A Daring Journey

Vasco da Gama (maybe)
 

        In 1497 Vasco da Gama set out from Lisbon with the mission of finding a maritime route to what I shall call actual India—Columbus having just a few years earlier convinced himself and a good deal of the European learned world that he had reached India in the Caribbean.  He spent a long time on the trip, which included numerous European “firsts”, or at least “first recordeds”.   He navigated the treacherous waters off the Horn of Africa, the continent’s southern tip.  He spent a certain amount of time investigating some of the lands on both the western and eastern flanks of the continent.  These landings were the origins of Portugal’s African empire in Angola and Mozambique, among other places.  Most important of all he did make it to “real” India, where he raised a good deal of hell and scouted out the the possibilities of a  Portuguese colonial presence destined, in Goa, to create one of the teeming multicultural cities of the Renaissance.  In economic and cultural terms he challenged the Muslim maritime monopoly in the Indian Ocean and “opened up” the East for the lucrative commerce of Europeans.  Vasco’s voyage was epoch-making and epic in its statistics,  taking roughly three hundred days at sea, travelling roughly twenty-four thousand miles, and losing most of his crew (including his brother) before landing once again on Portuguese land in 1499.  Fifty years or more later—we really are not sure when--a somewhat mysterious countryman of Vasco’s, an erudite Latinist, a soldier, an adventurer, a disappointed lover, but above all a magnificent poet wrote (in an elevated form of the Portuguese vernacular) an epic poem about the voyage.

The poet’s name was Luis de Camões.  His poem is called the Lusiadas (Lusiads in English), which means roughly “the adventures of the sons of Lusus”) as Æneid means roughly “the adventures of Æneas.”  The connection with Virgil’s Æneid is crucial.  Camões lived, breathed, and presumably bathed in the poems of Virgil, which he appears to have more or less memorized.  Lusus is a highly iffy mythological character, probably the son of the god Bacchus, and the legendary founder of the nation of Portugal, the Latin name of which is Lusitania.  Most people have heard of Lusitania, or at least the Lusitania,  for a somber reason.  It was the sinking of a British passenger liner of that name by the Germans in 1915 that was the immediate “cause” of America’s entry into the First World War.  But if you think any poem that requires this much explanation just to understand its name is a pretty fancy poem, you are right.  It is.  It is also very long.  Nonetheless it did find a publisher, who brought it out in Lisbon in 1572.  The rest is history, and as historians love anniversaries, it has not gone unnoticed that 2022 is the 450^th anniversary of publication.  Under these circumstances, a group of enterprising young scholars at Harvard decided to put together an academic conference to celebrate the occasion.

                                                        Camões (maybe)

 

As Chaucer’s Friar said after listening to the Wife of Bath’s extensive remarks introducing the actual story she is preparing to tell, “This is a long preamble to a tale!”  That is not the sole resemblance between the Wife’s introductory remarks and my own.  In both instances the prologues are more interesting than the tales themselves.  Nonetheless, I must continue with my own tale.  I am quite interested in Camões, and I published a short book about one of his poems a few years ago.  The proposed “Camões at Harvard” conference was a chance to take a shot at his greatest work, the epic Lusiads.  So I sent in a proposal to the organizers, and more or less forgot about it.

 

During the time the idea for the conference was being hatched, the pandemic was raging.  Covid has had a major dispiriting effect on all of education, including higher education.  Many institutions felt they had to abandon “in person” teaching in favor of various more or less unsatisfactory on-line techniques.  The Age of Zoom had arrived.  Even in normal times conventions, conferences, and group meetings were known as possible spreaders of infectious diseases.  You will recall the infamous Legionnaires Disease, so named because of its first identification in relation to a meeting of the American Legion.  I once left a scholarly conference sick as a dog.  During the height of Covid many long-scheduled meetings were cancelled or indefinitely postponed.  But with the reasonable hope that things were improving, the planners of the Camões conference came up with an innovative plan.  The conference would be “hybrid”, part on-line, part in person, depending on circumstances and the preferences of individual participants at the time, which is—now.

 

The best part of academic meetings, from my personal perspective, has always been the informal conversations among participants.  Having signed up, I was willing to give my talk by Zoom from my home library but without much enthusiasm.  I was greatly relieved when Covid conditions improved sufficiently to move forward.  What sealed the deal for us was an invitation from a delightful friend on the Harvard faculty, once a graduate student at Princeton and now a rising scholarly star, to stay for a couple of nights with her and her husband in their house in Cambridge.  So later today Joan and I will be at the Trenton station to catch an Amtrak train scheduled to be in Boston South Station in the late afternoon.  This is a big deal for us.  We have become timid fuddy-duddies when it comes to serious travel.  I doubt that any of Vasco da Gama’s crew could have felt more edgy.  I am hoping to travel little more than five hundred miles in the semi-luxury of “distanced” business class, spend no more than three days doing so, and lose none of my crew.  But you never know.  It is embarrassing to be timorous in anticipation of a short and comfortable trip to hear about the memorials of one of the longer and most dangerous trips documented in world history; but travel mishaps do occur.  The extraordinary maritime empire of tiny Portugal spread across the world.  One of the established genres of the nation’s rich Renaissance literature is the history of maritime disasters.  To be fair, the Portuguese had so many disasters only because they always had so many ships at sea undertaking so many ambitious and dangerous voyages.  Wooden ships but iron men.  So I’m looking forward especially to hearing a scholar give a talk entitled: “The Lusiads: Flipside of 15^th Century Maritime Disaster Literature.”  I find the word flipside in the title particularly intriguing, and possibly disconcerting.

 

 

More Light!

            For many years now I have noticed that each new approach of autumn brings with it a heightened feeling of solemnity, of melancholy really.  It is perhaps a part of the aging process.  I suspect that many if not most elderly people might recognize the phenomenon of which I speak.  This year’s gloom-ward turn was quite marked, and very abrupt.  It’s not quite yet a Stephen King novel, but it tends in that direction.  The first few days back from Europe were bright, sunny, clear, and crisp.  October and early November are usually quite beautiful around here.  I can remember in at least one recent year, and perhaps two years, when I felt obliged to write a few words about Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”.  It’s one of the language’s truly great poems, and while it captures something of the atmosphere of life’s narrowing constriction and even decay, it is  the “mists and mellow fruitfulness” and the “beaded bubbles winking at the brim” that carry the day.  Above all there is a sense of gradualism, a time to prepare for something unwelcome.  But this year’s crossing of the autumn equinox has seemed like a sudden leap into the dark.

 

I am not partial to “significant” acronyms—but SAD (seasonal affective disorder) really nails it.  Everywhere and always the gateway of life is light.  The light shined in the darkness, and the darkness did not overwhelm it, and the light was the life of mankind.  Is there a more important line in the Bible?  If you prefer a more secular text, there’s a beauty in Shakespeare.  Just before he stifles Desdemona, Othello says “Put out the light and then put out the light!”  The first light is, of course, the candle that has lighted the way to her chamber.  It is the second that is the more terrifying.  The light that he will put out is the life of a beautiful and innocent young woman; but to accomplish such a dark deed he must first have extinguished the light of his own reason.

 

Certainly seasonal affective disorder is a kind of shorthand, or maybe  longhand, for light deprivation.  That, in any event, has been my perception this year.  The more normal indicators of autumn are there, to be sure, but they are not yet prominent.  The general sense of the vegetation is still that of jungle and indiscipline, entangling vines hardy and ubiquitous everywhere in the woods.  The coloring of the leaves has begun in a few places, but the overwhelming sensation of sunny daylight hours is still that of “green mansions”.  But suddenly with our return to America there don’t seem to be any more sunny days.  There has been a streak of dark, rainy days.  The rain has been steady, and often heavy.  The ground has over this period gone from a state of being parched to sogginess, with small pools of standing water in low-lying spots.  The temperatures have also fallen dramatically into the low 50s and on one day the high 40s.  The effect is not of an autonomous autumn to be enjoyed, but of what I’ll call pre-winter, which is very different.  Pre-winter actually invites unease, apprehension.  The cloud-darkened skies obviously exacerbate the waning of the light.  There is no discernible dawn.  The night simply turns from black to gray.  And nightfall descends suddenly even before our early dining hour.

 

One of my favorite childhood poems was “Bed in Summer” by Robert Louis Stevenson.  In it a young lad laments that he is not allowed to stay out and play through the lengthening summer light: “In winter I get up at night/and dress by yellow candlelight…In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day…”  I was probably eight-years-old, living in my grandparents’ house in cold and wintry Colorado when I learned the poem; and it was the summertime injustice that captured my attention.  Now it is the associations of winter, the most arresting of which is the invasion of darkness.

 

I remember mentioning in another essay—a fairly recent one devoted to O. Henry-- some of the curious books gathered together in the eccentric library of my uncles and aunts.  There was one that fascinated me, although I am not sure I remember its title.  It may have been, and probably should have been, Last Words.  It was an anthology of famous last words as recorded by history and literature.  Several were the valedictories of condemned criminals, some of which were very famous indeed.  There was, for example, Jesus: “It is finished.”  There was Patrick Henry: “I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.”  There were two sets of last words by the formidable John Brown, the brief but electrifying statement he made before the court that had condemned him, and the short note he had in his hand as he set off toward the gallows: “I , John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.”  By no means were all of the last words so stirring or memorable.  Some of them were obviously accurate accounts reflecting the realities and confusions of the death-bed rather than polished rhetoric awaiting the engraver.  Under these circumstances quite a few of the entries in the book seemed to me a little banal.  One that sticks in my mind is that of Ulysses S. Grant, whose brief valedictory was “Water!”  But the one that remains with me most memorably was the dying cry of the great poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s on March  22, 1832.  According to his doctor, this great man’s last words were Mehr licht!  “More light.”

Top Colleges

 

 

Fairly recently the U.S. News and World Report published its annual rankings of American colleges and universities.  Within days the New York Times (Sept. 19, 2022, “U.S. News College Rankings Live On, Despite Criticisms”) published its annual critique of that annual report.  I have not seen a copy of the U.S. News and World Report in many years, if indeed it is still even published as an old-fashioned news magazine, a genre long since rendered anachronistic by cyberism.  But like most college professors, and certainly all college administrators, I am quite aware that, in the words of the Times article, the magazine’s rankings “continue to be a dominant reference guide for families evaluating colleges…”

 

Somewhat to your blogger’s embarrassment, his own institution, Princeton, currently holds the USNWR Numero Uno rating.  I do take pride in the university from which I hold advanced degrees and where I taught for many decadees.  But is Princeton really the best college in America?  Sure.  It’s right there in so many words in our barely musical alma mater: “It’s the best old place of all.”  Strangely you can find very similar phrases in other college songs, maybe most of them.  But uneasy is the head that wears the crown.  This year’s listings fluttered the dovecotes by demoting Columbia University from Number Two to Number Seventeen.  If the claim to be able to identify the best college in America is merely fantastic, the claim to identify the seventeenth-best is wholly preposterous.

 

There are of course variations in quality among institutions of higher learning, and hence sensible and defensible distinctions to be made among them.  But the USNWR ranked list is a gimmick, not a reliable data sheet.  The vast majority of college administrators surely realize that.  Most college presidents will even say that.  But then the whole lot of them sweat blood for the week before the rankings appear.  That is because college trustees, many, many parents, some unsophisticated high-school counsellors, affluent applicants on foreign strands, and indeed the general public are in its thrall.  I suppose these same people must spend a certain amount of time on the Internet engaging meaningless lists of “Ten Hollywood Starlets Who Used to Own Poodles,” or “The Twelve Greatest Rutabaga Dishes of All Time.”  My remarks imply no denial of reasonably objective standards or the qualitative comparisons among institutions.  But we might be a little clearer about what we think we are comparing.

 

What is the best fish in the sea?  It’s got to be the Norwegian salmon, right?  And what’s the best tree in the forest?  That would be the white oak, of course.  There’s got to be general agreement about that, but now comes the hard part.   Rank in order of superiority, the Norwegian salmon, the white oak, and Calacatta marble.

 

In order to offer a convincing list of top colleges, it is necessary to agree upon some generally applicable criteria.  There are fewer of these than one might think.  It is probable that American higher education remains the envy of the world.  If so, that high regard reflects the appreciation of its extraordinary diversity—a concept sometimes overhyped when talking about student body composition but undervalued in terms of the shape of higher education as a whole.  The American model is anything but unitary, featuring excellent institutions of many different kinds.

 

Many years ago I served on a commission engaged by the State of Florida to assess and report on the general state of higher education there.  It was among the more illuminating assignments I ever had.  A week-long glimpse is not a deep study, but you can learn a lot.  Florida is a highly populous state with lots of money inequably distributed among its population, little of which is seriously taxed for educational purposes.  Nonetheless it has a highly enrolled range of state colleges and universities, and several reputable smaller liberal arts colleges.  Their premier institution, the University of Florida at Gainesville, now twenty-ninth on the USNWR “national” list, has several strong departments.  That it is not in the league with some of the great midwestern schools has to do with sectional differences between north and south in the mid-nineteenth century.  The first sitting of the Michigan State Assembly (1837) established a university.  At the first sitting of the Arkansas legislature (1836) the Speaker stepped down from the podium to attack an opponent with a Bowie knife.  Autres pays, autres moeurs.   There is nothing in the Sunshine State approaching a great private institution like Stanford, Duke, or those of the Ivies.  Yet Florida has one of the most extraordinary educational institutions in the country: the Dade (Miami) Community College.  This huge enterprise enrolls more than a hundred thousand students, many of them from modest backgrounds--immigrants, the children of immigrants, and other aspirational and practically focused learners, young and not so young.  It is not MIT, Cornell, or Reed; but it has clarity concerning its own crucial institutional mission.  You can study practically anything at DCC, but one overarching strong component  is a focus on the skills of literacy and mathematics frequently short-changed by our more mediocre high schools.  I had the sense of an extraordinary institution that knew what it was trying to do and by and large does it.  I would have to call it a “great” institution even if nobody from Choate has ever applied to it.

 

There is no longer a broad humanistic agreement that the purpose of higher education is to broaden a student’s intellectual, cultural, and ethical horizons to enhance personal character and enable effective social engagement and service.  The purpose is to be able to get a good job.  There is nothing contemptible about this realization.  Our economic world has been in rapid change for at least a generation.  Our high schools produce fewer and fewer young people prepared to enter careers offering entry to even that modest middle-class life that was once the reasonable aspiration of all socially stable, family-centered people willing to work diligently and productively.  But the educational paths to such goals are now perhaps more varied than ever in the past.  Among professionals in higher education, “diversity” is now spoken of as a terminal good.  Without interrogating that assumption, I would hope it could be extended to embrace the remarkable and remarkably positive diversity of our American institutions of higher education.  That diversity does invite qualitative evaluation, but not from a single list of supposed “top colleges”.  Before you can responsibly say that an institution is more or less “good,” you need to know what it thinks its mission is, whether that mission has genuine value for individuals and society, and how well and faithfully it seems to be fulfilling it.  Very fortunately we still have a sizable number of very different “top colleges.”

 

Richard Francis Burton

   

Sir Richard Francis Burton on a good day

 

Not all Renaissance men lived in the Renaissance.  In fact I am beginning to believe that compared with nineteenth-century London, fifteenth-century Florence looks pretty monochrome.  The common belief seems to be that most eminent Victorians, including the four treated in Lytton Strachey’s classic book of that title, were uptight conformists.  It’s hard to know where that idea came from—not from Strachey, certainly.   All four were Renaissance men, including the one who was a woman, Florence Nightingale.  (“Renaissance man” is a state of mind, not a gender identity.)  For the past few weeks I have been intermittently caught up with a sensational example of the Victorian Renaissance man: Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890).*

 

I was vaguely aware of this man’s name at least—probably through its association with an early translation of the tales of the Arabian Nights—but my real introduction to his genius grew out of an association with a former student.  I suspect that the principal pleasures of most teachers’ lives derive from informal experiences, and outside the classroom.  

 

Though not exactly an established custom, it is not uncommon for graduate students, upon completing their dissertations, to present their professors with a parting gift.  This often may be simply a bound copy of the dissertation--not that there is anything simple about writing a dissertation--but sometimes it is some other kind of gift.  About fifteen years ago, not long before my retirement, I received from a departing graduate student a gift that I have particularly treasured.  In my own researches I was at that time beginning serious work on the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões and even beginning to contemplate writing a book about him.  This poet is best known for his epic poem Os Lusiadas, first published in 1572, which deals with the voyages of Vasco da Gama between Portugal and India in 1497-99. The poem’s name derives from the old Latin word for Portugal.  My student—whom I shall not name only because I have lost track of him and been unable to secure his permission to publicize his gift—presented me with the two-volume edition of Richard Burton’s Camoens: His Life and His Lusiads: A Commentary, (2 vols, London: Quaritch, 1881).  This is a work of enormous if often eccentric erudition written by a man who must have known, as well as any other mariner of his day, the maritime route that Vasco da Gama had taken four hundred years earlier, including the populations of East Africa and Goa and the Malabar Coast of India.  Working on Camões was the man’s hobby for twenty years; yet so broad and varied were his interests and accomplishments, his Portuguese studies are barely mentioned.

 

Burton, though a considerable amateur scholar, had little regard for institutional academia.  He was an Oxford drop-out, with Oxford doing the dropping.  But he was an amazing linguist, having about thirty tongues on his palette, and a voracious reader.  He was not a scholar, but an adventurer with scholarly interests.  His principal enthusiasms were sex, travel, exploration, military derring-do, sex, cartography, comparative religions, sex, horsemanship, espionage, and poetry.  His essays in Portuguese philology were merely a twenty-year hobby.  His checkered career as a British army office (he was Captain Burton, eventually Captain Sir Richard) offered him opportunities for frankly self-indulgent adventure.  He was married to a super-wife, Isabel Arundell (Lady Isabel), who not only put up with and enabled him, but edited and defended his work, and wrote his biography.   She has her own  biographies, and merits a blog essay of her own.

 

Burton’s most famous exploit came early (1853): his successful pilgrimage to Mecca in the disguise of an Afghan Muslim.  This potentially fatal deception was at the very least culturally insensitive, but is an extraordinary testimony to his courage and his linguistic and thespian skills.  Perhaps, dangerously, it may have encouraged him to think he could get by with anything.

 

I have insufficient room to do justice to Burton’s other travels.  He did major exploratory work in both East and West Africa.  He is credited with being the first white man to lay his eyes on Lake Tanganyika—“first white man” being an important category for the Imperial Book of World Records.  Often he was ill, injured, or wounded, several times on the verge of death, especially in a particularly disastrous episode at Berbera on the Somalian coast.  The Crimean War (1855-56) gave him the false hope of much desired military glory.  The highly effective officers of the Indian Army in which he served seemed like a ragtag Wild Bunch to the spit-and-polished bluebloods so incompetently led by the Crimean Supreme Commander, Lord Ragland, infamous for ordering the charge of the Light Brigade.  Burton barely got a look in from him.

 

and a bad day

 

I mentioned sex as among Burton’s interests only three times, as I feel constrained by self-imposed word limits for my essays.  One of his fantasies had to do with nuns.  This one had a long literary run beginning at least as early as Jean de Meun in the thirteenth century and Boccaccio in the fourteenth, but it really took off in 1669 with the anonymous publication(in French) by the Comte de Guilleragues of his steaming if pretended Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Contemporary readers pretended they thought the letters were genuine, and until fairly recently too many modern scholars really thought they were.  If I ever get sufficiently desperate, I could perhaps write an essay on this subject too.  I have to believe Burton’s interest was entirely academic, as he was bolstered by so many moralities.  He was married to a serious Roman Catholic, and he himself was a devout Muslim-Buddhist-Confucian-Catholic-atheist Anglican.  In his anthropological ventures, he often sought to measure the penises of the males of the tribes he investigated.  One of those times one might wish to be a fly on the wall of the hut.  He translated the Kama Sutra and several other Oriental sex guides that offered his contemporaries in England wonderful opportunities to be shocked, titillated,  and officially disapproving of the translator/scholar.  He had a strange episode of recuperation in America, on the eve of our Civil War, checking out the Mormons on the Great Salt Lake.  Several of his greater adventures were subsequent to his late marriage in 1861 at age forty.  “The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly takes place relatively late,” says Mencken. The formidable Isabel was often with him in his important years in Brazil (1864-60) and later in Damascus, India, in his English homecoming, and in Trieste.

 

Burton spent his final years trying to finish several writing projects and to organize many earlier ones, though much would be left to his feisty widow.   Altogether he published more than thirty books, several of them multi-volume like the Arabian Nights, several doorstoppers.  The biographer, Farwell is a marvelous writer himself.  On October 20, 1890, Burton was seriously ill in his lodgings in Trieste.  “And there came to him then the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies.”

and a really bad day

*My principal source is Byron Farwell: Burton, A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London: Longmans, Green, 1963).  I recommend the Penguin edition,  in many printings and cheap on the second-hand market.

 

Lake Tanganyika

 

 

 

Elizabeth II Regina, died 8 September 2022.  May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.

 

 

 

Death of a Great Lady

 

            We landed at Newark Liberty Airport on Monday, after a nine-hour  flight from Nice, precisely at the advertised time of 4.30pm, there to be picked up by our friend and former USPS letter-carrier, Mike Downes.  When a few months ago he retired from the postal service and quit delivering mail, it left him more time for his avocation of operating a boutique limousine service delivering people, mainly to and from airports.

 

            There is always comfort in returning to home base, though our minds remain full of the sights, sounds, fragrances, and tastes of Provence.  Some famous historian or another famously said that the most important event in eighteenth-century England happened in France.  The reference, of course, was to the French Revolution.  So I suppose it is not extraordinary that the most important event of our French vacation happened in England: the death of the Queen on September 8, four days before our return.  Of course, the death of a personage of such importance would have claimed international attention under any circumstances.  The political and cultural significance of the Queen’s reign has been endlessly discussed by experts in the press.  What has captured my own attention is the operation of social memory.   Few world leaders have been on the scene for seven decades, and few have been the objects of the evident admiration and respect of so many for so long.  But our group gathered together for the house party in Salernes—eight of us briefly, and six of us for most of the time—perhaps had its special reasons.  With the exception of myself, everyone there was a native-born Briton who had come of age in the early years of the Queen’s reign.  Five of us had been students together at Oxford in the late 1950s.  My one and only “meeting” with the Queen and Prince Phillip took place there, when I was rounded up by some desperate college administrator trying to put together a panchromatic group of foreign students for royal review.  The Duke of Edinburgh made a quip about the insufficiencies of British central heating. 

 

Halley's Comet smiles on William the Conqueror 

 

            Rarely enough are we self-consciously aware that we are experiencing something “historic”, but the death of magnates is an occasion when many do.  In earlier centuries people believed that the very heavens proclaimed the birth and death of great princes, as well as their great deeds, in meteor showers and comets.  What we now know as Halley’s Comet smiled on the Norman Conquest of Britain, and is recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry.  As we sat around the table hearing the news, somebody said, “I will remember where and when I was when I first heard this news--forever.”  This was an almost theatrically solemn remark and solemnly delivered.  But it was a sentiment we all understood, and one frequently commented upon in the press, as it seems to be commonly shared.  Liz Truss, who had been invited by the Queen two days before she died to form a government, had been the subject of much conversation—not all of it complimentary—in earlier days.   The whole period of our stay was a kind of running feast and symposium—wonderful conversation, much of it over wonderful meals.  We all have vivid memories of the circumstances in which we learned of certain private events.  But there is a very limited number of public events that command an almost universal racial memory.  The analogy frequently drawn in my age group was with the death of President John Kennedy by an assassin’s bullet on November 22, 1963.  If you were alive and sentient then, you almost certainly remember, and vividly, the circumstances of where and when you heard of it.  The more recent event seared forever into our memory, and especially the memory of younger people, is learning the  news of the Twin Towers attack on September 11, 2001.

 

            I heard of Kennedy’s assassination as I was walking up a hill between classes on the campus of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison.  I was in my first semester as a college teacher.  I was twenty-seven years old.  In the buzz of the crowd moving up the hill, a graduate student was loudly finding a silver lining in his reported news: this unthinkable event would permanently discredit the right-wing fanatics of the John Birch Society, the MAGA-monsters of that age.  Who could have suspected Kennedy was killed by the only Communist in Texas?  Like most of my friends I greatly admired JFK.  I also fancied that I had a personal connection with him.  After all, in the middle of  a hot, muggy day in July of 1958, as I sweated on the pavement in a coat and tie, I had seen the man himself in the flesh as he wheeled around the  circular drive of Columbus Circle abutting Union Station in Washington.  His open red convertible passed within ten feet of me as I stood waiting for the light to change.  There was a good-looking blonde woman laughing in the passenger’s seat.  It was all too perfect.  Golden youth.  Camelot.  I could not have invented it if I tried.  And now on Bascom Hill I suddenly learn he is probably dead.

 

            But that was already the second presidential death announcement that I shall never be able to forget.  On an April day of 1945, still a month short of my ninth birthday, I was walking through an alley shortcut in east Denver on my way home from school.  I was in the company of a contemporary and neighbor whose name, I regret to say, has long since disappeared from my memory.  But I shall never forget the encounter we had along the way.  A woman was standing in the middle of her small, tidy back lawn, separated from the alleyway by a likewise tidy white picket fence.   She was weeping profusely, and not very quietly.  She was surprised to see us, and the sight of us seemed only to intensify her distress.  “Boys,” she said, “boys!  Boys…I have to tell you.  Boys, our president is dead.”  We knew who the President was and what “dead” means.  But the news itself made less impression than it should.  What I mainly grasped was that a woman was weeping uncontrollably.  So far as my grasp of world events was concerned, the war news was all good.  Hitler was “finished” according to a pontificating next-door neighbor.  Soon we would “finish” Japan.  Then my dad would be home from fighting in the Pacific.  But I shall never forget that weeping woman.

 

            I say “never forget”, though can I trust memory?  Already Joan and I have somewhat differing accounts of learning of Queen Elizabeth’s death.  We can agree that we were all gathered around a table when we heard the news, but disagree as to which table.  In any event, the associations of the event will always be complex: the jarring intrusion of the news of death into a Provençal idyll.

 

                Entrecasteaux (Var): garden by Le Nôtre (1613-1700), photo by Joan, backside by blogger
 

Salernes Market

        Years ago when I was studying the Journals of Christopher Columbus, I found myself rather shocked by the feebleness of his powers of description. Here he was sailing about the Indies seeing strange and wonderful things entirely unknown in Europe, assigning them all to two unhelpful categories: “like what we have in Castile” and “not like what we have in Castile.” Yet here I sit at a verandah table looking eastward into the lightening dawn across a little valley to a range of low, green hills thinking “How like an early autumnal daybreak in the Ozarks”. Fog obscures all in the first low bottom. Behind it, rising from the second, it forms a kind of ghostly backdrop or theater flat to a ridge of hilltop trees, then behind that a dark green mass of undifferentiated forest on a hill almost of sufficient size to be called a mountain. Above all this the sky is of that blue inevitably called cerulean, though streaked with long, thin trails of cloud rendered golden by a rising sun, of which my vantage point allows me only the glimpse of a glow atop another large hill.

 

        One remembers landscape vividly but imperfectly. We arrived at Nice airport a little ahead of schedule. It seemed to be the right place except for one thing—it was virtually empty. Instead of forty car drivers holding up their signs, there were two. One of them had our name on it, and the person holding it was an attractive, petite young woman who leapt for our luggage and led us a few paces to a black Mercedes. The first week of September is a very good time to arrive in the south of France . The Parisians are back in Paris. The roads are empty—well, not quite empty, but far from the vibe of the Atlantic City Expressway. The drive to Salernes, though brief, is sufficient for one to experience most versions of the generally superb French highway system from super-highways to country roads. And all along the roads dozens of those little things you hadn’t remembered perfectly—the miles of expertly constructed stone wall, the peculiar dry greens of certain vegetation, the characteristic elegant road signs, the sometimes hideous commercial signage, the huge open warehouses of tiles and ceramics. And everybody driving new cars. Our first memories of the Provençal countryside go back to the early 1960s, when vehicles were fairly sparse, and every other one was a tired gray rattletrap Citroën utility truck, the farmer’s version of the classic Deux Chevaux that we ourselves were driving. Salernes is a bit over an hour from the Nice airport, but the only really challenging driving Ms. Celine faced came in the last two hundred yards of the trip. As it nears our friend’s house, the long private driveway features a dramatic curve on a sharp rise with a rough masonry wall on one side and on the other a drop into a mini-gorge. So far as I know, nobody has ever actually driven into this chasm, but the possibility does come into one’s mind while driving by. When you get to the straight and flat at the top, you are quite near the house, Saint Michel, and you have a clear view of its side and one of its most delightful features, the long stone patio or verandah that fronts the house’s broad side, overlooking a delightful view, and on which its inhabitants spend a great deal of time lounging, loafing, reading, conversing and most especially eating. It must have been close to two in the afternoon when we arrived to find our hosts seated around a table with other guests who had arrived before us lingering over the remnants of what they described as lunch but seemed to feature glasses of orange juice and the crumbled flakes from croissants. Just saying. 

        Even “luxury” air travel, with which we had indulged ourselves, left me exhausted and with the feeling that I had little furry sweaters covering my teeth. The rest of Saturday, after a fairly brief period of joyous reunions, was mainly sleep. But Sunday, the beginning of a new week, offered the opportunity for the distinctively French experience of “market day”. Throughout the rural areas of France, and especially in the south, regionally itinerant merchants set up their tented or canopied outdoor stalls in prominent public places and hawk their goods for half a day. Each town has its market day, and the merchants make the rounds. The weekends are particularly choice from the commercial point of view, and the comparative regional prominence of Salernes is signaled by its Sunday morning assignment. The dramatic decline of Catholic observance is likewise obvious in the arrangement. Fewer and fewer people attend Mass, and there are fewer and fewer priests to perform it. At Salernes the town square is briefly turned into a magnificent food bazaar: table after table of high quality vegetables, charcuterie, seafood, steaming cauldrons of couscous and paella, every variety of sausage and olive known to the race, cheeses, bakery goods, novelty sweets. At a lower level of the town, in space normally reserved for parking, is the market’s textile section. I did not visit it personally on Sunday, but if the experience of previous years can be trusted, it increasingly approaches the style of an American flea market rather an actual dry goods mart, with lots of cheap Chinese stuff of the Dollar Store genre. But of course you still find gorgeous Provençal tablecloths and some occasional nice handwork, and everything has today’s engagingly multicultural French accent. I went home happy with my purchases: mainly sausages. Joan was less happy. One man’s meat…But what a great beginning to a week away.

                                             Salernes Market on the town square

Educational Loan Forgiveness

 

I suppose it was to be expected that President Biden’s initiative on some debt forgiveness of educational loans would stimulate superficial and partisan reactions, but I am nonetheless disappointed by the response.  Depending on which superficial view one favors, the proposed loan cancellations are either a boondoggle give-away half-way to being a bribe for potential Democratic voters or a significant progressive step toward social and racial justice and the razing of at least one small mole hill on the famously uneven playing-field.  The nation is already at political war, and if truth is the proverbial first casualty of war, subtlety and nuance follow very closely in its wake.

 

The student debt crisis is a national emergency.  Admittedly it is not the only national emergency, or even the most threatening.  But it does in my opinion need to be addressed.  The fashion in which the Biden administration is addressing it not surprisingly has some good aspects and some bad aspects.  The muddle is not uncharacteristic of most of the generally meager results achieved in a government so narrowly divided and so ferociously animated by partisan spirit.  In my opinion the package is not one deserving more of either praise or blame than at about the sixty percent level, but of course we live in a world of hundred-percenters.  Hundred percentism is seldom nuanced.  The issues involved here are many and complex.  And since President Biden’s action is easy to praise and easy to attack if one seeks to make selective partisan and  polemical points, I suppose the discussion is likely to remain at that level.  The cost is the loss of an opportunity for a thoughtful discussion in which any just observer is likely to be of at least two minds.  In this brief blog essay, I can touch upon only one or two of many thoughts that come to mind.

 

One of the first points to make, because it is so often denied or doubted, is that the costs of higher education are real costs.  Not that skepticism is entirely unwarranted.  Like other real costs, some of them can also be inflated.  But almost everything about higher education, and certainly everything about residential institutions with serious scientific ambitions, has become increasingly expensive.  The principal ongoing task of administrative officers in all but a fairly small segment of American colleges is constricting often good educational ideas to the constraints of limited and unpredictable budgets.  Perhaps paradoxically, one of the most obviously inflated costs of higher education is bloated administration itself.  In many places there are whole offices devoted to helping students negotiate and navigate government loans!    Because if you build it, they will come.  The vigorous encouragement to borrow educational funds, especially under the Obama presidency, not surprisingly found takers, both among prospective students and start up educational ventures.  Even in the shadow of the crisis, the “demand” side—high school graduates assuming they will go to college almost as a matter of course—remains very strong.

 

Public subsidization of expansive higher education, one awkward means of which is student debt cancellation,  is one solution, but hardly the most efficient.  Somehow, it seems to me, the college problem has been separated in the public mind from the high school problem.  There are numerous facets of the high school problem, one of them being the dramatic discrepancies among high schools in terms of what they teach and how effectively they teach it.  This is one of several serious social issues apparently unapproachable with a liberating honesty and freshness.  Is there anyone in America who does not know what a “good school” is?  There certainly cannot be a real estate agent in the country who doesn’t.  The lives of millions of parents are organized around a belief in and search for a “good school”.  And if you know what a good school is, you perforce know what a not so good one is.  I will not say a bad school, though the laws of thought do make one think there must be such things.  One rough-and-ready parental definition of a good school is a school that gets your kid into college.

 

I graduated from high school in 1954.  I was a good student, supported by good teachers and encouraged by my parents, and I did take applying for college more or less for granted.  But this was far from a universal expectation among my classmates, of whom I would guess about half planned to go immediately into the work force.  Already the percentage of college applicants was a large increment from prewar years.  My parents did not go to college, and very few people in their extensive social circles had gone to college.  But my parents, though not highly educated, were well educated in useful fundamentals.  They were high-school graduates, a term they rightly claimed with pride.  That is because an American high school diploma in 1920 was considered a reliable warrant that its possessor was adequately prepared for civic engagement and a sound candidate for meaningful employment in the industrial, commercial, or artisanal worlds.  That is, they had skills of literacy and numeracy at a significant level, some fundamental scientific knowledge and a familiarity with “civics” that were a foundation for intelligent social and political engagement.

 

We no longer live in the world of 1920.  In today’s plugged-in, frothy post-manufacturing America our high schools produce only a limited number of graduates capable of doing jobs for which employers are willing to pay decently and which offer actual “career” opportunities.  This is a problem certainly destined to get worse, and certainly destined to widen yet further the very troublesome “wealth gap,” which is not unrelated to a “skills gap.”  Right now the first two years of “college”—and especially many of the colleges most subsidized by borrowed money—often deal with materials that rightly belong in well-funded public high schools.  Surely today’s students should have the opportunities, and the challenges, W. T. Sherman had in his backwoods Ohio school in the 1830s?  Is there a reason that American high-school graduate should not be able to read and write the English language competently, or have a grasp of mathematics to the threshold of pre-calculus, or have had a course in a laboratory science (including computer science), or make real progress in acquiring a foreign language, and enjoy some exposure to the serious study of history, social science, and the arts?  That is not too much to ask for four years of study, and no student would have to spend a dime to achieve it.  But it would require a lot of what my grandmother used to call “elbow grease”—both on the part of our students and that of our educational authorities.

 

 

 

NEXT WEEK

 

We are very much hoping that next week we shall be relaxing with old and dear friends in a Provençal farmhouse.  Travel arrangements are a little complicated, and I am not entirely sure that I shall have access to the means of mounting a post on Wednesday, September 7; but even if not, if all goes well, regular postings should resume no later than the following week.