All the Buzz

 

 

            I had little difficulty in choosing this week’s topic, which was in fact nearly inevitable.   It was all the buzz around here, and it had already been bugging me for several days when over yesterday’s breakfast table Joan excitedly pointed out a terrific article in the “Science Times.”  It had the possibly misleading title “Your Invitation to Party Like It’s 2004”.  She read most of it to me aloud.  The supposed partygoers were “seventeen year” or “Brood X” cicadas rising by their millions from the warming earth just as their parents had done in 2004 and their grandparents had done in 1987 and their great grandparents had in 1970—the first year in which the big red-eyed bugs had come to my attention.

 

            The past week around here was already one marked by certain events of parochial interest.  In addition to the attenuated excitement reported in my last post the period included my eighty-fifth birthday, a family gathering to observe it, and the first restaurant meal and first “in person” religious service (al fresco, of course) I had attended in living memory.  Several millions of flying, chirping, staggering, creepy-crawling, messily mating hyper-bugs showed up to help us all celebrate the easing of pandemic restrictions.  The “millions” is of course an extrapolation.  I can attest to no more than several thousand in the immediate vicinity of my front and back doors.  But as I write this within an enclosed room in an enclosed house I can hear the unceasing hum of  what must be a truly vast chorus.

 

            The story of the cicadas is the story of our greatest literature, though presumably a few hundred thousand years older than the invention of writing.  The first words of the great medieval romance of Tristan and Iseult are these: “My lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and of death, here is that of Tristan and Queen Iseult…”  If you don’t have Anglo-Norman romances at your fingertips, think of the “Liebestod”, the final movement of Wagner’s treatment of the same story.  Denis de Rougemont wrote a once famous book (Love in the Western World in its English translation) explaining the inescapable connections between eroticism and death, but you can save a lot of time and just look at the cicadas.  Love and death are about all they do, and that very briefly, if you don’t count seventeen years of preliminary and subterranean root-sucking.

 

            Gardeners may of course from time to time find evidences of their generally hidden existence.  Occasionally in turning over a spadeful of garden soil I have discovered a pasty colored wingless thing without visible carapace that you might at first mistake for an oversized slug.  These are called nymphs—very sexy name.  But Nature’s clock is ticking and when warm weather arrives you begin to see not merely the fledged cicadas but the little holes in the earth from which they have emerged.  They do fly, but rather awkwardly.  They appear to favor the creep,  and to judge from the hundreds that make their way to our new patio, they are partial to warm, flat stone.  But they are very thick as well in certain shrubs and, especially, in the trees in which they elect to deposit their eggs.  One such tree is the large old oak in our front yard.  I reported in an earlier post the planting of some young trees at Richard and Katie’s place in Kingwood.  We now fear that planting seedlings in the seventeenth year might not be such a great idea!  The egg-layers seek out “pencil sized” twigs according to the forestry gurus.

 

our oak tree

 

            The most evident traces of the cicadas, their abandoned semi-translucent shells or body-masks (exoskeletons), are rather ghoulish.  The insects land especially on vertical wooden surfaces such as tree trunks or wooden furniture or house sidings, wriggle free, and leave the exoskeletons behind, often in apparent defiance of gravity.  The strength of the grip of the tiny claws is nearly incredible.  I have repeatedly cleared the patio with a powerful leaf-blower, which has sometimes been insufficient  to dislodge them from their imperceptible purchase on the flat bluestone!  Then we accidentally learned a more drastic way of clearing the field.  On Sunday we had a belated birthday lunch on the patio, and my granddaughter Sophia and her boyfriend Raymond brought their dog Bambi.  Though the most friendly, mild-mannered, and unaggressive  thoroughbred you’ll ever encounter, Bambi really went to town on the cicadas.  I can only hope she didn’t have any tummy trouble on the ride home.  I believe the protein content of these flying worms is not insignificant, and I hear reports of a rise in their consumption by humans.  It probably would not take too many incidents to make a rise.  Once in the spring of 2004, at the X-bugs’ last appearance and shortly before my retirement, I was walking one day along the back of the building housing the Daily Princetonian.  A group of student journalists, many of whom I knew, were cavorting about; and one of them called me over.  He had a challenge for me.  Would I dare eat a cicada smeared in heavy chocolate sauce?  How could I lose face before my own students?  So I chomped down.  It was really good—tasted sort of like chocolate.  But one such feast is perhaps sufficient for a lifetime.

 

            According to the “Science Times,” their survival strategy is primitive but effective.  They simply reproduce in such extraordinary quantities that there are not in the world enough dogs, cats, rodents, birds, undergraduates, motor vehicles, or size twelve shoes to gobble up, smash, or squash any number of discernible statistical significance.  They do have some serious threats, not all of them fully understood.  There seems to be a mystery about their significant decline on Long Island, for example, though one probable cause is ecological change in the botany, especially an increase in invasive species.  In Princeton they have been more numerous in long settled parts of the town, where it has been many years since bulldozers dug out basements and house foundations.

 

 

            My first experience of the cicadas took place in 1970, when I was one of the ceremonial marshals in the Commencement ceremony.  These were revolutionary times—the Kent State massacre had taken place at the beginning of May—and the emphasis was on Revolution.  One of the honorary  degree recipients was Bob Dylan, then twenty-nine years old but long since a cultural superstar and anti-war “icon”.  There was a very fancy outdoor lunch thrown for the dignitaries on the sumptuous lawns of Lowry House, an elegant historical mansion used to house the President of the University.  Unfortunately the cicadas also found the ambiance agreeable.  The first course, already on the tables when guests took their seats, was a rich gazpacho.  Several of the bowls had been further enriched  with a drowned or flailing cicada.  One soldiers on.

 

 

            Bob Dylan later wrote a song about his experience at Princeton.  It is called “Day of the Locusts”—errant from the entomological point view, but spiritually apt in other respects.  The song speaks of “the man standin’ next to me” whose “head was exploding” with potentially messy results for the narrator.  This is what we call poetic license.  To the degree it is possible to make historical identifications of products of the poetic imagination, this man was Neil Rudenstine,a senior administrator and the future President of Harvard.  It would in fact be hard to find a less flapable or explosive fellow.  Dylan is a genius and a great poet, but even Homer nods and “Day of the Locusts” is not “Blowin’ in the Wind”.  It is, however, the only work of a great artist for which I was present at the birth, and thus has a special significance for me.  Poor Bob Dylan.  Our birthdays are only four days apart, and I am ahead of him by a mere five years.  We were lucky enough to be able to have lunch on my actual birthday with a dear old friend, Dale Allen, of the Great Class of 1970.  Dale is a real naturalist and ecologist who spent his career with the Trust for Public Land in his native Florida.  He and his wife Karen had come up to New Jersey to visit some of her relatives, to bike around on a few interesting trails, and—of apparently equal importance—to see the cicadas.  As one of the graduates of 1970, he remembered both his classmate Bob Dylan and the X-brood of cicadas vividly.

 

 

Honoris Causa

 

 

            On Sunday last Princeton University held its two hundred and seventy-fourth Commencement ceremonies, which included a couple of minutes of personal fame for me as one of six recipients of honorary degrees.  Neither the honor of the event nor my sincere appreciation of it was tempered by the somewhat peculiar circumstances under which the ceremony was conducted.  Under the conditions imposed by the pandemic many colleges and universities have this year once again cancelled any large “in person” events of this sort at all, as Princeton itself had done in the spring of 2020.  The suppression of college Commencements is a serious deprivation imposed both upon students who have worked long and hard toward a challenging goal and for the parents and other well-wishers who have invested so heavily in their enterprise.  There are things for which Zoom  approaches some kind of minimal adequacy, but an American college commencement ceremony is probably not one of them.

 

            The improving medical landscape and the imaginative repurposing of our football stadium  allowed our institution to pull off what I thought was a pretty remarkable feat.  Some large number of people—I shall not hazard even an approximate count—were able to participate in a kind of no-frills, pared down, socially distanced,  in-person ceremony that, in my admittedly biased opinion, still retained sufficient elements of both its necessary dignity and its desirable leaven of light-heartedness.  The traditional venue for our Commencements is “Front Campus.”  That is the name for the lawn, over which are scattered several large trees, between Nassau Hall, the oldest building on campus, and Nassau Street, the town’s main drag.  This is a setting that nicely links Town and Gown, as Nassau Street is  a state highway, indeed a segment of the old Lincoln Highway, if anybody still remembers the name of our first intercontinental “interstate” of 1913.  Front Campus used to be a very suitable  venue for Commencements—when there were considerably fewer students in the college.  In recent years, between the cramped seating for the graduates and the packed bleachers set up for the spectators, the metaphor of the sardine can naturally comes to mind.  Or perhaps in the present circumstance, the petrie dish.  A less “distanced” communal space would be hard to imagine—perhaps a beehive or a bat cave.  I suspect that the projected increase in the size of the undergraduate body, though fairly modest, may mean the end of Front Campus Commencements altogether.

 

                                  Pre-Covid Front Campus Commencement
 

            I think that the “back yard” of Nassau Hall, a large open grassy space called Cannon Green, might offer long-term possibilities.  It is a big area with fewer trees, and another large-scale event of the Commencement period is already held there.  To accommodate the numbers for Commencement itself would at the very least require some architectural imagination and the probable acquisition of considerably more banked bleachers.  For a variety of reasons I hope that the football stadium does not become a permanent Commencement site, but it worked surprisingly well last Sunday.  A football field with its margins is a lot of space, and the large number of graduates, even conspicuously “distanced,” were far from exhausting it.  Out of precaution each graduate was provided with only two tickets for guests, most of whom were parents.  I chose my spouse and my daughter, the more senior and proximate of the two professors among our offspring.  The spectators, scattered in widely separated pairs around the huge, high horseshoe stands, gave something of the impression of the Greek front line at the Battle of Marathon as I imagined it as a child.  The principals donned their academic garb in the locker room of the football team and marched solemnly into the arena through the tunnel from which our gridiron gladiators are wont to rush forth to thunderous applause.  The “interpersonals” were ostentatiously chaste: the ethos of safe sex adopted to ancient academic ritual,  There was no shaking hands, let alone the normative back-slapping, hugs, and kisses.  The praxis of hooding of the honorary degree recipients—normally their big moment in the ceremony—was omitted altogether for the sake of medical prophylaxis.  When we got back to the locker room we were presented with bags containing our hoods along with our elegant diplomas.  All in all, the event was one of the more brilliant triumphs of improvisation that I have ever experienced.

 

 

 

 

 

                                              Covid Commencement

            The degree is “Doctor of Humane Letters,” a most pleasing title and one that closely corresponds to what I have been trying to do for all of my professional life.   It also has an explicit connection to Oxford University where, sixty years ago now, I completed three transformative years of study as a Rhodes Scholar.  “Humane Letters” is the English version of Literae Humaniores, the intensive honors course in classical literature, history, and philosophy at Oxford.  It was generally called “Greats” by its students—whether in reference to its content, its ambition, or the exertions required to follow it successfully I cannot say.  I should make clear that I myself did not pursue this course.  I was “reading” (as they say in England) English literature, and my literary interests were at the time of my arrival mainly modern, even contemporary.  But the curriculum of the Oxford English course forced its students into serious philological study and the reading of important works in Old and Middle English, subjects I had pretty well avoided in my earlier undergraduate career at Sewanee.

 

            Literae Humaniores is probably also the eventual source of our most common use of “humanities” or “the humanities” in English today.  The Latin phrase, which means roughly “the more human branches of literature” clearly implies a contrast with something that is “less human,” namely theology or “study in the sacred page” as they called it in the Middle Age.  This phrase emphasized that the basis of “theology” was not free-wheeling speculation but literary study, biblical interpretation.  Theology was the “Queen of the Sciences”, but humane studies, that is the Liberal Arts, were its worthy ancillaries.  There was a fine pre-Christian exemplar of this way of thinking in the Latin phrase for the totality of human thought: “all things human and divine.”

 

            The humanities, or “humane studies,” are founded in tradition—that is, in the appreciation and critical assessment of the legacy of cultural inheritance.  The informed appreciation of human experience has a vertical as well as a horizontal axis.  We strive mightily to understand the variety (or if you prefer “diversity’) of human experience in the world of our own day; but we also study with intellectual sympathy and honesty the vast cultural deposit of ages and peoples past.  The human race has existed for a very long time and in nearly unimaginable variety.  Our striving for perfection in our own times is not advanced by the cancellation, erasure, or willful neglect of the human experience of the past.  Humane practice has had a special home in our institutions of higher education—some evidences of which, trivial but not insignificant, are the funny vestments and Latin phrases one encounters in academic ceremonies.  In a moment in which the sustaining power of humane studies is being noisily called into question, to be honored for pursuing them over a long career is, well, a real honor.

 

Stone Yard

 

            Our house, a Sixties-Modern bungalow that might be described as “small box,” has a pretty pedestrian presentation on its windowless front or street face.  Its back wall, in contrast, has huge floor-to-ceiling windows with wide views of  a lovely, sloping yard down to an open field beyond.   We really feel we live on that side, the garden side..  For years, probably decades, we talked vaguely of enhancing this back side with a deck.  Then last fall we took tea with our friend Frank on his recently and professionally installed small bluestone patio.  Seeing it inspired Joan to take dramatic unilateral action involving uncharacteristic extravagance.  So just as winter was setting in she had Frank’s master masons install a patio here, and not all that small a one either.  They finished as real winter arrived, so we were for some months in the rather weird situation of having this new outdoor “room, ” available but unusable and snow covered as we awaited spring.  Spring did finally arrive,  though, and the patio has revolutionized our lives.  We have some bright annuals in flowerpots to doll it up a little, and we practically live there now, at least in sunny weather.

 

            In a sense our beautiful patio is but the capstone of a garden that, if it is distinguished at all, is more notable for its geology than its botany.   It is perhaps paradoxical that its finest features are a variety of rocks, but if you don’t have a green thumb you have to make do with a granite-colored one.  I really like rocks and I really like found objects; and since rocks are among the more easily findable of objects, the rest was destiny.  I decided quite soon after moving here that I wanted to construct a stone wall around the property’s  periphery.  You see some beautiful old walls throughout the local countryside,  The reason there are so many old fieldstone houses in the northeast is that the farmers of the colonies and early republic kept damaging their plows on big, squarish rocks as they were plowing their fields.   The topsoil of most of our state thinly covers huge masses of schist.  This stuff has a natural tendency to break along a quite straight edge, at least on one side, and often ends up in almost regular rectangular form, making it highly suitable for walls, canal embankments, and the exteriors of domestic buildings.  There is not so much agricultural plowing these days; but the rocks are still there, and are dug up in large numbers in almost any construction project..  I made a specialty  of shopping malls under construction.  The process sometimes requires displacing by dynamite and earth-moving behemoths a few hundred thousand cubic yards of lovely semi-ashlar rubble.  If you are quick, audacious, crafty, and in a pickup, you can get there before the big trucks haul it off to the stone-crushing machines,  And that is how I came by the wall that now surrounds most of our garden.  I began modestly—at first I intended only to put up a low, decorative border to the driveway in the front of the house—but I then fell victim to mission creep.

 

 

            I have a certain amount of difficulty in dating this Pharaonic  project of wall-building with tolerable accuracy.   It moved at a variable pace over a few years and involved the searching out, securing, transportation, and artistic repositioning of what I reckon at the very least to have been more than a hundred tons of Jersey field stone.   But since every single stone was gathered by me and lifted or levered into the bed of a pickup truck, my automotive history gives me one solid date: 1993.  That was the year I had at last to replace the 1963 gray-green Chevrolet pickup with a big maroonish Ford pickup, the first new vehicle I had ever owned.  By that time the project was seriously advancing, though probably not yet at the halfway point.  My Dad had had the  Chevy on his farm in Arkansas and it was already battle-scarred from its previous heroic service when I acquired it and drove it East around 1970.  What a truck!  It can claim a nearly parental role in the raising of three great kids.  This is not to disparage the Ford which, having enjoyed a comparatively gentler youth than the Chevy gave me loyal, uncomplaining service for more than a quarter of a century.  But it is now gone too, alas, alas, and I must spend my last days pickupless.

 

            Naturally I had been gathering other sorts of stones long before I began the wall.  The one of which I am the proudest, and which has a history worthy of its own blog post one day, is a tolerably handsome cast cement statue of St. Anthony of Padua.  It was in pretty good shape, if you overlook the decaitated Christ child.  We sometimes call this statue “Frankie” in memory of the iconographic ignorance of the delightful friends who once kidnapped him and held him by that name for ransom under the misapprehension that he was Francis of Assisi.  One trash collection day long ago (we were still living on University Place then), driving through a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of modest homes once mainly inhabited by Italian immigrants, I saw this statue thrown out at curbside.  I actually thought it was plastic, and thus would nicely supplement the plastic pink flamingos already campily adorning our yard.  It is, however, solid masonry.  It was about all I could do to lift it and stagger to the truck’s tailgate.  Just as I  got it there I saw that I was being observed with what I must call astonishment by a woman two houses away.  It was in fact Jeanne Stone, a formidable grande dame and spouse of the famous historian Lawrence Stone, my distinguished senior colleague.  Over the years we became good friends with the Stones.  The episode of my strange garbage collection was never mentioned.

 

 

            A couple of other stone findings are of particular interest because I was actually able to include them in the wall.  A good friend, once our neighbor on University Place, came by a rather macabre item among a miscellany of relics on his domestic property: part of a German grave marker.   The inscription in the marble is “VATER”.  God only knows where it came from or how it came to be where it came to be.  I was able to incorporate it into a garden seat which I created at one end of a length of the larger wall.  Above it I have a small statue, and this one really is Francis.   My son-in-law, an Iraqi Jew,  gave it to me—a fact adding to the cosmopolitan allure of this rustic corner of suburban New Jersey.  Francis and I are both fathers, though of different sorts,  Actually, I made a few of these seats, and have the materials for several more.  They have their story too.  The long pieces of slate forming the seat benches were once the treads in an old staircase going up the west end of McCosh Hall, where the English department is housed, on the Princeton campus.  They were ripped out and cruelly thrown into dumpsters.  They are noticeably worn down and smoothly grooved by the friction of the feet of thousands of students of several generations—very soothing to one’s bottom.

 

 

Mayes Day the Thrydde

 

                                             Phoenix: the Arabian bird
 

            Though today is Cinco de Mayo, I find myself moved to write a bit about the more ancient festival of Mayes daye the thrydde.  For reasons any regular reader of this blog will appreciate, the past week was a somewhat gloomy one for me.  In the midst of life we are in death.  True enough, but so also is the converse.  In the midst of death we are in life, and on Monday I was jolted from my thoughts about a dead friend by a telephone call from a living one from with whom I had not talked in at least a year.  My belief in signs and portents is based absolutely in concrete empirical experience, and I have long since ceased to be embarrassed to acknowledge providential serendipities. Just as there are themes to carefully wrought works of literature and music, there are themes in life, sometimes discernible in its quotidian episodes.

 

            The caller was Joe Trahern, meaning Professor Joseph B. Trahern of Knoxville, a retired English professor like myself, an expert in Old English literature.  But Joe somehow failed to meet the first requirement of a quiet academic life, which is to convince your colleagues that you are so organizationally maladroit that it would be folly even to think about having you run anything.  That is, he failed to conceal his formidable administrative skills and wound up with major administrative positions first at the University of Illinois and then at the University of Tennessee.   Joe and I first met each other in the autumn of 1961 in graduate school and have been friends ever since.  My wife and I were married in June of 1962  There were comparatively few people at this event—the ceremony was conducted in a small side-chapel of a large parish church—and of those few only three or four are extant today.  But Joe was not merely there.  He acted as photographer

 

            Joe has a resonant southern voice, and though I had not heard it in a long time, I recognized it immediately.  What I did not at first grasp was what he was talking about.  “Do you know what day it is?”  he asked.  That seemed to me a pretty soft pitch.  It was Monday, but he had something else in mind.  “It’s May the third.  Bad day for lovers.”  It’s fairly rare for me to be in an on in-joke, but this one dawned on me with instant pleasure.  What Joe was referring to is a somewhat obscure detail in the poetry of Chaucer.  On no fewer than three occasions does Chaucer go out of his way to identify the date of May Third with the highly ambiguous fortunes of his literary lovers.  In his classical epic Troilus and Criseyde, May the third is a day upon which Pandarus, supposedly so aloof and worldly wise in the game of love, falls victim to Cupid’s archery “for all his wise talk”.  This is a calendrical invention not to be found in Chaucer’s rich source materials.  Then, in the “Knight’s Tale,” the mini-epic with which he begins the Canterbury Tales, the red-hot lover Palamon, in the seventh year of his captivity, makes a successful jail break on May the third, with resulting violence equal to that in the Iliad, and roughly animated by the same sexual passions.  Finally, in a mock-heroic moment of the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”, the most profound exploration of chicken sex in world literature, the passionate rooster Chaunticleer is grabbed by the fox on May the third. 

 

            But it was not simply the fact of an arcane calendrical aberration to which Joe was referring.  There is data, and there is the interpretation of data.  What Joe was specifically invoking was the interpretation of the data offered by D. W. Robertson, the great scholar with whom both of us had studied.  Robertson was sure that the idea of May the third was being used by Chaucer, master of moral allegory, for its ironic resonances with the Christian festival of the Invention of the Cross, or Holy Cross day, May the third.  Bad day for lovers, indeed, at least for a certain kind of lovers.  One of the central illuminating ideas I learned from Robertson’s approach was that the great humanistic poets of the European Middle Ages, poets like Dante and Chaucer,  were conscious and artful in their contrasts and comparisons of ancient love as presented in the classical tradition of Virgil and Ovid and in the Christian theological tradition of Saint Augustine.

 

            Both traditions were founded in a complex symbolic and mythological fabric.  The word invention in the “Invention of the Cross” is used in its now mainly obsolete Latin sense.  It means finding.  According to a legend wholly independent of the Bible, in the year 326 Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, found and unearthed the actual cross on which Christ had been crucified.  This archaeological coup considerably advanced the bourgeoning relics industry and helped shape its course for the later Middle Ages.  The whole Legend of the Cross is very beautiful and very complex, and its elements can be found widely spread over the history of European pictorial and literary art.  It was believed that the original skull of Golgotha (Golgotha meaning “the place of the skull”) was that in the burial site of Adam.  The wood from which Christ’s cross had been fashioned, after a certain amount of complex recycling, had come from the “Tree of Life in the middle of Paradise”.  So there was an actual arboreal, archaeological material evidence of Saint Paul's typology of the Old Adam and the New (For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.)  The Cross, like the man who died upon it, has been raised to life from the earth in which it had been buried.  This idea has its explicit development, among other places, in the extraordinary Old English poem usually called “The Dream of the Rood” or “Vision of the Cross”.

 

            Some of Professor Trahern’s own scholarly work deals with a somewhat similar myth.  He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Old English poem about the “Arabian bird,”—that is, the legendary phoenix.  The moral interpretation of the animal kingdom—what in the later Middle Ages is usually called the “bestiary tradition”—actually began in classical Antiquity, in fact probably even earlier.  The extraordinary thing about the mythical Arabian bird, of course, was its mode of reproduction.  It was not exactly immortal, because after a typical life of five hundred years or so it did die.  But it then self-immolated, and from the ashes emerged—a new phoenix!  So here we have another ancient poetic image of death's redress by life renewed or revived.

 

            None of these literary or theological issues became explicit in our fairly extensive conversation, which was devoted mainly to catching up with two traditional topics: the good old days, and a current family update. Joe’s first wife, also a good friend of ours for many decades , died some years ago; and he is happily remarried to a widowed old friend.  I still hope that we might one day meet her.  His daughter Sarah, uncannily the spitting image of her late mother, is the CEO of the Country Music Association.  If there is a bigger deal in Nashville, I’d like to know about it.  So I hope you can see that May the third, though it might have been an iffy day for Chaunticleer, was a very good day for me.

 

Robert Hollander

 

 

 

            Robert Hollander, the eminent Dante scholar, died about a week ago at the age of eighty-seven.  For more than a decade he had faced with great courage a series of daunting medical challenges.  His last months were spent living with his son’s family in Hawaii, and at the very end, comforted with familial love, he departed in repose and peace.  I call him the Dante scholar, and that is certainly accurate enough, though wholly insufficient.  With equal justice I could call him one of Princeton’s legendary scholar-teachers, one of America’s national leaders in the humanities, memorable conversationalist, amiable bon vivant, admirable husband and father in an impressive family.

           

            Obituaries now in preparation will document Bob’s extraordinary contributions to the study of medieval Italian literature.  They will include rich bibliographies and an impressive list of honors, prizes, and awards.  I may well have some part in writing one of them.  But the category on which I feel most moved to speak in this venue is something quite other: Hollander as friend.  We were friends, close friends, for fifty years.  We were also colleagues, collaborators, and occasional co-conspirators.  There is no greater trial of advancing age than the capricious but inexorable disappearance of old associates.  So many dear old companions of the way are gone, and I have now lost the closest of them all.  Yet I had had some insulation from the bad news, having experienced its premonition two years ago in another devastating blow.  That was when Bob’s wife Jean died.  Bob had himself long been seriously disabled, and he and his children decided that he would leave New Jersey to live with them in the West, alternating between households in Alaska and Hawaii.  Travel arrangements had already been made when a group of family and friends gathered, in what was also a farewell to their lovely house in the Hopewell countryside,  for a mellow meeting in Jean’s memory.  It was a lovely event, if one doubly bittersweet; for we recognized at the time the probable finality of the goodbyes.

 

            Cicero famously defined friendship as “a complete identity of feeling about all things in heaven and earth: an identity which is strengthened by mutual goodwill and affection.”  In my opinion that better defines a cult or a crush than a friendship, but it includes some of the right elements.  Our friendship was certainly based in shared common interest, respect and  affection; but it was also one long, continuing, and movable debate about fundamental aspects of medieval literary aesthetics.  Then, again, even I can recognize that if the beef is about “fundamental aspects of medieval literary aesthetics,” it may not actually be life-threatening.

 

            Our friendship mainly played out, naturally, in our shared professional arena of Princeton University; but many of its most memorable moments occurred far from its campus.  Years ago, the university owned a magnificent white elephant of a vacation “cottage” of robber-baronial dimensions on a Maine island.  Before the Administration got rid of it in a spasm of defeudalization, the Dean of the Faculty used to run an annual lottery that allowed a few interested professors to spend a week or two of the summer in this blissful place.  One year very early on the Hollanders won a spot and invited us to join them.  That was the beginning of periodic social interchanges for the next four decades, and the premonition of marvelous Italian adventures yet to come.

 

            Every university has certain famous courses, and among the most famous at Princeton has been the undergraduate Dante course as established by Hollander.  As notoriously demanding as notoriously rewarding, the course aspired, as Milton’s Paradise Lost had done, to a “fit audience if few.”  So each year the course attracted a few of the institution’s most brilliant students, and thus, over time, developed one of its more intellectually adventurous alumni subgroups.  The annual Class Reunions are a huge deal in this institution, and at some point the burgeoning body of Princeton dantisti—Hollander himself being a member of the Class of 1955—decided that the Purgatorio was preferable to blow-pong as a Reunion activity.  Thus the “Dante Reunion” made its intellectual intrusion into a traditionally saturnalian weekend.  Still later certain alumni, perhaps having grown somewhat thicker of wallet and possibly of girth, had a real brainwave: how about a week-long summer Dante Reunion seminar in some nice, sunny place, for example a trecento castle in Tuscany?  This fabulous place is near Certaldo, home town of Boccaccio; and it was known among the elect simply as “Il Castello.”  There Bob conducted alumni seminars.  As a teacher he was not flamboyant, yet he was nearly magical.  Teaching really difficult materials at the undergraduate level is a special art.  His forte was such teaching.  Italian Studies are not prominent in America, and he had few graduate students.  Fortunately one of those few, the brilliant and charismatic Simone Marchesi, today continues the distinguished tradition of Italian medievalism at Princeton.  Around the millennium I was lucky enough to be included as an ancillary spear-bearer in several of the Castello summer seminars.  Our experiences there remain, and will continue to remain, among the happiest we have ever had.  Most people who read Dante once return to read him again, and then probably yet again.  I certainly do, and as I do I will always remember Bob sitting at the head of a huge mahogany table surrounded by eager students of several generations.  It was through the Castello seminars that Joan and I first met some of our dearest friends.

 

 

 Jean and Bob Hollander in a photo publicizing their three-volume bilingual edition of the of the Divine Comedy, a superb text and mini-encyclopedia of the poem's scholarship

  

            Though I am eschewing any serious discussion of Bob’s copious publications, which would require a book chapter rather than a few blog paragraphs, I do have to make one exception.  Walking on Dante (1974), one of his tomes perhaps lesser known in the scholarly world, is known intimately to me.  That is because I hand-set the type for it, printed it, and bound it.  This book, rather this beautiful book—if I say so myself—is a collection of twenty-two of Bob’s poems, most of them previously unpublished.  Both Bob and Jean were serious poets, a fact that contributes uniquely to the excellence of their highly praised Dante translation.  Jean, indeed, published several volumes of her poetry, and for many years taught courses in poetry writing.  She left behind an admiring alumni body of her own in the Princeton area.

 

            I had only the smallest role in selecting the poems to be included in Walking on Dante.  There is a certain sprightliness to a few of them, as might be suggested by the flagrant musical pun in the title; but a quite serious one for which I’d like to claim some credit for its having been included is called “L’Annunziazione”.  I might describe the poem’s subject as the Italian character.  It reminds me rather of Auden’s famous “Musée des Beaux Arts”, as it is a poet’s reflection inspired by his viewing a painting.  In this instance it was a traditional religious painting by the fifteenth-century Italian artist Marco Palmezzano.   I am no expert on Palmezzano, who produced more than one “Annunciation,” but the painting Bob had in mind must surely be that most often identified as “Annunciation with seascape,” in the Vatican Museums.  Not that it actually matters for the meaning of the painting or that of the poem.  “Palmezzano understood / How things should be announced, /  From bodiless spirit to spiritless flesh;/ And so the two become / Embodied inspirited one.”  Any painting or poem about the Annunciation necessarily reenacts its theological subject even as it describes it: the subject of Incarnation, that is, the word made flesh.  Bob was an agnostic, not a religious believer; but he tolerated believers like me.  Indeed he knew more Catholic theology than many a seminary professor.  Dante, whose aesthetics are fundamentally grounded in an incarnational vision, demands no less of his most serious students.  As a dantista I am myself and will remain an amateur—a fairly knowledgeable one, I hope, but still an amateur.  Like Dante the pilgrim himself I am dependent upon good guides.  How lucky I have been to find one not merely in the pages of books but in the incarnation of a sustaining friendship of many decades.  Robert Hollander (1933-2021): Requiescat in pace.

 

 

Tree Planting

                                          one newly manufactured tree fence
                                            you can at least see its shadow

            I have the feeling that we really are finally arriving at a hopeful moment.  In part it is the weather, in part the impressive evidence of the national vaccination campaign.  This past weekend Joan and I broke free from what has seemed an interminable house arrest and drove thirty miles north and west through the greening countryside under bright sunshine to the beautiful country property of our elder son Richard and his wife Katie Dixon.  This modest excursion induced the amount of excitement one might expect from a week in Paris.

 

            Rich and Katie had planned a kind of working house party, at which numerous invited friends would enjoy a day in the vernal countryside and some top-quality gourmet food in exchange for a few hours’ help in planting out some seventy-five seedlings fresh from the greenhouses of the New Jersey Forest Service.  We arrived mid-morning on Saturday, spent the night, and returned home not too long after the lunch hour on Sunday.  In my geriatric condition I move pretty slowly (and uncertainly) and huff and puff a good deal.  It’s discouraging, but my doctor advises me to take as my reference point not my youthful self but other octogenarians.  By that standard things are a little brighter.  Even my small contribution was helpful, since for a variety of reasons not too many other indentured servants showed up.

 

                                                                           repairing devastation
 

            Among the serious damage inflicted by a series of major storms, beginning with superstorm Sandy nearly a decade ago, has been that inflicted on local woodlands.  The high winds damaged or flattened many large trees, including two in our own yard, and many untended woods are difficult of access on account of the tangle of fallen branches and trunks, and the thickets of opportunistic brush growing up amidst them.  There are many unpleasant aggressors just waiting for a chance, including a horrible strangler vine called China Berry or Porcelain Berry.   At Richard and Katie’s place, certain windswept patches of once heavy woodland look nearly clear-cut.   In ages primeval the fallen wood slowly pulverized, enriching the soil for new growth  This process must have often been accelerated by terrible fires ignited by lightning.  The recent forest fires in California have dramatized the dangers of building human habitations in forests that are in a “natural” or “unmanaged” state—the adjective having come to bear as much political as descriptive weight.  Forest fires are less common in our forests of the Northeast, but there are many other reasons to clean up and reforest devastated patches.

 

Infant white pine

            The New Jersey Forest Service has an annual sale of seedling trees--conifers and hardwoods—at low prices.   You order them in the winter, and since the competition is hot you order them early.  Richard ordered seventy-five divided among three species: Eastern white pine, white oak, and Cornelian cherry.  The white oak is one of my favorite of all trees, despite the fact that one came within about six inches of killing me sixty years ago.  And the prospect of a pine grove, with a breeze gently moving through the needled limbs and the sweet smell of fallen needles underfoot, is a happy one.  Not that I will be around to enjoy it.  I am just a one-time country boy.  My son is a real naturalist and environmentalist.  He has a rather purist attitude toward the Cornelian cherries, which were perhaps part of the package deal from the Forest Service.  They are not a native Eastern Seabord species, but some kind of exotic import.  My own view, strangely more liberal than his in this instance, is that we should to the degree possible view “invasive” botany rather as we are told to regard human migration, from a practical and welcoming point of view.  The dogwoods that have been naturalized in southern woodlands are a wonderful aspect of the countryside, and I do hope to survive long enough to see some yellow blossoms on the fast-growing Cornelians at Richard’s place.

 

                                            preparing the ground
 

            Richard had identified well in advance two or three plots, each fairly distant from the others, and marked each proposed tree site with a little flag on a wire mast, each coded by tree species.  What needed to be done now was to clear debris and rocks, dig the holes and fill them with turned soil, plant the seedlings, and get them off to a running start with a generous watering.  The final step was to protect them with a stout wire enclosure.

 

            My own entire effort was directed to the inglorious final step, time-consuming but indispensable.  I spent a few hours  constructing the tubular cages needed to protect the seedlings from the deer, at least for a few years that could give them a good start.  If unimpeded Bambi’s mother will happily chow her way through your entire vegetable garden in half an hour.   When browsing over the open forest floor she will snap up almost any inviting green sprout or interesting tender bark she sees poking up through the earth.   The staggering profligacy of arboreal reproductive effort—think of the number of acorns produced by a single mature oak--attests to the daunting prospects awaiting any particular seed.  Foraging animals are not the least of the challenges.

 

            The raw materials for my personal task were some heavy rolls of soldered wire fencing five feet high with a grid of two inches by four inches; my only tool was a fine old pair of industrial pliers with a keen wire-cutting edge.   My workshop was the driveway in front of the house.  I first cut length of a hundred inches, a bit over eight feet, with one edge trimmed even with the vertical and the other left with the two-inch prongs of wire left free.  I then joined the two long sides to make a circle, bending the two-inch prongs back upon themselves to suture the wire into a latticed tube.  This takes a little skill and considerable hard work.  It is fairly heavy gauge wire, and bending short pieces of it accurately is hard work.  But you end up with a mesh tube five feet high and more than thirty inches in diameter which, when properly installed atop the planted seedling, offers reliable protection for an indefinite period.  I did the better part of a roll on Saturday, and a full one on Sunday, or about twenty individual tubular fences.  Richard had done a large number before I arrived.  Altogether I think that fifty of the trees are now in the ground, most if not all with their mesh protection.

 

            Being on the fence is seldom an admirable position.  But in this ambiguous world in which imperfection characterizes so many of our actions, it is a pleasure to participate in something so unambiguously wholesome as planting trees.  Not that I in fact actually planted any over the weekend.  But they also serve who only stand and wait, as Milton says.  Waiting with me I had from time to time a delightful young granddaughter who will, I hope, soon enough see the seedlings outstripping her in height.  And as a first premonition of post-pandemic possibility, our arboreal weekend is likely to remain long and happily in the family memory.

 

 

most photos by Richard A. Fleming