There are good and bad things about aging. One of the good things is the possibility at least of an increment in wisdom based on actual lived experience. You have the opportunity to know more things because you have lived more things. One of my sardonic amusements in recent decades is listening to thirty- and forty-year-old pundits tell me what it was like living in the South in the late ‘Forties. I hope I have done a better job over the years telling my students what it was like living in fourteenth-century Kent; but I actually doubt that I have, and that is disconcerting. The bad things often include serious illness that hastens and magnifies what might be called the normal decay that comes with age. But just at the moment being old and sick is particularly grievous as an obvious emblem of the state of our beloved country.
We were both so whacked on Sunday that we retreated to bed very early. I must have been in the Land of Nod shortly after eight. Much restored, I did not arise until after daybreak on Monday. In my study, where the telephone answering machine resides, I was surprised to hear its half-hearted bleep. It was a message from good friends recorded at eight-thirty Sunday night. They are a couple in our age group and members of the “Dinners for Six” to which I have alluded in earlier posts. The husband of the couple was scheduled for an elective surgery at a Philadelphia hospital, to be performed on Monday. Procedures regarded as “routine” necessarily have a different valence for octogenarians, and his close friends have been aware of his forthcoming appointment. The phone message, from his wife, was informing us that he would not after all be going into hospital. His doctor’s office had called him to say that the rioting in Philadelphia made it unsafe either for medical professionals or for patients to be there for anything but emergencies. I then opened my computer to learn that Philadelphia was in an uproar, that SEPTA (the Philadelphia mass-transit system) had been closed down, and that there were large protest demonstrations, in several instances descending into riots, vandalism, arson, and looting, in about forty urban centers throughout the country. By Monday night it was a hundred and forty.
Princeton is about half way between two great cities, New York and Philadelphia, with good and frequent public transportation to both. That is one of its selling points, as it were. I was not born to be an urbanite, but I have come to love New York on my somewhat eccentric terms as a father of two of its residents and an unapologetic exploiter of the wealth of its cultural institutions, especially its museums and concert halls. Broadway shows and fine restaurants not so much, but a lifetime would not be enough to exhaust Museum Mile. Not to mention the city’s specialized libraries. Does anybody even know what is behind the doors of the Hispanic Society of America in Washington Heights? Now New York City is the coronavirus capital of the country, probably of the world. Such delights as I describe, alas, are for people like me, not for the millions who toil in the city’s buildings and streets but never enter those doors. But now nobody can. In the past week passionate demonstrations of nearly perfect righteous indignation have descended into chaos and violence in the boroughs of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. This is national tragedy born of national disgrace and an everlasting shame.
I was slower in coming to appreciate Philadelphia, but eventually circumstances joined to guide me. For several years I served on our regional academic accrediting body, which had regular meetings in the city. Then our son Luke spent some years doing his doctoral work at Penn, of which a close personal friend was president. Above all, I was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society, which holds two exciting annual meetings in its historic building in the center of the old city, within shouting distance of Independence Hall, perhaps the most sacred civic site in the republic. I came to enjoy the city as I enjoyed New York. The APS is a big deal for academics, though not so grand or so preposterous as the Académie Française, more along the lines of the British Royal Society, of which it was at the time of its founding by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 an intellectual offspring. When I call its meetings exciting I am being neither hyperbolic nor ironic. A number of the best lectures and discussions I have enjoyed in a long academic career have taken place in Philosophical Hall, the Society’s gravely classical auditorium. The Society includes many of the nation’s finest minds and scholars.
At the time of Independence, the young society really came into its own. Its early membership reads like an alternative listing of the Founding Fathers. Washington, Jefferson, Madison—they were all there. Thomas Jefferson was president of the APS at the same time that he was President of the United States. And that’s a problem. For at the very same time that he was actively pursuing the vigorous study of Native American languages, and establishing a scholarly archive of immense utility to those who would follow him, he was also the legal owner, by American law, of a sizable number of American human beings, slaves on his Virginia plantation. It is conceivable to me that for temporary and strategic purposes, which alone might make possible a united colonial war of independence and allow a viable union of its socially disparate victors, great Americans of that age might, holding their noses, tolerate an abomination that they believed was doomed to a natural and proximate demise. But this?
I am not a fanatic, and I don’t like fanatics. But within the last year I was moved to reread most of Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body (1928), one of few epic poems written in English since Milton’s time. Its subject is our Civil War of the 1860s. It is in my opinion very good, and unwisely ignored. Brown was a prophet, and like others with whom we are familiar wild-eyed, Bible-crazed, utterly convinced of his own righteousness. I would not have liked John Brown. It’s hard for me to imagine that anybody actually liked John Brown. People probably didn’t like Jeremiah either, but genuine prophets are rare, and deserve their due. As he was being led to the gallows, Brown passed the following note to an attendant: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” How could we as a nation have squandered the enormous blood-letting and destruction he there prophesied? Must our national agony be ever protracted and renewed in venom and in loathing, in lawlessness from those invested with the powers of law-keeping, and with the burning and trashing of our great cities that should be engines of productive industry, cultural beacons, and havens of civility and cooperative enterprise? Our ancestors who named their city Philadelphia had been trained in the classical tongues and shared a once commonplace Christian social doctrine. In its Greek derivation, Philadelphia is the city of Brotherly Love, as in the second tenet of the “New Law” as announced by Jesus: Love thy neighbor. As I write this I cannot remember a time in my life when I have heard an allusion to the city’s name untinged by irony or cynicism. But our country was born of sincere idealism, not of world-weary scorn. Lincoln was not speaking in the voice of a political comedian when he said “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” Right now both of “my” cities, along with dozens of others, are smoldering under curfews. Is the whole country so old and sick that we no longer care?
