Lady Justice Coloring Book

(crayons sold separately)

I did not intend to write an essay about Trayvon Martin and/ or George Zimmerman.  To say the same thing slightly more emphatically, I intended not to write about Tayvon Martin and/or George Zimmerman.  I did not regard myself as competent to do so.  Early on I did not follow even the journalistic presentation of the matter thoroughly or thoughtfully.  Daily summaries of the actual course of the trial left me with impressions but no confident conclusions, certainly with none that would authorize me to give public endorsement of—let alone second guess--a jury that showed every sign of having taken up its unpleasant duties with seriousness.  Furthermore, though I hope I sometimes have interesting contributions to make on the often whimsical topics I take up in my blog, I am far from believing that my political or social opinions are of general interest.  As for their authority, they rarely win approval, let alone agreement, even within my own family.

            We now arrive at the but.  I just came upon a brief article, based in a supposedly objective statistical survey, concerning public attitudes toward the acquittal of Zimmerman.  More than half of white people asked felt certain that the jury’s decision was the right one.  Less than ten percent of black people did.  A few days ago President Obama spoke movingly and convincingly to white Americans in the following terms: “I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn’t go away.”

            Mr. Obama referenced his own personal experience, as I must reference mine, comparatively trivial though it be.  I was immediately taken back in my mind to the afternoon of October 3, 1995.  About 1pm (Eastern Time) I was sitting around a large conference table with fifteen or more other members of the “Race Relations Task Force” of Princeton University: an impressive group of student leaders, professors, and administrators, about half of whom were black people.  The brown-bag lunch meetings of this earnest and well-intentioned group were generally useful but also sometimes somniferous.  Not today.  People came and went, discreetly, as their schedules demanded, and about one o’clock a newcomer arrived bearing the news of the O. J. Simpson verdict: “Not Guilty!”  

            I have possibly experienced a more ironic moment of professional life, but if so I cannot think of it now.  All the blacks broke out in more or less effusive expressions of delight.  Most of the white people, certainly including me, succumbed to the affect of having recently ingested a bad clam.  That is how the “Race Relations Task Force” of a great university related to race on this particular occasion.

            This was for me a difficult moment, for I fear that I had indeed come to a rather firm conclusion concerning O. J. Simpson’s role in the death of his wife Nicole.  But I could still tell myself that I hadn’t been there, I hadn’t heard everything that the jury had heard, and that “the jury had spoken”.  Perhaps I succeeded in convincing myself that it was at least conceivable that Simpson was innocent.  But there was a greater challenge yet to come.  

            Among my most distinguished colleagues at that time was Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Soon after the conclusion of the trial our excellent student newspaper ran its own article on “campus reactions” to the trial’s outcome.  A student reporter interviewed Toni Morrison, who was quoted as saying something I found quite fantastic.  She could think of no way in fact or in fiction that Simpson could have been guilty of the murder!  I am working from memory here, but Ms. Morrison’s general views on the matter have been documented elsewhere, and can be consulted.

            Now when one of the world’s great imaginative writers tells you something empirically probable is so impossible that she cannot allow even a fictional version of it, it may be time to reassess the meaning of meaning, and revive the doctrine of the plurality of truths.  In the thirteenth century some Christian followers of the Arab philosopher Averroës (1126-1198) developed a doctrine of the “double truth”.   Philosophical truth was one thing, theological truth another.  For example, Aristotle had held that the world was eternal; but the Scriptures spoke of a creation in time.  So the eternality of the world was “philosophically true” while the temporality of the world was “theologically true”.   So long as there was no forced confrontation or reconciliation of the two, an uneasy intellectual equilibrium could prevail.  Though few people realize it, our term “politically correct” had a similar theoretical origin in Marxist thought.  What is “politically correct” is the secular equivalent of what in the old sacred realm was “theologically correct”.

            I conclude that in the matter of Trayvon Martin and/or George Zimmerman an appeal to the truth is predestined to fail.  This is not merely because of the contested interpretations of meager and ambiguous evidence, but because different interpreters seek a definitive privilege for one or another of plural truths.  There is only what might be called instrumental or functional or legal truth in the verdict of a jury of one’s peers, supported by protocols of judicial review, but it is a truth nonetheless.  It is too much to hope for philosophy or theology.  Nobody sentient is likely to judge the American system of jurisprudence to be perfect.  But sins of commission are here worse than sins of omission.  That is why the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti will remain an "everlasting wrong" and that of Orenthal James Simpson a bizarre episode in popular culture.  Nobody with even a vague historical sense should lightly badmouth one of the undoubted foundations of our precious liberties, let alone replace it with the judgments of surveys in the popular press, the opinions of talking heads, or the organizers of on-line petitions.

           

Dead Letter Scholarship

 

 Where great ideas go to die

Most people are probably familiar with the alliterative advice given to fledgling professors: “Publish or perish.”  It means that the publication of scholarly research is a requirement of keeping a professorial position in an academic institution.  In general scholarly publication is a necessary but insufficient requirement for academic success.  Publishing your essay on “The Incidence of Incest among Lace-Makers in Seventeenth-Century Toulouse”—in a “good journal,” of course—cannot guarantee your advancement to a tenured position, but failing to publish it can seal your doom.

            These circumstances partly account for the generally uninspiring character of large swaths of the academic press—the thin books that might have made a tolerable journal article, the thin journal article that might have sustained a cocktail-party conversation for a minute or two.  Horace thought you ought to keep a finished manuscript in your drawer for nine years while you thought about the wisdom of publishing it.  But of course by then a junior professor would already be entering the third year of a second career as a taxi driver.

            In the calculus of academic evaluation books rank considerably higher than journal articles, but they are also more difficult to write.  Hence the academic vogue of the “edited volume”—and with it my eventual topic, the dead letter essay.  You dream up a topic and a title—Incest and Lace-Making: New Perspectives, perhaps.  Then you invite eight or ten desperate youngsters to contribute essays to your volume.  There were, after all, lace-makers in Genoa, Prague, Ghent, and Allentown PA as well as in Toulouse, plenty to go around.  And if they didn’t practice incest they sometimes had indigestion, which is close enough for volumes of this genre.  Eight or ten young scholars can add an item to the “Articles” subsection of their bibliographies, and you get to add a whole book!

            If you can actually get the book published, that is.  There has been known to be a certain slippage twixt cup and lip.  In my second year of professorial life (1964) I succumbed to the flattering invitation of a senior scholar who had the great plan of publishing a book of essays with new perspectives on every one of Chaucer’s tales.  I knocked myself out writing the greatest essay ever penned on the “Summoner’s Tale.”  It is also the greatest never read, because never published.  It was the first in what was to become a rather thick file of my dead letter essays.
             Full many a flower is born to bloom unseen

            And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

 world's largest dart board?

            Hardly less disconcerting than the editorial death of a laboriously written essay is its resurrection from the dead after considerably more than three days.  Hanging on a wall in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle is a huge wooden disk that looks like the largest dartboard in Britain.  According to a black-letter legend encircling the bull’s eye “This is the rounde table of king Arthur with xxiiii of his namyd knightes.”  What is it—besides being a Tudor fake, that is?  In the early 1970s I was recruited by an eminent but feckless proposer of edited volumes to write the lead essay for a book that would study every conceivable aspect of this bizarre artifact—artisinal, art historical, calligraphical, carbon-dendrological—you name it.  My assignment, should I choose to accept (as in a moment of temporary cerebral intermission I did) was to write a synoptic essay on “The Round Table in Literature and Legend”.  Arthurian literature is not exactly a small topic, and to work up such an essay from scratch was an enormous labor. I was accordingly rather miffed when it turned out to be a dead letter.

            Fast forward twenty-five years.  A strange contraption called the computer is now a common sight in academic offices.  I have sired children, and they have graduated from college.  My temples are gray.  I am an alleged eminence myself.  Out of the blue—Cambridge blue, in this instance—I receive an urgent communication from an editor informing me that after “some delay” my essay is about to be published.  Would I be good enough to make a quick review of the scholarship of the last quarter century to see whether my footnotes might require some tweaking!

            All this comes to mind because of a message from the editorial tomb received only this week.  Marjorie Reeves (1905-2003), an Oxford historian, was the world’s greatest expert on Joachim of Fiore and medieval millennialism generally.  She was a lovely woman and person of extraordinary moral vibrancy.  She played a significant role in my life and that of my wife, who had been an undergraduate at her college, Saint Anne’s, Oxford.  She is the only scholar with whom I have jointly published a book.

Marjorie Reeves (1905-2003)

           
          When her centenary hove into view as the twentieth century departed, I was happy to fall in with a plan proposed by a scholar in Germany to contribute to an “edited volume” in Ms. Reeves’s honor.  The editor was a woman unknown to me—perhaps not a promising  augury in retrospect.  But I wrote the essay and sent it off—straight to the dead letter office, or in this instance the Abteilung für unzustellbare Briefe.  Marjorie Reeves eventually died, and while I shall never forget her I had long since put her stillborn festschrift out of mind by the time I retired in 2006.  Guess what?

Tale of Two Suppers

“Christ was the word that spake it,
He took the bread and he brake it;
And what the word did make it;
That I believe, and take it."

                     attributed to Queen Elizabeth I

            The New Jersey climate—at least the summer climate--is semi-tropical.  If you leave your garden unattended for a two week period the results are fairly dramatic.  It took about one full and seriously jet-lagged week, dodging thunderstorms, even to get all areas of the lawn mowed.  It was more like hay making than grass cutting.  The tomatoes were in dire need of staking, and the basil plants already threatening to go to seed.  But I finally have that all tidied up and looking gorgeous, and have been able to turn to the brute labor of the firewood, the abundant if ambiguous gift of hurricane Sandy.

            In short we had fairly well regained a sense of domestic control, and it was almost with a feeling of equanimity that we took a long afternoon off on Sunday to go into the city.  The purpose of the trip was pure pleasure: an unexpected chance to have supper with dear friends of more than forty years, Jim and Hester Magnuson, who were in town briefly from Austin. 

            As our meeting time was not until seven, we had the late afternoon free, and we knew just how to spend it.  It is a short walk from Penn Station at Thirty-Third and Seventh Avenue to the Morgan Library at Thirty-Sixth and Madison, though the heat was sufficiently oppressive to make us appreciate our air conditioned arrival.  The Morgan is one of the crown jewels of the City, and at any given moment it usually has mounted a couple of what I think of as “two hour” exhibitions—meaning that a motivated viewer can really do them justice in a two-hour visit.  What had caught my eye in the Friends’ Letter was a new show entitled “Illuminating Faith: the Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art”.

            The Morgan’s collection of medieval liturgical books is of course superb.  Even so, I had wondered beforehand whether they would be able to find enough quality objects on such a specialized topic.  I need not have worried.  The Eucharist (Mass, Divine Liturgy, Holy Communion, Lord’s Supper) is the central sacrament of Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Anglicanism, and it plays an important role in most Protestant churches as well.  In the Roman Church of the later Middle Ages—from which all the Morgan’s materials are drawn—there were a number of dramatic innovations that encouraged an efflorescence of Eucharistic iconography.

           

The Corpus Christ festival in the Middle Ages            

The first of these was the invention of a major new  festival—Corpus Christi Day—to be devoted to the cult of Christ as present in the Eucharist.  An ecstatic nun, Saint Juliana of Liège (1192-1258), instructed by a private vision, made it her life’s work to promote the institution of the new feast.  One of her close spiritual friends was a local canon who happened later to become Pope Urban IV. According to the Bible the Last Supper took place on the evening of Maundy Thursday, the day before the Crucifixion.  But that day was already liturgically heavy with the ancient mournful solemnities of Passiontide.  Another Thursday was needed, and the festival of Corpus Christi was somewhat arbitrarily assigned to the Thursday after Trinity Sunday.  Trinity Sunday is not a fixed date, but it always falls in high summer.  One need not be a cynic to see that, in a world dominated by hard agricultural labor, St. Juliana’s spiritual enthusiasm might not be the only reason that a major new midweek holiday in the midsummer sun was not slow to catch on.

            It is a very strange thing for a man to hold up a piece of bread and say “This is my body;” and Christians have been, and remain, seriously divided about the meaning of it.  Large swaths of the medieval laity, by definition illiterate, pretty clearly had a magical view of the Mass.  Indeed the phrase hocus-pocus derives from the priest’s words of consecration, “Hoc est corpus meum”.  By the thirteenth century learned Roman Catholic doctrine had settled on transubstantiation.  However, that was itself a novelty unknown to the early Christian centuries.  For before you can believe in transubstantiation you have to be able to believe in substantiation in the first place.  This is a feature of the scholastic metaphysical doctrine that essentially tries to reconcile Plato and Aristotle in holding that the things of the material world have a double nature.  They have on the one hand essence or substance—the immutable “thingness” of them, so to speak.   But they also have accidence—inessential phenomenal qualities such a color, texture, weight, and so on.  The host (Latin hostia, “a sacrifice”) retains the outward accidence of a thinly pressed bread wafer but becomes in its substance the “body of Christ”.

            The cultural importance of the old feast of Corpus Christi was considerable.  Around it grew up much of the rich drama of the mystery cycles.  The Corpus Christi processions—which still exist in many parts of the world--were often magnificent.  The Eucharist (in the form of a consecrated host exposed in a monstrance or ostensorium, essentially a fancy liturgical picture frame) was reverently paraded not merely around the grounds of the great churches and monasteries, but through the residential and commercial streets of the towns and cities.  In Paris and elsewhere the bourgeois honored the Eucharist by laying out for display along the route all their most precious movables: golden vessels and silver plate, expensive clothing, jewelry, personal household images and icons.

            Some thinkers (like Queen Elizabeth) preferred to allow mysteries to remain mysterious.  The attempt to render visible an invisible spiritual world was to be sure one of the great engines of medieval art, but it also led to problems.  Several of these are hinted at in the current Morgan exhibition.  It is from the period of the most intense investment in the cult of Corpus Christi that various extravagances emerged—especially a superabundance of reports of walking, talking, and bleeding hosts.  For the Reformers the festival became a flashpoint of Eucharistic controversy, especially in the Spanish Netherlands, where the processions were on occasion attacked by mobs.  The Corpus Christi feast was abolished in all the churches of the Reform on the grounds stated by one of the Anglican Articles of Religion: “The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them”.  I think it should be entirely without controversy, however, to recommend a brief gaze at the sumptuous materials gathered at the Morgan Library, where they will be on display through the middle of September.

a contemporary procession

Greater and Lesser Lights

 

Very conveniently the climate of the Celanese monsoons has arrived with us in central New Jersey, making re-entry following our Sri Lankan adventure as free as possible from any sense of dislocation.  I needed that help, because there were other surprises for which I was unprepared.  Our baggage got lost.  It has now arrived, but trying to trace it involved a grueling tour of one of the less appealing circles of Automated Telephone Hell.  A happier surprise came in one of the packages in the large box of our accumulated mail: an early finished copy of my new book: The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.

            I was not prepared for this.  I had perhaps taken too literally the official publication date in late July, and so relegated the matter to one of those inactive bins of my brain that seem to increase in number daily.  I do, however, remember writing it.  The finished book looks terrific, if I say so myself.  Typography can dignify almost anything.  Sentences that invite embarrassment when written out in long hand may in print take on an impressive, even vatic air.  I naturally started reading the book, and must have spent at least seven minutes before encountering the first glaring error.

            The book, intended for the general educated reader rather than the specialist, is historical, biographical, and thematic in nature.  It deals with some extraordinary people—among them Valentine Greatrakes, an Anglo-Irish faith healer of the Restoration period, “Count” Cagliostro, magician to the rich and famous, and Julie de Krüdener, whom I characterize as an amalgam of Mother Teresa and Danielle Steele.  It is full of interesting lore about Rosicrucians, Freemasons, alchemists, and kabbalists galore.  But it does incidentally raise a concrete philosophical question—and a good one, I think.  How is it that the period of the Enlightenment (sometimes also called the Age of Reason) witnessed so many and varied episodes of the supernatural and the miraculous, of the esoteric, and of extravagant religious enthusiasm?  After all, our contemporary rationalists, and especially our growing band of celebrity atheists, seem firm in their conviction that just as human reason has the capacity to explain all the “mysteries” of the universe, human reason demands the cashiering of all delusional appeals to the supernatural of the sort that from the beginning of recorded history have offered men and women supposed pathways to transcendence.

            The answer I adopt is not my own but that of Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest of Enlightenment philosophers.  “Human reason,” he writes in The Critique of Pure Reason (1784) “has this peculiar fate, that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”

            I should have thought that no human heart could be deaf to what Kant is saying here.  He is talking about all the riddling questions I have been asking myself since I was able to ask questions: the God question, the soul question, the questions of the origin of the earth and the origin of life, man among the animals, the truth of rhe illusion of the freedom of the will, the conundrums that are the mystery of life.  The thinkers of the Enlightenment did a fair job of discrediting the sclerotic ecclesiastical institutions of Old Europe and of marginalizing their obscurantist theologies.  One famous description of the “enlightened” project was “the disenchantment of the world,” which is another way of saying the rationalization of the world.

            The first person to use the word freethinker in print seems to have been Bishop Berkeley.  He used it of the Irish rationalist philosopher John Toland, author of a most influential book entitled Christianity Not Mysterious (1696).  But until very recently belief in a Creator-God was considered one of reason’s minimal demands.  While it is too early to speak of a “scientific consensus”, the notion that the origins of the universe can be satisfactorily explained in terms of random and purposeless material accident, and those of all organic life in terms of Darwinian selection, are gaining an increasingly dogmatic tenor.

            Now and again I visit the religion “page” of the Huffington Post.  It is full interesting things.  Its editor, Paul Rauschenbusch, an admired friend, was for a time one of the deans of the chapel at Princeton.  One of the archived posts (“Science and Religion Quotes: What World’s Greatest Scientists Say about God”) is particularly arresting.  Only a few contemporary scientists express a confident atheism.  The anthology begins with Darwin himself.  It is of interest to see that Darwin raises the much maligned notion of “intelligent design,” though he frankly admits he doesn’t know how to evaluate its probative value.  He then says: “The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man’s intellect; but man can do his duty.”  Religious cant is one thing, ethical Kant quite another.  Ah, the “peculiar fate” of human reason!

 Valentine Greatrakes (also great name!)

Cagliostro (after Houdin)

Julie de Krüdener, by Angelica Kauffmann

A Tooth for a Truth

Clichéd writing is no doubt sometimes born of the writer’s want of imagination, but it is probably as often the imagination’s necessary surrender to the irresistible power of actual and overwhelming personal experience.  We have now spent more than a full week visiting a number of the more prominent tourist sites of central and southern Sri Lanka.  My “initial experience of Asia,” as formed by our tour, is almost inevitably an anthology of clichés already exhausted before Kipling.  But it would be foolish not to recognize the wonder of the daffodil just because Wordsworth recognized it far better long ago.

            What I have experienced first is a sense of bewildering copiousness.  There is simply a muchness of practically everything, and often enough a too-muchness.  The sense of super-abundance begins with the human population, though it does not end there.  “You should see India,” they tell me.  Or “It’s nothing compared with China.”  Perhaps so, but if your terms of comparison are the Baxter County Fair, or even Times Square, you will feel overwhelmed.  The little towns—usually nothing more than long strips of ramshackle commercial fronts laid out on either side of a seriously overused road—are small rivers of human flesh and automotive metal.  Even deep in the country you see people everywhere along the roads, many of them carrying by hand, back, shoulder or head top an extraordinary range of burdens: baskets, branches of bananas, long bamboo poles, firewood, auto parts, unidentifiable parcels of mysterious shape.

            The vegetable world competes in copiousness.  The foliage is startlingly lush, the flowers astonishingly abundant.  Everywhere along the roads are fruit and vegetable stalls laden with large piles of (to me) exotic, bright colored, oddly shaped produce.  Someone must buy some of this, though the only actual purchase I have seen was our own, of two succulent pineapples at risible cost.  No place seems odor-neutral, but the spectrum of actual aromas is very wide.

           

            Our hosts and guides (my son Luke and daughter-in-law Melanie) are professional scholars whose special expertise has given a unique richness to our encounters.  Luke is a linguistic anthropologist, ever alert in this multilingual land to subtleties of which I am totally unaware.  Melanie’s doctoral work was in the field of South Asian comparative religions.  She is a fluent Tamil speaker—and a little edgy, perhaps, in a country that so recently crushed a Tamil-based insurgency.  It is her research project on iconographic aspects of religious syncretism among Sri Lankan Buddhists and Hindus that has brought them here, and that determined a travel itinerary that included numerous important religious shrines.

            Four great world religions meet in Sri Lanka.  Buddhism enjoys something analogous to the role and privileges of a state church in old Europe.  There are large numbers of Muslims and of Hindus, who in various parts of the country constitute local majority communities.  Christianity likewise has an important minority presence which, despite the misinformation of our western travel guide, is by no means limited to “colonial types”—of whom we have encountered few.  On Sunday we were at a Eucharist in a large and largely full Anglican church.  Among the congregants there were three visibly identifiable “Europeans”, of whom we were two.  That was an English language service.  I doubt that the character of the Tamil and Sinhalese services scheduled for later in the morning was likely to be less“indigenous”.

 a monk exposes the tooth casket to a moving stream of pilgrims

            American Buddhists of my acquaintance have insisted that they follow a “philosophy” rather than a “religion”.  I try to avoid controversy whenever possible, but coming fresh as I do from a lengthy morning’s ritual of the exhibition of the relic of the Buddha’s tooth in Kandy, I would be at least inclined to try to re-open the conversation.  If what I saw wasn’t religion, what was it?  Part of Edward Said’s argument in his famous book Orientalism is that western scholars have misrepresented the eastern cultures of their study in order to justify a supposed European “civilizing mission” of colonial exploitation.  To do this required presenting orientals as barbaric, exotic, mysterious, and/or inscrutable—in short very different from ”us,” very other.  I want to avoid that sort of thing, and so will refrain from describing the Epiphany of the Tooth as a scene from a Pink Panther film.

a bloguiste-eye view

            For a medievalist this is easily done, for what I see is not alterity but striking similarity.  King Louis IX (Saint Louis) erected one of the finest Gothic buildings in Europe, the Sainte Chapelle of Paris, as a reliquary to house Christ’s Crown of Thorns.  The Temple of the Tooth at Kandy is obviously a massive architectural reliquary built for a similar self-perpetuating purpose.  The manner in which the sacred relic is exhibited to faithful believers—or rather the manner in which a dazzling golden casket is displayed with son et lumière—is practically identical with the way in which the monks of Canterbury displayed the relics of Thomas à Becket in the fourteenth century.  But perhaps there is a danger in not allowing things to be sufficiently "other"?

           

 

at the mosque in Galle

A Cultural Exchange

I am determined to mount a post in this first week of our Sri Lankan visit simply to prove that I have not succumbed entirely to the mental dislocations that left me seriously discombobulated for the first forty-eight hours of my stay in Colombo.  I now realize that whatever I may have thought in the past, this was my first experience of seriously long-distance air travel.  Never again will I use the phrase “jet lag” in glib or casual fashion.

            Nonetheless I have managed to accomplish a few of the essential things, beginning of course with an elephant ride.  I did it.  Photographic evidence does exist, though for technical reasons it cannot be produced at this time.  But I can promise you that a man with a brutalized coccyx needs no external documentary evidence.  We also toured the national museum in Colombo, where we saw many beautiful examples of early Buddhist sculpture.  Sunday was Father’s Day, and it was a particular pleasure for this old father to be able to celebrate it in the company of his youngest child, a rather new father, particularly as the celebration included a superb lunch in one of the capital’s premier hotels.  Should my son Richard read this post, let him eat his heart out at the news that at least five members of his immediate family have viewed the Sri Lankan gray hornbill—up close!           

            The next day we set off, the five of us distributed among three generations and three benches of a chauffeured van, on a tour of a few of the more notable sites of the land, one goal of which will be the reliquary shrine of the Tooth of the Buddha in Kandy, the old capital in the center of the island. We are just now at a fancy resort, the Chaaya Village at Habarana, a spacious sprawl of beautifully landscaped mini-chalets with tiled roofs and elegant, spare interior decoration.  Agile lemurs wander about the grounds.  There seems to be a new exotic bird in every tree.  At least this characterization applies to our section of the village.  We discovered on our lakeside walk some additional acres allotted to mini-mansions denominated the “Superior Suites” and the “De Luxe Suites”, leaving us to infer that we must actually be in the “Inferior Suites,” though the management has diplomatically refrained from proclaiming that on a sign post.

Starting Off with a Bang

 View from the pier

The conspicuously leisurely tenor of last week’s post was already succumbing to pre-packing jitters when the ringing of the telephone interrupted this initial sentence after its third word.  (I am not making this up.)  On the other end of the line was my daughter in New York.  She was concerned that I might be on campus—meaning, of course, the Princeton University campus.  Now as a matter of fact I was sitting in my private house, in what my wife calls my “Empire” and I call either my “library” or “the pressroom” as fancy directs me.  Although it was only eleven in the morning I had already twice been to, and returned from, the campus.  I had gone swimming early as usual, conveying myself to and from the gymnasium at a lively pace on foot.   I later returned by vehicle after the Student Center had opened to see whether I could achieve a piece of travel-related business.  I couldn’t.  And so I got back in the pick-up and drove across Route 1 to the Credit Union, where I could.

            My daughter then explained her strangely urgent concern about my location as it related to the location of the Princeton campus.  For the Princeton campus had been, for the last twenty-four minutes, under an emergency order of evacuation.  There had been a bomb threat!  Why should my daughter, roughly fifty miles away on the campus of another university—why should she be aware of an emergency on my campus, one mile away, of which I was entirely unaware?  I have not yet found the time to explore that question, but I did go immediately to the University website where I found, under the lurid rubric: “BOMB THREAT ON CAMPUS; evacuate immediately!” the following:

There has been a bomb threat to multiple unspecified campus buildings. Please evacuate the campus and all University offices immediately and go home unless otherwise directed by your supervisor. Public Safety officers and Princeton Police will direct drivers leaving the campus and those without cars will be directed to evacuation sites. You will receive an update later today. Do not return to campus for any reason until advised otherwise.

            Lately the university website has been noisy with alarums.  Last week it was a black bear poking about Dodge Osborne Hall.  When precious, manicured Princeton NJ becomes too Wild West, it is obviously time to take off for the Mysterious East, which I propose to do tomorrow.  In the meantime, though, all the putative excitement has rather diverted me from my bloguistical plan, which probably can, however, even yet be manhandled into a spurious conformity with the day’s explosive theme.

            As we are planning to be gone for a couple of weeks, we thought it might be nice to work in a visit to Rich, Katie D., and Ruby, who kindly invited us for an overnight on Saturday.  Their house on Coffey Street is being prepped for some major additions and renovations, but by extreme good fortune they have found a rental, on the same street, a couple of hundred yards even closer to the water.  One feature of their temporary abode is extremely unusual in New York houses: it has a narrow extensive, leafy front garden.  Practically all the others are set close to the street and have back yards.

            The yard has a small brick patio shaded by a substantial maple tree.  Between a couple of other trees Rich has slung a hammock.  The effect is of their own urban Catskill cottage or, perhaps, given the particular use to which we put it, a cabin in the Smokies.  For Katie D. is a Tennessean and a fair guitar-picker—an outstanding one, actually, for a Yalie.  Joan had thought to bring along her violin and the music for some old jigs and reels, and Rich, Ruby, and I got to enjoy a Red Hook Hoedown right there in the leafy front garden.

Red Hookers fiddling, Ruby raviing           

 But that was actually the second installment of the “circuses” subdivision of our pagan Sunday morning—the “bread” part consisting of huevos rancheros and other transgressions at a local eatery known as Fort Defiance.  The morning began early with a big bang—or several of them, to be precise, and in rapid succession.  Coffey Street ends, sort of, at Valentino Park, from which a sizeable, well built pier juts out into the bay, affording a superb view of the Statue of Liberty.  That means that the pier likewise affords a superb view of parts of nearby Governor’s Island—including a certain large abandoned building thereon that, at precisely 7:36 am, was spectacularly destroyed by controlled implosion.

   not long for this world

         The building had once served as military housing, I believe, and was of an exquisite ugliness.  If ever there was a building that deserved what it got, this was it.  In-the-know early birds, of whom there were probably fifty or more, congregated on the viewing plaza of the pier.  This is what we saw.  Rich got it all on tape.  You can read more about it on his blog.  The campus bomb threat, I am happy to say, has ended in a welcome whimper. 

           Next week, Sri Lanka!