Portuguese Allegory

In the avalanche of journalistic opprobrium that greeted the President’s visit to NATO and his subsequent announcement of American withdrawal from the Paris Accords, one barb had a special sting for me.  Somebody said that the President seemed determined to make America a world leader of a rank “about like Portugal’s.”  Hold that thought.

Well, the Princeton Reunions, which are quite the covfefe, took place this past weekend, and we attended some of the more age-appropriate and intellectually respectable parts.  These were very respectable indeed, featuring well conducted expert panel discussions on such topics as “A Book That Changed Your Life,” “Reflections on Class and Race,” and “Changing the Climate of Climate Change.”  We also took in a terrific lecture on “Shakespeare’s Style,” and participated in the seminar of the forty-second reunion of Bob Hollander’s famous Dante course.  As usual I saw hundreds of old students--in that fleeting, wholly unsatisfactory fashion of the four-second conversation.

What with one thing and another, I hadn’t been on campus much of late, and I took the opportunity to go by my old departmental office, where occasional bits of mail still show up.  To my great surprise—and momentary consternation, given the logistical problem presented—I found there a hefty box of books.  These were the “author’s copies” of my latest scholarly publication (Luís de Camões: the Poet as Scriptural Exegete) sent to me by my publisher in England.  I had not been expecting them.  I thought the publication date was in July or August.

When I retired a decade ago I wanted to continue reading and writing, but I also wanted to challenge myself with some projects outside my habitual beat.  I have now published three such books, the latest and most conventionally scholarly of which involved the challenge of dealing with the Portuguese language in an archaic and highly classicizing form roughly analogous to the English of the Faerie Queene.  It is the shortest book I ever wrote.  It took me the longest time to write.  It is also an allegory of the crisis in academic publishing; at fifty cents per printed page, it is roughly fifteen times the price of my first book (1969).

Manueline vaulting in the Hieronymite Monastery, Belém

We don’t know all that much about Luís de Camões, who died in 1580, aged about fifty-five, except that he ticked most of the right boxes for the Renaissance Man contest: scholar, soldier, lover, adventurer, Portuguese patriot.  Above all he was a very great poet, author of what I think is the finest of the secular Renaissance epics, the Lusíadas (Lusiads in English) as well as a large body of lyric poetry.  He has a small number of fine religious poems.  My book is an analysis of the most famous of these, an extraordinary poetic commentary on the psalm Super flumina (“By the Waters of Babylon”).  It is quite the equal of Milton’s “Lycidas” in my opinion, though practically nobody, even among professional scholars of Renaissance literature, has ever heard of it.  That is because it is written in Portuguese—which brings me back to the thought I trust you have been holding for the last four paragraphs.

Tiny Portugal was a most unlikely world “leader”.  Its land mass is about the size of Indiana.  In the year of Camões’s birth its population was approximately 1.25 million.  In the earlier Middle Ages the Portuguese had been overwhelmed by African aggressors.  In the later Middle Ages they were under constant threat from Castilian aggressors.  The subject of the Lusiads is the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India (1497-1499).  Within the period of about a century a tiny, marginal, thinly populated Iberian country had established a vast maritime empire in Africa, on the Asian mainland, and in the Malay Archipelago.  It “owned” that half of South America we today call Brazil.   This was an epic achievement that deserved an epic poet.  As a “world leader” little Portugal was doing quite well for itself.

But history is all about change, and there is waning as well as waxing.  “I saw that all the torments are caused by mutability, and mutability by the years,” wrote Camões in his poem; “when I saw how many deceptions time works on our hopes.”  The political pillar of Camões’s world was Empire.  Its spiritual pillar was the militant and intolerant Catholicism that several centuries of the Iberian experience of Islamic occupation had created.  Both crumbled before the advance of modernity, leaving as memorials in widely disparate parts of the world some great buildings, some great art, and the Portuguese language with its linguistic and literary artifacts.  Too many of the contemporary European intellectuals who inhabit literature faculties are disposed to excoriate history as opposed to trying to understand it.  For them all history must be the reflecting pool of Narcissus.  It is no wonder that great writers of the past who resist being remade in the postmodern image are having a particularly rough ride these days; but it is a pity, and a loss.  To conclude that America is destined for a world leadership role “about like Portugal’s” seems premature; but should that day arrive I hope there will still be those who keep alive the memory of our great old writers.

 façade of the Bom Jesus church, Goa (1605)

Student Debt Crisis

            I had already half decided that I would attempt to address the student loan crisis when I came upon an opinion piece by David Leonhardt in yesterday’s Times concerning Princeton, my former employer, and specifically its efforts to identify, attract, and give financial support to able students from “low income” backgrounds. In my long experience the Times has seldom had much good to say about Princeton.  But Leonhardt’s piece is not merely complimentary; it’s nearly fawning.  He praises the institution for the rising percentage of Pell Grant recipients in recent entering classes—a Pell Grant being a pretty good indicator of seriously modest family financial resources.

            In addition to a parochial interest in the issue of educational finance, I have a deeply personal one.  For nine academic years between the fall of 1954 and the summer of 1963 I got a superb education at three fine institutions, one of them being Princeton, from which I received my doctorate.  The out-of-pocket expense to me was nil--not one red cent.  Various foundations and trusts paid for it all.  A foundation has no face, and a trust no distinctive voice.  It was almost possible to regard the largess as entitlement rather than a gift of long-vanished generous and visionary men, a gift demanding a lifetime’s gratitude and repayable, and then only in part, by an ever-intentional teaching vocation.  I might wish the same for every intellectually serious boy and girl in America.  What we have instead is a generation of graduates suffocating at the bottom of a silo of debt.

            For the Princetons of the country—a fairly numerous but still proportionally tiny part of American higher education—the student debt crisis is, well, mostly academic.  The endowments of such institutions are so huge that they arguably need not and perhaps morally should not collect undergraduate tuition at all.  They could frankly embrace the role of redistributive charity that they perform and be done with it.

But consider the dog rather than the tail.  I mean the large number of institutions whose “financial aid packages” must depend upon an ever increasing ratio of loan to outright grant.  My undergraduate alma mater, which I think is perhaps ranked about number fifty in quality among the cohort of liberal arts colleges, now has a comprehensive fee (academic charges plus room and board) of about $55,000.  That is a real bargain.  The more famous places that everyone lusts after come in at $60,000 or more.  It is important to realize two things.  These figures are real, and relate to real costs.  Politicians now talking about “free college” must know that there is no more free college than there is free lunch: somebody is paying for it.  Secondly, such comprehensive fees exceed the median annual income of the middle quintile of American families, are about twice that of the fourth quintile, and about five times that of the impoverished bottom quintile.  Families in the second quintile, who probably could be described as “upper middle class” could at least in theory absorb one such fee per year, if only in theory.

The willingness of families to make heroic sacrifices to secure a good education for their offspring has inspired me for the last half century.  I understand also why during that time a college education has ever more explicitly come to be regarded in terms of economic transaction or investment.   Though entirely understandable and perhaps inevitable, this development makes us purists a little wistful.  For a few of us still believe that the goal of liberal education is preparation for personal spiritual fulfillment and virtuous civic engagement rather than admission to the top quarter of the top quintile—the only group in America today that can sit down and write out the big check to Amherst without batting an eye, whatever eye-batting is.

American higher education has certain marked similarities to American medicine.  Both have been, indeed continue to be, the envy of the world.  Yet circumstances seem to be demonstrating that without a fundamental rethink and the laborious forging of certain shared social goals we cannot afford either much longer.  There is a great deal to feel sad about in our current political circumstances.  My personal take as an American patriot—meaning someone who loves his native land—is that we are truly witnessing the degradation of the democratic dogma.  You will perhaps recognize in that sonorous alliteration the title of a fine book (1919) by Henry Adams.  Adams quipped that a study of the American presidents from Washington to Ulysses Grant “entirely disproves the theory of evolution.”  I say no more.  Though for obvious reasons the focus of attention remains on the executive, we are hardly less grieved by a body of legislators from whose small-minded mediocrity, bipartisan though further limited by a poisonous partisanship, it would be unreasonable to expect very much.  The “student debt crisis” will probably just have to take its place in the unmoving queue. 

Snake in the Grass

 ...not to mention the tree

 Saint Augustine and our Founding Fathers share more in common than I at first thought.  Augustine says that the search for happiness is hard-wired into our nature.  Jefferson says that it is not merely our nature but our right.  Well-being and optimism should thus be the defaults of the human situation.  I believe this accounts for the sense of grievance we feel—or at least I feel—when life is intruded upon by oppression, hurtful accident, or sudden medical emergency.  All of us, surely, face moments equally disturbing and clarifying in which we are forced to think about such things.

It was a choice Ozark morning in early summer, radiant but not yet hot.  There was not a cloud in the sky.  The only evidence that there had been a light shower in the night was the sparkle from every bright leaf and blade.   I was fourteen or fifteen, and my moral and physical being matched the brightness of the day I rushed out to meet.  What a great day to be alive!   As I hurried through the screen door I crushed down upon my head my well-worn straw hat.  What happened next began an unresolved theodicy of seven decades.  Theodicy, fancy word: “a defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.”  I reeled before an explosive pain in my right temple.  I actually imagined I had been shot.  Quite unbeknownst to me my hat, acting like a butterfly net, had caught a wasp between its leather sweatband and my hairline.  Never before nor since has an insect bite been so dramatic.  The pain was not merely excruciating but nauseating.  The right side of my head ballooned.  Within minutes the right eye was swollen shut.  Within an incomprehensible instant an effervescent youthful optimism was overcome by a confusing agony.  I was ill for three days.

It would be nearly another decade, anyway sometime when I was at Oxford, that I picked up Goethe’s spiritual autobiography, Truth and Poetry.  In 1755, when Goethe was six years old, the major church festival of All Saints’ Day happened to fall on a Sunday.  For that reason the heavy stone churches of Lisbon were more crowded than usual when about ten in the morning the city was flattened by a monster earthquake—soon followed by a tsunami and uncontrollable fires.  The loss of life was appalling.  The impact of this event on the European intelligentsia deserves a chapter in the history of modern thought. Goethe, who was a genius, could already at the age of six intellectualize the dilemma of the Enlightenment philosophes.  “By treating the just and the unjust in the same way, God had not behaved in the fatherly manner that I had been attributing to him in my catechism,” he later wrote.   “The wise and learned people around me seemed to be unable to agree on the way in which the phenomenon should be described….” 

Of course the “problem” was an ancient one, and it is beautifully treated in several ancient texts.  In those most familiar to me, the Scriptures compiled by the Hebrew theologians and the poetry of the Greco-Roman ancient world, there is a striking thematic convergence seized upon by the earliest Christian humanists, those ancient ascetics, many of them unknown to us even by name, to whom we are indebted for the preservation of practically everything we have of “classical literature”.  According to the myth of the Fall in the book of Genesis God created our race for immortal bliss in a magnificent garden.  But human perfection required the freedom of the will to choose moral imperfection.  That choice, proposed by the serpent, endorsed by Eve, and executed by Adam “brought Death into the world, and all our woe, with loss of Eden” (Milton).  The actual cosmogony or creation story is less central in Greco-Roman mythology—but the idea of a fall from perfection, gradual, episodic, perhaps continuing to this very day—is enshrined in the story of the violent ending of the Golden Age, effected through the revolt of Jupiter against his father Saturn, and emblematized by the birth of Venus, goddess of passionate desire. 

Ovid and Virgil both deal at some length with the sad implications of the end of the Age of Gold.  In the pastoral world of the Eclogues, in which shepherds and goat-herds pursue their rustic amours and poetry slams, hidden dangers abound.  “You lads who gather flowers and strawberries that grow in the earth,” says Damoetas, “fly hence!  A cold snake lurks in the grass.”  To which Menalcas adds: “Take care, my sheep, that you advance not too far; it is not safe to trust to the bank.”  In other words, don’t go near the water.

Disaster intrudes when least expected—and least comprehensible.  Proserpina (the Latin version of the Greek Persephone) is in a carefree instant snatched down to hell.  Avoid that field of Enna “where Proserpin gathering flowers / herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis / was gathered…” (Milton again).  Our old folklore is full of tales of sudden danger descending upon the innocent: the Babes in the Wood, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding-Hood.  The Greeks had a proverb: “Under every stone a scorpion”—as if to say “In every porch awning a wasps’ nest.”

Insights into Health Care

            Even occasional readers of this blog will be aware of its improvisational nature.  I am often constrained—mainly by ignoble sloth but on occasion by actual disruptive circumstance—to throw something together in rather a hurry and without benefit of the technical resources really required.  I am not so bad as Doctor Johnson, Prince of Bloggers, who might not even begin writing one of his essays until the printer’s devil was at his door demanding copy.  Unfortunately, I am not nearly so good as Doctor Johnson either.  It’s usually a question of hoping that things will come together.

            One genre of coming together is the historical congruence.   Historical congruences can be happy or sad, sometimes both.  Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—American Founders, presidents, and political antagonists—both died on July 4, 1826.  That day, by the providential scheme, happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of Independence Day, when the Declaration was first proclaimed in Philadelphia.  Both men were pretty prolific writers, but not so famous in literary history as William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, both of whom died on April 23, 1616.  That one involves a little historical leger-de-main concerning time zones and variant calendars and that sort of thing; but it’s too good to give up without a struggle.  Cervantes was so fanatical about deadlines as to take them rather literally.  His dedication of his last novel, Los Trabajos de Persiles and Sigismundo, is dated April 19, 1616.  He wrote it on his literal death bed.

            What makes these congruences congruent for my particular circumstances is that as I write I find myself temporarily confined to a bed in a hospital in Philadelphia, city of the Declaration.  My circumstances are by no means so urgent as those of Cervantes, and there is not the slightest hope of their stimulating another Persiles.  But they do invite serious thought about two topics near the top of the current American political agenda: health care and immigration.

            A very old and dear friend from Oxford days, a man who has appeared more than once in my blog posts over the years, was supposed to be visiting us in Princeton yesterday before going on to Boston, where one of his sons is in temporary residence, and thence to California, where he has business interests.  Most people, arriving at Newark Airport only to face the Case of the Disappearing Host, would utter a few awkward words of formulaic absolution and encouragement (“Not at all, old man; don’t give it another thought; just concentrate on getting well”, etc., etc.) and then move on north.  But not Andrew.  He came down to Princeton, where Joan was able to give overnight room and board.  Then they both jumped into his rented car and drove to Philadelphia, where we spent an entire long afternoon conducting an orgy of reminiscence and a probing seminar on the state of the world in a 150-square-foot room full of blinking and beeping machines, our debates fuelled by bad tea in paper cups supplied by friendly nurses, and punctuated by intermittent blood-lettings and takings of vital signs.

            Our topics included Brexit, the French election, and the rapidly changing latest Trumpiana.  But the setting of our conversation, together with some of Andrew’s own recent experiences, naturally raised the large subject of health care in a comparative context.  Something like sixteen percent of the American GDP is related to health care.  In Britain the figure is closer to six percent.  Anecdotes are not the same thing as big data, even if data is the gathering together of anecdote.  But my current, personal, anecdotal experience is that as a consumer of Medicare I have in general received services of extremely high quality.  The scientific and technological aspects of medicine in a university hospital, as this layman has observed them, are remarkably impressive.  The American health care system, as I am experiencing it, is anything but “failing”.

             I shall not attempt to draw from this experience any comprehensive generalization on the topic of health care.  On the topic of immigration, however, I will make so bold as to do so.  Most of a hospital stay is boredom alleviated by observing the variety of one’s fellow human beings.  I conclude on the basis of observation that of the most highly trained professionals I have encountered here—the superb physicians, chief nurses, and registered nurses—at least a third are not native speakers of the English language.  These are the people who have just fixed me up and plan to send me home today.  When one broadens the census of hospital workers to include what usually would be regarded as non-professionals, the proportion of the foreign-born would perhaps be even higher.  There are certain nativist attitudes to immigration in the air, and they don’t strike me as particularly conducive to the health of American health care.

            There are some advantages to last minute blog composition.  I just had the opportunity to test some of my impressions with the Asian-American medical student assigned to my case.  When I asked him whether the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania could operate without immigrants he simply laughed.  But he thought that the hospitals would probably have a better chance than general and family practices throughout the country.

Chloë and Hector

 basking in the sun

One summer’s day about three years ago I was prospecting for a few nicely squared field stones in a remote country place where I gather such things when I came upon a turtle.  The turtle, morosely planted in the shade of a clump of stringy grass, cast upon me what I considered the plaintive look of a lonely creature seeking companionship.  So I picked it up, placed it in the effective holding pen of the bed of my pickup, and after completing my business drove home.  If you are already offended by my blatant turtlenapping, I shudder at your reaction to what comes next.

For what happened next, and what happens altogether too frequently in my life these days, was oblivion.  Preoccupied with other matters, I did not immediately unload the stones, and only when I went to do so two and a half days later did the turtle reappear in my consciousness.  Removing a turtle from a landfill dump is one thing.  Starving it is another.  What most alarmed me was the fear of a possibly lethal dehydration.  My original thought had been simply to move the turtle to a better zip code.  But now I decided to put it in our atrium, one feature of which is a small pool frequently refreshed by rain and generous infusions of tap water, frequently recirculated by an electrical pump through the mouth of a concrete dolphin mounted by a cement rodeo-riding putto.  The pump is controlled by a switch in the kitchen, reachable by even the smallest ambulatory grandchild when sufficiently motivated; so the dolphin keeps pretty busy.

The atrium is about twenty feet square and has many other attractive features.  When I consulted written authority concerning the housing of pet turtles, I discovered that our atrium was the equivalent of the King Ranch and the Taj Mahal conjoined.   It could comfortably accommodate a half dozen carapaces.  The place is replete with vegetable delicacies and literally crawling with scrumptious insects.  Like Onan our frequently shaken bird-feeder regularly spills its seed upon the ground.  It turned out later that the root cavities left by long gone birch trees would prove perfect for hibernation.

Other inhabitants of the house, or frequent visitors to it, soon noticed that there was a turtle crawling around the atrium paths and swimming in its pool.  I tried, successfully for a time, to be as dumfounded as anyone else.  Perhaps it was spontaneous animal generation, as in Aristotle?  But eventually I had to come clean.  My spouse named the turtle, obviously a female, Chloë.  To the delight of the grandchildren, she became a part of the family.

Fast-forward now several turns of the seasons, and through two successful atrium hibernations.  Now I am working at the bottom of my garden in the warmth of an early summer morning when I see headed straight for me through the field grass, like a bee toward the hive, a really large turtle, obviously a male with sex on its mind.  I hesitated not for an instant.  I knew what this turtle needed and where it might be found.  I scooped it up, carried it to the outside atrium door, introduced it into its artificial paradise, and returned to my tomatoes.   Testudo Twain provided me a second opportunity to keep mum until others made the discovery, but that didn’t take too long.  Once again Joan was ready with the perfect name: Hector.

emerging from hibernation

We kept alert for significant tortoise social interaction but saw only indifference and occasional bickering.  Both turtles disappeared by around Thanksgiving.  Hector, covered in mud, reappeared briefly on a bizarrely hot day in February, then like the Punxsutawney groundhog wisely retreated for six more weeks, when within a few hours of each other both Chloë and Hector reappeared.  Since then they have been having public sex on a shockingly frequent basis.  And we have had to make a slight adjustment.

You are probably aware that a number of my colleagues in literary study have demonstrated that “men” and “women” are passé—the categories I mean.  It turns out that what we call “sex” is neither a natural category nor a fixed one, but a fluid condition constructed by society.  The failure to recognize this truth causes enormous problems, and perhaps even accounts for the election of Donald Trump.  During all my years as a professor, to my enduring shame, I resisted this scientific discovery, confidently espousing reactionary opinions born in the interstices of a premodern mind.  When they go at it our turtles do not make “the beast with two backs,” as Iago calls it.  Their amorous sport would better be described as “the shell game”.  But it turns out that I totally constructed—or rather misconstructed—their so-called sexual identities.  That is, we have been forced to conclude on the basis of empirical evidence that the large and aggressive Hector is actually Chloë.  The demure and tidy Chloë is actually Hector.  Somewhere among the woodruff there must be a cache of well fertilized eggs.  Perhaps I will be able to offer an update to this post in eight or ten weeks.

Philosophical, in Philadelphia

 Chaucer directed his wonderful poem Troilus and Criseyde to two of his admired friends: the trilingual poet John Gower and Ralph Strode, a logician from Merton College, Oxford.  He called the one moral Gower and the other philosophical Strode.  The adjectives sound heavy and stilted to us today, perhaps even ironical; but Chaucer meant them as straight and highly complimentary.  It’s rather a pity that philosophical in particular has lost its old juice.  To be philosophical about something these days is to be uncomplaining, pragmatic, or resigned.  In Boethius and other early writers “philosophy” can indeed lead its votaries to an attitude of indifference or even scorn toward many of the things that animate the rat race, but the word itself is true to its noble etymological origins—the love of wisdom.

All this comes to mind because we just spent two days last week at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the city in which Benjamin Franklin and others founded it in 1743.  In its name we have the dignity of the older meaning of the word.  “The first drudgery of settling new colonies is now pretty well over,” Franklin wrote, “and there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts, and improve the common stock of knowledge.”  The principal purpose of the Society would be to promote “useful” knowledge—particularly the application of new scientific knowledge and technological developments to the advancement of human health, welfare, and general felicity.  Its most obvious antecedent model was the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660; but there were, or soon would be, similar sodalities of the benevolent learned wherever the Enlightenment had taken root.  It was not explicitly a political organization.  But people interested in the betterment of mankind often think, rightly or wrongly, in political terms; and the Society really got going in the 1770s just as our nation really got going.  Among its early luminaries were many of our great Founders, including Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Monroe, and Washington.  Thomas Jefferson was actually the president of the Philosophical Society while he was President of the United States. To recall such names is to revel, licitly, in national pride; but it is also a sadly archaeological exercise.  As you catch glimpses of our national leaders today on CNN how many “philosophers” can you count?

The Society’s grand old buildings are in the historic center of Philadelphia, very near to Independence Hall.  The library is one of the intellectual jewels of the early Republic.  Among its treasures are the original journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  Like many early American intellectuals Jefferson was eclectic in his interests, which included agriculture, history, literature, and archaeology.  Everything about native Americans interested him, particularly Indian languages.  The Enlightenment was an age of great systems, and he and others hoped it might be possible to construct a universal linguistic map, which might deconstruct the Tower of Babel.  To this day the library remains an important world resource for the study of America languages. 

There are of course limits to the traditionalism of an organization dedicated to intellectual progress.  What we are now calling the STEM fields are probably still most thoroughly represented in the membership, but there are also artists, poets, musicians and quite a few humanities professors from fields less obviously “useful” than organic chemistry or applied mathematics.  At the meeting just concluded outgoing president Clyde Barker, an eminent transplant surgeon and medical educator, passed the gavel on to Linda Greenhouse, a prominent journalist and legal expert.  There is an actual gavel, incidentally, though it looks more like a detached door knocker than a hammer.  Naturally, it once was wielded by Jefferson.

 A meeting of the APS consists principally in hearing a series of diverse, carefully prepared learned talks pitched for a diversely learned audience, and then schmoozing about them with interesting people over nibbles.  Two of the themes last week were the growing impact of artificial intelligence on the professions and various aspects of observable climate change.  Sometimes what is observable in the very old tells us important things about the very new.  There are scholar-adventurers who seek out the oldest ice in the world and dendro-chronologists (“tree ring” experts) who wrest from the carcasses of long dead forests information about the here and now.

One odd feature of academic life as a university professor is that one is surrounded by great lecturers whose lectures one never hears. By chance I got to hear two dynamic talks by a couple of my own Princeton colleagues—something that I would never get to do under ordinary circumstances.  The astrophysicist David Spergel explained both of Einstein’s relativity theories in six minutes flat, and the Sinologist Martin Kern introduced us to the treasure trove of ancient Chinese bamboo manuscripts recovered from grave sites.  

We returned from our “philosophical” weekend refreshed in mind and body.

My Week With Conrad

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

            Last week we drove to New Haven, where we became part of a small, surprise dinner party honoring a close friend on his seventy-fifth birthday.  The memorable meal,  featuring succulent chicken and lamb, was supplied by a restaurateur-caterer with a mobile barbecue pit towed behind his SUV.  We had a great time, spent the night with our friends, and made a leisurely start on the return drive next morning.  But I am an inveterate early morning riser and, as usual when I am an overnight guest in someone’s home, I found myself with a good two or three predawn hours on my own.  I addressed them in the usual manner, by taking an interesting-looking title from a shelf of books: an anthology of spy stories.

            In this anthology were two pieces I had already read, and now reread with pleasure, by two authors I hold in the highest esteem: sections from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and Rebecca West’s The Birds Fall Down (1966).  Both of those books deal with revolutionary terrorism and police repression in pre-Revolutionary Russia.  West’s explicitly fictionalizes one of the most extraordinary facts in the history of espionage: the fact that a double agent named Yevno Azef was at the same time an organizer of social-revolutionary terror against the Czarist regime and a highly placed counter-terror agent of the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police.

            The effect of this early morning reading was the typical effect of most good reading: I wanted to do more of it.  Without attempting any description of my circuitous mental processes, I shall go immediately to their product.  I returned to Princeton determined to take up one of the few important Conrad novels I had never broached—Under Western Eyes (1911)—and I did so at the first convenient moment.  I have had a delighted several days.  It has been a while since I was reading something so pleasurable that I felt the need to ration the reading, as one might the eating of a fine piece of chocolate, lest I too quickly finish it.

            People have reading habits just as they have habits of other kinds.   I once had a friend whose mode of reading a novel I found most peculiar, especially since he had been an English major in college.  His principal aim, so far as I could tell, was to read the book as fast as possible.  His first move was to ascertain the number of pages.  He would then make a silent and tentative commitment to the first five percent of it—for a four-hundred-page book the first twenty pages.  At that point he had another chance.  He could either chuck the project or make a solemn commitment to finish it to the last page.  The arrangement was sort of like that of the religious novice under provisional vows faced at a certain point with the awesome choice of accepting or declining a life commitment.  But even when committed to a whole novel he allowed himself a major time-saving reading practice.  He would skip all parts “between quotation marks”—that is, all directly reported speech.  He reckoned that in general dialogue did very little to advance narrative.

            In the edition I own--the collected edition of the 1920s-- Under Western Eyes is 380-pages long; but if I applied to it the “quotation marks canon” it would instantly become a longish short story.  It is absolutely full of Russian revolutionaries and sentimentalists, and although they do enough to keep a plot of sorts going, what they mainly do is talk…and talk some more.  “In this book,” Conrad wrote to his friend Edward Garnett, husband of the famous translator of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, “I am concerned with nothing but ideas, to the exclusion of everything else.”  The ideas are thick on the ground, and major characters are tireless in enunciating them.  The unfortunately unreliable narrator is an ex-pat Brit in Geneva, where there may have been a few native-born Swiss people in residence at the fin de siècle, though it seems unlikely.  This man, a hell of a talker himself, is a “professor of languages” like me, except much more in demand, because most of the talkers wouldn’t dream of attending the salon of Madame de S---- without at a minimum perfect English, French, German, and Russian under their epiglottises.  (The book itself, fortunately, stays mainly in the impressive English of its Polish author.)  As the title might imply, a major theme of the book is the difficult if not impossible challenge presented to the “western” liberal mind by the opulent barbarism of Czarist autocracy.  A popular book of my Cold War youth was entitled Why They Behave Like Russians.  Its author must have been a reader of Conrad.

            When Conrad published Under Western Eyes in 1911 readers likely brought to mind the pseudo- or semi-revolution of 1905; but from a slightly later perspective it is likely to seem prescient with regard to the Bolshevik coup of 1917 and the huge cataclysm of the Great War of which it was an episode.  Just at this moment certain aspects seem quite contemporary.  When we speak of the “timelessness” of a fine book it is rarely because we think it free of time’s bonds, but because those bonds seem to become ever more elastic.