Death of the Author

Roland Barthes (d. 1980)

My chosen career as a professional student of old authors got off to a rocky start in the 1960s.  The author—or I should say the Author, capitalized—was already ailing even during my undergraduate years, and I had barely gotten my Ph.D. when his death was formally announced.  That was in 1967 when Roland Barthes, the famous French literary theorist,  published his influential essay “The Death of the Author”.  Barthes explained brilliantly how authors have always had much less to do with the books they write than you might think.  He extended and amplified the idea already popular among some of the so-called New Critics.  These people, who by now probably ought to be called the Paleolithics, held that an author’s intention was irrelevant to the work of art produced, the meanings of which were out of her hands the moment it left the printing press, if not before.  The arena of works by so-called authors now was the black ice and slippery cobblestones of language itself; the reader must be willing to do the heavy lifting of creating meaning, and be prepared for surprises.  So Randy Newman, author of “Short People Got No Reason to Live,” might in vain claim that his song was a satirical indictment of mindless human prejudices, invoking the indisputable biographical fact that he was himself a short person; he still faced the wrath of the Short Peoples’ Lobby, which turned out to be not merely extant but militant and irate.  But it wasn’t all bad.  If the Author was dead, the critic could be all the more lively.  Instead of talking about how smart Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf were, professors could concentrate on how smart professors are.  What was not to like in English Departments?

I was pretty cool with all this because most of my main authors were writers like Ovid, Augustine, and Chaucer; and whatever else you might want to say about them, these guys were definitely dead.  But then I encountered a dead author—name of Brás Cubas—of a kind I hadn’t thought much about before.  Not much, but some.  I remember mentioning in an earlier blog post the name of William Cooper Brann, also known as Brann the Iconoclast, the publisher of a free-thinking journal of that name, shot in the back by an avenging Baptist in 1898 on the streets of Waco TX.  Brann had offended this man’s group by saying: “I don’t have anything against Baptists except that they weren’t held under long enough”—an allusion, I believe, to baptism by full immersion.  Anyway it was in a sizzling essay of his (“The Mistakes of Moses”), stumbled upon in my grandfather’s house in my tenderest years, that I first encountered the potent productivity of dead authors.  It was in Brann’s day the universal belief of conservative Christians that everything in the Pentateuch (alias “Five Books of Moses”) had in fact come directly from the stylus, quill, or lead pencil of the super-prophet himself.  Brann drew attention to the possible difficulties of applying this belief to Deuteronomy 34:5-6: “Moses…died…and was buried in the ravine opposite Beth-Phogor.”  That is, Moses didn’t just prophesy his death, he recorded it.  I read “The Mistakes of Moses” more than seventy years ago, and hardly thought about it since—until quite recently.

 

My loyal readers will know that during the pandemic I have tried to improve the shining hour, linguistically speaking, by attempting to improve my Portuguese, the vehicle of improvement being an endless on-line Duolingo course.  I am a big fan of Duolingo. But though it does not refuse its gratuitous services to geriatrics, it seems designed for the young.  My grandchildren tell me that the structure is vaguely suggestive of a video game.  Indeed videogame (pronounced videogamey) is a word you learn early.  If your interests are in classical literature, you need to take some initiative on your own.  So a while ago I set out to supplement the youth culture of the Duolingo lessons with some independent readings in major novelists.  Certain historical and linguistic parallels between England and Portugal are striking.  Both are small countries—Portugal almost tiny—whose colonial expansion projected their vernaculars into two very large countries in the Americas.  (Brazil comprises roughly half of South America.)    Two famous authors, contemporaries, were brought to my attention, one European and one American.  The first, whom I have mentioned before, is the Portuguese intellectual and diplomat José Maria Eça de Queirós (1845-1900).  The Brazilian novelist is Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908). 

There is a quantum linguistic leap between the level of language needed to order a fish dinner in a Lisbon restaurant or try to pick up a girl in a São Paulo coffee bar and that needed to read a novel of Dickens or Henry James.  I threw myself doggedly into two of Eça’s novels—The Crime of Father Amaro and The Relic.  Very slow going, and I never did get completely through the first novel, though perhaps surprisingly one builds up a pretty big reading vocabulary quickly.  The Relic, on the other hand, finds a place on my top ten.  It didn’t quite change my life; but it certainly inspired me to further reading.  This time I turned to Eça’s South American counterpart, Machado de Assis.

                                    

                                                      Brás Cubas 1.0 (d. 1592)

 

I started with a short story I had seen much discussed—“Missa de Gallo” (“Midnight Mass”), a masterpiece worthy of Henry James at his most ambiguous, but with the apparent simplicity of Hemingway.  Emphasis on the word apparent.  So I then moved on to a novel with an intriguing title: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas).  Perhaps its comparative brevity was also an encouragement.  Both the Eça and the Machado novels are the first-person accounts of scoundrels.  What I will call the original Brás Cubas was a Portuguese nobleman, adventurer and slaver of the sixteenth century, the founder of Santos, now a beachfront city of half a million, sort of at the bottom of the South American “hump” that is the Brazilian coastline.  You are never quite sure who the Brás of Machado’s novel is; but the origins of his branch of the family date from the eighteenth century, and at the supposed time of writing several of his relatives are “still alive”.  Unlike the author himself, who is dead.  He tells us he died in August of 1869.  Indeed one of the first problems facing the dead author in writing his memoirs is whether to begin with his birth or his death.  He opts for the latter.  The novel was published in 1881, a few years before the final abolition of Brazilian slavery.  So if we thought it was perhaps necessary to wait for the arrival of Modernism in order to be post-Modern, we can think again.

                                            Machado de Assis (d. 1908)

The very first paragraph raises the intriguing question of the death of the author.  In reporting his own, as he points out, the narrator has the excellent precedent of Moses, author of the Pentateuch.  But there is still a bit of a conundrum, both metaphysical and linguistic, of distinguishing between an autor defunto and a defunto autor.  I think what this means (and I am consistently in the middle of the cohort of the Diamond League on Duolingo) is a dead author and an author who is dead, a scribbling cadaver, so to speak.  I won’t even try to tell you what is in the rest of the book.

Mozart, Among Others

 The venue for the Princeton University Concerts is the Richardson Auditorium of Alexander Hall.  This delightful building, a roofed arena of Byzanto-Romanesque mien, dates from 1894.  The great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, here to give a memorable lecture made more memorable by the fact that he delivered it brilliantly despite having had his large box of slides stolen from the Faculty Club while he was having lunch, declared it the most interesting building in Princeton. For decades when the institution was much smaller, it was used for all sorts of solemn ceremonies.  Later, with the large expansion of the university it could no longer serve those purposes.  So the interior underwent a magnificent acoustical upgrading, becoming a superb musical venue: Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall.  You may have noted that university buildings aspire to as many names as possible.  Plural appellation maximizes the confusion of campus visitors, and helps create one of the absolutely indispensable conditions of academic traditionalism and elitism—the dichotomy between an in-group in the know and an out-group anxiously clutching little indecipherable campus maps.  Furthermore the institution can honor the generosity of two major donors at a single blow.  More bucks for their bang, so to speak.  Be that as it may, we were delighted that relaxing Covid conditions made our trip out to a Sunday afternoon concert seem nearly as unexceptional as in the good old days.

 

Alexander Hall 

 

Though I am now long retired and increasingly removed from campus affairs, having some residual friends in high places continues to prove advantageous to me.  For many years our concert seats were in the upper tier of the elegant semicircle that is the interior of Richardson Auditorium.  These were lofty, nearly avian perches allowing a comprehensive and superior view of the whole of the stage and most of the rest of the audience.  But reaching them involved climbing a spiral staircase that leaves even some student athletes in training breathing hard.  One day a couple of years ago we found that our seats had been silently but impressively switched to the very front row of the ground floor (orchestra).  This unsolicited promotion, a response to visibly advancing age and creakiness, puts us about five feet from the stage and seldom more than twelve feet from the soloists, looking up at them at an angle of about fifteen degrees.  Fantastic acoustics and leg-room.  It’s a little ostentatious, but somebody’s got to sit there.

 

Richardson Auditorium

 

Sunday’s performance was a long and uninterrupted recital (about ninety minutes) by the brilliant Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Olaffson.  Mr. Olafsson is a tall, well-built, handsome fellow with a youthful but commanding stage presence.  He is not yet forty but looks as though he were not yet thirty.  He was wearing a quite blue blue suit, tieless, but with a white dress shirt fully buttoned up to the chin, black patent leather shoes, emphatic thick- rimmed glasses, and a wedding ring.  It all added up to what you might call serious, contemporary, minimalist, functional elegance.  Mr. Olafsson was in town because the genius who runs the concert series, Marna Seltzer, is imaginative, well-connected, and entrepreneurial and can sometimes  persuade artists to add a brief trip to Princeton on one side or the other of a scheduled appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York.  The reputation of the programs she has created, working with the law of the conservation of musical energy, has several times paid off for our Princeton audience in this regard.  Carnegie Hall and Richardson Auditorium are now peers.  

 

 

The superb program, which was called “Mozart and Contemporaries,” appears to be similar if not identical to that featured under the same name on one of his hotter Deutsche Grammophon disks.  There were fifteen works—nine by Mozart, two by Baldassare Galuppi, two by Domenico Cimarosa, and one each by Haydn and C.P.E. Bach.  If the performance had been nothing more than an exhibition of the man’s powers of memory, it would have been astonishing.  The very list of names—from the possibly most famous in eighteenth-century Europe to a couple that might send you in the direction of Groves’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians-- highlights the intellectual concept behind Olafsson’s performance.  That is the concept of context.  Artists often preface or supplement the music they perform with a few interesting, illuminating, or annoying remarks.  Olafsson began with what I thought was a brilliant micro-lecture of perhaps seven or eight minutes.  All Scandinavians seem to speak English, just to shame us.  Olafsson, who studied at the Julliard, speaks a virtually unaccented, elegant, educated American English unapproachable by any of the American politicians who have been endlessly talking through the interminable period of our mid-term elections.  “Mixing the celebrated and the obscure, I hope to slightly alter our psychological attunement, removing some of the baggage we all bring with us to Mozart’s music…to approach even the best-known works of Mozart with the same freedom and childlike enthusiasm I felt upon discovering the rare and staggeringly lyrical works from the likes of Galuppi and Cimarosa.”

 

He explained that the overwhelming genius of Mozart flowered in the context of a larger musical efflorescence, some understanding of which actually enriches one’s appreciation of that genius.  If the only thought you have ever given to this—and I fear I here indict myself—is in the cartoonish way that the film Amadeus presents the competition with Salieri, you are likely to have a pretty superficial view of a rather deep subject.  There was something wonderfully generous and expansive behind the pianist’s little talk, a generosity that found its parallel in the scrupulosity with which he addressed the keyboard of the huge Steinway rising from the stage before me, practically within my own reach as it seemed.  One passing remark sticks with me.  It was about Haydn, one of whose sonatas featured in the program.  According to Olaffson, Haydn was one of few of Mozart’s contemporary composers with the breadth of skill and energy of application actually to understand in its fulness the younger man’s achievement.  Haydn applauded that achievement with an open enthusiasm in which there was room only for admiration and thoughtful praise.  “Of course he was himself a very great musician,” said Olaffson.  But he didn’t stop there.  He added: “he was a great human being.”  I do not recall ever before hearing a great artist in any field praised by an expert critic as a great human being.

 

Whose Number Is Not Legion

 

This essay is a new venture for me, requiring a kind of provisional 

abrupt introductory paragraph that must serve as a foundation

for a structure to be erected upon it some hours hence--I hope by

about 3pm EST. That is to say, this post is to be continued. For

it involves matters that will not have happened until about then, 

or at least for which I have no hope of providing some 

photographic evidence of their having happened by then.  This

is as close to "live blogging" as Gladly Lerne is ever likely to 

come.  So with what I must hope is a sufficiently annoying air of

mystery, I leave you until later, or in this instance jusque' à 

plus tard....

        and it is now plus tard.  This is a story about two

 commanding figures, Napoleon Bonaparte and our daughter

 Katherine.  I realize that this may seem a conspicuous yoking

 of unequals of differing character, perhaps even a concordia

 discors like last week’s soiled fish.  But there are major

differences between them.  Our daughter , after all,  is a very 

nice person.  But it was the not-so-nice First Consul Napoleon 

who, two hundred and twenty years ago, established the

 Legion d’Honneur.  The French Revolution went a long way

 towards destroying hereditary aristocracy.  Along with

 titles of aristocratic rank were junked hundreds of

 religious and secular sodalities, fraternal organizations

 and orders of chivalry.  Many of these groups had been

 divided into hierarchical degrees of subgroups with more

 or less fancy titles.  Many had distinctive emblems,

ornaments, or features of dress that announced their wearers

 with varying degrees of iconographical exactitude.  In 

theory all this was swept away by the Revolution, one of 

the three bywords of which was Égalité--equality of social

station.  One title alone was thought sufficient for all:

Citoyen—citizen.  (For the Russians a century later it 

would be tovarishch—Comrade.)                 

Never mind that the egalitarianism might in reality be 

more linguistic than social.  The world of titular elitism

had been dealt a punishing blow.  And it might seem to

have created a “merit gap”.  Napoleon was at heart a 

soldier, and he believed that soldiers, though they fought 

nobly for their homelands, for their leaders, for their

religions, and for glory, by no means despised the 

“baubles” of military decorations.  Their miserly pay, 

when they got it, hardly made them what we would think 

of as mercenaries.  It was with this in mind that in1802,

 he devised the Legion of Honor to recognize conspicuous 

service to the French patria.  The recognition was not

 material, but of the highest prestige.  The Legion’s motto

 is “Honneur et Patrie"-“Honor and Homeland.”  At its 

origin Napoleon thought of such service as principally,

though not exclusively, military in nature.  The very

word Legion of course was a term borrowed from ancient 

Roman military history—a large fighting force (a minimum

of four thousand men) organized into a precise hierarchy 

of well-oiled functional parts.  The excellence recognized

among the new French Legioneers came in gradations or

degrees, as it had in the old church hierarchy and in the

burgeoning secular religion of the Free Masons.  Over 

time the concept of service to the French Republic was

largely directed to notable achievement or leadership in

many fields, culture, scholarship, industrial enterprise, etc.

It was also realized that there were throughout the world

men and women who, though not in fact French citizens

or perhaps even residents of France, were notable

contributors. People could and did honor the French

patrie from many foreign climes.  This was particularly

true, perhaps, of academic experts dealing with French

materials: French history, French culture, Francophone 

countries, and so forth.    

Two new electrifying knights
 

            By now you see where this is going.  A short while ago Christophe Kerrero, the Recteur de l’academie de Paris, inducted Dr. Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, historian and CEO of the Getty Foundation,  as a chavaliere.  Chevalier/e continues the title of distinguished military distinction in ancient Rome and the Christian Middle Ages.  The English word knight (from Old English cniht, “young man”) was a bit of an outlier.  The Latin word eques, like the French chevalier, the Spanish caballero, the German Ritter, etc., made clear this person’s essential source of fearful power.  As the French joke has it, the most important thing about a chevalier is the cheval (horse).  And indeed I would hate to be standing in an infantry line, sword in hand, facing ten or twelve 1400-pound war horses, each mounted by a steel-clad warrior with extended battle lance in “charge” position, headed my way at a canter that soon advanced to a gallop.

                                                       Claudine and Joan in the Grande Salle of the Sorbonne
 

            External evidences of the award—what Napoleon called the “baubles”--are a fancy medal for ceremonial occasions and a very discreet small red lapel bar for trips to the grocery store and things like that.  I now remember quoting Nina Berberova on the Kravchenko trial.  “To see with my own eyes how a former minister, or a world-known scientist, a Nobel Prize laureate or a Sorbonne Professor with the Legion of Honor in his lapel button hole, or a famous author would take the oath and under oath affirm that there never had been and were not any concentration camps in the USSR was one of the strongest impressions of my entire life.” Reports of Katy’s testimony are much more uplifting.

                                                        Pierre and Claudine Bloch: friends of seventy years
 

I have already reported on one of these filial laureations in January of 2001, also in Paris and also at the Sorbonne.  (I am now sort of embarrassed by the bragging in which I indulged, but should you have nothing better to do you can run a search under “What a Prize!”—an allusion to the prize-winner, actually--or follow the list back to January 27, 2010).  A large issue of my own this time is simply the unfortunate fact that I am in New Jersey, not Paris.  I didn’t think it was wise from the medical point of view to undertake another international trip so soon after the last one.  In case of my own possible temptation to revise this decision, the prize-winner herself stood ready to reaffirm it in emphatic form.  But all is very well.  Joan, accompanied by our eldest and very globe-trotting son Richard, are already ensconced in the elegant guest quarters of our very old friends Pierre and Claudine Bloch--next to the Luxembourg Gardens, a short walk from the site of the ceremony.  My erudite son-in-law Zvi, prohibited by his own professional obligations from attending the ceremony, has been keeping me company here.  So it's Hands Across the Water, and if all goes well with Richard’s plans to send me a couple of photos pronto, I shall achieve my first and probably only semi-live blog.  And I will say it again: What a prize!

                                                   

photo credits: Richard A. Fleming

 

Felix Culpa

 

On this slow news day, the closest I want to come to politics is a possibly eccentric meditation on the idea of the margin of error.  John Milton, in his epic treatment of the Genesis story, Paradise Lost, advances a theory of what is called in Latin a felix culpa and in English the “Fortunate Fall”.  This is the somewhat convoluted Christian theological idea that the primal sin of Adam and Eve, though utterly disastrous in its immediate effects, turned out in the end to be the cause of humanity’s greatest happiness, namely redemption through Jesus Christ.  Hence it was a “happy” sin or fault.  The paradox of the felix culpa is actually rather fascinating in its many ramifications.

 

My attention was recently drawn to the idea of fortunate mistakes in art and literature.  The line of thought was introduced by a news squib concerning a painting by the modernist Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).  Apparently one of his most famous works has been hanging upside down in various museums for the last seventy-five years.  I say “apparently,” because I don’t see how anybody can actually know.  The painting is a group of strips of color crossing at right angles parallel to the four sides of its canvas, a geometrical square.  The expert who declared the painting to have been hanging upside down claims there is independent evidence of this fact, but it doesn’t convince me.  The real reason behind the claim is that this guy thinks it looks better the other way.  I can get behind this argument.  Life would certainly be much improved if it conformed to the way I see things.  And as I look at the painting, it would look about the same whichever of its four edges was “up”.  If the way it has been hanging for seventy-five years is culpable, it is happily culpable.  It's all in the way you look at things.

 

 

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the philosopher-bishop George Berkeley published his novel ideas about ontology—ontology meaning, roughly, how things exist.  What brought things into existence was the fact that they were perceived to exist.  This theory was very elegantly expressed in a short Latin sentence.  Esse est percipi.  “To be is to be perceived.”  You have probably heard about “Berkleyanism” in terms of an example commonly used to illustrate it.  If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to see or hear the crash, did it really fall?  Indeed, did it really exist in the first place?  According to Berkeley it is only the perception of phenomena that makes them exist.  So at first blush it would seem that the answer is negative.

 

            Well, we do say that seeing is believing.  I recall from many years ago a hilarious segment on, I believe, “Candid Camera”.  A refrigerator salesman was trying to close a deal with a supposed prospective buyer (actually a conspirator in on the joke).  How, this man wanted to know, could he be absolutely sure that the interior light in the refrigerator actually went out when the door was shut?  He didn’t want to be paying for wasted electricity!  No amount of explanation and assurance from the salesman, no amount of fiddling with the little switch in the side of the door, could persuade him.  He insisted on actually climbing into the refrigerator and having the door shut on him if he was to be persuaded.  The salesman, apparently willing to do anything to close a sale, cooperated; so he scrunched the supposed “buyer” into the shelf above the vegetable drawers and actually closed the door!  In fact, Berkeley didn’t think metaphysics demanded such strenuous human measures.  Fortunately, all-seeing God, whose divine perception was continuous and ubiquitous, was in charge of ontology.

 

The witty English priest Ronald Knox wrote a limerick on this theme

There once was a man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad”

 

which elicited an equally witty if anonymous response:

Dear Sir,
              Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
                          Yours faithfully,
                                                  God

            Of course, if there is perception, there must be the possibility of misperception, and thus another chance of felix culpa.  For example I am slightly color blind.  How can I know that what I do not see is better than what I do see?  There are some great examples of masterful mistakes from literary study.  One concerns a very dramatic incident at the end of Melville’s novel White-Jacket: or the World in a Man-of-War.  The narrator, a Yankee seaman who takes his strange nickname from his home-made upper garment, narrowly escapes death in an accidental plunge from a spar high on a mast into the sea.  He plunged deep into the water before resurfacing miraculously uninjured.  In the submerged moment of his terrifying near-death experience, his whole life races through his mind.  “I wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying.  But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through”  (p.763, LibAm edition).

 

            An eminent Harvard professor, one of the country’s leading authorities on American literature, and a man who had either bad eyeglasses or a bad edition of the novel, waxed lyrical about this passage.  He was particularly excited by the idea of a soiled fish.  He wrote thus: “[Melville’s] “discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical.”  Now who could possibly doubt the poetic superiority of a soiled to a coiled fish?  And who would settle for rubbing up against a slippery eel if you could have a discordia concors instead?  The mistake is a great improvement on the take.  God bless the typographical error.  O felix culpa!

 

 

 

 

 

Elective

 

            It is possible that you are already aware that there is an election taking place in our country six days hence.  I am reluctant to write about politics in this blog.  I am not a political scientist or even a political groupie.  The category in which I would place myself is “concerned citizen”.  I hope and trust that same category embraces the large majority of my readership.  Because there seems to me to be a lot to be concerned about.  A brief venting on this subject will at least win my promise not to write about the actual election results.

 

            In the state in which I reside and therefore vote there is not a lot of action this year.  The names of neither of our two senators nor of our governor will be on the ballot.  They are all serving in unexpired terms.  Few of the Congressional contests are in serious doubt.  Our own representative, a competent, experienced, popular and well-spoken Democrat, will certainly be re-elected.  Such drama as I can find, and it isn’t much, is in the list of candidates for the Princeton School Board.  But New Jersey is somewhat anomalous in this regard.  Our two largest neighbors are New York and Pennsylvania.  There is enough competition in New York to qualify it as at least a “skirmish state” among the House candidates as a group.  And Pennsylvania is a full-blown “battleground state.”

 

            According to the endlessly repeated bromide attributed to Tip O’Neill (D-MA, d. 1994), “All politics is local.”  If so, I wish that somebody would get that word to the national headquarters of our two major political parties.  Because I am being inundated with importunate begging letters from my friends Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell imploring me to help elect their senatorial candidates in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada, among other places.  According to news reports “money is pouring in” in response to such appeals.  Maybe so, but not mine.  There is not even the pretense that candidates being pushed are meant to represent the electors in the states in which they reside.  They are meant to represent one of two major political parties, alias Good and Bad.

 

            Old age is full of insults and inconveniences, but there are a few advantages to it.  One of them is remembered experience.  When I was a kid the donkey and the elephant could be rather cheerful, even sprightly mascots of a competition that seemed more athletic than belligerent.  One knew lots of people who sometimes voted Democratic and sometimes Republican, depending upon the political circumstances of the moment and the personalities of the candidates.  It seems to me we now have an electorate that is very closely divided in numbers across the country, and very nearly immobile in the fixation of party allegiance.  This is a very bad situation for many mostly obvious reasons.  Our system of primary elections, ostensibly designed to facilitate efficiency, has the practical effect of nominating candidates who are extreme and not infrequently lack the competence needed to serve as democratic political representatives.  Thus among the candidates for whom this New Jersey resident is being importuned to contribute his Social Security shekels are a once-great football player of stunning ignorance and moral hypocrisy in Georgia and a cognitively impaired stroke victim in Pennsylvania.  In somewhat differing ways they exemplify the large problem identified above: a closely divided electorate increasingly fixated upon partisan preference.

 

            The two men to whom I refer represent different political parties.  The partisan problem is wonderfully bipartisan.  In my view it is political malfeasance for either of them to present themselves as senatorial candidates, though for different reasons.  Democracy depends upon the rule of law to be sure, but law alone is not sufficient to sustain it in any vibrant fashion.  It also depends upon a web of common-sense conventions.  One of these is that the electors be presented not merely with a choice of candidates, but with a choice of qualified candidates. 

 

Is someone in an unresolved state of seriously compromised health “qualified”?   I am particularly interested in cerebral vascular accidents (“strokes”) because of personal experience.  There is enough evidence of the occurrence of cerebral blood clots among the males on the paternal side of my family to give me some sleepless moments.  My beloved father died after a series of four strokes over the period of nearly a decade.  If you have ever personally witnessed the effects of a serious stroke on an active, articulate person of energy and intelligence, you have experienced one of life’s true sadnesses.  And if you have watched a video of the debate between John Fetterman and his opponent in the Pennsylvania senatorial race, you have had a glimpse of it.  But neither one’s sympathy for a man’s situation nor admiration for a his pluck can turn an issue of the public good into one of the private rights of disabled people.

 

About halfway through the disastrous sequence of my Dad’s decline in New Mexico, I went with him once to a meeting of his Stroke Club, a support group for sufferers and survivors, whose degree of impairment varied considerably.  I met several brave, indeed inspirational people at this meeting.  One guy, a former long-distance truck driver, pricked up his ears when he heard I was from Princeton.  “Have you ever heard of the Princeton University Press?” he asked.  What a naïve question, thought I, author of several books published by that press, when I finally figured out what he was trying to say and discovered what lay behind it.  This man could barely speak, but he was buying all the volumes of the English translation of Kierkegaard’s works as they were issued by the Bollingen Foundation through the Princeton Press.  A silent, useful rebuke for me and my assumptions: but I still wouldn’t want him as my senator.  Stroke victims sometimes can and do recover.  But they also can and do suffer successive seizures.  The insouciance and prevarication with which candidates, their assembled medical experts, and segments of the press want to avoid an honest discussion of medical realities is in one way astonishing.  In another, it is not.  One of our legendary football coaches is supposed to have said in a pep talk to his team: “Men, winning isn’t everything.  It’s the only thing.”  This guiding principle was passed on by my own coach—approvingly but quite ludicrously, given the material he was dealing with—to a team on which I once played.  This Darwinian exhortation seems now to be political science.  A columnist in the Times just said in so many words that the terminal goal of the senatorial election is selecting a person of the right party.  If that is your view of the ends of American democracy, you can probably relax a little about the problem of misinformation on Twitter.

No. 687 of the continuing series

 

The Golden Age

                                            Peaceable Kingdom of Edward Hicks
 

If you’ve read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, you will know—or at least be forced to deny in the face of overwhelming if dull statistical data—that the larger trends in global human felicity are on the upswing.  I refer to such major factors as the ravages of war, famine, and disease.  The number of our fellow humans who have fairly recently “been brought out of abject poverty” is astonishing.  Pinker’s book is in line with a major though historically fairly new trend of optimistic thought—mainly since the Enlightenment—progressivism—documented in another once-famous book by the Cambridge historian J. B. Bury*.  Yet one would hardly guess the world’s good news  from reading the daily papers or watching the PBS News Hour.  There one gets the impression that major world trends have probably never been worse since the time of the Golden Horde, and that in our own country “democracy is imperiled” about the same way it was in Bloody Kansas in 1858.  Do not misunderstand me.  It’s not that I think everything is just tikkity-boo.  I think a lot of things are pretty bad—just not 1348 or 1793 bad.  But as a student of earlier periods of history I am aware that the human struggle has in fact been unending.   Twice in my own lifetime the pessimism has been tinged with apocalypticism.  When I was a child in school the terror was Nuclear Winter.  For my young grandchildren it has been Global Warming.  We are born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, as the Good Book says.  What interests me in this essay is the alacrity with which spokesmen of the human race have embraced historical pessimism and continue to do so.

 

Having too little to do as he lolled around the Tower of London while awaiting eventual execution, the Elizabethan courtier and swashbuckler Sir Walter Raleigh dashed off an 800-page History of the World animated by his imaginative etymology of the word world: “that which groweth worse as it groweth older”.  Retrogressivism.  It is Raleigh rather than Pinker that my week’s reading in old poems has brought to my mind.

 

Among the great world myths, to be found in the lore of the most “advanced” of ancient peoples and in the least technologically developed of contemporary indigenous groups, is that of a Golden Age from which the human race has gradually declined or precipitously fallen in its ethical stature, moral grandeur, and state of felicity.  Usually, perhaps always, the transformation is the result of moral lapse.  Most famous of such myths is that in the Hebrew Scriptures—the story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent and the forbidden fruit tree.  In the early centuries of the formation of Christianity brilliant exegetes derived from this story in the early chapters of Genesis complex doctrines of human nature, the construction of the human psychological apparatus, refined philosophical concepts of the nature of human offense against God (sin), and the consequences of its supposed inheritability, often called Original Sin.  In the seventeenth-century the English poet John Milton, probably the best-known epic poet in our tongue, published Paradise Lost, announcing as his theme “Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World, and all our woe, with loss of Eden…”  For just as the human race was corrupted, so also did living conditions in our world become harsh and adversarial, and life itself a brutal struggle: vineyards into briar patches, so to speak.  The “peaceable kingdom” became the arena of human life “nasty, brutish, and short” in Hobbes’s famous phrase.

 

The pre-Christian myth of the Golden Age is alluded to by many of the classical Latin writers and treated at some length by the two most important poets among them, Virgil and Ovid. So consonant was it with the account of human origins in the Bible, the Roman myth needed only the slightest humanistic tweaking to enter the mainstream of Christian Latin literature, which it joined via various channels, but especially by way of a magnificent poem (early sixth century) by the brilliant poet-philosopher Boethius.  His greatest book, The Consolation of Philosophy is a prosimetrum, a work in which poems and prose passages often work in intellectual symphony.  One of the most famous “meters” (poems) in the Consolation begins “How much happier was that earlier age when contented men depended on the faithful fields and, not yet sunk into luxury, satisfied their hunger with easily gathered acorns.”  Felicitous, peaceful simplicity of life became deformed by the invention of navigation, leading to trade, and universal avarice.  The next steps toward depravity were bloodshed, wars of conquests, and the frantic digging for gold and precious gems.

 

  This short poem (thirty lines) of Boethius had a long afterlife.  It was translated or adapted by early poets in most of the European vernaculars—Chaucer included.  Chaucer’s “translation” is double the length of that of Boethius, and doubly pessimistic: by its final three lines the moral decline is so bad that nothing is left in the world but “covetousness, duplicity, treason, and envy, poison, manslaughter, and murder in several varieties.”

 

Boethius’s Golden Age meter of course derived from earlier Latin literary tradition.  The most influential of the classical versions are those of Virgil and, especially, Ovid.  Very early in the Metamorphoses Ovid traces universal world history from a Golden Age, ruled by Saturn under Astreia, goddess of justice, through its gradual decline into ages of less precious metals.  Things really got tough in the Age of Iron.  “Immediately every species of crime burst forth…modesty, truth, and honor took flight; in their place succeeded fraud, deceit, treachery, violence, and the cursed hankering for acquisition".

 

painful end of an era

 

The correspondences Christian theologians found between Moses and Ovid were not simply factitious.  Legends of the ruination of our once paradisal planet through human moral depravity are part of the shared stock of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern lore.  Virgil, widely believed to have foretold the birth of Christ in his Eclogues, could almost naturally become Dante’s guide to his imagined Christian underworld.  The end of the Golden Age and the loss of Eden are fundamentally the same old story of desire and rebellion-- drugs and rock-and-roll being long delayed afterthoughts.  The violent end to the Age of Gold came about in this wise.   Saturn’s revolting son--“Lecherous” Jupiter as Chaucer calls him—revolted against his father in a most revolting way.  He cut off his dad’s private parts and dropped them into the Mediterranean drink.  The result this aberrant act of coitus, after a certain period of foaming and bubbling, was the birth of the goddess Venus at Paphos on Cyprus.

 

Venus on the half-shell

Most readers probably consider it inappropriate if not blasphemous to find anything humorous in the scriptural version of the Fall of Man.   I do have to say that I find it hard not to smile when I read of  the first thing Adam and Eve did following the disaster.  They tried to get some underwear on, and quick: “and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”  Maybe it’s just the Elizabethan use of the word aprons.  Once the goddess of love got loose in the world, all hell broke loose, especially when her very naughty kid Cupid was around.  It’s more like a belly laugh in Ovid, where one of the first events in the fallen world is Apollo’s mad pursuit of Daphne, the beautiful daughter of a river god.  You know about Cupid’s arrows, of which there were two kinds: aphrodisiac and anaphrodisiac.  The first inspires a burning sexual passion in its victim, the latter a terrible headache and revulsion at the very idea of sex.  Just for the fun of it, Cupid shot Apollo with one of the former and Daphne with one of the latter and sat back to enjoy the fun.  This led to a frantic pursuit and many great works of Renaissance art.  Just as she was about to be captured and ravished by Apollo, Daphne uttered a desperate prayer to be saved.  Salvation came in the form of her miraculous transformation into a tree—the laurel tree, thereafter the Apollonian symbol of poets and poetry.  As her tender flesh turned to bark in his hands, and her lovely hair a tangle of leafy twigs, Apollo was forced to reconsider his options.  “Well,” he said in effect, “if you won’t be my girlfriend, will you at least be my tree?"

 

Arboreal Daphne 

*J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1920).  A timely study: 20 millions, half of them civilians, had just been killed in the Great War.