Urban Renewal

I didn’t really need another signal that I am losing my marbles, but I got a strong one last week.  There arrived in the post a large, beautiful, and obviously quite expensive art book published by Brepols.  This is a distinguished scholarly publishing house in Belgium, once chiefly known for its edition of patristic texts, but in recent decades perhaps more prominent in the field of sumptuous and pricey medieval art historical studies.  The book is entitled Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem, and lavishly illustrated.  There was nothing else in the envelope, though it did have a return address, that of a Medieval Studies Institute at a Big Ten university.  It looked to me as though some sub-subaltern on the staff of their prestigious journal had by mistake sent me this copy in order that I might review it in their learned journal.  I sent them an email with this surmise.  The subaltern’s mildly annoyed response was instantaneous, and it was accompanied by a copy of my own terse but unequivocal agreement to review the book, written a month earlier before the matter took permanent leave of my memory of it.  How to save face?  “Never apologize, never explain,” as Disraeli, Henry James or maybe somebody else is supposed to have said.  Just write the review—which I shall try to do within two weeks.

 

            But the book’s apparent subject matter—the way certain cities have either in reality or in spiritual imagination been “founded” in earlier ones—set me to thinking.  Especially important was the word “idea”.  During the recent elections I was constantly hearing from pundits that America was not a country but an idea. How, or in what sense might this be true?  On every day of my young life in school I had pledged my allegiance through the surrogacy of a piece of red, white, and blue cloth, to a republic, which was I suppose a kind of idea, but I didn’t think of it that way then.  To choose Jerusalem as the model of Christian urbanization was hardly an original gesture.  For of course the “new” or “spiritual” Jerusalem are ancient and widespread conceits both in antique Judaism and early Christianity.  And they straddle both sacred and profane realms.  Why are the words Tsar and Kaiser variants of Caeser?  That sort of thing: the “new Rome”.    I live in the American state of New Jersey, which seems at first glance quite unlike the Isle of Jersey in the English (and why isn’t it the French?) Channel?  How about our northern neighbor, both city and state, of New York?  Not a whole lot of similarity to old York there.  To get there from here you have to pass through New Brunswick, home to our state university.  New Mexico is sort of plausible from the geological point of view, but New Hampshire?  And how about New Paltz, N. Y.?  A place called “the Palatinate” sounds pretty fancy, but have you ever driven through New Paltz, N.Y.?  It turns out that “Paltz” approaches the way Huguenot exiles pronounced the word in the seventeenth century.  Among my much-thumbed reference books is Webster’s Geographical Dictionary (1949) in which there are upwards of twenty pages crammed with short entries of various News, and that does not even touch upon the German Neus, the French Neufs, and so on.  How many Newcastles, Castelnovos, Chateauneufs, Neudorfs, etc., are there in Europe?  People apparently long to live in the New Something-or-Other.  In Chaucer’s day the town fathers of London came up with a ceremonial name for their expanding metropolis: Troinovant, or New Troy.  Of course the original “new Troy” was Rome itself.  And if you are at all familiar with Augustine’s City of God, you must know that the great imperial city—with its teeming population, architectural grandeur, and moral cesspools was itself a type, simulacrum, or foreshadowing both of great Zion and great Babylon.  But it surely must have required a large amount of chutzpah—to use the technical term in medieval Italian—for the civic custodians of Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities to call itself Jerusalem.  And you can have linguistic renewal in more than one language.  Nova Scotia is a plausible geographical clone, I suppose, but New Caledonia (Nouvelle-Calédonie) in the southwest Pacific?

 

 

            Certain cities have enjoyed allegorical rebirths after their utter destruction.  One thinks particularly of the major North African city-state of Carthage.  Carthage made the big mistake of getting on the wrong side of mighty Rome in the second half of the third century before Christ.  The famous conflict between the two city states—which can be regarded as a single long-running war or a series of discrete conflicts--is one of the great events of ancient history, the Punic wars.  One of the Carthaginian generals, Hannibal, was a storied military genius who took a “cavalry” of elephants (elephantry?) across the Mediterranean and over the Alps to attack Rome from the north.  The annoying initial successes of the Carthaginians caused the Roman historian, statesman, and all-purpose old grump Cato the Elder to utter the single sentence most likely to be remembered by those alumni of Latin 101 who remember nothing else: Delenda est Carthago, “Carthage must be destroyed!”)  He wasn’t kidding either.  The place was utterly obliterated.  According to modern historical myth the site was then “plowed to salt,” so that not even a plant or blade of grass could sprout upon its former site.  The salting never really happened, for it wasn’t really necessary.  When the Romans wiped you out, you were well and truly wiped out.  Nonetheless there are at least a dozen Carthages in America today, and several more important ones elsewhere, especially the one on the Caribbean coast of Columbia (Cartagena).  The gazetteers  of both North and South Americas are replete with names cribbed from classical historians.

 

            And why is Zealand a place in New Brunswick (the Canadian province, not the New Jersey city), and what is new about New Zealand?  Then there all those great places that undergo name revisions on account on of regime change: the Constantinoples and the Saint Petersburgs….but that large subject would demand an essay of its own.

 

 

 

Democratic Doldrums

 

 

            This is the last thing I intend to write about the aftermath of our American presidential election for a while, but so far, so good.  I am referring here to the public reaction to its outcome.  The outcome has left millions disappointed, hundreds of thousands deeply distressed, and probably some tens of thousands in something approaching actual medical trauma.  I speak literally.  On Sunday our parish priest, speaking carefully but with obvious sincerity, spoke of the pastoral imperative of negotiating profound distress among communities united by a common faith yet divided by strongly held political disagreements.  The infliction of psychic pain on such a large swath of our national population is no laughing matter, yet so far as I know there has not been any significant civil disturbance of the sort I was anticipating.  ( I had been anticipating that Vice-President Harris was going to win the election, and that indeed some of her opponent’s most extreme partisans might well misbehave.)

 

            Let me be clear, as the losing contender in the recent election repeatedly said by way of preface to some opacity or other.  I need to make clear my sincere belief that the world would be ever so much better a place if everybody thought exactly as I do.  It is inexplicable to me that any sensible person might not think that way already.  But it turns out that there actually are these other people who do not share my views.  Lots of them.  Who knew?

 

            I read that among the “losers” of the election we must include the “legacy” press.  I must come clear and admit that I don’t actually know just exactly what the “legacy press" is, either from the point of view of legators or legatees, but I deduce that in practical terms it means the New York Times, the Washington Post, and perhaps the Los Angeles Times. While one might have thought that a hotly contested national presidential election would provide sufficient external or objective matter for any journal to try to deal with, the latter two of these papers made themselves the story by deciding not to publish an official institutional endorsement of either of the candidates from our two major political parties.

 

            A person who has loomed large in our political thinking for the past several months is a man named Robert Hubbell, who was brought to our attention by one of our old friends with whom we joined, along with another couple of close friends, in a monthly “Dinner for Six”, the main extra-gastronomic purpose of which was to review the political news, which consisted mainly in our exhaustive exploration of the latest enormities of Donald J. Trump.  Robert Hubbell is (I think) a retired lawyer living in the Los Angeles area.  He is energetic, industrious, highly intelligent.  He is a strong writer and a persuasive speaker, the indefatigable producer of his own political newsletter.  Mr. Hubbell issues a near daily political memorandum (the “Hubbell Report”), which is available on the Internet.  He is a strong supporter of the Democratic party, “up and down the ballot” as he often says.  He has particular expertise in legal matters.

 

            I presume Mr. Hubbell, in his clearly expressed unhappiness with the results of the election, probably represents in unusually articulate form, the attitudes of many other.  In one recent post he spent a certain amount of time adjudicating the linguistic distinction between the nouns resistance and opposition.  Which of the two is the right one to describe the proper stance that must now be adopted by right thinking people with regard to President Trump and his policies?  He is inclined to the former, and why not?  But in my opinion Mr. Hubbell has somewhat lost the plot.  He is insistent that the election was a very close thing.  I won’t enter a dispute as to what it takes to be a blowout.  But Trump won by a margin of eighty-six electoral votes and several million individual votes.  Harris won perhaps five states that don’t have seacoasts.  (Remember the term “coastal elites”?)  She lost every so-called “battleground” state.   Both campaigns spent an unconscionable amount of money in the pursuit of victory, but the “war chest” of the loser—more than a billion dollars—was truly obscene.  Thus she was essentially creamed by an out-spent, foul-mouthed, mendacious, and often incoherent convicted felon vociferously opposed by nearly all the elite cultural arbiters of the nation.  How, one might ask, could this happen? And one might well answer that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves, otherwise known as the demos, the people, who exercise their awkward rule by the awkward system called democracy (rule by the demos.).  

Presidential Election

 

What follows is not an essay, more like a plea or exhortation.  I began writing this on Tuesday morning shortly after returning from the poling place, a firehouse about a mile from our house, to which our neighborhood was assigned.  The few people likely to be reading blog essays this morning are well aware that yesterday was Election Day in the United States and aware as well that I generally put my post up fairy early on a Wednesday morning.  As I write, of course, the absolutely final results are not yet known, but it is certain that Donald Trump has won the election and won it big.   While I cannot say that I shall be entirely indifferent as to what the final certified results will be, this brief post is not concerned with them.  Anybody who has been “following” the election campaign closely—and it has nearly obsessed me—will be aware that it has been conducted with an intensity bordering on desperation, and that prominent supporters of both the major candidates have predicted a nearly existential cataclysm should their preferred candidate lose.  Yet it was always certain that one of them must lose.  The clear logic of the situation is that many millions of voters—probably nearly half of all voters—will emerge from the experience disappointed,  and not a few of them angry.  Many are likely to be suspicious and dubious of the validity of an outcome they have been nursed by months of extreme rhetoric to regard to be so undesirable as to be unthinkable.

 

Whatever the result, however, it is an evidence not of the death of democracy but of its practice.  One of Churchill’s more famous remarks, uttered a couple of years after the end of the Second World War, is this: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”  Our own American democracy is undoubtedly being tested.  What the current electoral campaign has revealed to me—though I have nowhere seen this as a prominent item of discussion in the press—is the inadequacy of our two-party system in its current evolution.  If the only purpose of your organization is to achieve power, you are likely to employ all legal means in its pursuit and to stretch the meaning of the word “legal” to its breaking point.  Fortunately, a genuine democratic system, truly engaged in a principled fashion, allows constant refocus and recalculation.  By this I mean it is possible to achieve a just and effective government, possible but not of course guaranteed.  When a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of a government he and his co-conspirators had come up with, he is reported to have replied: A republic, madam, if you can keep it.  Let us by all means keep it.

What About Us Grils?

                                                                    Jane Eyre

 

 

The essays in this blog not infrequently deal with books that I have found interesting, and not a few of them are novels.  This one was stimulated by one that I have not read, but clearly need to read soon.  I refer to the novel James, by Percival Everett.  James is of that genre of novels that belong at once to the categories of fiction and of literary criticism or literary history, for they are fictional works that in some imaginative manner interact with earlier works of fiction.  The “background” book in this instance is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a picaresque romp of high moral seriousness largely about the friendship of a young white lad (Huck) and an older black man (Jim).  A friend of Joan’s, who is reading James in a book club, asked me a couple of linguistic questions arising from her reading of it.  And as you have probably observed during the current political campaign, what you do when you don’t know the answer to a question is to obfuscate by answering a different one.

 

So I was set to thinking about a certain kind of book that messes with literary history while contributing to it.    I do not have in mind here that kind of novel in which the animation of the fictional plot depends upon an obvious contradiction of generally accepted historical fact.  These are sometimes called “alternative historical”, though I prefer the simpler “counter factual”.  Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Tower (1962), an imaginative orgy of the counter factual, depicts a world in which Japan and Germany, having won World War II, now administer a partitioned and occupied United States.  The underground opposition to the Fascists is led by a single heroic figure in Wyoming!  Who knew?  The genre of novel I have in mind—and to which (I take it) Percival Everett’s James belongs—I would regard not as counter-factional, but as counter-fictional.

 

A fairly well-known work from my own field of special interest in our earlier literature is John Gardner’s Grendel (1971).  The oldest great poem in English that most people have ever heard of is the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic poem Beowulf, dating in its sole surviving manuscript probably from about the year 1000, though likely to be of earlier composition.  Beowulf is the name of its Scandinavian hero, who battles against ferocious monsters.  In the earlier part of the poem, Beowulf as a young man takes on a terrible pair of monsters—Grendel and Grendel’s otherwise unnamed mother—who are attacking Heorot, a fabled mead-hall of the aging Danish King Hrothgar.  (In case you are wondering what a mead-hall is, it’s a place where heroic Scandinavian warriors sit around drinking mead, duh…Of course the precise recipe for ancient mead itself, a potent potion based in the fermentation of honey, is not known).  In similar fashion, the exact nature of the monstrosity incarnate in Grendel and his mother is not precisely clear, but it is formidable, terrifying, lethal, and anthropophagic (in more common parlance, cannibal).

 

Sometimes novelistic interplay can become complicated, or perhaps even puzzlingly complex. The more widely known the base or target novel, the richer the complexity is likely to be.  One of the early Victorian novels that anyone who reads novels at all is likely to know is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). There is a reason for Jane Eyre’s perennial popularity.  It is a really great novel, and its title character an enduring model of feminine pluck.  Jane has it all—meaning, in this instance, everything required of a stock heroine of Victorian fiction.  As a governess, Jane finds herself in the creepy moorland mansion of a dark, brooding, handsome, and super-sexy guy called Mr. Rochester, a man of mysterious sorrows.  Strange noises—of the “Did I really hear something?” type—occasionally float down from the off-limits attic.  Spoiler alert!  There is indeed, unbeknownst to Jane, someone in the attic-- a madwoman!  The madwoman in the attic is Mrs. Rochester, née Bertha Mason.  She had to be put in the attic by Mr. Rochester on account of her violent mental aberrations, which are both literally and figuratively incendiary and apparently render her unsuited to what might be called normal social interactions.  And as her continuing existence might seem an insuperable impediment to the much-to-be desired hooking up of Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre, you can be pretty certain that her potential longevity will have to be dealt with.  Read the book to learn how it all turned out.

 

The novel Jane Eyre is of course told from Jane’s point of view.  But feminist literary critics have encouraged a broader perspective, such as that which might be imagined to have animated the incarcerated Mrs. Rochester herself.  One of the more important books of literary criticism dealing with the Victorian novel remains The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.  Though outside my own special field of expertise, I became very familiar with this book.  By a stroke of fate, and my good luck, I was the chairman of the Princeton English Department at the time we were trying (successfully, I am glad to say) to poach Sandra Gilbert from the University of California.  So I naturally had to read her most famous book.  She was a splendid scholar, colleague, and friend during the five or so years we overlapped.

 

The device of telling a well-known story from a new perspective or oblique angle forces you (the reader) to reconsider what is usually a widely shared, nearly default moral perspective, often in a surprising fashion.  I first came to appreciate this literary phenomenon in unusual and certainly unsalubrious circumstances on account of something scrawled on the wall of a dirty public toilet stall.  I am of a generation so antique as to have learned their filthy language and sexual misinformation from furtive lavatory graffiti rather than from widely viewed family TV shows.  Scrawled on the wall of one particularly well inscribed public convenience, I found one day, among many other things, the following strange graffito, the product of dyslexia rather than of depravity, a benediction actually.   God bless little grils!  Beneath this, in bold majuscules, was the query DONT YOU MEAN GIRLS [?] without the punctuation mark the syntax required.  But it was the third and final sentence in what would today be called this thread that was truly brilliant.  It plaintively asked, What about us grils?  The ingenious conceit of John Gardner’s Grendel is to ask the question “What about us monsters?” in a way that makes a reader sympathetic to monsters.  The genius of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea is to give a compelling explanation of how a mulatta beauty queen from the Lesser Antilles came to be locked up in the attic of a creepy castle in the British boondocks.  It sort of makes you think twice about what it might mean to be a Victorian heroine.  Remembering the grils almost always enriches the tale told and the reader’s appreciation of the manner of its telling.

Madwoman in attic

 

Election Jitters

 

Though loathe to enter the overcrowded field of political commentary, of which there is no scarcity from others more sapient than I, election day is approaching with insistence, and I fear I am in any event running short of amusing or even light-hearted subjects.  So I had best face up to my fears.  These fears are not entirely or perhaps even primarily concerned with the identity of the winner of the presidential race. With two weeks to go, the race seems extraordinarily close, and the eventuality of an outcome of impressive decisiveness seems remote.  Remote, but of course much to be desired, for the simple truth is that the less contestable the results are perceived to be, the less threatening the contestation.

         There is in my opinion not a lot of room in which to debate one’s voting choice.  In saying this, however, I am obliged to acknowledge that many fellow citizens whose vote will differ from mine doubtless feel the same.  There is, however, a great deal more room for more realism and honesty in facing our dilemma than is being displayed in most of the news stories.  Of the very few commentaries I have seen that seem to me offensively accurate is that of Lee Siegel.  “Not in recent memory has the country been offered a choice between, in Harris, a vapid mediocrity, and in Trump, an unbalanced malignity. And not in recent memory have the running mates of the two presidential candidates been clearly more qualified than the latter — though barely so — to sit in the White House.”  It is my opinion that mediocrity ought to be able to trump malignity any day.  But this truth cannot redeem the disservice of our current party system or transform pigs’ ears into silk purses.

         There seems to be no such thing as impartial or non-partisan news these days, but our son Luke put me on to something reasonably close, a web program called “Two Way” directed by the political journalist Mark Halperin.  The “two way” part refers to our two-party set-up.  The Sphinx-like Halperin, who convincingly never shows the slightest hint of his own political preferences, is joined by highly knowledgeable representatives of our two major parties, both of them partisans but also honest brokers, and an audience of some dozens of “ordinary” voters.  The only slightly light-hearted stated goals of the conversations are “peace, love, and understanding”—and these standards are in the main observed—at least the first and, to a less extent,  the third are.  There are frequent invited interventions from professionally credentialled Democratic and Republican partisan experts.

         In many recent presidential elections the distribution of the popular vote has been relatively even in its totality and reasonably constant in its geographical distribution.  Due to the peculiarities of the system of election not by absolute majority in the popular vote but rather by majority in the block distribution of the individual states’ electoral vote, it has several times happened in recent elections that the winner was not the overall winner of the popular vote.  A popular vote within a state with a ratio of, say, twenty to one, is thus no more powerful that a vote of the same total number but distributed in a ratio of eleven to ten.  Many of the architects of the Constitution were fearful of what they called “the tyranny of the majority.”  Madison and Hamilton dealt at some length with this anticipated problem, as have several other classical political theorists.  This aspect of the American system, which some foreign observers find to be somewhere between puzzling and shocking, reflects the strong sense of what in my youth in the South were called “states’ rights”, a concept that though it survived even our Civil War has given much ground to the superlative powers of the federal government during my own lifetime.  Thomas Jefferson, the chief among the geniuses who wrote our constitution, was of the opinion that it was in a sense a provisional document that would be renewed, reexamined, and refreshed by regular and timely reviews by constitutional conventions.  Instead, it has become a verbal idol.

         It is very difficult to find anything like balanced or objective political news.  Neither the national print press or the radio and television stations make much genuine effort at “objectivity.”  Many don’t even try.  And perhaps there really is no such thing as “just the news” when so many in the news business are genuinely convinced that we face “existential” and apocalyptic threats unique in our history.  There are actually times when being a medievalist has psychic rewards in the present.  Logically, after all, “things can have never been so bad” only once, and the odds that that once is right now must be statistically remote.  Lincoln—I believe he was discussing agricultural problems—told the anecdote of a mythical wise king who asked his mythical wise advisors for a bit of advice: he wanted his wisest philosophers to provide for him a sentence that would always apply to any situation, and always be relevant and never stale but always true.  The gem of universally applicable wisdom provided was the following: And this, too, shall pass away.

         Such advice is important to take to heart.  Somebody is going to win the election, and the chances that it will be Mr. Trump are far from negligible.  Halperin speaks in contexts other than those of his “Two Way” program, and in one such conversation he has expressed his opinion that should Trump win, despite the ostentatious revelations over a long period of time of a bullying , name-calling vulgarity, a nearly bottomless mendacity, and the nearly uniform hostility of the nation’s social, cultural, journalistic and educational elites—that is to say if he is democratically chosen by an electorate which cannot possibly be blind to his flaws—the results will trigger a national mental health crisis.  Among the heaviest burdens of big-D’d Democracy is the social obligation of putting up with the choices of small-d’d democrats.  We shall do well to be spiritually prepared, knowing that whatever the outcome, this too shall pass away.

A Rose by any Other Name

 

 

Most readers will probably be familiar with Oscar Wilde’s brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest.  The whole play, like the title, operates on several levels.  From the philosophical point of view—if that is not too grand an approach to a work so light-hearted at the surface level—the subject is a classic one: the relation of words to the things they denote.  In a sense this is an issue raised by all nouns, the English words noun and name actually being variants.  The title of Umberto Eco’s delightful medieval romp—The Name of the Rose—reflects the medieval ancestry of the matter.  When Juliet poses her wistful question to Romeo—"What’s in a name?”—she suggests the arbitrary nature of words, the meanings of which are “socially constructed” and depend upon a general cultural acceptance for their utility.  I thought when I sat down to write about all this I might entitle the essay “The Unimportance of Being John.”

 

There are a lot of plays in the repertoire that exploit the theme of false or mistaken identity.  The ancient playwright Plautus wrote a farce about twin brothers that inspired one of Shakespeare’s early efforts, The Comedy of Errors, and has echoes in probably dozens of other Renaissance plays.  To get into my own little comedy of errors, though, I have to tell you a little more than is really interesting to you about the neighborhood in which we have lived for about thirty-five years.  It is a subdivision of about eighty houses, most of which were erected in the 1960s.  It is called the Gray Farm presumably on account of an old family farm that once filled the grounds, though I am only guessing.  Several of them were designed by members of the faculty of the School of Architecture.  Accordingly, there is considerable architectural variety among them, and even some architectural distinction, though most of them are comparatively modest in size, certainly as gauged by contemporary macmansion standards.  The Gray Farm scheme was designed to allow modestly remunerated tenured faculty members to buy and own a house, and to enjoy whatever long-term appreciation accrued to the property, within the context of an expensive real estate market in a definitely upscale place.  Naturally there was a catch.  The owners of the houses truly owned them, but they could not be sold on the open market or be transferred by testamentary will to the owners’ children.  They had to be sold back to the University at a price arbitrated between representatives of the University’s real estate department and the departing owners or their agents.  The aim was to enable faculty to own property which they could not otherwise afford.  There are other stipulations to the scheme, but those are the essentials.  With the fairly dramatic long-term improvement in faculty remuneration over half a century, a development that greatly expands the housing horizons for faculty, the Gray Farm scheme has become less popular.  There are other attractive and affordable options.

 

Of course living in a faculty ghetto means you have some interesting neighbors.  For most of our years here our two nearest neighbors were both members of the Department of Near Eastern Studies.  On the west was the eminent Bernard Lewis, historian,  Semitic linguist, neo-con guru and counsel to the Bush administration, and a chief animator of Edward Said’s disdain in his book Orientalism. It was a rare week on our street that did not see a visit from a recording truck visiting our neighbor to tape an interview with him.  Professor Lewis left the neighborhood for a retirement care facility and died several years ago.  But there are several other such eminences scattered throughout the neighborhood.

 

 

Last week, as I was getting dressed after a shower, I heard the front doorbell ring.  I knew that Joan was already out of the house, so I called out to Christie, our wonderful health aide, and asked her to answer the door.  She did so, and I could hear snippets of her exchange with the man who had rung the bell.  I heard him identify himself as from Philadelphia and from the Associated Press.  He was looking for John.  I soon was more or less dressed and able to meet him in the living room.  The man had in his hands a rather formidable camera. “John?” he asked.  So far so good.  Without the slightest prevarication I was able to answer, “Right! I’m John.”  “Well, I’d like to take your picture,” he said. 

 

Suddenly I had the feeling that this—whatever this might be—probably was, well, you know….when a photographer from the national press tells you he wants to take your picture you somehow want desperately to think of some reason why that might be true.  Milton’s last infirmity of noble mind.  The photographer, noting my struggle, began to share it.   “You…you are John Hopfield, right?”  Alas, manifestly this was wrong.  I did of course know who Hopfield was and had twice said “Good morning” to him over a twenty-five year period.   He was yet another genius Princeton physicist, one who strayed into biology before straying even further into the faculty of the California Institute of Technology before (fortunately for us) returning to Princeton.  And of course I knew that Hopfield built the house which we have owned since 1988, though it had had at least one other owner in between.  He’s the guy who saddled us with the bamboo.  I also knew, instinctively, what the photographer now was going to tell me.  Hopfield had just won the Nobel Prize.  I was able to tell the photographer that I thought Hopfield lived somewhere over on the other side of the golf course.

 

 

I then remembered years ago sitting nervously in the waiting room of a dentist’s office—flipping through a dogeared magazine of that specially trivial genre unreadable except by people desperately trying to prevent their minds from acknowledging impending root canal work.  This magazine had brief “human interest” items interspersed with paragraphs of “fun facts”.  Fun fact: Castor beans grow wild in Abyssinia.  Fun fact: Paul Revere made George Washington’s first set of false teeth.  Fun fact number three jolted me to attention.  There are more Nobel Prize winners living on Hartley Avenue in Princeton NJ than live in seven western states.  Hartley Avenue!  Our little street!  And indeed I knew of, indeed actually knew personally, two physics professors—Val Fitch (now unhappily deceased) and Joe Taylor (still going strong)—who were Nobel laureates.  Ed Witten, who lived on a cross street a hundred yards frm the corner with Hartley, had merely won the Fields Medal, there being no Nobel Prize in mathematics.

 

Blessed Beasts

 

 

            After nearly two decades of retirement I can hardly talk about a “professional life,” but I found myself in an odd position this week.  I have involved myself in two public events of at least a semi-educational nature.  The fancier of the two, in fact, indeed will be seriously scholarly.  I have agreed, with pleasure, to give a “Work in Progress” seminar to the faculty group of medievalists at Princeton.  It will take place a few hours after mounting this post, actually, and will deal with the fifteenth-century French poet François Villon.  This obligation will explain why I have mentioned Villon in my essays a couple of times in the recent months .  A topic once raised in one’s mind has a tendency to stay there until resolved in some way or other.  But other things have also been on my mind.  Topics to which I devoted a lot of time years ago were the cultural impact of the Franciscan Order on the cultural life of late medieval Europe and the colonial evangelization of Spanish and Franciscan missionaries in the “New World,” including parts of our own country, in the wake of the Iberian voyages of discovery beginning at the end of the fifteenth century. 

 

This interest was for me intensified when in 1992 I was one of the co-curators of a major exhibition at the Library of Congress: “1492, An Ongoing Voyage”.  The invitation to undertake that task was nearly inexplicable, but I undertook it as an educational opportunity in several different senses.  I can only hope that that exhibition, which got good reviews,  was at least as partially enlightening to its many visitors as it was to its curators, or at least to this one.   The Columbus of my boyhood, to the extent that I was aware of him, was a much admired figure.  In 1893 the Columbian Exposition in Chicago—basically a world’s fair designed to showcase the dynamism and artistic, industrial, and political ebullience of a muscle-flexing United States of America—had presented Christopher Columbus in heroic terms.  The fifteenth-century Catholic Italian mariner was more of an ingenious and resourceful Connecticut Yankee type.  Samuel Eliot Morrison, Harvard Ph. D., and a popular historian, himself a reserve admiral in the United States Navy won a Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a book still in print and still being read eighty years later.  This book is not hagiographic, but it certainly is admiring and still admired.  Morrison, who I thought probably ought to know, clearly regarded Columbus as one hell of a sailor.  Which he was.  But by 1992, the historical tide had turned, so to speak.  In some important historical circles attitudes toward what in my youth was universally called “the discovery of America” had changed radically.  Just because benighted Europeans didn’t know anything about the rich cultures of the Guarini, the Incas, the Mayans, the Aztecs and so many other inhabitants of the Americas didn’t mean they needed discovering.  From this perspective the mildest accurate term for what happened was encounter, but better ones would be invasion, conquest, oppression, colonization, and of course genocide.

 

Such meager credentials as I had for the assignment derived from my study of late medieval apocalyptic thought, much of it stimulated by Franciscan friars.  These are the same credentials that allowed me to accept an invitation from the organizers of the adult education program at my parish church to offer an adult forum before the Sunday Eucharist, on the topic of Saint Francis of Assisi.

 

 

Changing attitudes about Columbus should alert us to the reality that no historical personage, whatever good press he or she has in the past enjoyed, is immune from the trashing of “revisionist” history.  The late Christopher Hitchens, a man I much admired, cancelled the much admired Mother Teresa, so there’s no telling.  Still, I think that Francis of Assisi ought to be safe at least for the time being.  He is not merely the all-star historical saint of the Christian churches.  He has “crossover appeal” to the spiritually indifferent and even the positively irreligious on account of his legendary gentleness, low-carbon (bare)foot print, and above all, his love of animals.  He used to address them with the titles of “brother” and “sister”, as though they were fellow-members of his religious order.  This was part of a radical egalitarianism in his personality that could not be constrained even by the rigorous hierarchies of medieval society.  Among the famous episodes in Franciscan history is the report that Francis once delivered a sermon to the birds.  (We have all heard sermons that are for the birds, so why not?)  His disciple Anthony of Padua—who actually came from Lisbon, a major maritime center—specialized in preaching to the fish.

 

In many churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, there has emerged a popular homage to Francis, celebrated around his feast day (October 4), called the “Blessing of the Animals”.  It is exactly what it sounds like.  Animals—mainly household pets in our suburban contexts—are brought before the altar to receive a sacerdotal blessing.  Having constrained animals present at a eucharistic celebration does invite certain possible risks, but I have not yet seen a real disaster.  The adult owners of the pets are sometimes slightly awkward and tentative during the procedure, but youngsters seem uniformly enthusiastic.  And, obviously, they are the ones who count here.  Let the little children come unto me.  In fact, on Sunday a few small children, not wanting to be left out but not actually owning pets, presented the priest with stuffed animals.  Dramatic showmanship was a marked feature of Francis’s personality.  He was the first to popularize the Christmas creche.  According to a still influential book by O. B. Hardison (Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages) the whole of the Eucharist is mimetic and dramatic.  In any event, this is what the week has held for me thus far.