there don’t seem to be any more sunny days.  There has been a streak of dark, rainy days.  The rain has been steady, and often heavy.  The ground has over this period gone from a state of being parched to sogginess, with small pools of standing water in low-lying spots.  The temperatures have also fallen dramatically into the low 50s and on one day the high 40s.  The effect is not of an autonomous autumn to be enjoyed, but of what I’ll call pre-winter, which is very different.  Pre-winter actually invites unease, apprehension.  The cloud-darkened skies obviously exacerbate the waning of the light.  There is no discernible dawn.  The night simply turns from black to gray.  And nightfall descends suddenly even before our early dining hour.

 

One of my favorite childhood poems was “Bed in Summer” by Robert Louis Stevenson.  In it a young lad laments that he is not allowed to stay out and play through the lengthening summer light: “In winter I get up at night/and dress by yellow candlelight…In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day…”  I was probably eight-years-old, living in my grandparents’ house in cold and wintry Colorado when I learned the poem; and it was the summertime injustice that captured my attention.  Now it is the associations of winter, the most arresting of which is the invasion of darkness.

 

I remember mentioning in another essay—a fairly recent one devoted to O. Henry-- some of the curious books gathered together in the eccentric library of my uncles and aunts.  There was one that fascinated me, although I am not sure I remember its title.  It may have been, and probably should have been, Last Words.  It was an anthology of famous last words as recorded by history and literature.  Several were the valedictories of condemned criminals, some of which were very famous indeed.  There was, for example, Jesus: “It is finished.”  There was Patrick Henry: “I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.”  There were two sets of last words by the formidable John Brown, the brief but electrifying statement he made before the court that had condemned him, and the short note he had in his hand as he set off toward the gallows: “I , John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.”  By no means were all of the last words so stirring or memorable.  Some of them were obviously accurate accounts reflecting the realities and confusions of the death-bed rather than polished rhetoric awaiting the engraver.  Under these circumstances quite a few of the entries in the book seemed to me a little banal.  One that sticks in my mind is that of Ulysses S. Grant, whose brief valedictory was “Water!”  But the one that remains with me most memorably was the dying cry of the great poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s on March  22, 1832.  According to his doctor, this great man’s last words were Mehr licht!  “More light.”

Top Colleges

 

 

Fairly recently the U.S. News and World Report published its annual rankings of American colleges and universities.  Within days the New York Times (Sept. 19, 2022, “U.S. News College Rankings Live On, Despite Criticisms”) published its annual critique of that annual report.  I have not seen a copy of the U.S. News and World Report in many years, if indeed it is still even published as an old-fashioned news magazine, a genre long since rendered anachronistic by cyberism.  But like most college professors, and certainly all college administrators, I am quite aware that, in the words of the Times article, the magazine’s rankings “continue to be a dominant reference guide for families evaluating colleges…”

 

Somewhat to your blogger’s embarrassment, his own institution, Princeton, currently holds the USNWR Numero Uno rating.  I do take pride in the university from which I hold advanced degrees and where I taught for many decadees.  But is Princeton really the best college in America?  Sure.  It’s right there in so many words in our barely musical alma mater: “It’s the best old place of all.”  Strangely you can find very similar phrases in other college songs, maybe most of them.  But uneasy is the head that wears the crown.  This year’s listings fluttered the dovecotes by demoting Columbia University from Number Two to Number Seventeen.  If the claim to be able to identify the best college in America is merely fantastic, the claim to identify the seventeenth-best is wholly preposterous.

 

There are of course variations in quality among institutions of higher learning, and hence sensible and defensible distinctions to be made among them.  But the USNWR ranked list is a gimmick, not a reliable data sheet.  The vast majority of college administrators surely realize that.  Most college presidents will even say that.  But then the whole lot of them sweat blood for the week before the rankings appear.  That is because college trustees, many, many parents, some unsophisticated high-school counsellors, affluent applicants on foreign strands, and indeed the general public are in its thrall.  I suppose these same people must spend a certain amount of time on the Internet engaging meaningless lists of “Ten Hollywood Starlets Who Used to Own Poodles,” or “The Twelve Greatest Rutabaga Dishes of All Time.”  My remarks imply no denial of reasonably objective standards or the qualitative comparisons among institutions.  But we might be a little clearer about what we think we are comparing.

 

What is the best fish in the sea?  It’s got to be the Norwegian salmon, right?  And what’s the best tree in the forest?  That would be the white oak, of course.  There’s got to be general agreement about that, but now comes the hard part.   Rank in order of superiority, the Norwegian salmon, the white oak, and Calacatta marble.

 

In order to offer a convincing list of top colleges, it is necessary to agree upon some generally applicable criteria.  There are fewer of these than one might think.  It is probable that American higher education remains the envy of the world.  If so, that high regard reflects the appreciation of its extraordinary diversity—a concept sometimes overhyped when talking about student body composition but undervalued in terms of the shape of higher education as a whole.  The American model is anything but unitary, featuring excellent institutions of many different kinds.

 

Many years ago I served on a commission engaged by the State of Florida to assess and report on the general state of higher education there.  It was among the more illuminating assignments I ever had.  A week-long glimpse is not a deep study, but you can learn a lot.  Florida is a highly populous state with lots of money inequably distributed among its population, little of which is seriously taxed for educational purposes.  Nonetheless it has a highly enrolled range of state colleges and universities, and several reputable smaller liberal arts colleges.  Their premier institution, the University of Florida at Gainesville, now twenty-ninth on the USNWR “national” list, has several strong departments.  That it is not in the league with some of the great midwestern schools has to do with sectional differences between north and south in the mid-nineteenth century.  The first sitting of the Michigan State Assembly (1837) established a university.  At the first sitting of the Arkansas legislature (1836) the Speaker stepped down from the podium to attack an opponent with a Bowie knife.  Autres pays, autres moeurs.   There is nothing in the Sunshine State approaching a great private institution like Stanford, Duke, or those of the Ivies.  Yet Florida has one of the most extraordinary educational institutions in the country: the Dade (Miami) Community College.  This huge enterprise enrolls more than a hundred thousand students, many of them from modest backgrounds--immigrants, the children of immigrants, and other aspirational and practically focused learners, young and not so young.  It is not MIT, Cornell, or Reed; but it has clarity concerning its own crucial institutional mission.  You can study practically anything at DCC, but one overarching strong component  is a focus on the skills of literacy and mathematics frequently short-changed by our more mediocre high schools.  I had the sense of an extraordinary institution that knew what it was trying to do and by and large does it.  I would have to call it a “great” institution even if nobody from Choate has ever applied to it.

 

There is no longer a broad humanistic agreement that the purpose of higher education is to broaden a student’s intellectual, cultural, and ethical horizons to enhance personal character and enable effective social engagement and service.  The purpose is to be able to get a good job.  There is nothing contemptible about this realization.  Our economic world has been in rapid change for at least a generation.  Our high schools produce fewer and fewer young people prepared to enter careers offering entry to even that modest middle-class life that was once the reasonable aspiration of all socially stable, family-centered people willing to work diligently and productively.  But the educational paths to such goals are now perhaps more varied than ever in the past.  Among professionals in higher education, “diversity” is now spoken of as a terminal good.  Without interrogating that assumption, I would hope it could be extended to embrace the remarkable and remarkably positive diversity of our American institutions of higher education.  That diversity does invite qualitative evaluation, but not from a single list of supposed “top colleges”.  Before you can responsibly say that an institution is more or less “good,” you need to know what it thinks its mission is, whether that mission has genuine value for individuals and society, and how well and faithfully it seems to be fulfilling it.  Very fortunately we still have a sizable number of very different “top colleges.”

 

Richard Francis Burton

   

Sir Richard Francis Burton on a good day

 

Not all Renaissance men lived in the Renaissance.  In fact I am beginning to believe that compared with nineteenth-century London, fifteenth-century Florence looks pretty monochrome.  The common belief seems to be that most eminent Victorians, including the four treated in Lytton Strachey’s classic book of that title, were uptight conformists.  It’s hard to know where that idea came from—not from Strachey, certainly.   All four were Renaissance men, including the one who was a woman, Florence Nightingale.  (“Renaissance man” is a state of mind, not a gender identity.)  For the past few weeks I have been intermittently caught up with a sensational example of the Victorian Renaissance man: Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890).*

 

I was vaguely aware of this man’s name at least—probably through its association with an early translation of the tales of the Arabian Nights—but my real introduction to his genius grew out of an association with a former student.  I suspect that the principal pleasures of most teachers’ lives derive from informal experiences, and outside the classroom.  

 

Though not exactly an established custom, it is not uncommon for graduate students, upon completing their dissertations, to present their professors with a parting gift.  This often may be simply a bound copy of the dissertation--not that there is anything simple about writing a dissertation--but sometimes it is some other kind of gift.  About fifteen years ago, not long before my retirement, I received from a departing graduate student a gift that I have particularly treasured.  In my own researches I was at that time beginning serious work on the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões and even beginning to contemplate writing a book about him.  This poet is best known for his epic poem Os Lusiadas, first published in 1572, which deals with the voyages of Vasco da Gama between Portugal and India in 1497-99. The poem’s name derives from the old Latin word for Portugal.  My student—whom I shall not name only because I have lost track of him and been unable to secure his permission to publicize his gift—presented me with the two-volume edition of Richard Burton’s Camoens: His Life and His Lusiads: A Commentary, (2 vols, London: Quaritch, 1881).  This is a work of enormous if often eccentric erudition written by a man who must have known, as well as any other mariner of his day, the maritime route that Vasco da Gama had taken four hundred years earlier, including the populations of East Africa and Goa and the Malabar Coast of India.  Working on Camões was the man’s hobby for twenty years; yet so broad and varied were his interests and accomplishments, his Portuguese studies are barely mentioned.

 

Burton, though a considerable amateur scholar, had little regard for institutional academia.  He was an Oxford drop-out, with Oxford doing the dropping.  But he was an amazing linguist, having about thirty tongues on his palette, and a voracious reader.  He was not a scholar, but an adventurer with scholarly interests.  His principal enthusiasms were sex, travel, exploration, military derring-do, sex, cartography, comparative religions, sex, horsemanship, espionage, and poetry.  His essays in Portuguese philology were merely a twenty-year hobby.  His checkered career as a British army office (he was Captain Burton, eventually Captain Sir Richard) offered him opportunities for frankly self-indulgent adventure.  He was married to a super-wife, Isabel Arundell (Lady Isabel), who not only put up with and enabled him, but edited and defended his work, and wrote his biography.   She has her own  biographies, and merits a blog essay of her own.

 

Burton’s most famous exploit came early (1853): his successful pilgrimage to Mecca in the disguise of an Afghan Muslim.  This potentially fatal deception was at the very least culturally insensitive, but is an extraordinary testimony to his courage and his linguistic and thespian skills.  Perhaps, dangerously, it may have encouraged him to think he could get by with anything.

 

I have insufficient room to do justice to Burton’s other travels.  He did major exploratory work in both East and West Africa.  He is credited with being the first white man to lay his eyes on Lake Tanganyika—“first white man” being an important category for the Imperial Book of World Records.  Often he was ill, injured, or wounded, several times on the verge of death, especially in a particularly disastrous episode at Berbera on the Somalian coast.  The Crimean War (1855-56) gave him the false hope of much desired military glory.  The highly effective officers of the Indian Army in which he served seemed like a ragtag Wild Bunch to the spit-and-polished bluebloods so incompetently led by the Crimean Supreme Commander, Lord Ragland, infamous for ordering the charge of the Light Brigade.  Burton barely got a look in from him.

 

and a bad day

 

I mentioned sex as among Burton’s interests only three times, as I feel constrained by self-imposed word limits for my essays.  One of his fantasies had to do with nuns.  This one had a long literary run beginning at least as early as Jean de Meun in the thirteenth century and Boccaccio in the fourteenth, but it really took off in 1669 with the anonymous publication(in French) by the Comte de Guilleragues of his steaming if pretended Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Contemporary readers pretended they thought the letters were genuine, and until fairly recently too many modern scholars really thought they were.  If I ever get sufficiently desperate, I could perhaps write an essay on this subject too.  I have to believe Burton’s interest was entirely academic, as he was bolstered by so many moralities.  He was married to a serious Roman Catholic, and he himself was a devout Muslim-Buddhist-Confucian-Catholic-atheist Anglican.  In his anthropological ventures, he often sought to measure the penises of the males of the tribes he investigated.  One of those times one might wish to be a fly on the wall of the hut.  He translated the Kama Sutra and several other Oriental sex guides that offered his contemporaries in England wonderful opportunities to be shocked, titillated,  and officially disapproving of the translator/scholar.  He had a strange episode of recuperation in America, on the eve of our Civil War, checking out the Mormons on the Great Salt Lake.  Several of his greater adventures were subsequent to his late marriage in 1861 at age forty.  “The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly takes place relatively late,” says Mencken. The formidable Isabel was often with him in his important years in Brazil (1864-60) and later in Damascus, India, in his English homecoming, and in Trieste.

 

Burton spent his final years trying to finish several writing projects and to organize many earlier ones, though much would be left to his feisty widow.   Altogether he published more than thirty books, several of them multi-volume like the Arabian Nights, several doorstoppers.  The biographer, Farwell is a marvelous writer himself.  On October 20, 1890, Burton was seriously ill in his lodgings in Trieste.  “And there came to him then the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies.”

and a really bad day

*My principal source is Byron Farwell: Burton, A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London: Longmans, Green, 1963).  I recommend the Penguin edition,  in many printings and cheap on the second-hand market.

 

Lake Tanganyika

 

 

 

Elizabeth II Regina, died 8 September 2022.  May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.

 

 

 

Death of a Great Lady

 

            We landed at Newark Liberty Airport on Monday, after a nine-hour  flight from Nice, precisely at the advertised time of 4.30pm, there to be picked up by our friend and former USPS letter-carrier, Mike Downes.  When a few months ago he retired from the postal service and quit delivering mail, it left him more time for his avocation of operating a boutique limousine service delivering people, mainly to and from airports.

 

            There is always comfort in returning to home base, though our minds remain full of the sights, sounds, fragrances, and tastes of Provence.  Some famous historian or another famously said that the most important event in eighteenth-century England happened in France.  The reference, of course, was to the French Revolution.  So I suppose it is not extraordinary that the most important event of our French vacation happened in England: the death of the Queen on September 8, four days before our return.  Of course, the death of a personage of such importance would have claimed international attention under any circumstances.  The political and cultural significance of the Queen’s reign has been endlessly discussed by experts in the press.  What has captured my own attention is the operation of social memory.   Few world leaders have been on the scene for seven decades, and few have been the objects of the evident admiration and respect of so many for so long.  But our group gathered together for the house party in Salernes—eight of us briefly, and six of us for most of the time—perhaps had its special reasons.  With the exception of myself, everyone there was a native-born Briton who had come of age in the early years of the Queen’s reign.  Five of us had been students together at Oxford in the late 1950s.  My one and only “meeting” with the Queen and Prince Phillip took place there, when I was rounded up by some desperate college administrator trying to put together a panchromatic group of foreign students for royal review.  The Duke of Edinburgh made a quip about the insufficiencies of British central heating. 

 

Halley's Comet smiles on William the Conqueror 

 

            Rarely enough are we self-consciously aware that we are experiencing something “historic”, but the death of magnates is an occasion when many do.  In earlier centuries people believed that the very heavens proclaimed the birth and death of great princes, as well as their great deeds, in meteor showers and comets.  What we now know as Halley’s Comet smiled on the Norman Conquest of Britain, and is recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry.  As we sat around the table hearing the news, somebody said, “I will remember where and when I was when I first heard this news--forever.”  This was an almost theatrically solemn remark and solemnly delivered.  But it was a sentiment we all understood, and one frequently commented upon in the press, as it seems to be commonly shared.  Liz Truss, who had been invited by the Queen two days before she died to form a government, had been the subject of much conversation—not all of it complimentary—in earlier days.   The whole period of our stay was a kind of running feast and symposium—wonderful conversation, much of it over wonderful meals.  We all have vivid memories of the circumstances in which we learned of certain private events.  But there is a very limited number of public events that command an almost universal racial memory.  The analogy frequently drawn in my age group was with the death of President John Kennedy by an assassin’s bullet on November 22, 1963.  If you were alive and sentient then, you almost certainly remember, and vividly, the circumstances of where and when you heard of it.  The more recent event seared forever into our memory, and especially the memory of younger people, is learning the  news of the Twin Towers attack on September 11, 2001.

 

            I heard of Kennedy’s assassination as I was walking up a hill between classes on the campus of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison.  I was in my first semester as a college teacher.  I was twenty-seven years old.  In the buzz of the crowd moving up the hill, a graduate student was loudly finding a silver lining in his reported news: this unthinkable event would permanently discredit the right-wing fanatics of the John Birch Society, the MAGA-monsters of that age.  Who could have suspected Kennedy was killed by the only Communist in Texas?  Like most of my friends I greatly admired JFK.  I also fancied that I had a personal connection with him.  After all, in the middle of  a hot, muggy day in July of 1958, as I sweated on the pavement in a coat and tie, I had seen the man himself in the flesh as he wheeled around the  circular drive of Columbus Circle abutting Union Station in Washington.  His open red convertible passed within ten feet of me as I stood waiting for the light to change.  There was a good-looking blonde woman laughing in the passenger’s seat.  It was all too perfect.  Golden youth.  Camelot.  I could not have invented it if I tried.  And now on Bascom Hill I suddenly learn he is probably dead.

 

            But that was already the second presidential death announcement that I shall never be able to forget.  On an April day of 1945, still a month short of my ninth birthday, I was walking through an alley shortcut in east Denver on my way home from school.  I was in the company of a contemporary and neighbor whose name, I regret to say, has long since disappeared from my memory.  But I shall never forget the encounter we had along the way.  A woman was standing in the middle of her small, tidy back lawn, separated from the alleyway by a likewise tidy white picket fence.   She was weeping profusely, and not very quietly.  She was surprised to see us, and the sight of us seemed only to intensify her distress.  “Boys,” she said, “boys!  Boys…I have to tell you.  Boys, our president is dead.”  We knew who the President was and what “dead” means.  But the news itself made less impression than it should.  What I mainly grasped was that a woman was weeping uncontrollably.  So far as my grasp of world events was concerned, the war news was all good.  Hitler was “finished” according to a pontificating next-door neighbor.  Soon we would “finish” Japan.  Then my dad would be home from fighting in the Pacific.  But I shall never forget that weeping woman.

 

            I say “never forget”, though can I trust memory?  Already Joan and I have somewhat differing accounts of learning of Queen Elizabeth’s death.  We can agree that we were all gathered around a table when we heard the news, but disagree as to which table.  In any event, the associations of the event will always be complex: the jarring intrusion of the news of death into a Provençal idyll.

 

                Entrecasteaux (Var): garden by Le Nôtre (1613-1700), photo by Joan, backside by blogger