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!
