Pangur Bán

 

Pangur bán, meaning something like “Whitey” in Old Irish, or perhaps “Super-White” or “Snowball,” was the name of the pet white cat made famous by an unknown monastic scribe toward the end of the first millennium.  For him and his brethren the name would have had mystical associations to which no modern detergent ad could aspire.  For them it recalled the shekinah, the visible sign of the presence of the Lord, of Moses and then Jesus on the Mountain, a spiritual radiance and a whiteness “that no fuller on earth could achieve.”  (Mark 9:2). 

 

Reichenau, the small island in Lake Constance in southern Germany where the cat and the scribe lived out their companionate lives, was the site of a Benedictine monastery that became an important center of learning in Carolingian times.  The subject of the ancient and most unusual poem “Pangur bán” is a comparison of a mouser cat in its stealthy pursuit of mice and a scriptural exegete in his arduous search for the hidden meaning of a biblical text.  It is a delightful jeu d’ésprit composed and recorded not in Latin but in the vernacular language of his distant native land. Its unique character has made it one of the best known examples of Old Irish lyric poetry, of which there are unfortunately few surviving models.   I append the full text of the poem in the translation of one of the most distinguished of recent Irish poets.

 

In turning to what some may regard as an obscure subject (monastic cats) I meant consciously to seek refuge from the exhausting political scene that has been preoccupying me and so many others.  But of course there is no escape to be found.  The topic had barely forced its way to the periphery of my mental landscape when an exhumed years-old insult directed at childless “cat ladies” by J. D. Vance, Trump’s hand-picked running mate, forced itself on my attention.

 

            We happily housed a couple of cats for many years, but when they in the natural cycle of things expired, we did not replace them.  Our only current pets are turtles.  So I am not a “cat person”.  I do claim to be a “monk person,” however, having spent many years studying forms of Christian religious life in the Middle Ages.  It is understandable that most of the (few) people who have written about the poem “Pangur bán” have been most interested in the cat part.  But as a scholar I am more interested in the monk part.  The monk, after all, is the one who wrote the poem, and its subject is monastic scholarship, for which he wittily finds a surprising analogue in a cat’s mouse-hunting.

 

            Mr. Vance is a fairly recent convert to Roman Catholicism.  I have read that while he was preparing to enter the Church he chose from among the saints Augustine of Hippo as a special spiritual inspiration.  I myself am a great admirer of Augustine, and have spent many years reading and thinking about his writings, especially as they touch upon linguistic, moral, and social issues.  Without beating about the bush, I will say the silent part out loud.  Quite by accident, I know a great deal more about Augustine, his thought, and his writings than Mr. Vance is ever likely to learn on purpose.  Ordinarily the quality of an American political candidate’s Augustinianism is not a pressing issue, but Mr. Vance has made it one by declaring that childless women among our citizens necessarily lack a vital connection with the fate of the nation.  "We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable…. It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC--the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children."  I cannot say with certainty that no American politician dependent upon popular election for his position has ever uttered such a gratuitously stupid remark, but I must say I doubt it.

 

            Augustine, though not quite so fanatical about celibacy as some of the other early Church leaders, does make it clear in dozens of places, including two whole books explicitly devoted to  the subject of marriage, that wedlock is an inferior state, its redeeming virtue being that it turns to a socially useful good (the  continuity of the human race) an intrinsically evil phenomenon (the irrational supremacy of sensuality in the sexual act).  Much of the comedy of Chaucer’s brilliant presentation of the Woman from Bath is recreated from the rich controversial literature (mostly deeply misogynist) created by unconvincing clerical cheerleaders for celibacy over several centuries.

 

            But I will leave Senator Vance to wander alone and with unsure foot through the landscape of verbal pitfalls of his own digging.  He is a man who has talked a lot, often volubly and vehemently, and an army of Democratic Party gnomes are even now busy picking their way through a sizeable mountain of his careless obiter dicta.  There are bound to be many more remarks of the “cat lady” variety.  My own eccentric interest as a medievalist is with the feline-loving scribe of Reichenau a thousand years ago.  We do not know his name or his age.  That he wrote in Irish makes it virtually certain that he was an Irishman.  The text of his poem strongly suggests his amiability, self-effacement, cleverness, and studiousness.  His type should be well known to us from the sweet pages of a great book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, by the late French monk Jean Leclercq, a Benedictine scholar in the still living medieval tradition himself.  The phrase “opus Dei,” the Work of God or the Divine Task, is probably most familiar to most readers, if known to them at all, in reference to a controversial society within the contemporary Roman Church.  But its main meaning in earlier centuries was the wholeness of the life lived by the black monks, usually referred to today as Benedictines.  It was a carefully organized life of regular, scheduled prayer and work, the work including the manufacture and study of books by scribes and scholars.  These were the men who did the heavy lifting of passing on the cultural history of ancient Greece and Rome through the centuries of the formation of Europe to the rebirth of learning in the Renaissance.  Many of these cultural heroes are known to us not at all, many others only by a name or a date in a necrology.  Concerning this particular monastic “cat man” we do not even know these things.  We know only that he must have been a lovely fellow, a friend to feline and man alike, and that he led a life of gentle, unostentatious utility, the kind of life that makes the world a better place.

 

 

 

Pangur Bán and I at work,

Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:

His whole instinct is to hunt,

Mine to free the meaning pent.

 

More than loud acclaim, I love

Books, silence, thought, my alcove.

Happy for me, Pangur Bán

Child-plays round some mouse’s den.

 

Truth to tell, just being here,

Housed alone, housed together,

Adds up to its own reward:

Concentration, stealthy art.

 

Next thing an unwary mouse

Bares his flank: Pangur pounces.

Next thing lines that held and held

Meaning back begin to yield.

 

All the while, his round bright eye

Fixes on the wall, while I

Focus my less piercing gaze

On the challenge of the page.

 

With his unsheathed, perfect nails

Pangur springs, exults and kills.

When the longed-for, difficult

Answers come, I too exult.

 

So it goes. To each his own.

No vying. No vexation.

Taking pleasure, taking pains,

Kindred spirits, veterans.

 

Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,

Pangur Bán has learned his trade.

Day and night, my own hard work

Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.  (trans. Seamus Heaney)

 

 

                 

 

 

Life's True Treasure

 

“How vainly men themselves amaze to win the palm, the oak, or bays”  Andrew  Marvell

 

Over the years, in our household, various bits and pieces of poems, songs, Shakespeare plays, and bad movies have become a part of the family idiolect.  One of these is “life’s true treasure.”  Early in our marriage we watched an unremarkable Western in which a young man obsessed with the desire to strike a rich rift of gold allowed the obsession to destroy his own life and that of his lovely young wife.  One of her phrases became part of the household vocabulary: life’s true treasure.  That, claimed the wife, they had already at hand in the daily challenges and rewards of a shared life.

 

I thought of the idea of life’s true treasure again on Sunday, when in the political world that had been obsessing so many of us, the thread snapped.  I was taking an afternoon nap at the time, but when I woke up, I just sort of had a sense, and I was right.  I refer, of course, to the situation of President Biden, and to the thread suspending the sword of Damocles.  Everyone used to know about “the sword of Damocles” because everybody used to have read Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations or, more probably, heard about it from somebody who had, as was certainly my own experience in, I think, fourth grade.  But late in my teaching career I used the phrase before a small seminar of undergraduates, eliciting blank stares.  You can always tell the difference between student reactions, at least the reactions of ordinary boredom and those of honestly not knowing what the hell you are talking about.  Mainly my readers are, shall we say, of mature years, but for reasons soon to be made apparent my mind is at the moment on some rather young ones, and on the off chance there are a few others like them in the audience, I’ll say a few words about Damocles.

 

            He was a real person, a courtier in the entourage of the Sicilian tyrant, Dionysius of Syracuse, in the fourth century before Christ.  The following legend concerning him is, well, legendary.  Damocles had spoken enthusiastically of the great happiness that must characterize his boss’s life.  In order to teach him the lesson probably better know to us from Shakespeare’s “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” Dionysius invited Damocles to a sumptuous banquet, but placed him in a seat over which hung a heavy sword suspended from the ceiling held only by a single thread of uncertain but dubious tensile strength.  Well, President Biden spent a few most uncomfortable days recuperating from Covid as he awaited the breaking of the thread or the falling of the ax or the spring of the trap or whatever other metaphor you can come up with to emblematize a dreaded fate seemingly inevitable yet teasingly uncertain in its exact nature or timing.  He announced the decision in a brief, dignified, straightforward letter while I was having a Sunday afternoon nap.  His resignation threw the political world into chaos, which is another way of saying that we have shifted from one flavor of uncertainty to another.  Well, we are creatures who thrive on variety; but I prefer the uniquely quiet character of quiet familial love to the ragged uncertainty of national passion.

 

For what are for many others the stimulating new paroxysms of the rapidly changed political scene are leaving me free to enjoy our summer visit from the Montrealers (son Luke, Melanie and their two absolutely delightful kids, John Henry and Hazel) to the full.  We have been able to sublease a sizeable house in the neighborhood for them—a three-minute stroll through sylvan glades from our own.  Those arrangements are nearly ideal, offering an adjustable quotient of privacy and togetherness that recognizes the variety of tempos needed in a multi-generational household.

 

            Like all kids their age—Hazel is ten and John Henry headed for his twelfth birthday this week—these two are growing fast.   (The illustrative photos in this post were take by Melanie on their very recent vacation in Costa Rica.)  All grandparents have the right, and many of us believe the duty, to cluck over their grandkids.  This process usually begins with their astonishing rate of growth, all those incremented inches since last sighting.  On a white wainscotting panel in the kitchen we keep on display in penciled markings the dated increments in the heights from one visit to another.  The measurements are always taken with an elaborate show of exactitude, and the results are always dramatic and cluckable.  Since there are four other grandchildren whose measurements have over the years been recorded in that same place, the panel has become a little crowded—you might even say messy—but a just emblem of the dynamism of young life itself.

 

The households of the elderly benefit from infusions of dynamism, so long as we are talking about a disciplined dynamism.  Luke was able to rehabilitate three bicycles hanging unused for far too long in the garage.  Thus there is now available both a home base and a convenient escape from it, an excellent feature of successful inter-generational venues.

 

            Later today we shall hope to pack the whole kit and kaboodle into the Montrealers’ big Dodge van and drive up to Richard and Katie Dixon’s farm in Kingwood.  That’s only about thirty miles as the crow flies, but in terms of the sensation experienced, it could be three hundred or three thousand.  I haven’t been there myself in more than three months.  I wrote about the ambitious tree-planting party we participated in on that occasion.  That trip was in the still lightly-leaved spring.  We shall find it now, no doubt, in its preferred state, that of incipient jungle, full of mystery and challenge.  The kids will love it, and so will I.

 

 

 

 

 

Political Roundup

 

 

I honestly made repeated attempts to avoid another political topic this week, but my best intentions were overwhelmed by, first, a generalized panic in the Democratic Party, then an attempt on the life of the Republican presidential candidate, and then the sudden prominence of J. D. Vance, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, in the national consciousness.  The evolution of my thinking moved from great sympathy for Joe Biden to shocked concern for Donald Trump and then on to a kind of generalized confusion.

 

To begin with President Biden, he did dig himself into his own hole with a debate performance that had to be alarming for friend and foe alike.  In what I took to be a loosely organized but potent and coherent plan to dump him, the press turned his every move into a competency test.  There was a brutality about this process which, as it stems from intention and conscious purpose, might be better called cruelty.  I recall a scene in one of the Holocaust movies I saw years ago—perhaps it was “Schindler’s List” or one of the episodes in “War and Remembrance”—which portrayed a death camp “selection.”  The word “selection” had different shades of meaning, but in one convenient history I have found the process in general use at Auschwitz, in use beginning in 1942, was as follows.  “The selection procedure carried out on the ramps was as follows: families were divided after leaving the train cars and all the people were lined up in two columns. The men and older boys were in one column, and the women and children of both sexes in the other. Next, the people were led to the camp doctors and other camp functionaries conducting selection. They judged the people standing before them on sight and, sometimes eliciting a brief declaration as to their age and occupation, decided whether they would live or die.” 

 

By this process large numbers were sent almost directly from the boxcars to the cremation ovens as “unfit”—meaning unfit for productive slave labor.  But “selection” was a recurrent event.  Having successfully made the first cut, though it qualified the “successful” prisoner for assignment to hard labor and starvation rations, was far from a permanent reprieve.  Life as a slave laborer was, to put it mildly, unhealthy and debilitating, and at periodic intervals prison “medical” officials tested the slaves by perfunctory cosmetic inspection and by requiring them to show their continuing vigor through calisthenics, by running around in circles in grotesque foot races, and so forth.  Numerous Holocaust memoirs touch upon the desperate efforts desperate people made to pass these tests.  For them the issue was literally a matter of life or death.

 

There is a difference between corporeal and political death.  It is the latter that President Biden faces, or faced, or may face.  But I nonetheless saw evidence of an Auschwitz syndrome.  He is now required by the press and Democratic pundits--speaking anonymously because of etc., etc.--to run around in circles in the public square.  His every move (by which I mean bodily as well as verbal move) is now under intense scrutiny.  He is supposed to demonstrate appropriate levels of stamina, vigor, and verbal coherence.  The papers now spend less time reporting what he says than evaluating the degree to which he did or did not mess up in saying it.  As for content, it’s mainly binary.  Confused the name Trump with those of Zelenski and Putin (bad!)  Gave a “fiery speech” in Michigan (good!)  This is demeaning treatment for our president, and the open glee with which some of his opponents are greeting it is offensive.  They could at least dissemble the schadenfreude.  But of course, the problem is one of grave substance rather than of perception only.  Put aside the pragmatism of political reality.  Is it not obvious on medical and moral grounds, as well as those of national self-interest, that Biden should not be the candidate for the presidency?

 

Even well before the disastrous debate I had noted in television clips that President Biden on certain public occasions seemed to be walking with a rather peculiar gait—one that gives the impression of a short-stepped quasi-trot.  This phenomenon has been frequently commented on by others, sometimes with the assurance that it certainly does not suggest incipient Parkinson’s or dementia or anything else but maybe a touch of arthritis.    I am sensitive on this issue because my own walking has become poor and is deteriorating further.  Even with a supporting stick I am unsteady.  My own culprit is severe peripheral neuropathy in the lower legs, a long-time problem exacerbated considerably by the side effects of chemotherapy.  But I can still speak English.

 

            Yes, I know, one size does not fit all.  You read every day about septuagenarian marathon runners, octogenarian bungee jumpers, nonagenarian Sumo wrestlers.  But hard cases make bad law.  In one of Thurber’s great short stories, “The Curb in the Sky,” a hen-pecked, Mittyish husband whose narration of personal anecdotes is constantly interrupted and “corrected” by his wife, seeks material for narrative in what should be his own uniquely personal and singular possession, namely the stuff of his own dreams.  Is there anything that I, and I alone, could possibly add to the public cacophony surrounding the dilemma of Joe Biden?  The answer is “No”, but I might come close.  Not much of the commentary is coming from the President’s fellow octogenarians.  How does someone who is a documented decrepit assess the President’s situation?  I am in my late eighties and under attack from a progressive fatal disease which happily, at the moment, is in a “robust” remission (the comforting adjective of a super-expert).  I am not quite ready for the rocking chair, but I am certainly not trying to run the Free World.

 

I have nothing to add to the cataract of commentary concerning the attempt on the life of Donald Trump.  Political murder is perhaps not inherently more damnable than murder of other kinds, but it generally garners more attention.  The sensational incompetence of the security authorities on this occasion will legitimate the wildest of surmise and guarantee a profusion of conspiracy theories.  Irrational acts are not always without rational explanations.  My own tentative surmise, which I advance with no authority beyond what seems to me a common sense guess about an opaque matter, is that there was no conspiracy, maybe no political thought at all, only something perhaps more appalling because more senseless.  It seems likely to me that this poor lost young man who shot Donald Trump did so for the same reason that Mark Chapman shot John Lennon and John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan.  Chapman eventually said: “I wanted the fame.”  There are many categories into which we distribute people in our minds.  Donald Trump is a politician—among other things.  For some folks he is a savior, for other the devil incarnate.  Before any of these things, though, he is a celebrity, somebody being famous for being famous.  He is a very big celebrity.  In the overheated kitchen of our current politics everything seeks a political explanation.  But, as Milton tell us, fame is the spur.  Fame is the last infirmity of noble mind, and perhaps the first infirmity of the small, stunted mind of an obscure lost youth.  The death of one spectator and the wounding of two others was simply the collateral damage of an obscure neediness.  But Donald Trump’s defiant, courageous response, captured in a photograph likely to take a place in the iconography of American patriotism alongside that of the Marines atop Mount Suribachi, may well play a significant role in the election.  Talk about presidential!

 

            What, finally, of Veep candidate J. D. Vance?  Well, both as an English professor and a kind of hillbilly myself I have to say I admire his autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, especially as I have the deepest suspicion that he wrote it himself.  He is very smart, articulate, forceful and ambitious.  Some of the more extreme opinions he has espoused in the past will be under attack in the campaign ahead, and he will be assailed for inconsistency.  In very recent history he was a die-hard opponent and critic of Donald Trump.  Now he is showing every sign of taking on the role of attack dog in the service of that same man.  Perhaps there will be a debate between Mr. Vance and his presumed counterpart, Vice-President Kamala Harris.  If so he will have to defend and explain what he calls his intellectual evolution and what some others less charitably call flip-flopping.  And  he will need to throw back to Ms. Harris the pithy inspirational advice she has repeatedly—and I do mean repeatedly—proffered in recent months.  That advice is to concentrate on “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

 

 

 

Political Dialects

 

 

 Keir Starmer

 

winner and loser

Rishi Sunak

 

            I know little about the Labour Party leader and new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, which is to say that I know little more than what has been in the American press, supplemented by occasional deeper dives into a few extensive opinion pieces in reasonably trustworthy British commentators.  (The British press can be quite as propagandistic and partisan as the American, but I find there are more honest brokers among English commentators than among American ones.)  But there seems to be a fair consensus concerning him: a highly competent lawyer, undramatic to the very border of putting you to sleep, yet said to be a man of strong opinions, strongly held perhaps but most cautiously advanced.  But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  He just spearheaded a huge revolution in British electoral politics.  Though he was aided in his task by the natural desire of an exhausted electorate for change and by the fecklessness of a Conservative Party no longer clear on what it thinks it is conserving, it was still a remarkable feat.  It was also something of a resurrection act, given the doldrums in which the Labour Party languished under Jeremy Corbyn.  The reshaping of his party—the necessary prelude to its success—can have been no easy task.  On the other hand, in winning its record majority the Labour Party only got about a third of the total vote, which was more clearly a boisterous rejection of Tories than a heartfelt endorsement of their conquerors.  The victory was huge, perhaps even staggering in breadth, but not necessarily very deep.  The Liberal Democrats, who had seemed dead in the water, also made a significant comeback.  A very important development: Nigel Farage’s new UK Reform is now very much on the map.  Farage himself, though roundly denounced by the American commentariat, is, if I sense things aright, about to become a serious force in British politics.  He now has his own seat in Parliament.  Farage will probably continue to be treated as a nut job by the bien pensant Anglo-American press, but in my view he is the only major political figure in the British landscape of whom the adjective “charismatic” might be used.  At the very least he is remarkably articulate and skillful.  The fragmentation of the vote, which also suggested a serious eclipse of the Scottish National Party, looks much more like that in several other European countries than it has in the past.  Britain is not alone in refuting the idea of an uncomplicated rightward lurch throughout Europe.  The second round of French elections has also seriously questioned the trend, though only at the cost of creating a parliament almost tailor-made for inaction.

 

            Rishi Sunak, the Tory leader whom Starmer trounced, can be accurately described, I suppose, as the most sensational loser in British politics.  Commentators have had to go back more than a century in political history to find even an approximate parallel.  But I italicize the word loser for a particular reason.  What it means in this context is that the Tories were defeated by the Labour Party in a political election.  But in the American English used by Donald Trump the word is an all-purpose insult denoting personal inadequacy of all sorts.  A rough analogy to its semiotic degradation is evidenced in the adjective “pathetic”.  Both words are among Trump’s staples in his lexicon of invective.  According to Trump’s one-time chief of staff and Secretary of Homeland Security, John F. Kelly, President Trump used the term “suckers and losers” of some American service men killed or wounded in military action.  Trump has vehemently denied having made any such remark, as he also denied having had sexual relations “with a porn star.” These are disputed matters.   Just as in Clintonian times it all depended upon what the meaning of is is, who can know precisely at what moment an ordinary actor achieves stardom?  All this became relevant in the disastrous debate when President Biden invoked the memory of his late son, Joseph, generally known as Beau, who had served in the Army in Iraq in 2008-9, and who died of cancer in 2015.  Beau Biden, widely admired, was a decorated veteran who was already advancing in his own promising political career at the time of his death.  President Biden, indignantly defending the memory of his dead son, attacked Trump for his reported remarks about “suckers and losers,” denying that his son fit in either category.  On the contrary, his Irish up and coherent for a brief moment, Biden said “You’re the sucker, you’re the loser.”  Better late than never, perhaps, and certainly more defensible than the debaters’ childish finale about golf handicaps.  But hardly Douglas versus Lincoln.

 

Among Shakespeare scholars there is a kind of literary urban legend concerning Gladstone (or alternatively “a Victorian British matron”) who having viewed a performance of Hamlet (or perhaps Anthony and Cleopatra ) is supposed to have thus summed up the evening: “How very unlike the domestic life of our own dear queen!” Comparisons inevitably invade my mind at this time of political drama both for Britain and for America.   At the center of Sunak’s brief and dignified concession speech was his unequivocal and unqualified statement that “…I take responsibility for the loss.”  Loss is what is suffered by a loser.  This was not said in a perfunctory or incidental way.  It certainly was not said with even a hint of extenuation, let alone rationalization.  He did not suggest that the election had been rigged or insinuate that he had lost because of a head cold, or that the press had been against him, or that the moon had been in the eighth house.  He accepted responsibility because he had been the leader of the Conservative Party in an election that was for him and his colleagues a catastrophic defeat.  But though the concession speech was quite brief, it was memorable not only for the economy of what it went on to say but what it refrained from saying.  In the latter category conspicuously was any hint of personal animus or of grievance based in a suspicion of unfairness or shadiness and any badmouthing of the victorious party.  This brings me to what he did say.  He made clear that there would be an orderly, efficient, and civil transfer of power, and that that was a fact that should be reassuring to all Britons.  Few people can have a more accurate view of the difficulties his successor faces than does Sunak; but Sunak expressed only encouraging hopes for the country’s success. He made no attempt to evade his own responsibility, even while stressing that his lack of success came not from want of trying.  He reported that he had already conveyed his congratulations and best wishes to Keir Starmer, who received them with the same courteous professionalism with which they were offered.  Nothing about suckers and losers.  And the only thing about “I’m the guy…” was in essence “I’m the guy who lost the election.”  Honesty, modesty, civility, courtesy.  These qualities appear to be too delicate to endure the Atlantic crossing.  What losers!

 

 

 

A Hopeful Palimpsest

Archimedes palimpsest

 

       It is probably not a good sign when a funeral service is more encouraging than a political debate between the only two plausible candidates for the next four-year term of the presidency of the United States, but such was my experience toward the end of last week.  The debate came first, but I shall deal with it only briefly, as, Number One (as one of the debaters said repeatedly) it has already been the subject of a vast amount of commentary from professionals at all levels of the commentariat, and Number Two, it was such an actual disaster for President Biden and the Democratic Party and so unspinnable that it would be shameful even for a party hack to try.  Mr. Trump lied incessantly during the debate, but he did so with a comparative coherence, and he even had several sentences in which could be detected a complete thought laid out in proper form with a subject and predicate in the right order.  As I write this the Democratic panic of the first post-traumatic period has perhaps somewhat abated.  I now doubt that Biden will voluntarily withdraw or be forced out of the contest, as seemed at least possible in the frenzy of Friday morning.

 

Elective politics is always a choice among imperfect alternatives.  It often enough demands invocation of the adjective “realistic” and the phrase “the lesser evil.”  But how can a dynamic nation of three hundred and fifty million be presented with the choice that now presents itself?  I have several lovely grandchildren.  Am I supposed to claim that I am untroubled by the reality that Joe Biden, for all his undoubted good intentions and bumbling avuncularity, should be the guardian of the atomic codes? That Trump lies habitually does not exonerate the pious fraud of prominent Democrats who have for so long assured us that, behind the scenes, Biden is a sort of combination of Metternich and John Chrysostom.

 

            So much for Thursday night.  I now turn to the paradoxically happier subject of the memorial service.  A few years ago a dynamic and charismatic Englishman, Will(iam) Noel, took up a leadership position in our University library system.  He was a Cambridge-trained historian, a medievalist, and a cutting-edge innovator in library science.  He had spent some years at the Walters Gallery in Baltimore before moving to the University of Pennsylvania libraries.  The Penn library—including its rare book and manuscripts division—was superb in my own fields of special study even before the founding of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies about fifteen years ago.  At the center of this enterprise was the huge gift of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts—valued at the time at about twenty millions, though in fact priceless--made by Mr. Lawrence Schoenberg.  Will Noel was the director of this enterprise, and how Princeton lured him away from it I cannot know and would never be allowed to say even if I could.  I was already well retired by the time he got here.  I was alerted to his moving to Princeton by close friends who had known him in Baltimore.   As a long-time booster of Princeton’s Firestone Library, and as an active member of the Friends of the Princeton University Library I came to know him only slightly, but well enough to be mightily impressed.

 

            Two or three months ago Will Noel was in Edinburgh with some professional colleagues on some library-related business.  As he was walking on a sidewalk, an out-of-control vehicle flew off the roadway onto the pedestrian sidewalk and struck him.  Of the group with whom he was walking he alone was seriously injured, but very seriously indeed.  He survived for a while hospitalized in a coma, but not for long.  He died on April 29^th.  The accident was of the malign, senseless, and indeed incomprehensible sort that challenges my increasingly desperate attempts to continue to believe in Providential Order.  It snuffed out the life of a brilliant and innovative scholar at the height of his powers.  But before that, the scholar was a husband, a father, a brother, a friend to many, a colleague to many.

 

 

            This breadth of the loss was not the primary focus of the beautiful memorial service that took place last Friday, however.  The tragic sense was not suppressed but overwhelmed in the best sequence of brief but powerful personal reminiscences I have ever heard at such an event.  I was able to attend with my Baltimore friends, one of whom, Charles Duff, was among the eloquent speakers.  The Princeton University Chapel is a mini-Amiens Cathedral and one of Ralph Adam Cram’s greatest masterpieces.  I don’t know the precise seating capacity of the building, but it must approach 2,000.  It was probably three quarters full.  As you grow older, you find yourself attending more and more obsequies.  And If you write a regular blog, you find yourself writing more and more obituaries.  In recent years I have had to memorialize four of my own dearest friends: Michael Curschmann, Robert Hollander, Joseph Trahern, and most recently Andrew Seth.  Will Noel was not a close friend, rather a much-admired acquaintance and professional colleague, but his comparative youth and unfulfilled projects add a particular sorrow to the brutal caprice of his death.

 

            Anyone inclined to think that library science or codicology (the study of codices, or manuscripts) are dull, arcane, or dry-as dust pastimes would, I believe, soon be disabused of such notions if they could meet a fine teacher who was also a fine codicologist.  You can put my premise to the test with little expenditure of time--though with a substantial risk of intellectual excitement--by viewing a Ted Talk Will Noel gave more than a decade ago, about the Archimedes palimpsest then on display at the Walters Art Gallery. * Archimedes, perhaps the most famous ancient scientist known to us by name and a body of written work, flourished in the third century of the pre-Christian era.  In the earliest periods of book making, the materials needed for their manufacture were costly and sometimes difficult of access.  Under these circumstances obsolete books with vellum (animal skin) pages were often scraped down and reused, usually leaving a faint, sometimes shadow-like impression of the original writing.  Such a book is called a palimpsest from a Greek term meaning “rubbed smooth again.” The Archimedes palimpsest is part of a hand-made thirteenth-century prayer book.  Scrupulous, patient scholars have deployed their skill, erudition, and some cutting-edge scientific instruments to decipher the erased text lurking within its recycled pages.  Lo and behold, they found passages of previously unknown works of the celebrated philosopher.  Forget the baloney in the Da Vinci Code.  This is the real thing—original writings of the most famous ancient Greco-Roman scientist known to us. His most celebrated saying, or at least his most popular one, concerns the Law of Levers: Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.  It is by no means grandiose to suggest that something spiritually analogous can be said of those scholars like the late and very much-lamented Will Noel.

 

            Thursday night was sad, somber, and depressing.  Friday morning was by contrast inspirational and encouraging.  There are few enough institutions in our society that seem to me both essential and unequivocally good.  Some of those dealing earnestly with cultural preservation and education are among the best.  The outpouring of love, appreciation, and admiration evident in that memorial service were first of all emblems of the esteem in which a particular man was held by so many.  But in a larger social sense they were likewise gestures of support for what is the larger cultural mission to which thousands of scholars and teachers are eager to devote the work of a lifetime, and indeed to the enterprises of the spirit and the intellect generally.  So the end of the week turned out to be for me a kind of temporal palimpsest on which distress had been overwritten in uplift and hope.

William Noel (1965-2024)

 

*https://www.ted.com/talks/william_noel_revealing_the_lost_codex_of_archimedes?language=en&subtitle=en&trigger=15s

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Owl of Minerva

 

One more word about teaching what the world ought to be: Philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after actuality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. The lesson of the concept, which necessarily is also taught by history, is that only in the ripeness of actuality does the ideal appear over against the real, and that only then does this ideal comprehend this same real world in its substance and build it up for itself into the configuration of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a configuration of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this gray in gray, but only understood; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall. [Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.]   

G.W.F. Hegel, Preface to the Philosophie des Rechts

 

In the course of this essay I shall attempt to comment on the meaning in this famous passage, at least to the uncertain extent that I understand it myself.  I hope that its main point—a personal application of a frequently quoted epigram made by a philosopher of history--will be reasonably clear.  The subject might be defined as the sadness of the search for wisdom.  But it requires the somewhat breathless introduction of three important thinkers.  They are (in an order both chronological and alphabetical) Augustine of Hippo, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, and Clive James.  The three men were very different one from another; yet they shared the crucial commonality of intellectual brilliance deployed upon challenging and consequential subject matter, and extraordinary powers of verbal expression in deploying their ideas.  Augustine (354-430) was a North African Roman who became the most influential theologian in Western Catholicism.  Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher of huge intellectual ambition and influence; and Clive James (1939-2019) was an Australian born journalist and cultural critic who spent most of his life in the intellectual and professional milieux of London.

 

G. W. F. Hegel

 

            Hegel and Clive James are linked for me because of James’s brief but brilliant biography and assessment of him in one of his wonderful essays in Cultural Amnesia.*  If you don’t know this book, I strongly recommend it to any reader with an interest in our cultural history and an appreciation of fine English prose.  It is a collection of a hundred or so brief biographical essays.  Speaking of the famous remark about the Owl of Minerva, James says: “Hegel’s prose could be very beautiful like this.”  Yes, but he immediately adds: “After his death his prose became famous for being unyieldingly opaque, and indeed much of his later prose was.”  I am no expert on Hegel and have found trying to understand him too hard a slog to claim confident success.  Clive James’s six-page essay devoted to him in Cultural Amnesia is one of the clearest, most succinct treatments of a truly towering philosopher I could imagine.

 

Clive James

 

A second famous passage comes from Augustine’s autobiography, the Confessions, and provides a kind of parallel.  It is an address directly from the author to God: “Late [or, probably better, too late] have I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so modern”.  (Sero te amavi pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova.)  Hegel and Augustine share the idea of “too lateness,” but in rather different senses.  Augustine berates himself for time wasted in futile or errant philosophical searches.  Hegel seems to be announcing a morose law of intellectual history.

It will probably be apparent why the themes raised here might impose themselves upon the reflections of a scholar in his old age.  I have devoted a great deal of my life to studying and writing about “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”  I am not sure that the owl has ever appeared in my barn loft, but the raven is sure to before very long.  It’s only a question of time.

In the ancient moral vocabulary, writers make a distinction between two Latin words, scientia and sapientia. The former, scientia, is usually translated as “knowledge”, sapientia as “wisdom.”  The two obviously related concepts are not identical.  Wisdom is the moral fruit of the proper use of knowledge.  We all, or at least most of us, believe in some form of this idea.  Another famous formulation we owe to Pascal in the seventeenth century: “The heart has its reason which reason knows nothing of…We know the truth not only by reason, but by the heart.”

It is at least a curiosity that the symbolic association of the owl (bubo) with wisdom has continued in popular iconography until our own day.  Minerva is the goddess of wisdom.  Her Greek equivalent is Athena.  Her avian emblem, the owl, which once brought the dignity to Athenian coinage that the eagle now sheds upon the American, has largely been co-opted by Walt Disney and seems to represent a kind of endearing avuncular amiability.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but Athena’s bird was more venerable, solemn, indeed magisterial.  Wisdom--a thing different from intelligence or even intellectual brilliance, and certainly different from amassing a boxcar load of quaint and curious facts—seems to be a reward for an attitude rather than the achievable goal of a program of long and scrupulous search.

            It is only natural that a scholar, given the opportunity to look back in review, might want to reflect on the distinction between knowledge and wisdom.  Learning offers its great contributions to one’s life, but it is not a substitute for living. The great French historian Jules Michelet—and I do mean great—is reported to have made the following sad remark late in his life: “I have passed along the side of things, for I mistook history for life.”  Among the four or five most fecund legends in our literary culture is that of Dr. Faustus, usually called the “Faust Legend”.  Remotely based in the memory of an actual Renaissance savant, it records the fictional history of a scholar of great learning who makes a pact with the Devil.  In exchange for a period in which he will enjoy great wealth, prestige, and sexual pleasure, the scholar will give up his immortal soul.  Selling one’s soul has become proverbial. The legend appears in practically all forms of early popular literature—folklore, ballads, broadsheets.  In English literature it is enshrined in Christopher Marlowe’s powerful drama; but its most famous appearance in the literature of “high culture” is in Goethe’s lengthy poetic drama, Faust, which appeared in two parts in the early nineteenth century.  This work is often regarded as the greatest achievement in German, and indeed one of the greatest in world literature. In Goethe’s treatment of the Faust legend, the appetite for universal erudition is paralleled by gross carnal cupidity and criminal indulgence. 

 

Dr. Faustus with mentor
 

Everyone must have some definite concept of the “mad scientist,” a man whose scientific investigations have driven him to the brink, and sometimes over the brink, of lunacy.  Who is likely ever to forget Dr. Strangelove as presented by Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers?  But there are mad humanists galore as well. I speak as one who spent half a century teaching in liberal arts departments of a major institution, and as I scan our contemporary cultural landscape, I find some of our madder humanists only slightly less alarming than Dr. Strangelove, our updated Dr. Frankenstein.  It is the link between erudition and madness that makes what I shall call the “real world” so chary of it.  The “Acts of the Apostles” (cap. 26) gives an account of Paul’s verbal self-defense before Festus, the Procurator of Judaea.  “And as he thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud voice, ‘Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad’.” Has the scientific quest that led to a hydrogen bomb or the technological deployment that led to the overheating of the earth’s entire atmosphere exceeded the bounds of moral capacity?  And the questions that seem so tremendous on the cosmic scale do have their echoes in the twilight lives of aging scholars. The concerns that crowd the mind are hardly of a Faustian grandeur.  They are small, personal, quaint, perhaps even droll, but no less disquieting as we strain our failing ears listening in doubtful hope for the sound of the whoosh of a huge owl’s flapping wings.  Too late?

 

*Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (W. W. Norton: New York and London, 2007), pp. 876.

 

 

Vice-Presidential

 

Now that the ex-President and apparently certain Republican candidate for the presidency in the upcoming general election has been adjudged guilty of felonious crimes, and now that the bad-boy son of the sitting President and all but certain Democrat candidate in that election is likewise a convicted felon, where precisely do we find ourselves as Americans?  Besides in an orgy of illogical equivalation, that is?  I would like to think that profound embarrassment might be the opening bid on this one, but don’t count on it.  What would embarrass your average Washington politician would shame a hog to death.  We are not quite a banana republic, as the doom-peddlers in the press suggest, but more like the intermediary stage of an “Only Fans” republic.

 

I am among the statistical majority of Americans who seem to be in a state beginning with disquiet and then rapidly revving up from there as we think about the impending election.  Leaving aside all strictly political questions, the age and affect of the presidential candidates is a matter of concern, an entirely legitimate one.  Take it from one who knows: eighty is not the new anything; it is old age.  This perception immediately leads to a focus on the major candidates for the vice-presidency, only one of whom is presently known.

 

There is a good deal of long-accepted hypocrisy concerning the choice of vice-presidential candidates by the political parties.  The standard rhetorical position is that the person chosen, who is at the remove of “one heartbeat” from the highest office, is always someone fully and manifestly qualified to be president.  Does anyone actually believe this pious malarkey?  Certainly not the national press, whose reporters and commentators stress such matters as the desirability of regional, factional, racial, or gender diversity.  Another implicit desideratum—loyalty to the boss—seems to be the primary if not sole requirement of the most recent and currently presumptive Republican candidates.  Mr. Biden offered early and unequivocal assurance that his vice-presidential pick would be a woman.  This prerequisite reduced the candidate pool by less than a half in absolute terms, but considerably more than half in the terms of tested, experienced politicians on the national scene.  Still, my own subjective and personal observation is that on the whole our prominent female politicians are proportionally more capable and promising than the male colleagues who so considerably outnumber them.  That is of course a personal judgment without objective verifiability.  Whether that judgment be just or not, the pool was soon to be drastically reduced when a racial codicil was added to the presidential candidate’s stated will.  Very shortly thereafter the following appeared in the national press.  “More than 100 prominent Black men released a strongly worded open letter Monday, warning Biden that not picking a Black woman would cost him the election. The signatories of the letter included rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, radio show host Lenard McKelvey (a.k.a. Charlamagne tha God), actor Cedric Kyles (a.k.a. Cedric the Entertainer), commentator Van Jones, Bishop William J. Barber and civil rights attorney Ben Crump, among others.”

 

The main point of this essay is not a selective criticism of personalities, but I see little evidence that Kamala Harris has been a successful vice president or would be a good president.  Since she so far has no Republican counterpart, comparisons are impossible.  One cannot be even handed while being empty handed.  That Mr. Trump’s eventual choice will strike me immediately as “presidential” seems unlikely, but we must wait to find out.  Getting back to the current known quantity, Vice President Harris, she is less well regarded in the polls than either of the prospective presidential candidates, both of whom are “under water” as the lingo goes.  So I am in the national majority.   Part of what I sense as the near despair of the electorate as it contemplates November is a group of “under water” candidates whose primary attractive quality is in the “lesser evil” category.  My own misgivings are less directed to policies I fear than to failures in that essential part of national leadership that is clarity, power, and conviction in the articulation of those policies.  This is not an English professor’s snobbery.  The ideas by which politicians live are seldom more coherent than the language in which they express them.  Nor do I set the bar unreasonably high.  I shall presume on faith that Ms. Harris commands the orthography of the word potato, which proved to be a shoal upon which Vice President Dan Quayle’s political boat foundered; but I have to say that in terms of public oratory Quayle was a virtual Demosthenes or a Danton when compared with her.  Even in the festival of inarticulateness that is the United States Senate (a.k.a., “the greatest deliberative body on earth”) the word salads she dishes up are particularly lacking in nourishment.  "The governor and I, we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time, right, the significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires. What we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children.”

 

Well, like most elderly people I in fact do quite a bit of thinking about the passage of time and the significance thereof.  “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream  Dies at the opening day.”  Also daughters, of course, though Watts was a stickler for meter.  I try to be optimistic, but it’s often an uphill struggle.  Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614) began with a fanciful pessimistic etymology of the word world itself: it is supposed to mean “ware old, i.e., that thing that groweth worse as it groweth older.”  That is the opposite of progressivism—regressivism.  There is a lot of that around in the air today, but I do not share it.  America has been in a few tight corners in its time.  Those so confidently predicting the death of American democracy should one or the other of the two candidates win in November might remember this.  Are we really facing greater danger than in 1777, or 1858, or 1932?

 

The office of the Vice Presidency is peculiar in various aspects, one of them being that in choosing a candidate one person, (the presidential candidate) is the sole elector.  This means that one man elects our vice president.  According to a famous indelicacy of John Nance Garner, who in 1933 accepted the job from Franklin Roosevelt in exchange for a few convention votes, the job is “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”  One doubts that we actually have a reliable economic history of this particular commodity; so I won’t go there.  But I record my suspicion of rank exaggeration.   Whether this was a more pessimistic evaluation than that of Theodore Roosevelt is debatable.  Teddy said, "I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor of history, than vice president."  In fact fifteen vice presidents have moved on to the presidency, eight of them on account of the death of a president, and four of these were later elected to terms of their own.  I’d say that’s a pretty consequential launching pad.  The vice-presidency is certainly a job that would seem to deserve a “free and fair” election of its own as opposed to the opportunity for the popular ratification of the pick of a single man.