Los Angeles, Burning

 

 

On Saturday our excellent friend Frank drove us into New York to visit the Sienese painting exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.  The exhibition will be up for only a couple more weeks, so that it was perhaps a little more crowded than I would have liked, but of course the paintings were magnificent.  It is a matter of wonders.  The paintings themselves are individual treasures, and it is wonderful to me that, even in old age, I am still privileged to see such beautiful things entirely new to me.  Ordinarily, a visit like this would inspire me to write a little essay about them.  Even so this week my attention has to be directed elsewhere.  It must be comparatively rare for a couple of octogenarians living in a quiet corner of an east-coast college town to be privy to fairly earth-shattering events playing out some twenty-five hundred miles to the west, but that is the situation we are in.  I am referring to the destructive wildfires, fanned by strong winds, that have been hop-scotching through some of the tonier areas of northwest Los Angeles, and particularly the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades.  They have captured the whole world's attention, but we perhaps have a special interest.  Immediately to the east of some of the incinerated mansions is the Getty Museum, which is distinct from though obviously related to the Getty Villa, a huge waterfront house that back in the day was the tycoon’s private residence.  After additions and modifications the Villa now houses most of the institution’s significant holdings in ancient Greek and Roman artefacts.  Our daughter Katherine is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and among the most fundamental of her responsibilities, and certainly an awesome one, is the guardianship of these world treasures.  Both the Getty Center and the Getty Villa have been threatened—indeed continue to be threatened—by the fires.  Naturally these circumstances have given us a particular interest in the ongoing national calamity playing out in and around Los Angeles.

 

Between the classical holdings of the Villa and the much larger and eclectic ones in the Getty Museum on the main campus—an enormous museum surrounded by specialized libraries, conservation ateliers, etc.—a serious fragment of the artistic heritage of our human species has been under threat by wildfire.  One can hardly imagine the urgency and anxiety that Katy and her colleagues have been facing—so far with good success, thank God.  And speaking of the deity, the concept of the act of God—that is, a disturbing event for which no specific individual human responsibility can be plausibly assigned—seems to be waning in the collective litigious consciousness.  The mayor of Los Angeles is facing finger-wagging for having been in Ghana at the time disaster struck, though it is not clear to me that her absence exacerbated an eighty-mile-per hour firestorm, let alone was its cause.  Cnut couldn’t control the tides, and he was a king.  We hope for demonstrable competence in our elected officials, but too many of them are satisfied with the first and indispensable ability: to get elected.  Even so I would hope that the rancor of our recent election season might end, and that we might sympathize with, perhaps even grieve for, our fellow countrymen in such manifest distress.

 

But this cataclysm has set me on a trip down memory lane, for as a kid I lived briefly in various places in California—including Los Angeles, though not in one of its classier quarters.  We lived in the neighborhood called Westchester, at the time one of the city’s modest but salubrious areas, though very near the airport which even then (circa 1950) seemed to have large, noisy planes coming or going every five minutes.  It was a simpler world.  I remember that my father bought a new Chevrolet—the only brand new car I had ever seen up close—for what seemed to me the astronomical price of a thousand dollars!  At that time I had no first-hand experience of the gold coast neighborhoods that have been in the news on account of their actual or prospective incineration.  The O. J. Simpson trial brought the prophetically named Brentwood to the world’s attention.  And I had a distinguished medievalist colleague and friend who taught at UCLA and whom I visited a couple of times at his fabulous house on toney Outpost Drive where, I learned, several of his near neighbors were movie stars and celebrity “adjacents”.  There was a later episode that for a while had the fancy houses of fancy people in that part of L.A. featured in the national press: that of the “Bling Ring”.  A group of overprivileged young people valiantly battled against their existential ennui by breaking into the houses of rich and famous people, more or less incidentally stealing valuable garments and other gaudy upscale souvenirs.   As I recall, they made a particular victim of Paris Hilton, confusing me, as I at first thought that was a hotel but was actually a person.  Indeed, I believe I saw just yesterday a report that Ms. Hilton’s house has burned to the ground, though it might not have been the same residence as that of the Bling Ring era.

 

The social, cultural, and economic prestige of a comparatively small number of the fire’s victims has attracted the attention of the popular press; but that should not disguise the fact that this terrible event is a true national human disaster affecting many thousands of our fellow citizens.  Indeed, it may take a good deal of time to absorb the implications for one of the world’s great cities.  And while it may not be a second Lisbon earthquake—the terrible event that challenged the bourgeoning optimism of the heirs of the European Enlightenment—it is necessarily a lugubrious reminder of enduring human limitation and fragility in a world we only pretend to own.

 

 

 

 

 

Words and Things

Costa Arms 

Many of the most stimulating books I have ever read were written more than a millennium ago, but in thinking about old books, and especially in trying to teach them to undergraduates, I often found they benefit from some introductory explication.  This essay will have a modest topic—words and things and some of the relationships between words and things.  I want to start with a book written by Saint Augustine at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries.  Augustine’s book has a simple and possibly misleading title, De doctrina christiana, On Christian Doctrine.  A better title might be Teaching in a Christian Manner.  Its subject, to use a very fancy word, is hermeneutics, or the interpretive principles that should inform reading, in this instance the study of the Bible.  You might describe it is as a preparatory handbook for people trying to read, understand, and teach the Bible.  But its general principles are relevant even to my light-hearted subject: rebus puzzles.

 

This little book of  Augustine’s theories was produced in his role as a Christian theologian—meaning, for him as a student of the Bible—but it has been admired by students of linguistics in general.  The terms “semiotics” is a catch-all term for the various kinds of sign systems with which we are familiar, among which  human language is obviously prominent.  With regard to sign systems in general, Augustine makes a distinction between natural and conventional signs.  His book begins with the assertion that all teaching (doctrina) is necessarily about one of two subjects: things and signs, res and signa in Latin.  By very rough analogy you might think of res/things as the world of science, and of signa/signs as the humanities.  He makes a second binary distinction.  There are two categories of signs, natural signs and conventional signs.  There is no smoke without fire—that is, smoke “signals” fire in all places in the world.  It is a natural sign of fire.  But the word fire which, signals the same reality as smoke does, is a word in the English language, its meaning agreed to by convention among English-speakers but by no means “naturally” obvious to those who do not speak English.   Other words “for” fire include ignis, pyr, fuego, ogień, brand, and so forth, but they “mean” fire only within the delimited range of conventionally agreed upon shared languages.  Despite what many Americans seem to think, simply raising the decibel level of English to a shout does not make it universally comprehensible.  Nobody "naturally” knows what the word “fire” signifies.

 

                       “Gift” is a pleasant word in English.  In German the 

lexically identical word means “poison”.  So if somebody gives 

you a gift, hope it is in Birmingham rather than Berlin.  For 

there are many distinct human languages.  The common 

domestic animal we call in English a dog is called a chien 

in French, a perro in Spanish, and a hund in German.  There 

is no universally understood word for dog, not even “bow-

wow”—though there is an actual “bow-wow theory” that

posits the origins of human language in the imitation of

birdsong and animal noises!  Human language is a sign 

system.  

 

                  But as someone interested in pictorial as well as linguistic signs, my mind just now turns to a genre of signs in which the pictorial and the verbal are intentionally  yoked.  I refer to rebus constructions.  The word rebus is in Latin the dative or ablative plural of res (meaning things).  So a rebus is a verbal construction in, by, or with things  The following is a dictionary definition of a rebus: “a representation of words or syllables by pictures of objects or by symbols whose names resemble the intended words or syllables in sound; also, a riddle made up of such pictures or symbols”

 

Of course, rebus puzzles are founded not merely in language, but in particular languages.  Many old aristocratic families in Europe, who often had Latin mottoes, also constructed rebuses as well.  Some of these will seem far-fetched to us now.  But in theory a rebus can be constructed in any written tongue.  In English many common words are homophones—that is, words which, whatever variations they may display in their written forms are indistinguishable in their pronunciation: for example, the first person singular pronoun (I) and the ocular organ (eye).  If you wish, you may add the now mainly obsolete expression of assent or agreement, as in “the ayes have it.”

 

On the south coast of Long Island is the old town of Islip.  Its European settlers arrived early, and it claims its civic foundation in 1683.  In Old England the Islips were a many-branched family, and there is at least one village of that name I have visited (in Oxfordshire) and some others recorded on maps.  The Islip family had several notable branches.  I believe that an Islip was one of the last abbots of Westminster Abbey before the dissolution, for example.  Today the people who live on Long Island are more likely to call the place “Iz-Lip” rather than “I-Slip,” but check out the official town coat of arms.  You do need to know that as a technical botanical term the word slip denotes to a small plant cutting, or leafy twig, especially one made for purposes of grafting. 

                                               

 

There is endless fascination, most of it pretty light-hearted, in rebus constructions, which might fairly be described as visual puns, and this thought can bring me to my slightly digressive conclusion.   The words name, nomen, and noun are first cousins, and many rebus constructions exploit the relationship.  According to the poet Pope puns are the lowest form of humor, but some very witty people have not hesitated to play around with their own names in serious ways.  The heraldic shield at the top of this essay is that of the very extensive clan of Mediterranean families called “Costa,” a word with several meanings in several Romance languages.  But the primary meaning in Latin is rib.  The possibly strange marks on the shield are meant to signify the residual bones of cleanly picked beef or pork ribs!  The name was frequently adopted by or forced upon Spanish and Portuguese conversos—Jewish families converting to Christianity by election or by coercion!  The English “metaphysical” poets of the seventeenth century are so-called because of the sometimes extravagant “wit” of their linguistic formulations.  The greatest of them, John Donne, in what one might call a “rebus-adjacent” poem wrote one of his deepest theological meditations in a deceptively simple three-stanza poem built upon his own surname as past participle, with an implicit pun on the Latin word perfectus. meaning complete, finished, or done.

 

John Donne: A Hymn to God the Father

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

 

 

 

 

 

New France & New Year

Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal

 

            Primo, our heartiest New Year greeting to all.  We have just returned from the journey advertised in my “Christmas” post, a brief visit to the Montreal branch of our family—son Luke, daughter in law Melanie, and grandkids John Henry and Hazel.  Most clichés concerning grandchildren happen to be true.  They are delightful, and they grow very fast.  If they live at a distance from you, you probably don’t see them often enough.  So our reunion was joyous.  The holiday was quite white, deeply chill, and marvelously mellow, its chief achievements being gastronomy, the completion of an impossible jigsaw puzzle from piece one to piece one thousand, and attendance at one or two (I being one of the slacking oners) festival eucharists at Christ Church Cathedral.  There was a nearly Dickensian richness to our festivities, but mainly without the Dickensian schmaltz.  It is hardly more than four hundred miles from our house to theirs, but age and infirmity conspire to make the journey a real trial for me, and therefore something of an accomplishment.  I have pointed out before in these pages the linguistic spoor that links French travail (labor, work) and English travail (taxing difficulty, the pains of a birthing mother).  In earlier epochs almost all journeys required hard traveling.  But in earlier times grandchildren generally lived close by.

 

French Canada is not far away, but it is always surprising to me.  The kids, who are of course in local schools are now naturally bilingual.  Unsurprisingly, our recent American election has generated some awkward international results, and the presumption of some major international politicians is often enough to shock us. Being a good neighbor is not always easy, and being a neighbor to the United States has its special challenges.  Somewhat more than a century past the revolutionary Mexican President Porfirio Diaz thus lamented his country’s situation: “Poor Mexico!  So far from God, so close to the United States!”  In our day Donald Trump, whose activities as a troll qualify him for a prime residential lot beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, has taken as his target the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau; but his crude hauteur may seem a model of moderation when compared with the behavior of some Renaissance potentates, secular and religious alike.  Naturally certain episodes from history invade my historical mind.  Consider for a moment the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) brokered by Pope Alexander VI between the kings of Spain and Portugal.  (Tordesillas is a little place in north-central Spain not far from Valladolid.)  The treaty established a longitudinal line running from the top of the globe to its bottom, 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. This line divided the known world into two areas, with Spain claiming ownership of all non-Christian lands west of the line, and Portugal claiming all non-Christian lands east of the line. 

 

The principal maritime powers in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century were Spain and Portugal, both of which had been busy claiming insular properties newly discovered or at least newly colonized in the North Atlantic Ocean.  The Western coast of Africa was already somewhat known territory to Iberian sailors when Columbus (a naval agent of the Spanish monarchy) threw a spanner into the works by coming across what he assumed to be India but was in actual fact the huge land mass comprising the continents of North and South America.

 

The Pope thought that it was important for the peace of Christendom that the rivalry between the Iberians be regulated; so with staggering presumption he proposed that all the “new” territories being found in the “New World” be equably divided between them for the purposes of pacific commerce and of course evangelism.  

 

This may have been the most stupendous real estate transaction ever effected.   Quite apart from the absurdity of assuming a freehold claim to two vast continents, the arrangement had what seems in retrospect one glaring peculiarity: the peculiarity of Brazil.  Because of the way Brazil’s upper eastern bulge extends far into the South Atlantic, it was counted among the new provinces of Portugal rather than of Spain.  I doubt that the principals realized Brazil was also destined to make up roughly half of the total land mass of South America.  This scheme, though satisfactory to the Iberian potentates, failed to satisfy some other important Europeans who, by chance, did not live in Spain or Portugal.  Needless to say, what the large populations who already lived in the Americas thought was not an issue of discussion. And it is only natural that the Pope’s tidy plan failed to satisfy a number of important players in Europe who had been left out of it.

 

And in fact the histories of European expansion in the northern sections of the New World would be determined not primarily by a contest between the Iberians but by a later one between France and England.  Competition in land claims among the European powers was brisk but such claims could in the long run be secured only by significant colonization and credible military backing.  France’s plausible land claims in North America were enormous, including Newfoundland and Labrador, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi River. This land they called New France. 

 

But the French colonial experience in terms of Francophone settlement in America never approached the level of French territorial claims.  Tentative Francophone settlement was effectively limited to a few places in southern Illinois and, especially, Mississippi River and coastal sites surrounding New Orleans.  Actual French-speakers are few in contemporary Louisiana, and the number is declining rapidly.  The contrast with Spanish speakers is dramatic.  It is significant that the huge American land purchase of 1803 (more than eight hundred thousand square miles of land) is called the Louisiana Purchase despite the fact that the area called “Louisiana” is a small fraction of the land purchased.  Maybe this was history’s second greatest land deal.  And since there was an actual exchange for money—however paltry in retrospect—it plausibly can be described as a land deal rather than a land-grab!

 

We tend perhaps to think of our early American history from too narrow a view, but our national formation was in part an episode in the large and complex picture of the intense European rivalries working their way out on the North American Continent.  The major work of one of America’s greatest early historians, Francis Parkman, the erudite and eloquent author of France and England in North America (1892), is as exciting a read today as when it was published in the nineteenth century.  And Parkman is in print in the Library of America.

 

 

Christmas Greetings

Lukas van Leyden

    “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”  You may regard this utterance itself as a bit hobgoblinish, but of course it is not my own but that of one of America’s first great thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson.  I invoke it now to salve my own conscience and perhaps attenuate potential embarrassment.  I have for many years now been rather punctilious in mounting a essay on a regular weekly schedule--more or less on the basis of "come hell or high water".  What I have tried to transform into  a moral virtue I now perceive rather along the lines of a foolish consistency, resulting not infrequently in essays of more than usually dubious usefulness.

    So here’s what’s up.  Later this morning Joan and I are flying to Montreal to spend the Christmas holiday with Luke and Melanie and our grandkids John Henry and Hazel.  Travel even so modest as this is a big deal for us old folks, and I want to devote my full attention to getting to Montreal and back and, more importantly, to enjoying our time there.  Although I am in theory as glad as ever to learn and to teach, there will be no post on Wednesday the 25^th, Christmas day.  The odds are perhaps better for Wednesday, January 1^st, 2025, but even that is provisional.  So let me take the opportunity right now to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  For what it’s worth I am also throwing to the winds a positively epic unbroken streak on Duolingo.  Why do I have the odd feeling, so portentous in my own minds,  that perhaps these developments are actually ones the world will little note, nor long remember, as somebody or another memorably put it?

 

Urn Burial

 

 

Joan is a member of a club in town called the “Old Guard,” a name perhaps suggesting the age but not necessarily the distinction of its membership.  It is in fact a group of men and women of retirement age, many of whom have had distinguished careers in what I shall call the world and have carried into their retirements not merely a great deal of varied life experience but intellectual vigor, imagination, and sociability.  I am not a member, though I now and again scrounge an invitation from my spouse to the weekly lectures that seem to be the group’s chief raison d’être.

            The lecturers come from far and wide, but this is a college town, and Princeton faculty members are not infrequently recruited.  A slightly odd feature of faculty life is that though you are surrounded by eminences in many fields, you do not ordinarily get to hear them lecture. 

The lecturer at the most recent meeting, Anthony Grafton, an internationally famous historian, who is in his last year before retirement, happens also to be my long-time friend and close neighbor.  He is a brilliant scholar and extraordinary teacher.  In this dazzling and highly entertaining lecture, he drew on materials from a recent book co-authored with Maren Elisabeth Schwab and entitled The Art of Discovery in Renaissance Europe: How Scholars and Artists Learned to Dig into their Past (Princeton, 2022).  It was about the birth and early history of antiquarianism and the antiquaries who practiced it.  Tony was dealing mainly with Italian and other continental scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, but he brought to my mind an eminent Englishman of the seventeenth.  I refer to the Norwich physician-philosopher-theologian Sir Thomas Browne, the famous author of the Religio Medici.  Slightly less known, though inescapably brought to my mind by Tony’s wonderful lecture, is Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Brief Discourse on the Sepulchral Urns late found in Norfolk (1658), generally regarded among the greatest monuments of English baroque prose.  One early European mortuary practice was the burial of the remains of cremations in small caskets, boxes and ceramic vase-like jars.  This practice has survived in many cultures, and could be said to be flourishing as cremation has become more commonplace in western countries.  Browne’s title tells it all while telling nothing.  His essay starts out being “about” some ancient burial urns found at Walsingham, Norfolk, in 1658. but soon turns to life, death, and the Meaning of It All.  Browne is widely admired as the greatest writer of baroque English in our literature.  In a passage redolent of the ambiguous anthropology touched upon in last week’s essay, Browne thus summarizes the human condition: “But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.”

 

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)

 

Even for a very great writer, the exhibition of mannered language runs the risk of peer censoriousness.  Ben Jonson was highly critical of the language of the Faerie Queene.  “Spenser,” he wrote, "in affecting the ancients, writ no language: yet I would have him read for his matter.”  Another censorious Johnson (Samuel) made similar remarks about Browne’s prose.  Hydriotaphia cannot be said to be written in no language, but it’s English that no other major writer ever achieved or even very nearly imitated.  The learned neologism of the title itself (a combination of Greek “water jug” and “burial”) is a typical Brownism.

 

        

 Iron Age burial urn and contemporary religious ashes urn

 

Browne was an antiquary but a most philosophic one.  He was genuinely interested in the funeral urns to be sure, but more as a moralist than an archeologist.  There are other notable examples in English literature.  Shelley, to a certain degree, was interested in the actual Egyptian monuments behind the idea of an imaginary statue of the Pharaoh “Ozymandias”.  But the subject of the poem is the vanity of human wishes.

According to Max Weber (and many others) the chief project of the Enlightenment, or at least its collateral inevitability, was “the disenchantment of the world.”  Plausible, but bad news to a medievalist, for there was of course considerable loss among the gain.  “There was a time,” wrote Wordsworth of his childhood, “when meadow, grove and stream, the earth, and every common sight to me did seem appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream”.  But--and what a sad but it is--“The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”  In another place: “Physician art thou? one all eyes, Philosopher! a fingering slave, One that would peep and botanize Upon his mother's grave?”

Prof. Grafton made the point that especially in Renaissance Italy, where ancient ruins were nearly everywhere, there was a strong tendency to associate new discoveries of old tombs and burial sites with specific famous ancient people.  The antiquaries were not big on unknown soldiers.  In my own researches I ran across several medieval tales concerning the grave of the poet Ovid—in reality a site entirely unknown and unknowable—a poetical tomb that was conveniently mobile throughout upper Italy.  (If one had to guess about Ovid’s actual burial site, as one indeed does have to, a better bet  would be coastal Romania.)  The medieval legend of his tomb has several versions, but the core narrative is this: two priests, students, or other literate types are wandering along some Italian via or another and come upon a tomb clearly marked PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO and try, with surprisingly easy success, to conjure up the long dead poet’s animated spirit.  They want to ask him a question.  “Please tell us, Sir,” they ask, “Which was the best line you ever wrote and which the worst?”   Old Ovid replies with two pithy lines, both of which are genuine and (this being Ovid after all) are about sex.  I’ll give the lines in abbreviated but accurate paraphrase.  The worst line: the great God decrees that whatever feels good is good.  The best line: It is virtuous to abstain even from lawful joys.  The moral calculus, of course is that of medieval asceticism.  But it is surely a rare example—I at least know of no other—of literary criticism offered not upon but from the grave.

It is not surprising, perhaps, that great historians have taken as their subject matter the written works of such of their predecessors who have written about the past.  The history of written history and of those who wrote it is endlessly fascinating.  Thomas Browne was a medicus, of the tribe “physician” that by Wordsworth’s time could invoke the scathing lines I cited two paragraphs above.  But his world was still sufficiently enchanted to invite his investigations into the mystery of “fiveness” and to speculate about the spiritual meaning of the scriptural water jars in the story of Jesus’s first miracle (John 2), the Greek word being Latinized in the Vulgate as hydrias.  One hardly knows whether to call this mode of thought semi-medieval or semi-modern; but the prose in which is it explicated is delightful.

 

Human Nature

 

Two weeks ago I published a little piece about Boethius.  I had been stimulated to do so by the announcement of a forthcoming mini-conference marking the 1500^th anniversary of the poet-philosopher’s death.  That conference, sponsored by our Classics Department, took place toward the end of last week, and I was able to be in attendance, much to my intellectual profit.  It was immensely encouraging in the face of all the chatter about the eclipse of the humanities in our liberal arts institutions.  That the small seminar room in which it was held was uncomfortably full is a very good sign of the robust health of the humanities.  I expected a Times headline: “At Princeton, Standing Room Only for Sixth-Century Neo-Platonist”.

 

Having already offered my widow’s mite on Boethius himself, I shall now attempt to  do the same on the topic of his apparent concept of human nature.  For that is one of the major if mainly implicit subjects of his great best-seller, the Consolation of Philosophy.  Boethius was actually a theologian, though he wrote his Consolation in the guise of a secular philosopher.  The metaphoric structure of the Consolation is founded in the idea that Lady Philosophy is a wise healer/teacher dealing with a very ill patient whose malady stems from his oblivion of his own true nature.  Lady Philosophy begins her diagnostic interrogation by asking Boethius whether he is aware that he is a man (he is so aware).  Having further heard his opinion that he is a man, she asks whether he can define what that is.  His answer: “A mortal rational animal…and nothing more.”  This answer appalls Lady Philosophy because of its materialism.  Where is the soul?  For us the concept of the soul is mainly if not entirely metaphorical: the battle for the soul of the nation, etc.  But in the old psychology soul (anima) was an absolute if immaterial reality, that which was the unique special constituent of the human species, both a feature and a proof of man’s immortality.

 

One of the most consequential medieval popes, Innocent III (d. 1216), wrote a kind of anthropological diptych, one volume extolling the dignity of human nature and a second excoriating its depravity.  It perhaps tells us something that only the second survives.  It is called De miseria humanae conditionis, which even the unLatinated can see looks pretty grim.  Chaucer translated it as Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde—a coffin-table book, perhaps?  The more positive view has its own rich literature of course, wonderfully delineated in a classic study by a Harvard English Professor, Herschel Baker, The Dignity of Man: Studies in the Persistence of an Idea (1947).  Baker’s book is endlessly fascinating in its presentation of the traditional old European theory of man’s nature as sacramental, that is, having both an outward physical body and an invisible spiritual core.  Anybody interested in our earlier literature, especially Shakespeare, Cervantes, and other such Renaissance giants, will benefit from reading Baker’s book.

 

We often seem to think that the decisive progress toward the “modern” in Western thought is a feature of the Renaissance, but I put my money on the Eighteenth Century.  “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man”—so go the famous lines from Alexander Pope (the neo-classical poet, no relative of any of the several Pope Alexanders).   That was in his “Essay on Man” in the 1730s.  Somewhat later the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, opined that “Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular.”  

 

J. H. Van den Berg

 

            I cannot believe this is true; at least if it is, I have been barking up the wrong tree for many decades, a possibility by no means to be dismissed out of hand.  Of course, brilliant writers have been writing about human nature from the dawn of recorded human history, and as often as not they have been more concerned to show its consistency than its variety. But I am more in tune with the Dutch psychologist Jan Henrik Van den Berg in his very challenging book The Changing Nature of Man (1956).  Part of our difficulty in understanding—understanding, that is, as opposed to confidently misunderstanding them—is our natural tendency to apply the contemporary mental categories that for us are virtually instinctive to situations in the remote past.  But as my own greatest teacher was wont to say, “You cannot play hopscotch before the rules for hopscotch are invented”.  We may safely assume that blood was circulating through the human body before 1628, when that fact was “discovered” by William Harvey.  But that truth is a fairly recent discovery in terms of the long history of world literature.  We cannot expect medieval literary references to the heart, of which there are very many indeed, to reflect the attitudes of modern cardiology.

 

Psycho-history, or “mentalities” as the French like to call it, is a topic nearly infinite, but I want to scratch another half inch of its surface by mentioning the work of Julian Jaynes.  By chance I was personally interacting frequently with Julian beginning about 1970, when he was a research psychologist at Princeton and I was in the early years of my career.   We were both deeply interested in undergraduate life, and in the promise we saw in the idea of the residential college—of the sort that eventually has become universal on our campus.  (The residential college system creates coherent subgroups among an undergraduate body of a size to foster a wide variety of intellectual and cultural activities, such as theater, musical groups, or community action volunteers, at what might be called local scale.)  Julian was the first faculty Master of the Woodrow Wilson Society, later Wilson College, of which I was the first regular faculty director.  The system, consisting of seven separate colleges, is now universal.  Jaynes was officially a researcher attached to the Psychology Department.  We all knew that he was writing some kind of ambitious book, concerning which he was so evasive as to lead us to believe it was a pipe dream rather than a bibliographical reality.  But then in 1976 it suddenly burst upon the literary world: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).  For a while it cut a pretty broad swath, and it (unlike Julian himself, alas) is still very much alive.  There is even a Julian Jaynes Society.  I shall not try to tell you what is in it, or to pretend that I even fully understand the argument.  But I can and do use the professorial dodge of recommending that you read it for yourself.  It is in one oblique way a literary study.  He uses the classical Homeric materials to posit a dramatic hypothesis about a profound historical change in the operations of the human mind.

 

Julian Jaynes reunifying a mind

 

 

 

 

 

Academic Palms

 

            As I have now written about eight hundred weekly posts, I have to forgive myself for forgetting most of them and, no doubt, inadvertently repeating subjects now and then.  Inadvertent but inevitable: I have nowhere near eight hundred ideas.  This week, however, I am fully aware of the repetitive element.  My subject must once again be the achievements of one of our children.  Katherine Fleming has been honored with yet another prestigious award by the Republic of France.  Thus it was that a week ago we found ourselves Ubered up the Turnpike through really beastly traffic to Manhattan.  Our destination was an event at the French consulate on upper Fifth Avenue to attend the award ceremony.

 

            There are all sorts of reasons to continue to admire French civilization, the chief of which is that it is so wonderfully civilized.  But teachers and scholars have a special reason for their appreciation.  At least since the days of Napoleon the French have been leaders in giving public recognition to outstanding men and women renowned in science, humanistic learning, and teaching prowess.  Among the honorific categories of French knighthood are the three grades of the “Ordre des Palmes Académiques,” the “palms” involved belonging to the realm of allegorical botany, sort of like the laurel leaves you see in pictures of Virgil, Dante, and Petrarch.  The three grades are chevalier (knight), officer (officier), and commander (commandeur). None of these awards is cultural chopped liver, but the highest, commander, is of course particularly prestigious, and this was the one with which Katy was being presented on this occasion.

The site of the ceremonial event was the Villa Albertine, a part of French consular properties on Fifth Avenue.  It is the home of a French cultural center and small library.  This historic building is an imposing mansion on the east side of Fifth Avenue just south of the Metropolitan Museum.  It was built by a captain of industry, William Payne Whitney, just at the beginning of the twentieth century.  The house he built is truly baronial, but I don’t hold that against him.  There is an important distinction to be made between barons and robber barons. I insist on a a fairly high level of genuine iniquity in my robber barons, and Mr. Whitney by no means qualified.  He was to be sure of the category of “Patrician, Filthy Rich,” but a number of our great ones of the Gilded Age combined opulence with civic consciousness and philanthropical zeal, and there were several noble Whitneys whose names are remembered for their cultural good works.  (Of course the founder of Whitney Museum of American Art had the maiden name of Vanderbilt.  So it goes, or at least used to go.)

 

            There were perhaps sixty people at the event, only a quarter of whom were blood relatives of the honoree.   Lots of what I think of as New York People.  It was presided over by Mons. Mohamed Bouabdallah, who holds the titles of Cultural Counselor of France in the United States and Director of the Villa Albertine.  If you try hard enough to imagine just how polished and suave somebody holding those ranks is likely to be—that is to say, a public-facing French diplomat housed in a Fifth Avenue mansion--that was Mons. Bouabdallah to a T.  Katy herself is a terrific performer, so that there was a subliminal sense of repartee just beneath the high seriousness of their dialogue.

 

            Though this was my first visit to the Albertine, I had seen Katy “perform” there one other time on video.  A year or so ago in that venue she had a recorded public conversation with Laurence des Cars, the head of the Louvre Museum in Paris.  The Louvre is perhaps the most famous art museum in the world.  The Getty may be the most opulent; so one learned from the conversation between their two directors a lot about the deeper challenges facing the international museum world.  Those challenges cannot be reduced to any single issue, but they all must involve the delicate negotiation between keeping artefacts safe and making them public.  That is the fundamental issue, but it seems to have an endless number of fascinating corollaries. 

 

            Of course our daughter had to make a little acceptance speech—like all of her formal communications elegant, witty, but also at heart substantial.  It was also very kind in its allusions to her parents, to whom she gave probably too much credit in the formation of her international cultural perspectives.  But we loved it; and it is true that her breadth of cultural range, her remarkable abilities in several foreign languages, and the catholicity of her intellectual sympathies do have their origins in part in her experiences in various of our sabbatical stays in England, France and in Italy.  I remember her so well as a very little girl living on a farm on the outskirts of L’Isle-sur-Sorgue in 1968, the year of the great French student rebellion and general strike.  There she was in her little red polka dot dress gobbling escargots and gabbling in peasants’ French.  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive….Sometimes I ponder in my mind the remarkable differences between the lives lived by my grandparents and those being lived by my grandchildren.  One might think that they represent not different generations but different species.  Yet the through-line is family, which remains for many of us the indispensable constellation of social cohesion in a vast galaxy of whirl and change.