Scholar Gypsy

Nil admirari prope res est una, Numici,
solaque quae possit facere et seruare beatum.
Horace, Epist. I, vi.

You and you alone bring out the gypsy in me.
The Gershwins, “Embraceable You”

Horace’s famous advice to his friend Numicius—Nil admirare, “Be astonished at nothing”—became as sacred scripture to generations of European sophisticates. The advice was of course merely an elegant and classical version of the usually whispered injunction of embarrassed mothers to their gawking offspring: don’t stare. Horace’s phrase was the actual motto of one of the most admirable scoundrels of world literature, Byron’s Don Juan. It was the proper attitude of the ultimate sophisticate, the terminal cosmopolitan, the man who had been everywhere, done everything, seen it all. A group of my undergraduate college friends in a Romantic poetry course—none of us had been very far, done very much, or seen even life’s previews, let alone the first reel—invented an imaginary companion, Neal Admirary, who epitomized the sophistication for which we aspired. I suppose it is not surprising that hicks feel the fear of being thought a hick with a particular acuteness.

Well, half a century later, after many decades of life as a wandering scholar, I’m still at the aspirational stage; for on my second day back in Paris I found myself gawking in the street right in front of our apartment. I would have thought that simply having an apartment in Paris ought to be enough to assuage Neal’s savage breast for at least a day or two—but, no. Having an apartment in Paris is by no means a sufficient guarantor of the Nil admirari spirit.

The neighborhood of the apartment, very near the Eiffel Tower, is I suppose more like the upper West than the upper East side, but it is still plenty “fashionable”. In the short half-block to the east there are two grocery stores, one a cadet outpost of a large chain, the other the more typical and ludicrously named local “SuperMarché” presided over by north Africans. Both of them have beautiful fruit and vegetable stalls on the sidewalks in front.

a local Paris fruit-stall

There are two reasons that the fruit displays in French shops look so scrumptious. The first is that the fruit is scrumptious. Retarded French agriculture is years behind America in the race for the tasteless apple and the sawdust orange. The second is that the shopkeepers invigilate their wares ferociously, immediately discarding any plum, pear, apricot, or kumquat may that betrays the slightest blot, crease, wrinkle, or inappropriate softness. The rejects go into a kind of poubelle shopping cart, and thence into the large green and yellow garbage bins at street-side.

garbage can belonging to local Paris fruit stall

Early yesterday evening as I returned from a long day at the library, there were six gypsies, five women and a male teen, ransacking these garbage cans. All the women had the little, wheeled, grocery-carriers popular with French housewives. They had, in addition, several suitcases of various sizes. The young man had some kind of homemade pushcart. These they were cramming with discarded fruit and vegetables. Their attitude was utterly lacking in anything hurried, furtive, or embarrassed. They treated the well-dressed pedestrians on the sidewalk as minor nuinces to be tolerated in a spirt of noblesse oblige. This was not the pitiable dumpster-diving of a New York down-and-out. Though they seemed in fact to take everything, they still examined each piece with the leisurely expertise of Parisian shoppers. Neither the store clerks nor the numerous passersby took the slightest notice. Nil admirari. I was the only one gawking. Still, this was surely an “admirable” sight to come upon in a middle-class neighborhood of a European capital?

It is now politically incorrect to speak of “gypsies,” the authorized term being some form of “Roma people.” Certainly gypsies have been among the groups facing discrimination, and with Hitler attempted annihilation. But the weak foundation of political correctness is often easily undermined by having read a book or two. One of the favorites of my childhood was George Borrow’s Romany Rye, somewhat dated in style, but eternal in its interest. (A “romany rye” was a kind of fellow traveler of gypsidom, a non-gypsy who knew gypsy lingo and ways, as Borrow certainly did.)

Jan Yoors, scholar gypsy and gypsy scholar

Its modern equivalent is an extraordinary book by Jan Yoors, The Gypsies. Yoors (1922-1977) was a Flemish-American artist and photographer. As a young lad in the Low Countries, animated by a spirit of reckless adventure, he once ran off with a gypsy caravan. He soon enough returned home, and his avant-guard parents, instead of punishing him, agreed that on a regular basis he might spend a part of each year on the road with his gypsy friends. This he did throughout the decade of the 1930s. His account of his experiences is gripping. Several years ago I was lucky enough to find on Ebay a signed copy of his book, together with four or five of his own stunning, unpublished photographs. If Borrow and Jan Yoors can talk about gypsies, and they do, so can you or I.

Such anti-gypsy feeling as I have encountered in this neighborhood, and there is some, grows out of repeated episodes of annoyance experienced in the Champ de Mars. This is the pleasant and well populated rectangular park running between the Eiffel Tower and the École Militaire, a space sacred to joggers, nannies with children in strollers, pan-Mediterranean boules-players, hyper-hormonal adolescent lovers, Asian photographers of themselves with tower, African hawkers of tower gewgags, and gypsy beggars and ring-scammers. If you live around here you cross the park frequently, just in the course of your daily business. On approximately forty-three per cent of crossings you will be accosted by a gypsy ring-scammer.

In search of a useful photograph, never found, I happened upon another American who has written about the ring-scam at length; so if you want a whole bague-blague-blog, go here. Bref, the deal is this. As you are walking along you become vaguely aware of a person (usually male, but not always) walking toward you. Just as you cross, or are about to cross, this person suddenly reaches down to the ground and appears to pick up a gaudy gold ring. This is then shoved in your face. “Here’s your ring,” (s)he says, always, as in the miracle of Pentecost, in your own language. “You dropped it.” Since it is not your ring, and since you did not drop it, since it is indeed nearly impossible to imagine how one drops a ring while walking in a park, you are likely astonished by this person’s reluctance to take no for an answer. But if you are insistent enough your interlocutor will give up, transforming instantly from exotic gypsy ring-finder to common-or-garden variety gypsy beggar. Like most scams, this one depends upon the cooperation of the victim’s own dishonesty and cupidity. You are supposed to claim the “lost” ring with feigned expressions of gratitude. The “finder” will then suggest that an appropriate reward would speak even louder than your words. The ring being worth thirty-five centimes, anything above five euros will do. I have never seen this scam work, or heard of its working. It is impossible for me to believe that it has ever worked. But of course I have never heard of the “Nigerian banker” scam working either, though you know it must sometime, somewhere. People do not send out millions of emails or “find” three thousand rings a week just for their health.

Bloguiste en vacances

Emergent circumstances now emerge, leaving me in search of the right analogy. I find it, naturally, in academic life. Oxford University, where I took an undergraduate degree (1958-61) as a Rhodes Scholar, prides itself on its ancient mode of instruction. It is called the “tutorial method”. Each week—during the twenty-four weeks a year a slothful Oxford undergraduate is actually in residence, that is—the student has a meeting, of about an hour’s duration, with his tutor. The first fifteen minutes are taken up with social trivialities, usually including (anytime after about 9:30 a.m.) a glass of sherry. Then, for the next twenty minutes, the student reads viva voce the essay prepared on that week’s topic. This is followed by the tutor’s oral critique of what has just been read and, perhaps, some discussion between tutor and student.

Oxford seems very proud of this system. At the recent Oxford reunion, which I wrote about in a posting not long ago, the Vice-Chancellor made it clear that the institution is prepared, like JFK, to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, to continue to support the “tutorial method”. Perhaps there is some less efficient way of teaching than the tutorial method, but if so I haven’t yet discovered it. Like so many other aspects of modern academic life the “ tutorial method” is among the fossil remains of an ancient time before the invention of typewriters, word processors and photocopy machines. The word “lecture” reveals the kinship of that fossil to the tutorial method. Anyone who knows a little French knows that the word “lecture” has to do with reading. In an age before easily reproducible textbooks the professor read (lectured) his opinions from a podium. Students wrote down what he said on wax tablets. If you think that Aristotle at times sounds elliptical, it’s because what you are reading is not Aristotle but student notes on some Aristotelian “lecture”.

It should be fairly obvious that the discussion of a student’s essay would be more fruitful and more profitable if the tutor had actually had time to read and think about the essay in advance. But since Jowett didn’t know anything about email attachments we continue to glory in the “tutorial method”. All this is neither here nor there, except by way of providing me with an anecdote needed to minister to my own sloth. I had an undergraduate acquaintance at Jesus College, a history student, who was more conspicuous as a bridge player and ballroom dancer than as an historian. The awful responsibility of producing an essay every week at last overwhelmed him, and the dread day arrived when he had to appear before his tutor armed only with a few random sentence fragments in a notebook. According to his own proud testimony, he handled this sticky situation in the following way. He addressed his tutor confidently: “Last week an essay,” he said; “next week an essay. This week—copious notes!”

Your bloguiste finds himself in a somewhat similar pickle. He has twenty-four hours to prepare to take off for Europe. Tomorrow night, volcano volente, he’ll be half way to Paris. On Wednesdays the second and the ninth of June he ought to be able to come up with something that might, by the exercise of heroic charity, be called an essay. But on June sixteenth he and his friend John Meyer will be in a car at an undisclosed location in northern Spain searching for their pilgrimaging wives somewhere along the route to Santiago. They must sweep them up in the aforementioned vehicle before driving like demons to Barcelona to catch a ferry for Livorno. Because on the following Wednesday, June 23, bloguiste will be installed in the Castello Santa Maria Novella in Marcialla, near Certaldo in Tuscany, sitting at the feet of the world’s greatest living dantista, maestro Roberto Hollander, who will be conducting a week-long seminar of the Princeton Dante Reunion. This year’s theme: Dante’s use of his classical predecessors.

Jean and Robert Hollander, the famous translators of the Divine Comedy

As thirteenth-century Tuscan castles go, Santa Maria Novella is pretty deluxe. There are even those who, seduced by the amenities, the superb gastronomy, and the celestial calm and beauty of the surroundings, are willing to forgive the want of wi-fi. Truth to tell, your bloguiste is of their number.

The Castello Santa Maria Novella, near Certaldo

Readers can therefore look forward to a two-week vacation hiatus in Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche. These circumstances may also serve to offer a plea of extenuating circumstances to private correspondents who may have concluded that I have dropped off the edge.

History Is For the Birds

"My heart in hiding stirred for a bird"....But what bird?

I spent a rather wakeful night in New York, made somewhat more tolerable by the news that came with the dawn. The Specter is no longer haunting America. This development, according to the newscaster, was “historic”. Though I could savor it as news, it seemed rather tasteless as history. I’ve always liked my history to be aged for a couple of weeks before decanting. Still, the tension between the here and now and the then and there is enervating. George Gissing took as an epigraph of one of his books a quotation said to be from Jules Michelet—I have never found the original source—in which the great French historian supposedly reflected on his life in these sad terms: J'ai passé à côté du monde, et j'ai pris l'histoire pour la vie. I would translate, loosely, “I passed by the world on the other side, and I mistook history for life.” This must seem a rather terrifying possibility to any scholar like myself who has spent so many years immersed in books and in the exhausting and uncertain attempt to imagine the human life of the past. When in doubt, put your nose into a book; and that’s what I did on the ride home. I happened to have with me the first volume of William Boulton’s The Amusement of Old London (1901). That’s real history and, as usual, it did connect with real life.

A nice feature of our house—for which we prepay with winter fuel bills—is a long wall of glass along the south side, looking down through our garden to the field and woods beyond. On rare occasion now and again, in bright sunlight, a baffled bird will try to fly through the glass. The shock must always be rude and painful; two days ago it proved fatal for the beautiful specimen above, whose little corpse I found as I stepped out into the yard. I was headed for some chore, and I set the bird aside for a decent Christian burial at a later date. We couldn’t identify it, and a friend suggested that I make a photographic record. So I call upon my ornithological readership for help. It will no doubt be child's play for any bird-spotter. My son Rich could do it in a second, but I doubt that he is reading this blog, busy as he is with scouring the second-hand bookshops for a replacement copy of Julia Ward Howe’s Trip to Cuba (1860), for which the Firestone Library is once again billing me.

The death of this bird bothered me a lot, and this is in some ways surprising. I grew up in the country. Everybody hunted, including me. I never was a “sport” hunter, but in my time I killed and consumed, without a second thought, a large number of squirrels, rabbits, and quail. After half a century of watching a thousand tame squirrels prance about the Princeton campus, that all seems like a dream; but to this day I am nonplussed by what I will call the eastern, liberal inability to “get” what the agrarian Battle of the Second Amendment is really about, which is the default conservatism of human community. One of my culture heroes, the early anthropologist E. B. Tylor, summed it all up in a single magisterial sentence: “Most things that exist in the world exist for the reason that they once existed.” The hunters and the gatherers have been around for a very long time. Once on a family holiday in Spain, while staying in a village, we experienced a freak hailstorm of brief duration but considerable ferocity. In the minute after its abrupt end all the villagers rushed into the fields in search of zonked birds, which they brought back, many of them still weakly flapping, in their disgusting variety (sparrows, crows, magpies, etc.) as table delicacies. These people would have eaten my dead bird with gusto, and probably shot it with even more.

Bull-baiting

All this came to mind as I perused the first two chapters of Boulton. From the first I learned that the most popular and profitable public London entertainments from the Restoration through the Georgian period were various exhibitions of orchestrated cruelty to animals: dog fights, cock fights, bear- and bull-baiting. These spectacles, most of which took place in the unelevating venue of Hockley in the Hole, slightly eclipsed in their popularity even human gladiatorial combat, non-lethal but sanguinary. The baiting generally involved setting ferocious dogs upon chained or tethered bulls or bears. Another favorite sport involved igniting powerful firecrackers that had been affixed to large animals. Some “events” consisted of nothing more inventive than a group of men beating or hacking a brute to death in the middle of an arena. Two days a week—Mondays and Thursdays—had regularly schedule baitings.

Bear-baiting: the stalls for gentry

And who, exactly, enjoyed such “sport,” already more than a century old as the Age of Reason came into full bloom? The answer would seem to be—everybody! I have always been a great admirer of Queen Elizabeth I. She had a lot going for her. She could speak Latin. She translated Boethius. She was a patron of the arts. And of course she was the “head” of my church—“insofar as the law of Christ allows”—and a considerable theologian. (She came up with the best definition of transubstantiation on record). She was also big on the bulls and the bears—and I am not referring to the stock market. “The Queen herself was a great connoisseur in the sport,” writes Boulton; “so much so, that she deprecated the competition of the playhouses, and issued orders from the Privy Council forbidding the acting of plays on Thursdays, the chosen day for the bear-baitings at Bankside.” Eat your heart out, Will Shakespeare!

Jean-Baptiste Greuze: sentiment

In 1763, in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the great master of “sentiment” exhibited among other celebrated paintings his “Girl Mourning Her Dead Bird”. In that same year there flourished in Paris at least a dozen well patronized cockpits. Many of the capital’s leading citizens undoubtedly enjoyed both exhibitions. Now that is historic.

Mr. Micawber, meet the enemy...

This will be a grumpy, cheerless, puritanical, and visually bleak post. I made the mistake of looking at the morning paper in close proximity with my morning shave.

There is an odd phenomenon that most people my age have experienced. There is undoubtedly a female version, but for men at any rate, it seems to be associated with shaving. I had come upon it two or three times in literature without paying it much mind. Then one day about twenty-five years ago I encountered it in my own mirror. Shaving is an exacting exercise, and the shaver tends to concentrate on small details rather than the large gestalt. But all of a sudden I did see the larger picture in its wholeness, and the larger picture was my father staring back at me. This was not vague resemblance, but a sudden shock of identity. For the briefest of moments I actually thought I was having a supernatural experience.

My father was a great man, and a hero to me to this day. He was also, I thought, quite good looking; to become his tonsorial doppelganger, once I had a moment to think about it, seemed not such a bad thing and maybe even a good one. So I jogged along in that mode for another couple of decades until once again my morning shave was rudely invaded. The intruder this time was less welcome—my grandfather. My grandfather lacked my fathers (his son’s) principal virtues, and certainly his joie de vivre. He was in my experience crabby, bigoted, and embittered. I realize in retrospection that he must actually have been haunted by a sense of failure. The high point of his life had been service as a recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War of 1898. He spent long hours sitting around his front yard in a straw hat with a .22 rifle, shooting at squirrels marauding in a distant walnut tree. One memorable day he amazed us all, no doubt especially the squirrels, by actually hitting one. But mainly—and this was the thing—he was a really old guy. His abundant hair was wild and white in that distinctively Irish mode. He had shiny, crackled, old man’s skin that bruised and cut easily. This is the man who now stares back at me from the shaving mirror.

This week’s news from Greece and lower Manhattan has put all this into perspective for me—the perspective famously articulated by Pogo. When I look into the mirror, I see the Enemy, and the Enemy is us, specifically us geezers. Practically the entire Western world is on its way to hell in a hand basket on account of geezers chowing down their free lunch. Only it isn’t lunch—in lots of places it’s a five-course banquet washed down with a vintage of pleasant local varietals. Furthermore—and here’s the really important part—it isn’t free. It only seems that way on account of the magical illusion of plastic cards.

The “economic crisis” clearly involves arcane and esoteric dimensions well beyond my capacities. But there is something wrong with our whole national approach when a Ph.D. in English can make neither head nor tail of a 1040 income tax form. It was an evil day when John Maynard Keynes replaced Wilkins Micawber as the official Guru to the Geezers. Remember the Micawber Principle? Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery. Maybe the return of the debtors’ prison wouldn’t be such a bad idea, or at least debtors’ house arrest, such as that imposed by the EU on Greece. But, physician, heal thyself! In many of those EU countries official Geezerdom begins at age 55.

One of the last things my mirror-dad said to me before morphing into my mirror-grandad was roughly this. “Son, our country is in a real mess. It’s mainly self-indulgence, which since the war has been transformed from a shaming vice into a civil right. If we are going to get out of this mess we are going to have to do three things. People are going to have to work harder and be more productive, and they are going to have to make conscious sacrifices. Washington has to make fewer and smarter expenditures, or to raise more money through significantly raised taxes—probably both. For a start the government is going to have to quit spending money that it doesn’t have. But in order to have even the money it ought to have to do the things it ought to be doing, it’s got to have more income. If people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in a nice house, they ought to be willing to pay what’s needed to live in a nice country.”

Why is there not a single politician of repute, in either party or in no party, who is willing to articulate these elementary principles? One answer is that no such person could possibly be put into office by an electorate so addicted to the free lunch. But the waiter is even now at long last calculating the bill, and no matter how many tantrums we throw in the street, with or without a few homicidal fire bombs, somebody will have to pay it. My dad was not an economist. He didn’t even have a college degree. But he did work for a living. I know I have an erudite readership. Surely out there in the electronic academy, there must be somebody who can explain why my dad and Mr. Micawber are wrong.

The Massachusetts Line

The Prince of Poets: In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

This Wednesday it will mainly be all about last Wednesday when, loyal readers will recall, we drove to the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, the site of a notable Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, where I delivered a lecture on Luís de Camões. The Director of the Center, Professor Frank Sousa, an affable and energetic Azorean, and his colleague Victor Mendes, a cosmopolitan peninsular, then regaled us at dinner at Sagres, a restaurant in nearby Fall River. While I cannot claim to have visited all three Azorean-Portuguese restaurants in North America, I will be bold enough to say without fear of successful contradiction that this is the best one. Until last week I had known Fall River only in two connections. The first, of course, is that of a famous murder case in 1892, when everybody but the jury knows that

Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.

The second is more personal. About twenty years ago, two middle-aged sisters, the daughters of a deceased Fall River printer, got in touch with me. They were attempting, perhaps somewhat tardily, to tidy up their father’s estate by cleaning out his letterpress workshop. It was a sizable building that had apparently been standing idle for about two decades. Its roof had in one place collapsed, and water had ruined a good deal of the equipment, including most of the type holdings. Nonetheless I was able to rescue several tons of foundry type, one nice old Pearl Press, and (the greatest prizes) two fabulous stone-topped oak composing tables. But now, at last, I have found something worthy to set atop them: a dish of baked stuff squid from Sagres!

Two specialties of Sagres: the windrose (Portugal); stuffed squid (Massachusetts)

Driving to the South Shore, as they seem to call it, had not been all beer and skittles. We left soon after first light, but even so there was already a fair mess awaiting us by the time we got to the George Washington Bridge. We had to make our way through toney but congested Fairfield County, and past darkest New Haven and Bridgeport, home of our latest jihadist, before we got to the handsome fields and waterways of the Rhode Island coast. The return trip, by way of contrast, was pure pleasure. We had decided to make a kind of mini-vacation of it by driving all the way across Massachusetts on the turnpike to visit our good friends Steve and Andrea White in Hancock, a hamlet on the outskirts of Williamstown, in the extreme northwest corner of the state.

Steve was for some years the superb Episcopal chaplain at Princeton, where Joan worked with him as a colleague and I as a sometime auxiliary in his flock. He typifies in his multiple competences a growing segment of the clergy of our church. He went into the priesthood only after a successful career as a business executive. He is also a fine carpenter—which gives the concept of the “imitation of Christ” a wholly new resonance—so that in addition to his clerical duties on the staff of the parish church in Pittsfield he has on the side been busy rehabilitating country houses, in a particularly stunning example of which the Whites themselves reside.

We had a mellow evening dinner with our friends, but what I will tell you about now is our busy day in Hancock and North Adams that preceded it. It happens that the “town” of Hancock includes one of the most impressive of extant Shaker archaeological sites . As most of you already know, the Shakers were one of the more admirable and impressive religious groups to flourish in New England and upstate New York (then the western frontier) in the early and mid- nineteenth century. Their communities were in effect mixed-sex Protestant monastic houses. Though the fact was probably unknown to them, the Hancock Shakers lived rather in the spirit of the pre-Benedictine house at Whitby in which the poet Cædmon composed (orally) the first known English poem—“Nu sculon herian”, to the considerable admiration of the monastery’s head-woman, Saint Hilda.

Shaker stone barn: Hancock MA

I should perhaps stoop to the phrase “mixed-gender” to avoid “mixed-sex”, since the Shakers avoided mixing sex so assiduously that they managed to become extinct. But during their heyday they were quite successful in replenishing their communities with converts willing to adopt celibacy. The term “Shaker”, like the “Quaker” that it followed and the “Holy Roller” it antedated began as a semi-insult; but then so did the term “Christian”, which, aided by various soi-disant Christians and the national press, is rapidly reclaiming that status. All Shaker communes housed remarkable craftsmen, designers, carpenters, and architects; but the one in Hancock has left an unusually impressive number of relics, including a huge brick residence hall and a vast stone barn, the likes of which I had never before seen. Original Shaker furniture is still to be found in the upper reaches of the antique market. Even the modern reproductions are out of my price range.

We then trundled over to nearby North Adams to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art , known in those parts at the MASSMoCA, which only sounds like the blend of the week at Starbuck’s. If you have never been there, as I never had, you must seize any proximate opportunity for a visit. The museum is housed in a vast, sprawling, old brick industrial building, as intrinsically ungainly as the great brick dormitory of the Shakers is elegant. I have never actually been in the execution cellars of the Lubyanka, but they probably would now be anti-climactic. Yet at a certain point heroic ugliness achieves majesty and even magnificence, rather like the Luna Moth eventually fights its way through its dung-colored cocoon. The fantastic show that is “up” at the moment features the vast wall paintings, several square miles of them, I would guess, by the late Sol Lewitt.

My first reaction was that no two tourist “attractions” could have been more different that the Shaker Village and the Lewitt murals, but one of the chief functions of college professors is to find spurious but momentarily plausible overarching field theories. It seemed to me then that the Shakers had reformed the complexity of communal living to an admirable simplicity. Sol Lewitt, for his part, had in the alembic of his genius distilled from the simplicity of geometrical units a mind-boggling complexity of effect. Another way to think about the two is in terms of the line. Both Sol and the Shakers were partial to the line dance.

Lines dancing

Mixed Messages

A mixed message

I must begin with an important message. Last week’s post was rushed because of unexpected intrusions into my midweek schedule. This week’s is rushed because I am spending most of my Wednesday driving in the direction of Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth (MA), where at 5 pm I intend to deliver a lecture entitled “Luís de Camões: the Poet as Scriptural Exegete”. The lecture is open to the public, and I shall hope to see in the audience several of my numerous fans based in the Greater Falls River Co-Prosperity Sphere.

That’s my message, but hardly the end of my musings about messages in general. Messages are becoming practically epidemic. According to most of the political commentators I read, the world’s movers and shakers do little else than send “messages”. The actions of legislatures, the venues chosen for political speeches, the names given to presidential pets—all these things are actually “sending a message”. The more opaque the law, the speech, or the onomastic activity, the more certain it is to be a judged “a very clear message”, or perhaps a “message heard loud and clear”. If the commentator doesn’t like what he heard, or thinks he has heard, it is a “terrible” message. But the very worst sort is the “mixed message”.

Actually, mixed messages are by far the most interesting ones. Anyone who doesn’t like a mixed message better not read a Shakespeare sonnet. My long departed mother was the queen of the mixed message. “Have fun,” she would say, “and be careful”—before releasing me for any activity of the sort designed to encourage a carefree spirit. What might be called the mixed messages of history are among the most interesting of all. I’d call them message of historical irony if the word “irony” hadn’t been so thoroughly debased by popular journalism.

One interestingly mixed message of history seems to be that nothing fails like success. Everyone knows Wordsworth’s marvelous “Tintern Abbey”. If by chance you do not, seek it out. There are few more beautiful expressions of the powers exercised by the beauty of Nature on our moral and psychological constitutions. But how many have wondered how such a huge ecclesiastical ruin ever came to be stuck so far out in the boondocks?

"Tintern Abbey", by J.M.W. Turner (1792)

In the twelfth century a group of zealous French monks, dissatisfied with the comfortable slackness that had overcome so much of the Benedictine establishment of their age, launched a rigorously ascetic reform of religious life. They did not think of themselves as a new order, but they came to be thought of as one by others. They were (and are) called Cistercians after their prominent “mother house” at Cîteaux in Burgundy. In their search for renewed simplicity of life they sought to imitate the ancient monks of Egypt and Palestine, who had made their remote dwellings in the deepest reaches of the desert. The “deserts” of medieval Western Europe were for the most part woodlands and scruffy, uncultivated moorland, lands whose agricultural value was limited to free-range grazing.

It was an age that admired sanctity, and considered it socially useful. Land-rich nobles, eager to score a few pious works for their often-alarming moral balance sheets, gave the Cistercians large tracts of their worthless land, which for the monks might be a kind of spiritual Lebensraum in which they might pursue their austere life of votive poverty undisturbed. Then in the thirteenth century something unexpected happened, something having to do with textiles. A lot of people wanted clothes. Clothes were made of wool. Wool came from sheep. Sheep ate grass. People who owned a lot of grass were suddenly rich. They needed stuff like barns, storehouses, stables, indentured agricultural workers, and the complex structure necessary for industrial enterprise. I have in the past had occasion to cite the Michael Corleone Theorem: "Just when I think I am out, they pull you back in." This happened to the Cistercians in spades, and one result was what might be called the architectural mixed message. It is a phenomenon without which the world would be a less interesting place.

Above : Monastic Tithe Barn, Great Coxwell, Oxon. (Photo: John Waine, 2004)

Below: Assisi's multi-million dollar monument to Franciscan Poverty

Sometimes the mixed message demands a certain amount of literary education for its full impact. I have a young friend in Paris, Bill Thompson, who is something of a genius at discovering brilliant mixed messages. Bill is a polyglot Texan expatriate, a one-time Marshall Scholar and British academic. He is a trained Soviet expert, but now works in Paris for the OECD. The OECD (ostensibly the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development) may be one of those shadowy, NGOish, Matrix-type entities that are secretly running the world, but if so, they haven’t let me in on the secret. I met him through the adult education program, of which he was the director, at the American Cathedral in Paris. Most recently Bill sent me the following mixed message, in the form of a photograph taken by his friend Bob in Barcelona:

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