Collecting and Recollecing

 

 

On Sunday mornings Joan reads aloud the collect of the day at the breakfast table.  This week began with one of my favorites* and set me thinking about both certain eccentricities of the English language and the very powerful ways in which reading has informed my own life and the lives of so many close to me.

 

The noun collect, denominating the introductory prayer with which the celebration of the Eucharist has begun nearly since time immemorial, is a peculiar one.  Like the verb of the same spelling, it derives from the Latin colligere, which means “to gather together, to collect.”  But the nominative collect has a vocal emphasis on the first syllable and the verbal form on the second.  Participants in the same church service will pray a collect and join in when they collect the offering. In the first instance what is being gathered are prayerful intentions, in the latter pecuniary  contributions.

Thomas Cranmer

 

The verbal beauty of Anglican liturgy is in part a resort of historical serendipity.  Various early Latin versions of most of the collects are abundant, but the English Reformation coincided with a great increment in humanistic learning and vernacular enrichment that is evident in ecclesiastical translation.  Furthermore, many Church leaders were accomplished writers, in particular Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the literary genius behind the Book of Common Prayer of 1549.  Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series of novels (and plays) has popularized other less admirable aspects of the ecclesiastical events of the age.

The exhortation that Bible readers should read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the substance of Holy Writ would merit an essay of its own.  Particularly rich is the tradition of reading as providing a kind of nutrition through eating.  The famous phrase “inwardly digest” from this collect became nearly proverbial in later English literature.

 

                                              BOSWELL**

and

HUME

 

But I realized, unfortunately too late, that what I chose for literary and aesthetic interest compels me to brush up against some dreaded heavy-duty theology.  That is because what all the reading, marking, and spiritual manducation in the collect is in aid of is the fostering of hope in one of the most mysterious of Christian doctrines: the immortality of the soul, eternal life, “life after death.”

James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, made a visit to his dying friend, the famous philosopher David Hume.  Hume was a radical religious skeptic. Boswell, a conventional Christian who recited the Nicene Creed and its clause affirming his belief in "the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting" on a frequent basis, was perhaps hoping for a deathbed conversion.  If so, he would be disappointed.  Hume was utterly unphased at the prospect of his impending death and, in his own expectation, the definitive annihilation of his being.  Both Hume’s belief and his unbelief astonished and terrified Boswell.  That meeting took place on July 7, 1776, when the United States was three days old and perhaps five percent of educated people then held ideas closer to those of Hume than to those of Boswell.  I suspect that by the bicentenary of 1976 Boswell would have had trouble getting five percent  among the same demographic.  It has been well said that the Enlightenment project was the “disenchantment of the world.”  The more that science could explain, the less room there was for folkloristic legend and myth, however endearing or even fascinating it might be.  Anthropologists were wont to speak of “primitive” beliefs, from which the human species gradually emerged in its slow progress toward a fuller rationality.  In individuals this process involved overcoming the infantile sensibility, putting away “childish things” as the Apostle Paul himself called them.  But putting away childish things can be painful.  Wordsworth was a child of the Enlightenment.  “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” he cried out—that dawn being the French Revolution.  “But to be young was very heaven.”  Yet one of his most profound and mature poems—usually called the Immortality Ode-- (“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”)—begins with a lament for a spiritual truth overhwhelmed by an inferior “science”:

 There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream

   The earth, and every common sight,

         To my mind did seem

         Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

 

It is not now as it hath been of yore…

 

It is commonly believed that the origins of our religions are to be found in primal fears, especially the fear of death.  The Roman poet Statius put into the mouth of one of his less attractive characters an opinion that became a set piece for atheists in our older literature: “Fear first created the gods!”  It is a line that appears in Chaucer.  I myself have come to a very different hypothesis and a more positive one.  The belief in immortality grows not out of fear but out of affirmation of the goodness of life.  This was Cicero’s opinion.  He says that he could never deny the immortality of souls even if its impossibility could somehow be definitively demonstrated.  In his view life itself was so good that it could not possibly be subject to all the woeful limitations endured by human bodies.  I never used to think about any of this too much.  Funny how octogenarian thought may differ from that of junior high school.  But which of the two is actually more childish?

As the French say,--and of course they have something snappy to say about practically everything-- “Pour être mort, il faut mourir.”  In order to be dead, it is necessary to die.  But one can quite honestly express a fearlessness of death while acknowledging the dread potential of the dying part.  On this front the messiness of the possibilities become ever more obvious, and they do tend to crowd the mind.

         But so do many other things.  Hume was an empiricist, an empiricist being someone whose judgements and actions are founded in actual observed experience.  I think our worldviews are determined less by what we “believe” than by what we see.  What we see is for me best captured in words by poets who have written about their own observed experience in remarkable ways.  Here, for example, is Hopkins:

 

   The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed…

 

This is in one way a rather conventional Victorian religious poem.  That is what it seems to want to be.  But the poet’s extraordinary imagery will not allow it to be.  The grandeur of God cannot be captured in a simile, only hinted at.  It is bright; it is dynamic in its shining.  All well and good.  But then comes the seeing, the deep seeing.  “It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.”  What an amazing line.  Read, mark, learn…

 

 

* TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST: THE COLLECT.  Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them: that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast  the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our saviour Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

 

**The are pluses and minuses in having an erudite readership.  This post had been mounted for less than two hours when I received an email from Terry Seymour, once an undergraduate of mine and now (among numerous other achievements) one of the worlds leading experts on Samuel Johnson and his circle, suggesting that this painting, purloined for the usual decorative purposes from Google Images, is not of James Boswell but (probably) of Thomas Percy.  My feeble reply to this is "Who is Thomas Percy?" But I don't need much research to conclude that he was better looking than Boswell, and since it's still pretty early in the morning, and since only God and Seymour are likely to know the difference, I think I'll leave him there. I also appreciate an email from God relating to other matters touched upon in the essay.   But I warmly thank my friend Terry for giving me the opportunity of a little glad if embarrassed learning.

Special Aups

                                          Vaduz

Aups

 

A few subjects of this essay will be our daughter Katherine’s travel itineraries, the beautiful crisp fall weather we are enjoying, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, and the wit and wisdom of Julius Caesar.  Saturday’s beautiful weather—bright, chilly  crystalline air  rapidly warming beneath  a brilliant rising sun—was particularly splendid as experienced on the bluestone patio onto which the sliding doors of our glass walled house open at the back.  From the front everything about the house is flat and uninteresting.  It gives off the vibe of a small, windowless warehouse.  It does have the distinction of having been designed by an eminent member of the Architecture School about 1960, a fact that gives me small comfort whenever I contemplate its gray, windowless street front.  That is because its backside, which is for our purposes the living side, is almost spectacularly beautiful. The yard slopes down gradually toward a nearly acceptable workshop-tool house; behind that the view from the house includes several beautiful yards of the extensive fieldstone wall I myself built in earlier days.  Beyond that a lovely path makes its way through a field on which a younger generation once played baseball, and then along a forested path that leads, after about a quarter mile of forested common land, to a T-junction.  There walking paths in either direction follow the cliff side looking down on Lake Carnegie. 

 

This lake is one of the ornaments of our campus and our town.  According to legend it was a great disappointment to the university trustees, who had in the first decade of the twentieth century been cultivating Mr. Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist, in the hopes of a gift of some large and imposing public University building.  Among the favorite gifts for which he was noted were libraries and “science buildings,” both of which made them salivate—in the very discreet manner in which Presbyterian elders might be seen to salivate, of course.  But fortunately Mr. Carnegie had ideas of his own.  In the days when a dollar was a dollar, he gave away three hundred and fifty million of them.  He knew that what Princeton really needed was a long, thin water reservoir that could double as  a recreational site, with special emphasis on the manly British sport of competitive rowing. 

 

I’m sure you follow the sequence here.  It was on the bluestone patio looking down toward the path that could eventually lead us to Carnegie’s aqueous bounty that we on Saturday enjoyed a whirlwind visit of an hour and a half from our daughter.  All three of our children are notably dutiful with regard to us, the APs (aging parents) but Katherine’s attentiveness can be described only as heroic given the fact that her job, leading a major American cultural foundation with its principal seat in Los Angeles, requires frequent travel to major European capitals—and, as it turns out, at least one not so major.  She was on her way to hop a plane to Zurich, the major airport closest to her actual destination—Vaduz.  Vaduz???  I faced the humiliation of having to learn that it is the capital of Liechtenstein.  It turns out Vaduz is an actual place.  You might describe it as a suburb of Davos.  They apparently have Davos-style meetings there.  I wouldn’t know.  Look, I’ve been to the Sulphur Springs Fair twice, but I never heard of this Vaduz place.  To my credit I already suspected that Liechtenstein itself might be real, and I was secretly glad to have confirmation.  But our daughter was shocked, shocked, by my ignorance.  A European capital city!  You…a college professor?

 

         In the long run this humiliation excited a competitive spirit.  Surely there must be somewhere on my own itinerary that would stump her.  I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head, so that my own eventual email riposte probably reached her mid-Atlantic.  I inquired how frequently she visited Aups.  Gotcha!

 

Aups is not exactly the capital of anywhere.  It is actually a beautiful little village in upper Var in Provence that has been around for a very long time--a lot longer than this jumped-up Vaduz, I’ll warrant.   I have been able to visit it a couple of times thanks to its proximity (maybe ten kilometers) to our friend Andrew’s house at Salernes, where we have spent several delightful vacations.  In fact, both of the APs are practically Aups habituées.  Any place so ancient is bound to have some interesting associations, even if it has been in decline for a couple thousand years.  It is, for example, famous for its truffles, at least among trufflers.  In an earlier century its Catholic peasantry was badly bloodied up by a mob of Cathars, which is of interest given that the Cathars were usually on the losing side of that equation.  But its more interesting fame, for purposes of an obscurity contest, is more ancient yet.  For thanks to Julius Caesar Aups has a credible claim to be the most insignificant place in Europe.  If you know even a little about Julius you are likely to know that he was much concerned with fine distinctions of social and political hierarchies.  He liked arrangements in which the hierarchies were clear and he was at the top of all of them.  He happened to pass through Aups on his way to conquering Gaul.  He probably regarded the hamlet as nothing more than an inadequate watering hole for his men’s horses.  But he is supposed to have made his larger hierarchical attitudes clear by saying: “I would prefer to be the Number One Guy in Aups than the Number Two Guy in Rome.”  It was an attitude likely to get him into trouble one day.  But as an example of imperious wit it was enough to establish little Aups as the world’s quintessential Loserville.  I doubt that my attempt to invoke its legendary obscurity can harm it though.  The proper French pronunciation of the place may sound like what an Anglophone might blurt out after dribbling soup down his shirtfront, but Scandinavians now pay half a million for a decayed stable in the area.

 

Returning to the Number One Guy ever to visit Aups, everyone knows that Julius Caesar was a man of parts.  He was among other things quite the wit, and he seldom passed through any part of his expansive and expanding Empire without making some memorable comment especially designed for teachers of Latin 101.  His most famous such remark of course is a masterpiece of precision recording his activities when he strayed with imperial intent into a part of the world  that wasn’t quite yet fully pacified, as the Romans like to put it.  Veni, vidi, vici.  Where, I ask you, would introductory Latin students be without veni, vidi vici?  “I came; I saw; I conquered.”  Just popped out of his mouth, apparently.  He also has famous last words.  Et tu, Brute?  (Or was that Shakespeare?)  And into how many parts is omnia Gallia divided?...

                           

                                tres partes, of course

 

History and Oblivion

 

This will be a very brief essay.  No essay at all, really, more like a sad mini-meditation on the ambiguities of history.  It has been hard to be anything but sad in the current historical moment.

 

I have spent most of my life studying history.  It has been history of a special sort, since it has focused on old works of art, literary and visual.  My approach has been a fairly common one.  I have tried to understand old verbal and visual constructs in terms of the likely intentions of their creators and their intended audiences.  Trying to understand the past in its own terms is very hard work, because the past is a foreign country, or rather many foreign countries. We keep saying that we must heed the lessons of history, that we must never forget this or that.  Sometimes the thises and the thats are of gigantic size, the evils of the Atlantic slave trade, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust of European Jewry.  Who possibly thinks that such enormities should be forgotten even if they could be?

 

         But historical memory has many uses, some of them more conducive to human felicity than others.  My own paternal grandfather provides me with a monitory example.  Though born in this country, he was a fanatical pseudo-Irishman.  His father, who arrived in America as a youth about the time of the Civil War was for most of his life a coal miner in southern Illinois, but I think my grandfather was born in Detroit.  He had a mediocre career in various pockets of the lower, lower middle class.  Its high point was a brief stint as a recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War.  The immigrant father (my great grandfather) abandoned Catholicism in a dramatic fashion that I might recount another time.  His son (my grandfather) turned the family religion department over to his Northern Baptist wife.  His chief spiritual passion, so far as I could judge, was hating England.  I don’t know that he had ever seen an actual Englishman, but I supposed he must have.  However, he didn’t need to have done so in order to hate them all with a fury.  Thus did the internalization of certain quasi-legendary iniquities of the administrations of Viscount Melbourne and Robert Peel continue to sour the world view of a man into the 1950s.  And, incidentally, some of his posterity.

 

But among the world’s active and malignant ancestral hatreds, that born of the Irish famine was, if you will allow the irreverence, small potatoes compared with many others.  Some still active ones were already virulent at the dawn of written history.  When Joshua, who lived in the Bronze Age, first crossed the River Jordan, the land in which he found himself, however promising and indeed promised it might have been, was far from uninhabited.  It was replete with Amelikites needing to be smitten “hip and thigh”.  The Amelikites, sometimes called simply Amelik, were  an indefinite tribe, or race, or coalition, who appear widely but indefinitely,  (both in terms of chronology and of geography) in early sacred history.  What is definite is that they needed the hip-and-thigh treatment, that is, ethnic cleansing, aka genocide. 

 

Never forget.  Remember the three hundred at Thermopylae.  Remember the Alamo.  Remember Treblinka and Sobibor.  But for the love of God remember them in a fashion more likely to lead to their effectual oblivion than their repetition.  John Kennedy performed one of the most benign and brilliant achievements of modern history during the Cuban missile crisis when he simply pretended  that he never received a certain provocative note from Nikita Krushchev.  (To his credit, Krushchev, having taken the time to think twice, went along with the fiction.)  This was an act of willful oblivion that may have allowed the continuation of the human species.

 

 

 

Autumn Chill

 Autumn, serious autumn, arrived here on Friday.  By “serious autumn” I perhaps mean “ambivalent autumn,” Keats’s season of mellow fruitfulness plus a rather chill drizzle.  The soggy colorful leaves are now clogging the street drains and damming up in the gutters to make a chain of nasty puddles.  We have plenty of clichés to cover the phenomenon.  You have to take the good with the bad; life is like a box of chocolates.  But, especially as I grow older, I find the bad is so bad that it is very difficult to savor the good to its fullest.  A couple of weeks ago in my first response to the murder and mayhem in the Middle East I turned to the famous psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the waters of Babylon”), concerning which I had a few years ago written a book.  One of its most memorable verses is this: “How can I sing the song of the Lord in an alien land?”  Thoughts surrounding this verse have continued to tug at me.  In its historical context the psalm’s specific setting is the so-called “Babylonian Captivity” six hundred years before the birth of Jesus, when many Jews were carted off to slavery by their Babylonian captors after the sack of the Jewish capital.  But the song has for many centuries also been interpreted metaphorically and morally.  That alien land, which unfortunately is too often and too frequently where we find ourselves, is a world blighted by human hate, violence, and open warfare.  “The song of the Lord” is the humdrum life of peace and sufficiency for which all surely must long and far too many cannot attain.

 

            But we did obtain a nice thick slice of it over the weekend as we celebrated the nineteenth birthday of our granddaughter Cora Louise, a college sophomore who seems headed for a major in philosophy.  We were a restaurant party of five.  In addition to Joan, me, and the birthday girl herself, we were joined by her eldest sister Sophia and Sophia’s husband Raymond.  The venue was one of the better of several Thai restaurants in our town.  It is called “Amazing Thai.”  Amazing, well, that might be pushing it just a bit, but the fare was indeed delicious, of high quality, and certainly ample, just the right thing for the dark, chilly, and rainy night that had nothing left in it of Indian Summer.  Not that it would have mattered all that much.  The essence of family events at their best is the natural feeling of shared affection, good humor, and easy and wide ranging conversation.  Old age is not without its trials (not forgetting also the tribulations, if only for rhetorical purposes), but it offers rewards one can only claim by growing old. We are all individuals, but unless we are singularly unlucky, we are not alone.  We are a part of many families, but most especially of our own family, sometimes called the nuclear family.  There are many forms in which human community has been preserved and perpetuated, and I shall disparage none.  But the mode of  overwhelming practice in the western cultures of which I am both an historical student and a living part has been socially sanctioned monogamous marriage.  My own life partner and I have had the challenges, obligations, responsibilities, high privileges and unique satisfactions of bringing into the world three remarkable children, each of whom now with a life partner has brought into the world several more of their ilk.  Children no more.  The oldest now nears sixty.  Even if I lack the biblical grape vine and the fig tree, we now have the unique pleasures of their camaraderie, and that of their children, on our bluestone patio, and on rare occasion the Amazing Thai restaurant.  To fete young Cora Louise in an atmosphere of wide-ranging, good natured, and often witty conversation, is a pleasure literally priceless.

 

            But how to sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?  For Gaza was never far from our dining table talk.  The name bubbled up from other conversations at other tables.  In any event, we ourselves brought it with us to the restaurant.  Cora’s father is both an Arab and a Jew, the son of Iraqi parents expelled from their ancestral homeland by a Jew-hating government two long generations ago.  That is a superficially "identity" way of describing him.  His colleagues and students know him as an American sinologist of international repute who has done ground-breaking work on East-West cultural contacts in the period of early modernity--often called by us "the Renaissance."  Cora's other grandparents live in Jerusalem.  She may well have immediate relatives in jeopardy for all I know.  So even in the midst of a mellow and celebratory supper, there was the sorry background music of the alien land.

 

         Most controverted issues, even ones on which intelligent people must come down more on one side than another, and perhaps overwhelming more, have some ambiguity and nuance.  For myself I find it very difficult to be an hundred-percenter on what has traditionally been called the “Arab-Israeli Conflict,” of which the War in Gaza is the most visible current manifestation.  Tolerating differences of opinion, even vehemently expressed opinion, is part of the price of existence in a world of free thought.  But what are we to make of widely bruited pronouncements by a tenured history professor at one of our great universities?  This man, a laureated expert in his specialized field and following what I regard as a sacred profession as a guide of young people, gleefully reports in a political pep rally before a bunch of them that he is exhilarated—yes, exhilarated by an attack perpetrated by barbarous fanatics with bullets and blades on women, children, geriatrics and a crowd of young peaceniks at a musical event.  Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.  Such  was the barbarism of warfare in Palestine six centuries before the Christian era.  Still current in 2023.  Exhilarated!

Constitutional Review

      

For many reasons, I am loath to write on political topics.  The chief reason is that I am not an expert on politics, or even particularly “political” in the popular sense.  Furthermore, most of us are already suffocating in the foul air of political commentary, most of it evanescent and a good deal of it annoying.   But now and again I, like so many others, do get provoked by the unintelligent, inefficient, and slothful actions of way too many of our elected representatives.  That so many such people get elected in the first place is extraordinary.  The history of our country, for all its failures as yet to honor its original hopes, has been driven by intelligence, innovation, and competence.  But our current Congress is by the standards of any self-respecting body requiring reflection and cooperation to arrive at effective joint action, simply incompetent. 

         If we really revered the Founders, we might pay more attention to the dangers that many of them saw in the excesseses of party feeling.  This particular mess was principally (though not exclusively) the work of a few fanatically self-righteous Republicans; but this few is enabled by the  pusillanimity of many others in their party.  At the top of the agenda of the piously invoked “people’s business” is self-preservation, holding onto office at whatever price.  Donald Trump is not the cause of the enfeeblement of American democracy, but the result of it.  What is wrong with American democracy is the democrats.  I do not refer here to the members of a particular political party, though they do play their role, but to the demos, the people, the electorate.  We have met the enemy, and it is definitely us.

         It was never as though the continuing existence of the United States, let alone its rise to world prominence, was a foregone conclusion from the moment they cleaned up the battlefield at Yorktown.  There is a famous anecdote concerning Benjamin Franklin recorded in the journal of a Maryland delegate to the Continental Congress.  You probably know it.  I hope it’s authentic, though it doesn’t really matter, because it is certainly true.   As the Congress completed its work, a Philadelphia lady ran into the sage philosopher on the street and asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”–“A republic,” was Franklin’s reply, “if you can keep it.’”  Well, they did keep it for a while, but it was often pretty touch and go, until by about 1858 it became obvious that for a lot of influential and unhappy campers in the South it was likely to be simply go.  Efforts to keep it had to become even more strenuous.  Was the idea of “democracy” even realistic?  In his immortal speech on the battlefield at Gettysburg—a speech more consequential even than the epic battle it memorialized, one sage auditor noted—President Lincoln characterized the still young and embattled nation as one “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the propositions that all men are created equal.”  He continued, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation , or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

         The question remains current.  History is always enriched by myth, and if the myth can contain a little something lost in translation, all the better.  The Chinese leader Zhou-en-Lai was supposedly asked what he considered the most important consequences of the Paris student “revolution” of 1968.  “Too soon to tell,” he replied.  This banal comment has become an apothegm of profound Confucian wisdom on the assumption that the question referred to the French Revolution (1789).  Because it really is too soon to tell whether our country can long endure.  The republican ideal can be kept alive only if we keep trying to refine and expand it.

“Democracy” is an imperfect system  of majority rule, not a license for minority obstruction.  In fact, Kevin McCarthy’s principal crime, in the eyes of his extreme adversaries, was the act of bipartisanship—a tepid and coerced one admittedly—that actually broke a legislative logjam, temporarily resolved the immediate problem, and allowed the House to function.  His crime was dealing with Democrats, who hold about 49% of the seats in the House and 51% of those in the Senate.  Those statistics are not of the sort to encourage any realistic, patriotic legislator of either party to claim an overwhelming mandate absolving them of the obligation of compromise, and serious compromise at that. 

That is what is required of elected representatives, but there is a prior requirement for those who elect them.  That is a certain minimal knowledge of the structures of constituted government and a certain minimal participation in their operations.  I am not talking about what is needed for a college degree in political science.  I am talking about knowing what the three constitutional branches of government are and do, the distinctiveness of our bicameral legislature, the names and broadly espoused policies of our own elected representatives, and at least a little about the systems operating in our own state and local governments.  Study after study has revealed vast swathes of the American electorate to be ignorant of these most elementary of matters. 

A march of malcontent fascists with tiki torches spewing vile into the streets of Charlottesville is hardly a good advertisement for the state of American democracy; yet I doubt that the Union troops at Shiloh would have found in them the mortal threats to our national existence that a good deal of over-heated rhetoric coming from the punditocracy now suggests.  Those men knew what a real mortal threat was.  The tiki-torchers are at best, and worst,  the emblems of serious political pathology.  But there are upwards of three hundred and thirty millions of Americans.  Surely you can find three hundred of them to march in support of any benighted idea you come up with, including axe murder.  We need a serious national “back to basics” political review.  I think what we need is three or thirty million of us marching in support of calling for a Constitutional Convention.  A certain amount has happened in the political, technological, and industrial world since the late eighteenth century.  You have probably noticed.  The authors of the Constitution hoped they were enshrining some immortal ideas, but not even the pious among them aimed for a sacred book.  The Founders believed that amendment would be continuous and frequent.  Some argued for a constitutional convention every five years by statute for purposes of review and probable updating.  For many civil libertarians the most important part of this most important document is the so-called “Bill of Rights,” the first ten amendments added to the document virtually while its ink was still tacky.  You might say the sainted Founders forgot the most important part their first try.  But all too soon a brilliantly original and experimental document became for many a kind of textual fetish.  One of the grievances of the so-called Russian Orthodox “Old Believers” was the orthographic modernization of the spelling of the name of Jesus in a seventeenth-century Bible.  So easily can the letter stifle the spirit.  We can do better—which is the meaning of the word amendment—but will we?

 

 

 

 

 

Sit and Weep

 

After a week of screaming headlines and an inundation of appalling, indeed frightening newspaper articles, gruesome photographs, and television reports, we still have no coherent sense of the disasters playing out in the Middle East, and no confident sense of likely developments in a setting of such volatility and unknown unknowns.  Just at the moment the focus is on the horrendous death and destruction being visited by Israeli air power as the ground forces of the IDF stand by  near the barrier fence for an expected massive land invasion of Gaza.

 

The barbarous acts committed by Hamas against young children, including babes in arms, have incited a special revulsion in many, and what I regard as a perplexing silence or even semi-justification among others.  There is every possibility that open warfare could expand to Israel’s northern border (with Lebanon).  There are many other dangerous complexities.

 

A few years ago I published a book on a topic that is likely to seem to most people arcane rather than simply specialized.*  The subject was a brilliant religious poem by the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões, who died in 1580.  The poem is a commentary in 365 lines of polished verse on the nine verses of the psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the Waters of Babylon”), number 137 in most English bibles.  The psalm is in the voice of a Hebrew captive, part of a group being transported by their captors from their sacked capital to Babylon.  At some point along the river the captors ask (or order) the Jewish captives to perform one of their traditional songs.  But the speaker declares this impossible.  For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.  How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?  If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.  If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.  I provide the full text of the psalm in a modern English version (New International) at the bottom of the post.

 

Portuguese literary scholars have often called this poem “Zion and Babylon,” the two cities (Zion being another name for Jerusalem) constituting a binary opposition with obvious moral dimensions—and some not so obvious ones.  It has been very highly praised. The Spanish poet  Lope de Vega (d.1635) called it “the pearl of all poetry.” As the psalm is itself a beautiful song about music, it is hardly surprising that is has captured the interest of dozens of musicians from Palestrina to Bob Marley.  I well remember when I first saw the poem. It was on a long flight from California to New York.  I had been reading Camões’s famous imperial epic (the Lusiads) in the splendid verse translation of Leonard Bacon (Hispanic Society of America, 1950).  In order to give his readers a demonstration of the poet’s prowess in forms other than the epic, Bacon appended at the back of his book “A Note on ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’” along with his own translation of the poem.  Reading it had an electrifying effect on me.  In the popular expression, I was blown away.  I spent several hours of the flight studying the English text.

 

Expanding nine verses of biblical Latin into 365 lines of Portuguese redondilha gave Camões a pretty free hand.  So different are the techniques of medieval exegetes from modern practice that following its thought is not always easy for us.  They prefer the allegorical, hidden meanings of Scripture to the apparent literal meaning of the text.  Any modern reader of Super flumina has to be startled if not repelled by the psalm’s final two verses celebrating infanticide.  Bacon wrote thus:  “The poem is, of course, an expansion of the 137^th Psalm, every verse of which, with one exception, is quoted in it.  That Camões left out the conclusion of the psalm has an interest.  One is apt to believe that his mind and heart were revolted by the barbaric savagery of the 6^th Century before Christ, but in any case such a piece of sadism would not have harmonized with the Poet’s visionary ecstasy.”  Actually, the poet spends eight ten-line stanzas “translating” these lines! But as he regards them as allegorical—betokening the obligation of all believers to root out and destroy all the moral imperfections within their own souls by smashing them against “the Stone that was Christ,”—he pays scant attention to the literal sense certainly intended by the psalm’s unknown author.  I say “unknown author.”  Some Renaissance exegetes insisted that King David was the author.  They knew David died centuries before the Babylonian Captivity, but claimed that he had written this song as prophecy.  And prophecy of a sorry sort it is.

 

Today we look on, appalled, at the Slaughter of the Innocents in the kibbutz villages of southern Israel and in the bombed-out buildings of Gaza City.  Twenty-five hundred years without much moral progress to show.  How long, o Lord, how long?

 

                                   

   

 

*Luís de Camões as  Scriptural Exegete (Tamesis/Boydell and Brewer: Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester NY, 2017)

 

Psalm 137 [Super flumina Babylonis]

¹ By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
    when we remembered Zion.
² There on the poplars
    we hung our harps,
³ for there our captors asked us for songs,
    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How can we sing the songs of the Lord
    while in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, Jerusalem,
    may my right hand forget its skill.
⁶ May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
    my highest joy.

⁷ Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
    on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
    “tear it down to its foundations!”
⁸ Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
    happy is the one who repays you
    according to what you have done to us.
⁹ Happy is the one who seizes your infants
    and dashes them against the rocks.

The Reading Group

 

Youth is wasted on the young.  Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said that, and I suppose he probably did.  But it’s one of those supposed “quotations” that I have seen only as a quotation, and it has no firm location in a primary text that I can cite.  I have a heretical addition to this thought: Education is wasted on the young.  That’s sort of a joke, obviously, and hardly an idea that someone like myself, whose life career has been teaching young people, is likely actually to believe.   But it points to a truth of which I have become ever more convinced over the years, and especially since I retired from teaching.

 

            It is this:  the four-year liberal arts curriculum that a large number of Americans have experienced is a beginning, not an end, a foundation, not a finished edifice.  How many clichéd graduation talks each year have as their structuring cliché the fact that the word Commencement means “beginning”.  The thing about clichés, though, is they are mostly true.  What you learned in college demands continual renewal and replenishment, sort of like putting more money on your Metrocard.  Take Hamlet, for example.  I think it is important work of English literature, and everybody ought to read it.  I have spent a lot of time teaching it to eighteen-year-olds, and reading their sometimes brilliant essays about it.  But what is an eighteen-year-old really likely to know about the “the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune”?  It is only when you yourself personally encounter some of life’s hardest knocks and most painful abrasions that you really begin to see the bigger picture.  At least that has been my experience.

 

            I have been moved to think about all this because of a pleasant experience I had about a week ago.  I retired at the age of seventy mainly for my own personal reasons, but I still want to claim a little civic virtue in the decision.  You may be aware that for many years now young Ph.Ds in the humanities have had difficulties finding faculty positions commensurate with their training, or perhaps any positions at all.   I think it is often self-indulgent, and in many instances simply selfish, for professors to hang onto their tenured positions into their later seventies, and in some instances, their eighties.  But of course I did miss teaching, and welcomed incidental opportunities as they came along.  Obviously, I was already aware of various civic “Adult Schools” and other organizations in our town devoted to “Continuing Education” or “Life-Long Learning”—the monickers vary—and had taught in several on an occasional basis.  But I had been unaware of the scale of these activities.  The Princeton Adult School claims to offer 250 courses a year to a total enrollment of about four thousand!  That was approximately the size of the Princeton undergraduate body during most of my career.  I was attracted to a slightly smaller but in my view classier operation called the Evergreen Forum.  In it I taught numerous courses, some of them related to the particular book I had most recently published, but others devoted to major authors like Dante and Chaucer.  Just about the time I was already beginning to think that I was a bit long in the tooth for this kind of teaching as well, fickle Fortune made two malign interventions.  I fell seriously and for a time alarmingly ill; and then the whole country, indeed world, became the victim of a protracted viral epidemic. Teaching days really were over.

 

            But I had by then reflected on what was so pleasurable about my experience in teaching fellow “seniors”.  Partly it was simply the confidence that they had heard about World War II and knew who the principal combatants were.  That is, they tended to have knowledge based in an already comparative longevity.  But it is also a matter of attitude. These people do want to be there; they are interested in the subject, or sincerely interested in getting interested.  They also are nice, genuinely amiable people.  The nice experience to which I earlier alluded was an invitation from the well-named Reading Group, a local club of well-educated, dedicated readers.  The club seems now to be composed entirely of women, though not, I think, by statute or design.  Few of the members are as old as I, but some are, and all are seriously “adult”.

 

Their mode of procedure is as follows. They pick a book,  some agreed upon title of general interest that has created a buzz in the book reviews or otherwise become prominent.  Everyone in the group reads the book.  I presume there is general chit-chat about this book among members; but some if not all of the selected books become the subject of a general meeting.  At it some allegedly knowledgeable person gives a short talk about the chosen title and/or broader literary and historical issues it may raise. Sometime last year a friend who is a club member asked me if I would give a talk relating to a new Princeton University Press title that was enjoying a large degree of “crossover” success in book stores: Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath.   Marion Turner is a famous Oxford professor, author of an impressive biography of Chaucer.  The Wife of Bath is probably even more famous—one of the most memorable characters in English literature, and certainly in the Canterbury Tales.    Of course I agreed, and as the proposed date was months in the future, didn’t think a lot more about it.  I had given such a talk to this group once before.  Although I do not remember much about the event, it would have been the early 2010s because the book I was talking about was Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, published in 2011.

 

But time does move on, and by the last week in September I had to turn my mind to the task.  I think it was a pretty decent talk; it was certainly generously received.  But it wasn’t dumbed down.  If you are going to talk about the Wife of Bath you have to face up honestly to some very complicated aspects of the medieval literature of asceticism.  It is nearly miraculous that Chaucer could make a masterpiece, at once comic and profound, out of such materials.  My audience was not a graduate seminar in medieval literature, but a group of mature, very well read general readers.  They were not merely capable of tolerating some rather arcane “background”, they seemed eager to engage with it.  Reading is a cooperative venture between author and reader.  A good read is much less like eating lunch—like it, don’t like it—than like having a conversation with an interesting friend.  We all want to get something out of a book we read; but the degree to which we can do so depends in part on what we ourselves are willing and able to put into it.  And that in turn depends in part on the wisdom gained from life experience and the reading of many other books.  I guarantee you that reading Hamlet when you are fifty-eight is a different experience from reading it at eighteen.  And giving a lecture at eighty-seven is a different experience from giving one at twenty-seven.  Indeed, a lecture is like a mini-book.  The word lecture itself is French for “reading” and preserves the memory of the teaching methods in the medieval schools.  Anyway, my thanks to the Reading Group and to all reading groups.  That there are hundreds, possibly thousands of such self-animating reading clubs and study groups throughout the land is a comfort in what so often seems a coarsening national cultural landscape.  Indeed "Reading Group" sounds   like a fair title for civilization generally.