Impressive

 

 

             

 

 

 991

                                 .918

 

 

 

Two vaguely similar numbers—991 and .918—coalesced in my mind this week when we achieved an unprecedented head-start on preparing our annual Christmas greetings cards in what ought to be good time even for our increasingly sluggish postal service.  The date 991 is famous in my little sphere for a battle in which a brave band of English warriors met in a bloody fray with marauding Viking Marines.  This event is memorialized in an important Old English poem, “The Battle of Maldon.”  When making their heroic speeches, military heroes in Old English poems have a tendency to go through the drill of presenting arms.  Having no sabers to rattle they instead brandished spear and shield in menacing fashion as they uttered their alliterative threats, boasts, encouragements,  and philosophical observations.  A famous spear-shaking speech appears in the “Battle of Maldon”.  The spear-shaking orator is an old warrior named Byrhtwold.  Things are not going well for the home team, who experience serious attrition.   As his comrades fall all around him Byrhtwold delivers a memorable pep talk: “Our courage must be all the greater,” he declaims, “our hearts the keener, our spirits more intense, as our strength diminishes.”

 

            Well, I too am a geezer—so I translate eald geneat--and though I face no Vikings,  companions are falling all about me and I face my own personal version of Byrhtwold’s problem of diminishing strength.  My response involves neither  targe nor javelin.  I simply do about a quarter of what I used to do, and spend about three times as long on each task.  The tasks recently completed—setting the type for and then printing a very modest Christmas greetings card—took me pretty well two full days.  Tidying up will probably take another full day.  The paradox is that I am about two weeks ahead of my normal schedule.  When the “last minute” ceases to be a possibility, you tend to do it way before that.

 

            As to the fraction nine hundred and eighteen one thousandths (.918), it relates to my role as an amateur letterpress printer.  That is the height (in inches) of a piece of movable type.  You probably know that “letterpress” refers to the printing technique associated with the name of Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the fifteenth century.  In letterpress, the raised faces of cast metal types precisely arranged and secured in a strong frame are first inked and then pressed against paper or some other suitable material by mechanical force, resulting in a printed sheet.  Printing was a huge American industry in the nineteenth century.  Every page of every book, every copy of a daily newspaper, was put together by the human hands of compositors (type-setters) working in large shops.  In addition there were thousands of “job printers” working from their own homes or small shops producing letterheads, commercial advertisements, business forms, calling cards, and so on.  The amounts of heavy metal type used in the industry were staggering.  The joke used to be that the only thing keeping Manhattan Island from blowing away in a storm was the weight of a thousand print shops.  There was constant innovation, as for example with stereotypes.  The fevered and protracted race to invent an efficient type-setting machine was won by the Mergenthaler Linotype, one of the most brilliant inventions in the history of printing, which was in significant use by about 1890.

 

            But though the equipment and procedures of letterpress printing were greatly improved over more than three centuries, its basic principle—a raised and inked type face pressing against paper--remained in operation well into the twentieth century.   Then the process called offset lithography challenged and largely replaced it.  Lithography (“stone writing”) exploits the fact that oil and water do not mix.  This allows a properly prepared text or design on a plane surface to be transferred or “offset” to a flat rubber blanket and thence to the desired printing surface.   The techniques of offset were especially effective for printing huge numbers of copies of magazines or other materials making lavish use of photographs and pictorial design.  The undisputed reign of offset lithography, however, was much shorter than that of letterpress.  As with so many other industrial processes, computer technology is revolutionizing practically all aspects of the printing industry.  In fifteen minutes you can compose on your MacBook to be printed on your wireless Brother a page as beautiful as one produced by Manutius Aldus in Venice in 1500.  Or almost as beautiful.   You will be hard pressed (so to speak) to find a stock of hand-laid rag paper, and you will never be able to feel the bite of the types as you run your fingertips (clean, please) very lightly over a few lines of the printed text.

 

            Letterpress “Print Shop” was still common as one of the vocational options in many high schools, including mine, in the early 1950s.  But by the 1960s and 70s, commercial letterpress was in rapid, near total collapse.  How I developed an interest in printing might be an engaging story, but it is for another essay.  Suffice it to say I got my first press as a birthday present from my wife about 1970.  It is a beautiful old Vandercook Proving Machine found in an intimidating printing junkyard in Camden.  The fouled makeready on its large, cylindrical drum was still in place, recording forever its last macabre act: NOVEMBER, MONTH OF THE HOLY SOULS.  ENROLL YOUR DECEASED NOW.  I used to go to weekend auctions in New York where they were selling tons of type at scrap metal prices and you could buy a Heidelberg press for two hundred dollars.  Of course you then had to move it.  Sometimes an entire shop would be sold for scrap.   Over a few years I put together a fine if eccentric letterpress shop for about a thousand dollars.  In one sale California job cases in bulk were a dime apiece.  Then Manhattan interior designers discovered their potential for the mural display of  tchotchkes.  Now a single type case may go for fifty dollars on Ebay.  Naturally I have spent a certain amount of time cursing myself for not snapping up this, that, or the other when I could have done.  Then, again, divorce is a high price to pay for a few hundredweight of Caslon.  There has been a renaissance in craft printing and with it a lightning transition from burdensome junk to expensive antique.

 

            Hand-set letterpress printing is enormous fun, but quite hard work.  You need a strong back (lots of standing), excellent eyesight, and nimble fingers.  The requirements are vaguely similar to those for the Anglo-Saxon army, though the work itself is fortunately less dangerous.  Byrhtwold’s answer to the diminishing strength of his cohort was to fight more fiercely, but that worked only for a short while.  Mine is to moderate expectations, choose achievable projects, go slow, take a lot of time, talk to myself a lot, have a magnifying glass always close at hand, and make frequent recourse to large mugs of tea.

 

           

 

Bibliomancy

 

                                                             Benozzo Gozzoli, "Tolle, Lege"
 

 

            Today’s effort will be devoted to bibliomancy, a word so recondite as to have been overlooked in the tenth edition of the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.  But bibliomancy is a perfectly good word, and used to be a real thing.  It means the use of books in divination.  Such a topic, naturally, requires this blog’s customary meandering treatment, as it has risen in my consciousness in a rather erratic fashion.  (Remember that erratic derives from Latin erro, meaning “to wander or stray about”).

            A couple of days ago, I was interviewed by a television producer concerning occultism in the Enlightenment, and its possible practice among the founders of our nation.  The topic of bibliomancy came up.   Just before that, in putting together last week’s blog I experienced a personal little bibliomantic tweak I now feel I should mention, along with a much more forceful one on Sunday, associated with seasonal change.

            The book most frequently used for its supposed predictive powers has naturally been, for the last fifteen centuries or so, the Bible, and I shall return to the Bible presently.  But in Antiquity the epics of Homer, and especially Vergil, were commonly used.  We have especially good evidence for the widespread use of the sors Vergiliana (the “Vergilian lottery”) in which randomly selected lines from the Æneid were searched out for their predictive potential with regard to particular persons and circumstances.  This was quite a craze among the Roman imperial élite.   In the Christian Middle Ages Vergil was known not merely as a very great poet but also as a wizard or magician.  Not too many famous poets have alternate spellings for their name, but Vergil is often Virgil.  That may be because the Latin words virga and virgula (a tree branch or twig) were used of a magician’s wand or the divining rod of a water witch.  I suppose that in a pinch any famous book of sufficient gravitas could serve for purposes of bibliomancy.  Many years ago we had a great family vacation in the beautiful Northwest, roughly in the latitudes between Portland and the Canadian border.  Somewhere in the Washington State boonies we spent a night at a hostelry called the Moby Dick Hotel.  In supplying the metaphysical needs of their guests the literate and possibly eccentric proprietors of this place had supplanted the once standard Gideon’s Bibles in favor of copies of Moby Dick.  There was one in every room, including the public jakes. 

            The world’s Christians, beleaguered as we are, are still fairly numerous, so that some hundreds of millions of people have just observed, or at least been vaguely aware of, the beginning of a new year in the religious calendar, namely the first Sunday of Advent.  The season of Advent is the brief preparatory and penitential season anticipating Christmas, the legendary date of the birth of Jesus being December 25, according to the Western calendar.  There is some really great Advent music, and an Advent calendar can whet the interest and anticipation of the young.

            Loyal readers of my blog, and there are some, may recall my nut obsession, most recently exemplified in a post about gathering hickory nuts.  Well, the fun (gathering) phase is essentially over, and I now face the daunting task of getting a sufficient amount of actual nut meats out of the shells to justify the effort.  I have had it quite definitely in my mind that I want enough for one really great, rich nut cake.  My specific and challenging goal as prefixed in my mind: one pound of nuts.  (For one cake?)  Well, for last week’s blog I was thinking not about nuts but the American criminal justice system.  In choosing courtroom scenes famous in literature, I invoked the most powerful I knew, that in The Brothers Karamazov, a novel I would have claimed to know very well.  Yet I had completely forgotten that the third chapter of the “trial book” is called “The Medical Experts and a Pound of Nuts.”  This chapter of the book is of great psychological and theological importance, and doubtless one of the passages that made Freud believe that Karamazov was the most brilliant novel ever written.  It has to do with the testimony of a kindly old German doctor, Herzenstube, concerning an experience he had had twenty-five years earlier when the defendant, Dmitri Karamazov, now accused of parricide, was a sadly neglected child.  He had shown the boy a trivial kindness apparently unique in the lad’s bleak life.  He had given him a pound of, of…and here Herzenstube, though fluent in Russian, lost the word he needed.  It had to be teased out of him: “Apples?”  No.  “Nuts?”  Yes!  “I bought him a pound of nuts.”  Unconscious bibliomancy.

            One mode of proceeding for the bibliomancist was to open the book randomly (Æneid, Bible, whatever), stick a finger on one of its leaves, and then apply the specific text touched upon to the question at hand.  Successful application often required considerable ingenuity.  But in societies in which the distinction between the aural and the written was not so marked as today, the fortuitous hearing of a text could also be oracular.  Both hearing and reading are relevant to the most consequential instance of bibliomancy in western cultural history, and both are highly relevant to one of the set readings for the first Sunday in Advent (Romans 13:11-14,) crucial parts of which are the following: ...it is now the hour for us to rise from sleep…The night is past and the day is at hand.  Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness…In this exhortation to spiritual wokeness Paul anticipates, somewhat prematurely as it has turned out, the second advent of Christ.  That is why it is the inevitable Advent text.

            The historical personage this text most famously woke up was Augustine of Hippo, whose conversion to orthodox Christianity had large consequences for the intellectual history of Europe.  On the verge of his dramatic moment of final submission he already knew in his heart he wanted to be a committed Christian, but his attachments to sexual pleasure and neo-Platonism still stood in his way.  This is a dilemma every reader will be able at least to half understand.  (Who among us hasn’t suffered the itch of neo-Platonism?)  In a paroxysm of nervous indecision, a copy of the Pauline epistles in his tunic pocket, he stepped out of the house into the garden and sat down beneath a fig tree.  From beyond the garden walls he heard the sing-song voices of children playing some game.  Their words were “Pick it up and read it, pick it up and read it…”  So he did.  He took out his book and opened it at random.  The first words his eyes fell upon were it is now the hour for us to rise from sleep.  The rest is history.

            I have recounted this story rather breezily, but the eighth book of Augustine’s Confessions, where it is related, is a masterpiece of subtle and complex literary construction.  By Augustine’s day random lectionary readings had already played a major role in the legendary sacred history that was forming around heroic asceticism.  Fortuitous episodes of bibliomancy could be highly consequential.  You might just happen to hear a lectionary reading that would change your life immediately and forever.  One of the most consequential passages you could stumble upon would be the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.  I think of it as the all-star chapter of the whole New Testament.  Along with a whole lot of other great stuff (self-made eunuchs being among my favorites) we get Jesus’s answer to a really Big Question: “What good thing shall I do that I may have life everlasting?”  The answer includes a clause that turns out to be a deal-breaker for the earnest young man who asked the question: “Sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to poor people.”  But many others, including Anthony of the Desert and Francis of Assisi, were able to sign up for the whole program.  It is alarming that the “voices of the page,” whether read silently by oneself or heard read by another, could have such dramatic or lurid results.  When we talk about “the power of books” these days we can hardly have such instantaneous, life-altering consequences in mind.  Perhaps one should be cautious in asking any questions inviting possible answers that one does not want to hear.   Still, I have half a mind to offer Herman Melville a role in determining my dinner menu just as soon as I finish writing this.

 

 

 

 

Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night

 

 

            One of the world’s greatest possible book titles was pre-empted by the humanist poet Francis Petrarch in the 1360s when he published his little treatise entitled Concerning His Own and Lots of Other People’s Ignorance (De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia).  The crisis in our endangered American democracy  is everywhere in the news these days, and its root causes identified with varying degrees of plausibility: too much polarization in politics, too much money in politics, too little talent among politicians, gerrymandering, voter registration, voter suppression, voter fraud, voter apathy.  Perhaps we ought also to include Petrarch’s suggestion among the dangers.

 

            At both federal and state levels there are three branches of American constitutional government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.  For many years now a journalistic quiz conducted among eligible voters--the Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey—has tried to get a rough idea of what Americans actually know about the most basic rules and procedures by which we are governed.  In recent years,  with only slight percentage variations, only one third of Americans have been able to identify the three branches of the government.  That closely approximates the percentage of college graduates in the country, but there is less overlap than you might think. 

 

            Events of the past week suggest that many of us would benefit from a crash civics course.  Two of the branches were on conspicuous if controversial display: the legislature in the House of Representatives in Washington and the judicial in a courtroom in Wisconsin.  The wonder of it all is that despite powerful distractions, partisan passions, and much unbalanced and even erroneous commentary from major news sources,  they actually worked.  What I mean by this is that lawfully elected political representatives and a duly empaneled jury of our peers came to reasonable conclusions within the framework of our consensual social contract.  This does not mean that spending a huge amount of money we do not actually have is now an idea beyond cavil or that Kyle Rittenhouse is a “hero” rather than a dangerously undisciplined youth.  But it does mean that although nearly drowned out by all the clunky noises, our democratic processes actually were functioning.

 

            Though the passage of the “infrastructure bill” was in my opinion the more significant event of the week, it seems to have been the criminal trial that has most ominously inflamed passions and most clearly vindicated Petrarch’s title.  Ignorance of the law may be no excuse for criminal perpetrators, but it was nearly the default position of some eminent journalists who wrote about this case with passion, disseminating as they did so inflammatory untruths.  I would say “on both sides” if that phrase did not so basely betray the ideal of impartiality allegorized in Justice’s blindfold.  Fiction can indeed illuminate the inadequacy of our apparatuses of human justice, but it should do so honestly as fiction, not under the false flag of “reporting.”  All literature professors have to be Aristotelians if we want to keep bread on the table.  In his famous defense of the moral utility of fiction against radical Platonists who gave poetry the ethical status of a reflection in a mud puddle, Aristotle pointed to fiction’s moral clarity.  You can have all the messiness and ambiguity of reality, but without the occluding tedium and irrelevance.  Imagine facing Jardyce and Jarndyce from Bleak House as lived reality!

 

            As I look back at the past week, several novels dealing with adversarial legal proceedings come to my mind, including the only novel that many American high school graduates seem to have heard of, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Literary "courtroom drama" is pretty common, and a few great writers have created it with genius.  Of them few have been more interested in the ambiguities of justice, especially in the disparity, or rather the unbridgeable chasm between a Providential order and the imperfections of the human legal system,  than was Dostoyevsky.  Crime and Punishment was published only five years after the reforming Czar Alexander II, the “Liberator,” introduced the innovation of the “English” trial by jury into the Russian legal system in 1864.  Historians tell us that part of the contemporary impact of the trial scene in The Brothers Karamazov (1879) for its first Russian readers grew out of its still comparative novelty.  The twelfth book of Karamazov is certainly one of the greatest courtroom scenes in literary history, and like most of the others, it is rather disconcerting.  There’s a clue in the book‘s title: “A Judicial Error”.  Forty years later the whole “bourgeois” system would be overthrown by “revolutionary justice”, in which “individual rights” played no role.  Justice was what the Party defined as justice as, like a meandering stream, it moved through history to the dictates of dialectical necessity.  This, indeed, put an official end to judicial errors, as Solzhenitsyn underscores in the sardonic title to one of his short novels: We Do Not Make Mistakes.  Democracy is said to be the worst possible system of political organization except for all the others.  Something analogous could be said about our imperfect system of trial by jury.

 

            For our justice system is full of mistakes.  How can it fail to be?  It must necessarily wade through the morass our own and many others’ ignorance.  What is necessary but also necessarily imperfect demands ethical delicacy.  In Dostoyevky’s novel the famous big city defense lawyer Fetyukovich—the Johnnie Cochrane of Saint Petersburg, so to speak--passionately invokes in its secular form an ancient theological maxim: sins of commission are more serious than sins of omission.  In our legal tradition this appears as “Blackstone’s ratio”—referring to William Blackstone, author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England.  Blackstone writes: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.  I hope that might be something close to the actual traffic of our criminal courts even if it necessarily means that many, many felons walk free.  Yet how frequently do we find this spirit among zealous prosecutors, or the zealous commentaries of journalists?  The frequent fallibility of sanctioned police forces and established courts is paradoxically outstripped by the vigilantism that lawlessness ostensibly justifies.  I’m not a regular reader of Westerns, but I am a supporter of the Library of America, and not too long ago I got their anthology simply entitled The Western.  All the novels it brings together are good reads, but one of them deserves a permanent place in that rare category Virginia Woolf called “novels for adults”: The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940).   In addition to being what is usually called a gripping story, it cocoons a work of political theory at least as challenging as the treatises of John Locke and rather easier to understand.  It is set in the nineteenth century, of course; but it is as fresh as this week’s news.  Good guys with guns.  Defund the police. The Helping Hand Strikes Again.

 

            The week’s events set me searching my shelves for one last novel.  I couldn’t find it, but  Joan turned it up immediately.  It is a golden oldie, A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes (1929).*  Our particular copy is a particularly precious oldie, a Modern Library hardback in its dust jacket with a printed price of 95¢! (Pennies long since being meaningless, the “cent mark” has disappeared from the computer keyboard.  You now have to seek it out among “Advanced Symbols”.)  If you have not read this book you will want to do so.  I will be a little coy about describing it and say it is a story about the unspeakable guilt of innocence.  In only slightly less cryptic terms, those of an excellent introduction by Isabel Patterson, it is “an account of the melancholy fate of a crew of well-meaning pirates who fell into the clutches of half a dozen children.”

 

            Perhaps the novel is not the ideal mode for the advancement of serious political discussion, but it sure beats Twitter.  Not a great deal that is profound can be reduced to 140 graphic characters, but in an age before “social media” Robert Goheen, a great president of my university, once did it in fifty.  I was then much younger, and much more certain about things than I am now.  After I had generously shared with him one of my certainties, Goheen paused, then replied gently, “John, never be sure that you are more than about 80% right.” This perhaps complicates matters.  As I read the reactions to this week’s news I conclude that the worst aspect of my and other people’s ignorance might be the part that thinks it knows too much.

 

*published in England under the title The Innocent Voyage

 

University of Austin

 

 

            Recently a group of academics and journalists announced the foundation of a new American university, the University of Austin (not to be confused with the large old university already in that city, the University of Texas).  The muted buzz that greeted this birth has now largely stilled, but I believe the initiative may prove to be of lasting importance.  It has further publicized the charges of groupthink and herd mentality widely leveled against university faculties, especially humanities departments.  These charges, which find expression in bizarre incidents reported in the popular press and close-to-the-bone spoofs in stand-up comedy and the satirical television serial The Chair, have already infiltrated the national political debate.  The president of the fledgling institution declares it to be guided by three principles: unfettered search for the truth, freedom of inquiry and conscience, and civil discourse.  What’s not to like?  Well, according to a political cryptographer on MSNBC, what these principles really mean is that “In exchange for paying to indulge in racism and transphobia the students get…nothing.”  The peculiar nastiness with which the erudite used to abuse each other was called “theological hatred,” odium theologicum.  With the decline of religion we are left with odium academicum.  Among more moderate cavils I have seen is an essay by the president of Wesleyan University (an institution in which faculty opinion on woke issues ranges all the way from A to A prime) gently lamenting the wrong-headedness of the whole Austin idea.  He is not sure we need “another conservative university.”  Nor am I, if what that description means is an indoctrination machine.

 

            Academic wokeness is sufficiently irritating and, indeed, sufficiently intellectually pernicious to stimulate the foundation of an Anti-Woke academy, but Anti-Wokeness cannot be the sole or even main substance of an academic enterprise.  I am a titular member of a controversial group called the Heterodox Academy founded by the social psychologist Jonathan Heidt at NYU.  Its members believe that higher education should be characterized by “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.”  That one can be controversial by loving Mom and apple pie should tell you something about the current state of many academic faculties.  Such an organization as the HA does valuable work in defending liberal principles of academic freedom and comity.  But there is a difference between the guiding principles of an educational institution and its curriculum.  If the University of Austin can develop an excellent curriculum to which it applies its admirable principles, it could be a great success.  But that will be an extraordinarily heavy lift.  The names I have seen listed as its potential beginning faculty form a kind of Who’s Who of victims and critics of wokeness.  I admire some of them enormously, but of course the way to build a great faculty is to hire people who know a lot about particular disciplinary subjects and are very good at teaching them.  I will return to this theme in a moment.

 

            First, I perhaps need to make the point that many of the world’s great centers of learning, like the social organizations founding them, were born in polemic and reaction.  This is particularly true of American colleges.  Many venerable institutions came into being because their founders were unhappy with the state of the venerable institutions to which they were at the time attached.  The English monarchy is a most venerable institution.  When they became aggrieved at the monarchy, the Founding Fathers dumped it and launched a cheeky start-up of their own.  The origins of the western university—a construction of startling originality—were gaudily entrepreneurial and adversarial.  Peter Abelard became famous by breaking with his old teacher, William of Champeaux, and setting off on his own.  Several medieval universities were founded by disgruntled professors unhappy with trends in their own institutions.  In early America the great engine of educational innovation was the Christian religion in its often warring sectarian forms.  This or that religious group was desirous of having its “own” institutions or unhappy with trends in one that already existed.  The great glory of American higher education, which is still in many ways the envy of the world, lies in its copious variety, aka “diversity”.  You have your Harvard and you have your local community college.  My view is the more the merrier.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.  I don’t think the mission of higher education is to spare undergraduates the “harm” of disputed ideas.  When it comes to the power of Truth, I’m with Milton: “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”  In principle there is absolutely no reason that in this land of start-ups you could not launch a successful, potentially great, start-up university.  But it will not be easy.

 

            There is an often-told anecdote about the American tourist in Oxford dazzled by the utter perfection of the nearly sacred lawns within the individual colleges.  She asks a gardener, busy in pushing a compressive roller over the grass, how he has achieved the magic effect.  “Oh, it’s pretty simple,” he replies.  “Keep people from walking on it, and just keep clipping it and rolling it, clip and roll, clip and roll—for eight hundred years.”  Venerability cannot be ordered from Amazon.  Ivy is a comparatively slow-growing plant.  Most of our great institutions have impressive origin myths stressing their difficult and humble beginnings.  I have not seen President James Garfield frequently quoted in recent decades, but every dog has his day.  To Garfield is attributed another famous anecdote concerning higher education.  The ideal college, he said, was “Mark Hopkins and a student in a log cabin.”  (The theologian Mark Hopkins was a legendary teacher and president of Williams College in the middle of the nineteenth century.  The remark was soon improved to “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log with a student at the other.”)  Perhaps the University of Austin will be able to create a significant and credible institutional “presence” within a relatively short time.  After all Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, did spring fully grown from the brow of Zeus.  But that is a daunting challenge not to be achieved by high principles or noble goals alone.  It will require a boatload of money.

 

            Though their website is a bit cagey on the matter, Austin’s founders are talking about a bricks-and-mortar operation.  That, in my opinion, is the only model capable of competing with the long-established institutions that are the American norm.  On-line courses, “distant learning”—all well and good around the edges, but not a university.  As it now can cost a million dollars to build a big house in this country, you can perhaps imagine what it would cost to reproduce the real estate of even a small liberal arts college, let alone a Cornell or a Chapel Hill.  Or perhaps like me you cannot: anyway, some number ending with many zeros.  Medieval universities could be peripatetic.  The University of Austin doesn’t have to be in Austin.   I suppose that one realistic possible head start would be to snap up one of several failing old institutions in a fire sale.  (The term of art would be “partnering”.)  Given two facts about the current cultural moment—the large number of the super-rich and the vehemence of our political divisions—I suspect there is a significant pool of potential mega-donors.  Whether there is a sufficient pool of mega-donors committed to a fiercely independent enterprise—one of the founders’ stated promises—is another matter.

 

            The problems that any nascent start-up faces are formidable.  But its promise is still nonetheless great, and it enjoys some fine advantages and possibilities.  One major problem in American higher education is its exorbitant cost, especially at the elite or “legacy” institutions.  It is hard for me to believe that it is worth $80,000 per annum to bask in the intellectual radiance of Wesleyan or anyplace else.  Not that I imagine that many families actually pay those fees.  Like my own institution, Princeton, most of our very expensive institutions are actually charitable engines of financial redistribution which, through lavish programs of scholarship aid, have for decades been fostering the national meritocracy in which I still believe.  It is easier to do this if you have an endowment of a few  billions.  But whether paid by individuals or by charitable endowments, the high costs are real.  And though education is supposed to be highly profitable to those lucky enough to enjoy it, no epithet is more damning in the discussion of colleges and universities than “for profit”.  One major factor in the rise of college expenses in recent decades is the manifest bloating of highly paid university administrations.  A start-up could and should strangle this monster in the cradle.  The Austin people seem to recognize this problem and be ready to address it.  A second great advantage would be in faculty recruitment.  College teaching is conspicuously a buyer’s market at the introductory level.  And within current faculties, yearning to breathe free, there still are a great many talented professors who are passionate about Euler numbers, the Chanson de Roland, string theory, tectonic plates, Meso-American pottery, Kant’s second treatise, African economies, the Great Migration, the languages of the Malay peninsula.  These are among a thousand other topics crying out to be studied and taught in a generous, liberal, and tolerant intellectual milieu.  A very great deal about the ways our colleges are run seems tired and creaky, including the academic calendar, the nature and purpose of the doctoral dissertation in the humanities, and the conventions surrounding faculty tenure.  The new broom sweeps clean.  The founding of a new university might offer an opportunity for a deep dive into these troubled waters.  But first things first.  Having adopted its coat of arms, the UofA must now move on to the second requirement of an American university—a line of sweatshirts.

 

 

Crowds and Castastrophe

 

 

           One of the old saws needing serious qualification is the one about safety in numbers.  The dangers presented by the madness of crowds as an important historical theme was first drawn to my attention by a book I read many years ago: George Rudé’s The Crowd in the French Revolution.  The dangers are especially great when large numbers in the crowd are literally or, perhaps more commonly, metaphorically intoxicated.  By metaphoric intoxication I mean possession by an intensely powerful shared immediate objective, passion, prejudice, or religious fervor.  Race riots, pogroms, lynchings—all of which are well documented in modern history—are examples of the dangers of mob violence.

            If crowds can be the incubators of criminal violence, they often have been the convenient targets at which criminal violence has been directed.  The “crowded market-place” has been one of the favorite venues for Middle Eastern suicide bombers, but any large gathering, such as those congregated for religious services and weddings, has proved vulnerable.  Four or five years ago a demented man in Las Vegas murdered some sixty people attending a music festival.  About eight hundred others were wounded by his gunfire or injured in the ensuing panic.  Without attracting the attention of any of the hotel staff he had successfully brought up to his complimentary rooms in an upper floor of the flashy Mandalay Bay hotel a veritable armory of high-powered rifles, some of them modified in such a fashion as to turn them in effect into continuous-fire machine guns.  As a concert neared its conclusion he fired down into the large crowd in attendance in the plaza below. He set a new record, which will doubtless prove temporary, for mindless slaughter before killing himself.  Nobody knows why he did it, but there is no why that could really explain it.  He had big gambling debts, but he carefully paid them off before getting on with his mass murder.  If people are packed closely enough together, a shooter need not be much of a marksman to do a lot of damage.  In Colorado a graduate school dropout shot up a cinema audience gathered to view the film “The Dark Knight Rises.”  In Florida an Islamic terrorist dealt out devastation in a packed nightclub.

            In all these instances, and indeed in dozens of others like them, journalists are wont to underscore the dichotomy between the carefree, often celebratory mood of the congregated victims and the inscrutable dark motives of the perpetrators who strike without warning or comprehensible motive.  Yet as we have been reminded by a terrible event of the last few days, crowds have demonstrated time and again that they are very great dangers to themselves.

            Religious pilgrimages, sporting events, rock concerts—anyplace where large, het-up crowds are trying to get into or out of constricted areas—are potential sites of slaughter.  The latest disaster, last Friday, was at a Houston music festival at which the rapper Travis Scott was performing before an audience of fifty thousand people.  That is roughly the population of a small city like Joplin MO or Troy NY.  At such events the authorities normally have on hand a medical tent to deal with drug overdoses. For Mr. Scott’s performance, this facility was overwhelmed before the actual concert began.  Mr. Scott is apparently one of those “the-show-must-go-on” types, so it went on as, unbeknownst to him, people were being suffocated and trampled to death.  Altogether, eight died.  Many more were injured, including a ten-year-old child.  One of the dead was fourteen.  Am I simply too unhip to know why a ten-year-old would possibly be at such an event?

            There have been a few times in my life when I felt endangered by being in the midst of a crowd.  Mainly this has simply been a feeling of enforced immobility and uncertainty amidst sensations of obscure shoving and jostling.  Once in London I felt overwhelmed and threatened among a sudden rush of drunken Scottish soccer fans who swamped an Underground train on which I was riding, packing the car far beyond its intended capacity.

        The only time I have been really scared was on my one visit to Israel many years ago now.  My son-in-law, who grew up in Jerusalem, had arranged a marvelous tour for me, and directed most of it personally.  But he thought, correctly, that I would like to visit some of the traditional pilgrimage sites in and around Bethlehem.  There I was on my own.  Bethlehem, a West Bank village under the administration of the Palestinian Authority, is probably not more than ten kilometers from the Old City in Jerusalem; but in my experience it has much in common with Virgil’s Avernus, or perhaps the Roach Motel.  It is much easier to get into than out of.

            I don’t know what to call the formidable fortress through which all travelers between the two territories must pass.  Terms like check-point or customs station are clearly inadequate.  It seemed to me very large, and reminded me most of a heavy concrete subterranean parking garage.  It was roofed with a grill of heavy metal bars.  You could hear and also see military boots walking noisily about on top of it.  There were some roped stanchions to direct lines of visitors toward the kiosks where officials, again I think military people, asked you what you were about and examined your passport.  Except there were not any lines of visitors, only me and three or four others, one of them a Christian nun.  After a brief but thorough inquiry into my papers and purposes I was directed to a door quite some distance away.  This opened onto the Palestinian West Bank in the form of a grubby and littered parking lot where there were waiting, as I had been told to expect them to be, a number of drivers in their taxis hoping for visitors to employ them as guides to the principal tourist sites of Jesus’s birthplace.  My “guide” was a pleasant man who took me to all the right places and let me poke about on my own.  I enjoyed the experience, parts of which were quite moving.

            This essay is about crowds, however, and specifically the large crowd already gathered at the parking-garage frontier barrier on the return trip.  I had been one among five on the exit from Jerusalem.  I was now one among five hundred—one conspicuously tall Caucasian bobbing above a choppy sea of Semites.  There was a lot of shoving and jostling.  It was as though everyone in the crowd was trying to stake out an ideal place from which to race to an exit, the exact position of which no one knew.  This seemed wholly irrational.  Though more people kept arriving, there was plenty of open space behind; yet people jammed in like voluntary sardines.  There were loud arguments in Arabic, louder peremptory commands from the military police.  There was no independent volitional motion.  The whole crowd swayed and staggered to capricious but irresistible forces.  Some people were being pushed against the iron bars of the cage.  My rational mind knew that there were twenty yards of open space not far distant behind me; still I was terrified.  What must it feel like to be trampled by a hundred soccer fans or rap enthusiasts who have nowhere to go except across your body?

November Begins

 

 

            The last few days have been eventful, and in my part of the world somber in a way that echoed the events.   A week out from the changing of the clocks, both the mornings and the evenings are unpleasantly dark, with chill winds and a fair amount of drizzle.  I have finally had to face up to how much I am dreading the approach of real winter.  The three immediately preceding days have seen Hallowe’en, the opening of the global climate conference in Glasgow, and then yesterday a couple of harbinger gubernatorial elections.  Each of these I found disconcerting in various ways.

 

            The evolution of Hallowe’en in this country is particularly interesting.  All the world’s great religions are ritually respectful of the dead; and some students of comparative religion find in the commemoration of the dead and various concepts of spiritual afterlife or material reincarnation the principal and original impulses behind all religions.  In the old religious calendar of Christian Europe there were two adjacent holy days (falling on November first and second) devoted to the commemoration of the dead.  All Saints’ Day was a general celebration of all those who had formally or informally been declared to have been conspicuously holy.  All Souls’ Day remembered the far larger number of the ordinary “faithful” (i.e., believing) dead.  The distinction is between commissioned general officers and the rank-and-file enlisted, so to speak.  Hallowe’en (All Hallows’ Eve) denotes explicitly the night before All Saints’ Day, i.e., October 31.  In centuries past the two festival days made a kind of pre-winter double-header, often featuring various local and to our minds secular jollifications and pranks.

 

            The Puritans who came to New England, highly principled killjoys, were hostile toward many of the old religious holidays.  Offering prayers for the dead, as though the agency of living petitioners could influence the divine judgment passed upon the souls of the defunct, was a “popish” notion deeply abhorred by the Reformers and connected with the doctrine of a temporal Purgatory they rejected.  While nothing of the religious meaning of Hallowe’en survived in American Protestantism, some of its rich European folkloristic associations did—especially those having to do with actual mortuary customs.  Hence all the tomb-crypt-skeleton-skull side of things.  These associations proved sufficient for the creation of our strange secular rituals in honor of—what?  In many old European countries there had been mellow family “reunions” across the Great Divide held in the churchyards, the most common burial sites.  What might be macabre was not always spooky or sinister.  Some of the strange bond of jollity linking the quick and the dead on All Souls’ Day survives in the Mexican “Day of the Dead,” in which there is a fusion of late medieval European and Amerindian traditions.  Unfortunately I can tell you nothing interesting about our Hallowe’en beyond the historical backgrounds.   We live in a neighborhood with too few young children.  It is not officially a “senior community,” but seems to aspire to that status.  We did as usual put out a minimalist jack o’ lantern, but there were no little ghosties or ghoulies who visited our street.  The chances of rowdy teenagers soaping our car windows are zilch, and that’s a little sad, strangely.

 

            This brings us to day two: Glasgow.  There is not much reason to believe that the results of the global climate conference just beginning will differ significantly from those of twenty-some earlier meetings.  The journalistic preparation for the meeting has been apocalyptic.  By first reports its opening discussions have been recriminatory (“Rifts and Finger-Pointing,” says the Times.)   The global warming formulary, like the religious formularies it increasingly resembles, is faith-based, faith being “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  The problems as they are described to us are of an enormity and an urgency demanding from the nations of the world a level of earnest engagement and cooperation unprecedented in all previous history.  The master-builders of the medieval cathedrals might work for a lifetime with no expectation even of approaching the completion of their vision, but the long haul is not a framework democratic politicians find  congenial.  They need evidence of things seen, such as “tax cuts,” “programs,” and “jobs”.  The tyranny of short-term thinking is everywhere to be seen in our politics.  How could that not be the reality in a system in which elected officials must spend so much of their time worrying about being re-elected.  Our Congress has been struggling with proposed legislation of allegedly existential import and certainly unprecedented expense.  Once you move beyond a few broad categories (family leave, free education, “human infrastructure,” “green projects,” etc.) who actually knows what is in or out of the proposed bills?  How in fact do you “debate” the contents of proposed legislation requiring some thousands of pages for its description?  Yet most of the public talk was about how things might be arranged to give President Biden an apparent “win” or two to take to Glasgow as talismans of his capacity to show “leadership” in the Climate Struggle to save our world.

 

            Thus we arrive at Day Three, yesterday, with its two “bellwether” gubernatorial elections, one of them in my own state of New Jersey.  I have delayed mounting this post by several hours in the vain hope of securing the advantage of knowing the definitive results.  We began the day early in a nearly empty polling site, but as of now, things are still too much up in the air.  Whatever the final result in New Jersey, it will be very close.  In this state, that fact alone would be an eloquent gauge of the level of enthusiasm propelling the Democratic incumbent, Phil  Murphy.  The Republican victory in Virginia needs some big adjective like stunning.  At least it stunned me.  I’ve been reading the New York Times and the New Yorker.  Obviously, I had my preferences, which I was able to express as a voter.  But I already knew that I was unhappy with the election before the voting had begun.  The cause of my unease was less with the possible outcomes of the elections than with the mode in which they were conducted.  So far as I can judge the competitors in Virginia were two honorable, intelligent, and capable men of proven capacity.  Mr. McAuliffe, the Democrat, is a kind of new model Clintonian politician who had already competently served a term as governor. Mr. Youngkin, the victorious Republican was a big success in “private equity”—a background becoming not uncommon among first-time political aspirants.  So Youngkin is filthy rich, as opposed to McAuliffe, who is merely rich.  God knows that the world, and our own dear nation within it, face problems worthy of serious and nuanced discussion by thoughtful people.  But the debate, such as it was, was mainly about Donald Trump.  McAuliffe did his best to prove that Youngkin was Trump redivivus.  Youngkin did all he could to distance himself from Trump without offending those who would be happy if he were Trump.  One can say of these performances that they exhibited considerable political dexterity, but hardly any political vision commensurate with the challenges we face.  But I must end this literary display of my seasonal affective disorder,  Each year I react to the prospect of winter with increasing glumness; but I do hope the next three days of November will offer more encouragement than the first three.

 

The Harvard Game

                                                    Duhhhh...
 

            The final weeks of Indian Summer have seemed particularly mellow this year, and I have enjoyed one particular aspect of them in a special way.  I make no claim to being a serious “sports fan”, but I continue to enjoy and admire certain aspects of Ivy League intercollegiate competitions.  Football is very big business in this country, and far too big a business in American universities and colleges.  There is something truly grand about American collegiate football.  My teaching career began at the University of Wisconsin, and I acknowledge what one must call the cultural awesomeness of a Big Ten Saturday afternoon.  Huge crowds, parking mayhem, industrial-sized marching bands in flashy uniforms, grotesque operatic renditions of the “Star-Spangled Banner”.  That is the model that defines professional football, as well, and seems to be the ambition of half the country’s high schools.  Once the dynamism of the American commercial spirit invades an institution, there is no turning back.  I never actually attended a Wisconsin game; but  you hardly needed to be at the stadium to know what was happening.  The whole city of Madison shook to the roaring of the crowd.  But here in the old Ivy League there are still some vestiges—and they are only that, vestiges—of the genuinely amateur and gentlemanly ambiance in which the collegiate sport was born.  As is well known the first ever recorded football game in this country was played on November 6, 1869, between teams from Rutgers and Princeton.  Handlebar moustaches are no longer the vibe, but it’s not quite the Dallas cheerleaders either. 

 

            It was probably about forty years ago that I served briefly on the university’s Committee on Athletics.  This was hardly a heavy assignment, and it had a great perk in the option to purchase season seats on the fifty-yard line.  So I secured two, and have renewed them every year since.  We are not talking a Notre Dame VIP box here.  A ticket costs about as much as a stadium hot dog, and may well taste better, though I have not run a test.  I used to make it to a game or two each year.  Since retiring I’ve done a little better, though the whole program was shut down for Covid.  In our socially constrained world, I make a bit of a thing of it.  The walk to the arena from my house is a tiny bit over a mile, approaching my huffing and puffing limit these days, especially when packing a nice lunch and a book or two in a cloth bag, as I like to do.  We used to have a small gang of retired faculty sitting together, but that play has been broken up by one thing or another, the main thing being the Grim Reaper.  I am now just another fish in the sea of students and alumni.

 

            If in retrospect the Harvard-Princeton game was declared to be the “game of the week” by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, as it in fact was, the explanation is to be sought in the curiosity of the play rather than in its uniformly high quality.  Princeton began bravely but ingloriously with a self-inflicted wound—a lengthy forward pass thrown with absolute precision to a Harvard defender.  But honors were pretty much even on this kind of thing, making for an exciting and suspenseful struggle in which, for a time, neither team seemed to be able to score a touchdown.  Would it be a duel of field-goal kickers?   After all there is presumably some reason the game is called football.

 

            The Princeton stadium has something of the sol y sombra features of a Spanish bullring.  The home team (west) seats grow ever cooler and shadier as the afternoon progresses, the visitors’ (east) side ever more bright and sunny.  So I did what I sometimes do on chilly game days—I moved over to the corner of the visitors’ side during the Covid-abbreviated halftime high jinx.  This would allow a quick exit when the game ended and warm sunshine until then.  There were maybe twenty of us scattered among a half acre of empty seats. I could not have known that my excellent view of the north end zone—not usually considered a desirable vantage point—would on this occasion be decreed by fate to allow me a superb view of all the important action.

 

            I forgive myself for not knowing exactly what happened from this point in the game, because as it turns out the officials in charge of it didn’t know either.  But early in the fourth quarter there was a sign from Heaven registered on the electronic scoreboard.  With thirteen minutes and thirteen seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, Harvard scored its single touchdown, evening the game score at thirteen to thirteen.  Now, that is a lot of thirteens, and it should have been enough to make everybody happy if wary.  When the score was still thirteen to thirteen at the end of four quarters, it should have been a tie. 

 

            My view of American popular sports harks back to a Golden Age around 1950.  But there are all these new rules, designed to pander to fans requiring non-stop drama and impatient with all ambiguity.   First, they sissified  baseball by coming up with the nutty notion of a “designated batter”.  The sudden death overtime innovations in football are even worse.  The tied teams compete, rapid fire, in simulating a post-touchdown conversion until one of them wins.  Now all gladiatorial combat is required to end in death, and as quickly as possible, since the fans still may have a long drive ahead of them.  My view is that sometimes there really is such a thing as a tied game between equally matched adversaries, a result bringing honor to two teams and disgrace to neither.  This truth, which is recognized in chess, the supreme game of all games, ought to continue to be recognized in football.  In short, I do not like these innovations, and yes, I know the “lightbulb joke” on this topic—a joke obviously easily adapted to any institution of the teller’s choosing.  How many Princetonians does it take to change a lightbulb?  The answer is of course three.  It takes one guy to change the lightbulb and two others to lament about how much better the old lightbulb had been.  But if you absolutely insist on new bulbs, make sure they are bright ones.

 

            Five, yes five overtime periods now played out at the goal line just beneath me.  Presumably some folks in the stadium knew what was happening, but I was not among them.  The decibel level of the shouting drowned out the PA system.  It was all quite satisfactory from the partisan Princeton point of view.  So far as I could tell. Harvard kept making winning plays only to have the referees decide, upon mature consideration, that they had in fact not won.  Harvard made a good kick.  Princeton made a good kick.  Then Harvard won again, except that somebody failed to notice that the Princeton coach had called for a time-out.  When the call was revised, the Harvard coach threw a hissy-fit—a bit of drama in itself worth the price of admission.  He threw his cap to the ground.  He stamped his little feet.  Princeton completed an end zone pass.  A Princeton defender knocked away a Harvard pass that would have evened the score.  I had no idea that the game was over, but a couple hundred Princeton fans concluded that it was and rushed onto the field in a victory frenzy.  Final score: Princeton, 18; Harvard, 16.  I began my bemused walk home.  I presume that large, fuming buses full of large, fuming football players, headed north on the New Jersey Turnpike in the direction of New England.  A day or so later Ivy League officials, with Princeton now at the league’s top,  actually re-read their new rules and discovered that under prevailing circumstances the crucial time-out had been inadmissible.  Oops, their  bad.  One for the books, but by that time the book had already been printed.  The stuff of legends.