Inbound, from the Internet

If life is what happens in the meantime, I have had a week of living large. We arrived in Paris more than a month ago, but my first fortnight here was occupied mainly with preparing a lecture that I was obliged to give in Cleveland in the middle of October. Regular readers will know about that pleasant event, but they will know, too, that it took a full week counting travel and recuperation time. So in my mind's eye I didn't settle down to what you might call serious work until the beginning of last week. In this context "serious work" has a technical connotation that may not resonate with all readers. Strange to say, some folks just aren't into sixteenth-century Portuguese religious poetry. Serious work, you see, means the composition of a monograph about Sobolos rios que vão, an extraordinary poem by Luis de Camões.

What I Should Have Been Working On

Furthermore, this meant that, turning my back on my recent and exhilarating flirtation with trade publishing, I was returning to a level of scholarship so recondite as to make even my great work on asyndectic parataxis in the Lesser Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor seem vulgar and popularizing. A reputation for true obscurantism is easier to talk about that to achieve, and I refuse to give mine up without a struggle. I did make some progress, meaning I got some pages written; but I had not reckoned on the operation of the Michael Corleone Theorem: "Just when I think I am out, they pull you back in."

What I Was Actually Working On

Before I had left America, in fact a goodly time before I had left America, I had recorded a CSPAN interview about The Anti-Communist Manifestos. This was sort of fun, if somewhat ersatz. The recording took place in a small room in the mid-town high rise campus of Pace University. Around the room were light boxes hoked up with photographs as a fake Manhattan skyline. I hadn’t exactly forgotten about the interview, but I had long since given up expecting its imminent airing—which would in any event be rather academic to me here in Paris. Hence I was taken by surprise by its appearance. I don’t think I did too badly, considering the fact that nobody told me that if I wanted to make eye contact with my television audience I’d have to look at an imaginary spot about two feet above the head of the person I was actually talking to. You might like to see it. Your time will be only slightly more squandered than if you drove out to the mall to watch the Sears truck unload. You can see it here. Or if by any unhappy chance you have not been introduced to my son Richard’s wonderful blog “A Brooklynite on the Ice,” you can dispatch two nerds with one groan by watching it there. Rich has me sandwiched in between Michelle Obama’s sweet-potato and some unclaimed Hallowe’en sweets. You appreciate the unifying leitmotif: sweetness.

I learned about its appearance from a small avalanche of emails. The scholar may often be unsure of whether he in fact has any audience at all. You spend several years researching a learned book, and a couple more years writing it. Add two more years, if you are lucky, for the process of publication. Then maybe after two more a couple of people will write condescending reviews of a page or two, the gist of which is the following: “B+. What this guy should have said...what I would have said...”, etc. But almost anything posted on the Internet is likely to get nearly instantaneous response.

One group of messages is from former students. Any teacher is always thrilled to hear from a former student—even if the communication is a disguised request for a letter of recommendation. A professor of literature is going to be particularly thrilled to hear from former students who listen to or watch programs about literature—especially when (as was the circumstance here) they seem to be doing this in precious moments stolen from their day jobs running the world. I also heard from quite a few B+ types. “Didn’t you mean Germany one time when you said Russia?” Er, yes, sorry. “Did I hear you say that Hiss was convicted of treason? It was perjury.” Well, I don’t think that I said treason, but if I did that was a mistake, because it was perjury, though of course the perjury was a mere emblem of the espionage on which the statute of limitations had expired, and yadayada yad.

One guy (and this was more like D- than B+) went on the warpath about a passing remark made in the book—but certainly not in the interview—about Dalton Trumbo. Now, look. Dalton Trumbo wore very cool hats. Dalton Trumbo may have been a good screen-writer. Dalton Trumbo may have been screwed by HUAC. Dalton Trumbo may still be a Hollywood darling and the subject of a recent hagiographic offering by PBS. But I am here to tell you that Dalton Trumbo was also a Communist acolyte of Joseph Stalin, a denier of the gulag, and a maligner of truth-tellers like Koestler and Kravchenko. He was in short a useful idiot member of the American Communist Party. But I digress...

Among the most poignant messages I received were several from people, mostly of advancing years, for whom the content of my book had vivid associations, often through family members. A man about my age wrote to me from rural New England with an extraordinary story. He is of Finnish-American descent, and he has in his possession, and allowed me to see, three autobiographical essays by relatives or friends of his parents’ generation—American survivors of the gulag! Actually there are quite a few books by or about American “zeks”—the Russian slang acronym for political prisoners. Three of the ones that impressed me most are Alexander Dolgun’s Story, Walter Ciszek’s With God in Russia, and Robert Robinson’s Red on Black. This last touches on the multiply ironic histories of blacks who tried to escape American racism by going to the USSR.

One community that certainly needs its own historian—and I hope my correspondent might be he—is the large group of Finnish-Americans who, abandoning their little farms and the idling factories of the Midwest, took off for the Soviet Union in the early Depression years. Some were members of the Communist Party. Others were enthusiasts of the socialist vision. Still others were simply naïve members of a tight-knit ethic community that had been sold a bill of goods. By the thousands these idealistic immigrants—in common with non-Russians from a hundred nations, including a very large contingent from Finland itself—got caught up in the grinding machine that was Stalin’s gulag. That they were innocent of the crimes for which they were punished is perhaps too banal a point to make. One of the essayists (a woman) reports that her NKVD tormentors actually said to her, “If out of a hundred people we arrest, one is truly guilty, we are doing a good job!”

All three of the essays I have seen are written in a kind of rusty and faulty English miraculously remembered after fifty years of torment. The literary quality is that you would expect of someone with a few years' elementary education in a Michigan school house of the 1920s or 30s. But they are enough to make the very stones weep, and I hope they make it into print. The world is tired of bad news. We all want a respite from misery. In the Canterbury Tales the Monk’s contribution is a sad litany of de casibus tragedies beginning with Lucifer and Adam and coming down practically to the “present day” with Count Ugolino of Pisa, ever memorable from Dante’s Inferno. At last the Knight, tiring of the unceasing woe, interrupts the Monk and cuts him off:

“Hoo!” quod the Knyght, “good sire, namoore of this!.../ for litel hevynesse / Is right ynough to muche folk, I gesse.”

Yes, I guess so too. But as I told my correspondent, a world that is prepared to forget its Trails of Tears, its Armenian genocides, its Holomadors and its Holocausts, its Rwandan massacres—that is a world condemned to experience them again.

Bounded by History

I've always had a snobbish aversion to the word "historic" as used by American travel agents and local civic boosters. They present us with historic sites, historic areas, historic neighborhoods, and historic buildings galore. Usually this means that the thing referred to has been around forever, with a starting date for forever being somewhere around 1920. History, surely, is universal. It is the medium in which we live and move. I may fail to achieve fame or glory, but I can no more opt out of being "historic" than I can opt out of being mammalian or bipedal. To use the language so oddly used by our President of Afghanistan, history is a category of necessity and not of choice. Nonetheless, I find myself talking quite shamelessly about how "historic" our location in Paris is.
Here we are at the point of the little yellow slip, on the Avenue de Suffren as it separates us in the Fifteenth Arondissement from my daughter and her family in the Seventh across the street. As you can see, we are practically in the Champ de Mars park, which runs between the Eiffel Tower on the one end to the École Militaire at the other.

On a proportional basis, at least, there is probably more of revolutionary Philadelphia still intact than there is of revolutionary Paris. Practically all European capitals show the evidence of the drastic and unforgiving progress of the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. There is very little of Balzac's Paris left for the same reason there is so little of Dickens's London. Nobody in particular wanted to keep it, and there were piles of money to be made by changing it. But in Paris the remaking was particularly intentional and drastic. The great urban planner Baron Haussmann rebuilt Paris on lines not merely incompatible with the the old unplanned jumbled neighborhoods, but positively hostile to them. He wanted a city that was new, beautiful, and different, and he got all three. But certain things have a better chance of survival than others. Only Xerxes or the Army Corps of Engineers would have the gall to change the course of a river. Only a vandal would turn the Tuileries into office blocks. And the Champ de Mars--well, as its name implies it was a military parade ground of ancient lineage. You might as well try to turn Fort Dix into a theme park. Actually, when you come to think of it....but I digress. This means that right at the moment the Flemings are living directly across the road from, well, history!

At the Musée Carnavalet on the edge of the Marais--another happy escapee from Haussmann's radiating avenues--there is currently an exhibition concerning Paris in the Revolution. There was a kind of tributary mini-expo featuring English satirical prints dealing with the Revolution or Napoleon Buonaparte--to the extent that Gillray and his contemporaries made a distinction between the two. The Carnavalet's mission is Parisian history, and its collection of revolutionary prints, paintings, and knickknacks is unrivalled.

Among the most striking prints on display were several that depicted events on the Champ de Mars. On July 17, 1791 a large crowd gathered there in connection with a circulated petition demanding the abdication of the king. As is usual with "historic" events what actually happened next depends upon what "history" you read. But the upshot (so to speak) was that units of the National Guard, probably under the command of Lafayette, fired into the crowds, killing many people. What was called the "Massacre of the Champ du Mars" was one of a series of radicalizing events that would spell doom for the "liberal" revolution imagined by people like Lafayette. Indeed the damagogue Marat attacked Lafayette violently in the aftermath of the event.




Less violent, though disturbing enough to some in its own way, was the formal institution of a new civil religion, replacing traditional Christianity, but imitating some of its outward forms. The revolutionaries went so far as to install the goddess Reason (in the form of a super-model of the day) on the altar of Notre-Dame cathedral. Someday I intend to write a little essay about this, because I am convinced that the organizers of this quasi-liturgical event took as their iconographic guide in coming up with Reason's costume a medieval manuscript of the Roman de la Rose! The revolutionaries were for the most part a godless bunch. A few were actual atheists; many more were when pressed what I would call low-church Deists. Their "theology", if any, was of the "clock-maker" sort; and though they were democrats the last thing they wanted was to invited that particular artisan back into the Assemblée Nationale. But Robespierre and some of his friends found it convenient to take at least a step in that direction, perhaps rather as Stalin in the middle of the War found it convenient to reanimate, in a limited way,the Orthodox Church. They instituted something called the "Feast of the Supreme Being". Try to imagine a block party presided over by, say, Matthew Arnold, and you'll get the feel of the thing.

In the Carnavalet exhibition one of the more striking images was this one--the celebration of the Fête de 'Être Suprème on the Champ de Mars, 20 Prairial de l'an II (June 8, 1794). That would have been about three hundred yards from where I sit as I write this. Talk about historic!

Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters

My last effort was more a phenomenon than a real blog posting. I had no computer with me during my recent trip to America, and scant time to have used it should I have had one. I was working from a rather dodgy PC in the public lobby of the hotel in which I was staying, so that I considered it a major feat to get anything up at all.

My visit had two parts. The first day was spent mainly at a beautiful independent school, the Hawken School, where I met with some individual classes and addressed a large school assembly on the topic “What Are the Humanities”. I thought that after all these years it was perhaps time I figured it out. There is a very great deal in American primary and secondary education to cause distress and alarm; but if you are inclined to pessimism, as I often am, a visit to a place like Hawken is most salutary. Quite apart from the impressive student body, the place has a visionary head of school, a faculty not merely committed to their students but to the actual subjects they teach to their students, and—quite as important as either of these—an active group of civic-minded parents deeply invested in the school’s success.

The next day was spent mainly with the chair of the art history department at Case Western Reserve University, the distinguished professor Edward Olszewski, my host for two delicious meals, and my guide around the fabulous Cleveland Museum of Art. Even with many of its galleries closed during a dramatic expansion of the facilities, it makes an overwhelming impression. Prof. Olszewski was also the man who introduced my lecture on “The Letter and the Spirit: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis and Pictorial Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance Art.” You undoubtedly know Leonardo’s “Madonna of the Rocks.” Everybody knows the painting. Ah, yes, but do you know what the rocks are, where they come from, and why they are there? If you don’t, you’ll want to hear this lecture.

The whole trip, though exhausting, was richly rewarding in cultural alimentation (as well as the more conventional mode of gastronomy) and in human fellowship. What I did not fully grasp until very late in my stay was the justification for my having been invited to make the visit in the first place. It was a sensational exemplification of the virtues of casting one’s bread upon the waters, as I shall explain in a moment. But I fear that what with the ravages of secular humanism and all that, there might be one or two of you out there who don’t know what bread-casting is all about.

My grandmother used to listen to a religious program on NBC radio when I was a child. (The idea of a religious broadcasting by one of the major networks would today seem extraordinary, but it was then quite common. I remember hearing President Franklin Roosevelt on the radio leading the entire nation in the Lord’s Prayer.) One evening, while I was trying to do something else, I was hearing rather than listening to the kind of uncontroversial and platitudinous preacher that the format encouraged. It was perhaps the once famous Norman Vincent Peale, whose specialty was the Good News as Good Vibe, lots of uplift. My grandmother’s own religion was definitely of the “No cross, no crown” school. Anyway with this guy, whoever he was, there was not much cross to a whole lot of crown. The gist of his sermon or inspirational talk was this: “Remember—a good deed is always a good investment.” He exemplified the fact that no good deed goes unrewarded with various anecdotes, and with repeated citations of the Bible text (Ecclesiastes 11:1) around which the whole sermon was built. “Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again.”

That was a text with which I was not unfamiliar, though it did puzzle me, as soggy, water-logged bread did not seem to me a highly desirable commodity, and, anyway, why go through the rigmarole of throwing it away so you can find it again? I have since learned from erudite Bible commentaries that what is probably being advocated is grain shipments, from which a good profit was reasonably to be expected—meaning that this Preacher of Plenty was right on!

In any event, there were repeated citations of “Cast your bread upon the waters...” Although different speakers or presenters came on the show each week, there was a permanent MC, whose unctuous attitudes and holy tones might have inspired Eliot’s great line about “the sapient sutlers of the Lord.” This guy introduced the program, and always brought it to an end by summarizing the evening’s message in a pithy phrase or two. On this particular night the announcer made a booboo so egregious that it actually showed up later in a collection of nationally broadcast malapropisms called “Pardon My Blooper”. After thanking the preacher for an inspiring message, he concluded by exhorting his national audience to put it into practice. “...and so, my friends, remember—‘Cast your broad upon the waters...This is the National Breadcasting Corporation’.”

Back to the main plot. I eventually discovered that the real reason I was having such a great time in Cleveland had to do with some long-forgotten bread-casting of my own. I was there, ostensibly, because I am an expert in medieval Christian iconography; but there was a more satisfying reason. Among the more substantial and civic-minded citizens of Cleveland is a family of whom the wife is a former Princeton undergraduate. I don’t mention her name lest even such meager publicity as this cause her embarrassment. This woman is a Hawken alumna and a Hawken parent. She is a busy wife and mother, and she is an outstanding art historian in training. The truth of the matter is that I do not remember teaching her at Princeton, or even the course in which I taught her. Fortunately from my point of view she was not so forgetful of me.

Bishop Berkeley famously asked about the tree falling in the forest, unseen by human eye, unheard by human ear. Wordsworth spoke of

....that best portion of a good man’s life /His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

Berkeley’s answer was that God heard the tree fall. It was God’s unseen glance, indeed, that allowed the tree and every other thing to be. Esse est percipi. To be is to be perceived. And Wordsworth, though he felt forced to cast off the old biblical myths, was still writing within a providential world in which bread cast upon the waters might after many days be found again. One of the greatest joys of having been a teacher is the discovery that it’s all true.

Blogging in extremis, or is that Cleveland?

This post is destined to be more perfunctory than most. I spent all of yesterday on a flight from Paris to Cleveland, with a tense connection in Newark that might have given me a few more gray hairs had not that job not been taken care of long ago by anxieties past. On the Paris-Newark flight my seat-mate was a most interesting Chinese-American musician, a former member of the Curtis faculty, who is now pursuing a musical career in Paris. But as he was better at sleeping in a cramped Continental seat that I am, we only really got into conversation somewhere around Newfoundland. I am further constrained by the fact that I am traveling without computer, and I shall be dependent upon the generosity of new-found friends at the Computer Center on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. My first stop was Glidden House, my three-night home-away-from home, a classy hotel on the edge of the CWRU campus.





This may be the first blog posting ever sent from the "business" computer at the Glidden House sign-in desk. I am going to spend most of today the Hawken School, and talking with the students there about the Humanities. (The capital letter is about all the respect they get these days.)


The principal purpose of my visit is to give a lecture sponsored by the Art History department at Case Western in conjunction with the fabulous Cleveland Art Museum itself. That will be tomorrow, and I shall try to add an addendum concerning it.

Idiomatic Idiocy

One of the discomfiting but eventually salutary aspects of temporary expatriation is the feeling of being an immigrant, a stranger in a strange land, and the only person in Paris who doesn’t know the drill when it comes to getting in the right line at the post office or even validating a single bus ticket. I live a pretty comfortable and secure life in the daily run of things, and it is doubtless a good thing to experience at least a whiff of what millions of the hard-working poor throughout the world must experience as a nearly permanent condition.

I am in theory an expert on French literature, and I can document that claim with two published books about the Roman de la Rose, the most important vernacular product of medieval France and numerous periodical essays. I have read pretty widely in French literature. Despite an appalling accent that my interlocutors do little to ignore, I can on a daily basis get by in conversation, especially if the conversation is about Gothic architecture or Abelard’s linguistic theories. Trying to buy an electric fuse in a hardware story is another story.

Of course language exists within culture, and when cultural alterity meets linguistic alterity the results can be stressful. I mentioned proudly in my last post that I had already successfully signed up for the local swimming pool. But when I showed up at seven the next morning, my proud achievement in buying the admission ticket was reduced to ashes. The procedure that one has to go through actually to get into a French swimming pool would be worth a post of its own, but this one must be about how I failed to get in at first try. I negotiated the byzantine security system, which involves the acrobatics of changing clothes in a closet designed to hold a midget’s wardrobe, and arrived at poolside, goggles in hand, wearing my quick-dry trunks labeled “Colgate Swimming.” Before I could take the plunge, however, no fewer than three of the civil servants whose job it appears to be to support the civil servants supporting the four lifeguards, joined by at least a half dozen of the swimmers themselves, threw themselves upon me in indignation. They explained in clear if impatient terms, and in several languages including English, that I was under no circumstances to defile the pool wearing “baskets” (i.e., basketball shorts) and, worse yet, without a head covering. I must have proper swimming gear. Such gear was obviously demanded, as should have been clear even to one of my nationality, by l’hygiène. As a matter of fact the hygienic condition of my midget’s closet had approximated that of a minimally hosed out garbage dumpster, but under the circumstances I lacked both the ego and the linguistic resources to point that out. I retreated in confusion, perhaps--to attempt an epic simile--like a man who, at his boss’s funeral, has loudly broken wind midway through a rendition of “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring”.

But I recovered during the day. When in Rome do as the Romans do. Get the right swimming accoutrements. The place I could do this most easily, my daughter told me, would be at a mega-sporting goods shop called Decathlon, of which there are two or three branches in Paris, the nearest being across the river on the avenue Wagram. This place, four or five stops up the number 6 Métro line, is a very good address and full of classy people in search of classy (and expensive) sportswear. If I may indulge my appetite for stereotypes, I have noted in the past that when the French bourgeoisie takes to the ski slope or the tennis court, they do it wearing only garments in which athletic function has been accommodated to the requirements of French haute couture. In the past I have sometimes wondered where they even got such stuff, because it wasn’t J. C. Penny’s. Now I know: 26, avenue Wagram.

It’s also the kind of place where you have to have been a debutante in order to join the sales staff. Tall, slim, elegant, aloof females—with the fourth of those adjectives bearing most of the phrase’s stress—stand around the sales stations chatting with each other, expertly avoiding eye contact with the potential customers. I summed the situation up in an instant, and little-red-hen like, set out to do it myself. In fact, I found men’s swimming suits with little difficulty. There were approximately two hundred thousand of them in two slightly different styles (both of which had the feel to the finger of prosthetic devices one might wear, concealed by over garments, to assuage the discomfort of an inguinal hernia). But there were three different prices—the top of the line being 60 Euros. Yes you heard me. Sixty. Euros. I immediately shifted my attention to the bottom rung which, while still pretty costly did not actually involve a second mortgage.

chapeau de piscine, also known as abri de piscine

Mission half accomplished; now for the couverture. But here was a mystery. Though there were rank upon rank of swimming shorts, I could find not a single swimming cap. I must anticipate the end of the story by giving you in advance the perfectly explicable cause of my difficulty. For the swimming caps when I eventually was led to them gave no indication to the naked eye of being swimming caps. They—again, thousands of them--were all tightly packed in little shiny, square cardboard boxes that looked, perhaps, like a rather ambitious week-end’s supply of condoms. That, too, was condign, since wearing one of them makes you feel like you’re practicing safe sex with your head, but I digress.

I knew that it was not possible that Decathlon had no swimming caps but, temporarily stumped, I had to face the terrors of accosting one of the ice maidens. As I approached her I realized that although I knew the rather odd French word for a swimming suit (maillot—after the tight weave, as in chain-mail, believe it or not) I didn’t know the word for the accompanying headgear. I therefore made a logical punt—almost always fatal in matters idiomatic. I was having some difficulty, I told her, in locating the chapeaux de piscine. This at least captured her attention, and she told me that they didn’t sell them, and that I should try Bricolage France--the local version of Lowe's or Home Depot. They only dealt in swimming gear. “Pas de chapeau?” I asked, pointing at my head. She laughed out loud. What I had said was apparently so rich as to deserve to be shared with another ice maiden. “Hey, Marthe, this gentleman wants a chapeau de piscine--for his head.” More laughter. Then she led me to the bonnets de bain in their nice little pharmaceutical boxes.

• bonnet de bain, also maille (tattoo 1000 euros en plus)

Battered, bushed, but blogged in

From time to time I have encountered web sites at which some frenetic typist, amidst many misspellings and only partially comprehensible abbreviations, announces that he is “live blogging” from a court-room, ring-side, or the Great American Bake Off. Though this is surely to be preferred to dead blogging, it is not without its own problems.

In any event, this is probably as close to live blogging as I am likely ever to get. I am sitting in a lounge at Newark airport sipping cranberry juice watching other people play video games on their computers while they sip other stuff. Those few who are not tapping their computer keys are tapping their toes with that kind of nervous anticipation of people whose full-time job is to wait for something to happen, or somebody to arrive, or some mode of conveyance to be announced as “ready for boarding.” Some time ago our wonderful daughter Katy decided that her parents were no longer aging but positively aged and that, as a consequence, they should no longer travel tourist class on the large international carriers. She set out to investigate a number of “niche” airlines that made a specialty of “all business” flights at rates somewhat lower than the typical first-class cabins on the segregated routes.

She found something called “L’Avion”, and we greatly enjoyed that for a while. “L’Avion offered vastly comfortable seating half way between a divan and a dentist’s chair, plus lots of coddling by attentive, smartly presented staff members. On overnight flights sleep was not only possible; it was inescapable. The fares were higher than on the cattle cars, of course, but still not outrageous. It was a great experience. We wondered how “L’Avion” could make a go of it.

As it turned out they couldn’t. After a brief period this nice line began cutting its schedule. Indeed it turned out that one of the reservations we had for a transatlantic flight simply disappeared when all Thursday flights disappeared. Then “L’Avion” disappeared from the computer screen altogether. A few months later something called “Open Skies” appeared in the recently vacated space. We are waiting now for the “Open Skies” evening flight to Paris. There are a few differences. “L’Avion” was a dependency of Air France; “Open Skies” is a dependency of British Airways.

...dot, dot, dot...
and I am now on the plane, where I discover that only about a fifth of it is on L’Avion’s model. The plane is in fact another version of proletarians and aristocrats separated by about five hundred dollars on the ticket price. Part of that differential, the part that matters most to me, is in leg room, which goes, on a per-square inch basis, at about the rate of Manhattan real estate. But there seems also to be the feeling on the part of the staff that two or three times in an hour they must remind you in some alimentary way of your privileged status. The most recent reminder has been a hot, buttery croissant and a little pot of exquisite Swiss strawberry jelly.


...a few more dot, dot, dots...and here I am in Paris, where the initial efficiency has been stunning. We are into our gorgeous tiny new apartment on the avenue Suffren. After a most pleasant reunion luncheon with Katy, Zvi, and the two youngest of our gorgeous granddaughters (the eldest being occupied with a high level photography workshop over at the American University in Paris), I toddled the long block down toward the river to the municipal sports center “Emile Antoine”. There I purchased a carnet pour 10 entrées (tarif reduit) and intend to show up at the pool at seven tomorrow morning. And just to prove that I really am here today, I employ the old photograph-of-the-day’s-newspaper date beloved of Columbian terrorists and the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The Power of Procrastination

The main excitement of this Wednesday in my house is the looming fact next Wednesday, when we shall be in Paris recovering from the exhaustion of trying to achieve, but of course failing to do so, all the things that at the moment seem non-negotiable prerequisites of our leaving. Posting a blog essay is not high on the list. Indeed, it is not even on the list, and at the moment that is a considerable advantage. It means that at least for now I am not required to abandon the purity of my proscrastination. In my undergraduate days I had a classmate who had taken fecklessness to an altogether new level, and proved that sloth might be classed among the fine arts. This man was the master of the wheedled extension and the negotiated Incomplete. He spent most of his waking hours playing bridge and watching a television program called “Gun Smoke”. He was very accomplished in both endeavors. He seemed to have total recall of every card played and of every obscure incident in every episode of “Gun Smoke”. One day the man gave me the following advice: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the next day.”

I scorned his advice. I was a determined overachiever. In fact on most days I had usually overachieved before two or two-thirty in the afternoon. I got good grades. I got a silver cup proclaiming me among the better students of literature in the whole Sewanee class of 1958. This man got mediocre grades—though, infuriatingly enough, passing ones. He had not so much as a ceramic flowerpot to show how smart he was. Fast-forward half a century. Eventually, after many more pewter cups, I got a meager pension from the debauched holdings of the Teachers’ Insurance and Annuity Association and the College Retirement Equities Fund. This other guy, when he last surfaced, owned about a third of the state of North Carolina.

I might at least improve the hour by listing—not addressing, mind you, merely listing—some of the things I have to accomplish before I get on the airplane next Tuesday. I must write an ambitious lecture on “Scriptural Exegesis and Pictorial Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance Art.” As readers of my last post probably can divine, what I have in that line so far is a small collection of blurry pictures of pigs.

Being graded on a paper is a miserable experience; but there are experiences more miserable yet, such as assigning a grade to a paper. One of my former colleagues, who taught at Yale before he came to Princeton, told me that one of his own elder colleagues at that institution had made the paper-grading business bearable by limiting himself to but two grades and a single comment for all papers. His two grades, over which he often agonized in paroxysms of scrupulous indecision, were A- and B+. The written comment was invariably the same: “Some interesting ideas.” I thought retirement meant that my paper-grading days were over, but I find I must write an “expert” evaluation of a manuscript submitted to a scholarly journal. Writing evaluations of really terrific essays is easier. Writing evaluations of really horrible essays is yet easier. What is quite difficult is writing a helpful commentary on an essay that is almost good as is, but could be really terrific if only the author would rewrite it completely. In order to explain how this might be done, of course, I shall in effect have to do a complete rewrite myself.

Then there are several letters of recommendation for graduate school, law school, medical school, and business school. The liberal professions seem to me threatened by an entropic death brought about by a surfeit of evaluation; and the high cholesterol diet begins early, with the application process. I am rather unsure whether admissions committees actually read the letters I write, but their potential and perceived significance for the young and hopeful applicants is such that their author is required to take them very seriously indeed. It’s too bad in a way that they are all confidential, for many are masterpieces worthy of wide circulation. The Collected Letters of Recommendation of J. V. Fleming would certainly be the thickest of my various publications.

Those are just a few of the things I have to do before I leave, and they are as nothing in comparison with the domestic chores: garden, car insurance, root-and-branch search for overdue library books, pre-paying the property taxes, organizing medical prescriptions, etc., etc. I take some comfort in the example of the great Samuel Johnson, whose three hundredth birthday fell this month. Johnson is sometimes said to be England’s first professional man of letters—that is, he actually earned his living from his writing. That is not easy to do today, and it was practically impossible in eighteenth-century London. Johnson’s writing is extremely varied. The publication of his great dictionary of the English language was a Copernican event in the history of our culture. He has works of exemplary fiction that every educated person should read. (His Rasselas is in my opinion superior even to Voltaire’s brilliant Candide.) His Lives of the Poets—and especially the remarkable “Life of Savage”—established a mode of literary biography still vibrant today. But Johnson’s steady income came from his essays for the periodical press. In this capacity he faced definite, inflexible deadlines, and his mode of operation was inspiring. Ordinarily he only began writing his essay when the printer’s boy arrived on the doorstep to pick up the already overdue copy. Dr. Johnson—a blogger’s blogger!