QOTD (2011-12-02); or, Advent 2 December 2011
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The following, by E.B. White, was the highlight of the Princeton Glee Club’s secular lessons and carols tonight (I mean, other than the delightful singing):
From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions in many places. Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who can’t eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time. Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities! Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes don’t fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists! Greetings to wives who can’t find their glasses and to poets who can’t find their rhymes! Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight. Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word “How” (as though they knew!). Greetings to people with a ringing in their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep, and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths! Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to people who can’t stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too, the boarders in boarding hoses on 25 December, the duennas in Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got nothing in the mail. Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; merry Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction! Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think–plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners whose conduct is unworthy of their car! Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; joy to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers to soldiers and guardsmen on land and sea and in the air–the young men doing the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such, Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the Secretaries-designate, the President-elect; Merry Christmas to our new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management! Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas to all who think they are in love but aren’t sure! Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers who can’t think of a moral, gagmen who can’t think of a joke. Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon! And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters! Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!
The fairy lights are up in my room, Handel’s Messiah is on the radio, and I’m making mulled wine for a party tomorrow night! Whatever we may have to object to in the Christian liturgical calendar, hurrah for it giving countries with Christian cultures a time when it is perfectly acceptable to be happy all the time, whatever the Puritan work ethic and the capitalist speed-up may say to the contrary!
QOTD (2011-11-12) 12 November 2011
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Voltaire, Candide (English translation my own):
Toute la petite société entra dans ce louable dessein ; chacun se mit à exercer ses talents. La petite terre rapporta beaucoup. Cunégonde était, à la vérité, bien laide ; mais elle devint une excellente pâtissière ; Paquette broda ; la vieille eut soin du linge. Il n’y eut pas jusqu’à frère Giroflée qui ne rendit service ; il fut un très bon menuisier, et même devint honnête homme ; et Pangloss disait quelquefois à Candide : « Tous les événements sont enchaînés dans le meilleur des mondes possibles : car enfin si vous n’aviez pas été chassé d’un beau château à grands coups de pied dans le derrière pour l’amour de mademoiselle Cunégonde, si vous n’aviez pas été mis à l’Inquisition, si vous n’aviez pas couru l’Amerique à pied, si vous n’aviez pas donné un bon coup d’épée au baron, si vous n’aviez pas perdu tous vos moutons du bon pays d’Eldorado, vous ne mangeriez pas ici des cédrats confits et des pistaches. — Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. »
The entire little society took part in this laudable plan; each set himself to exercise his talents. The little piece of land returned a great deal. Cunegonde was, in truth, quite ugly; but she became an excellent baker; Paquette embroidered; the old woman took care of the linen. Not even Brother Giroflee refused to help; he was a very good carpenter, and also became an honest man; and Pangloss said sometimes to Candide: “All events are connected in the best of all possible worlds: for in the end if you had not been chased from a beautiful chateau with a great kick in the ass for the love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been put to the Inquisition, if you had not crossed America on foot, if you had not stabbed the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the good country of Eldorado, you would not be here, eating candied citrons and pistachios.”
“This is well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our own garden.”
QOTD (2011-11-04) 4 November 2011
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Some of the most exciting moments in one’s education are when one finds oneself circling round, reading primary texts one has been hearing or reading about for quite a long time, but that one could never have understood without the tools one has gained since. Pater, Plato and Platonism:
The treatise, as the proper instrument of dogma—the Ethics of Aristotle, the Ethics of Spinoza—begins with a truth, or with a clear conviction of truth, in the axiom or definition, which it does but propose further to explain and apply.—The treatise, as the instrument of a dogmatic philosophy begins with an axiom or definition: the essay or dialogue, on the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does not necessarily so much as conclude in one; like that long dialogue with oneself, that dialectic process, which may be co-extensive with life. It does in truth little more than clear the ground, as we say, or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one may have a fair chance of knowing, or seeing, perhaps: it does but put one into a duly receptive attitude towards such possible truth, discovery, or revelation, as may one day occupy the ground, the tablet,—shed itself on the purified air; it does not provide a proposition, nor a system of propositions, but forms a temper.
What Plato presents to his readers is, then, again, a paradox, or a reconciliation of opposed tendencies: on one side, the largest possible demand for infallible certainty in knowledge (it was he fixed that ideal of absolute truth, to which, vainly perhaps, the human mind, as such, aspires) yet, on the other side, the utmost possible inexactness, or contingency, in the method by which actually he proposes to attain it. It has been said that the humour of Socrates, of which the famous Socratic irony—the pretence to have a bad memory, to dislike or distrust long and formal discourse, to have taught nothing, to be but a mid-wife in relation to other people’s thoughts—was an element, is more than a mere personal trait; that it was welcome as affording a means of escape from the full responsibilities of his teaching. It belonged, in truth, to the tentative character of dialectic, of question and answer as the method of discovery, of teaching and learning, to the position, in a word, of the philosophic essayist.
[...]
If Platonism from age ot age has meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of “being,” or the nearest attainable approach to our substitution for that; for others, Platonism has been in fact only another name for scepticism, in a recognisable philosophic tradition. Thus, in the Middle Age, it qualifies in the Sic et Non the confident scholasticism of Abelard. It is like the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates himself again, in those endless conversations of Montaigne—that typical sceptic of the age of the Renaissance—conversations with himself, with the living, with the dead through their writings, which his Essays do but reflect. Typical Platonist or sceptic, he is therefore also the typical essayist. And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does but commence the modern world, which, side by side with its metaphysical reassertions, from Descartes to Hegel, side by side also with a constant accumulation of the sort of certainty which is afforded by empirical science, has had assuredly, to check wholesomely the pretensions of one and of the other alike, its doubts.—”Their name is legion,” says a modern writer. Reverent and irreverent, reasonable and unreasonable, manly and unmanly, morbid and healthy, guilty and honest, wilful, inevitable—they have been called, indifferently, in an age which thirsts for intellectual security, but cannot make up its mind. Que sais-je? it cries, in the words of Montaigne; but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socrates, with whom such dubitation had been nothing less than a religious duty or service.
Sanguine about any form of absolute knowledge, of eternal, or indefectible, or immutable truth, with our modern temperament as it is, we shall hardly become, even under the direction of Plato, and by the reading of the Platonic Dialogues. But if we are little likely to realise in his school, the promise of “ontological” science, of a “doctrine of Being,” or any increase in our consciousness of metaphysical security, are likely, rather, to acquire there that other sort of Platonism, a habit, namely, of tentative thinking and suspended judgment, if we are not likely to enjoy the vision of his “eternal and immutable ideas,” Plato may yet promote in us what we call “ideals”—the aspiration towards a more perfect Justice, a more perfect beauty, physical and intellectual, a more perfect condition of human affairs, than any one has ever yet seen; that κόσμος in which things are only as they are thought by a perfect mind, to which experience is constantly approximating us, but which it does not provide. There they stand, the two great landmarks of the intellectual or spiritual life as Plato conceived it: the ideal, the world of “ideas,” “the great perhaps,” for which it is his merit so effectively to have opened room in the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all, through our affinities of nature with it, which, however, in our dealings with ourselves and others we may assume to be objective or real:—and then, over against our imperfect realisation of that ideal, in ourselves, in nature and history, amid the personal caprices (it might almost seem) of its discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate attitude on our part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts. Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.
QOTD (2011-10-30); or, On What Matters 30 October 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Ethics, Politics/Current Affairs, QOTD.1 comment so far
Professor Stefan Collini, concluding his remarks at Cambridge on “The Very Idea of the University,” 11 October 2011:
We all in our way have an obligation to try to hand on to our successors an institution that has managed, through difficult times, to keep alive and embody what is most precious in this particular idea of the university. Organised scepticism is one of its animating principles: that questioning of all claims to truth, no matter how familiar or well-established, and no matter how elevated the academic or political authority who makes them….
As I hope every student who passes through this university comes to realise, the house of intellect is in one sense necessarily a democracy. Yes, of course we have our rituals and our hierarchies, but in the end, across a supervision room or seminar table or lab bench or wherever, the powers that ultimately govern our doings are the better arguments and the better evidence, and it doesn’t matter who puts them forward.
So whatever decisions we make in the present about our funding or our institutional structures or our forms of teaching or assessment, or the hundreds of other practical things we have to decide about, I think we have no choice but to be committed to handing on to our successors an institution which is still able across the whole field of human activity to challenge the current state of understanding, and which is always free to suggest that there are other places to start and other things worth understanding. And keeping that spirit of inquiry alive—really alive, not just paying lip service to it when we put all those lifeless abstract nouns into those life-destryoing report forms, but keeping that spirit of inquiry alive—is what all of us, in this room and in this university and in other universities, have to regard as our priority.
I should make clear that this does not seem to me a comfortable or easy position. In fact, it’s a very radical notion in its way, because it says that we’re committed to this kind of freedom of inquiry come what may. And what may come are not just government directives or external decisions that we may regard as misguided and even damaging, but—an even truer test of our mettle—what may come includes those moral and political values to which we, as ethical agents and responsible citizens, feel a strong commitment: values which these days often take the form of, for example, ensuring for others a genuine respect and equality of treatment and improvement of life chances, and so on. Those are all hugely important things, but they’re not, I submit, primary and distinctive responsibilities of universities, and at times they may even conflict with the prime task of extending understanding. This is not the least of the ways in which the very idea of the university is such an outrageous one.
If we are only trustees for our generation of the peculiar cultural achievement that is the university, then those of us whose lives have been shaped by the immeasurable privilege of studying and teaching in a university are not entitled to give up on the attempt to make the case for its best purposes and to make that case tell in the public domain, however discouraging the immediate circumstances. We owe it to those who preserved and enriched the traditions of inquiry which we have inherited, and we owe it too to the generations yet unborn who should not be denied the precious opportunity to wander through the galleries of the human mind with no more fixed purpose than a curiosity to understand how such mangifience came to be and how it can be renewed and extended. A sense of our place in this longer history chastises the petty vanities and foolish crotchets of the present, but it can be inspiring; and we reflect that, even in circumstances that may have looked to them as little propitious as ours do sometimes to us, no previous generation entirely surrendered this ideal of the university to those ontological fantasists who think they represent the ‘real world’. I deliberately choose there that rhetorical excess, because, as Newman well knew, such verbal serpents can be the carrier—even though it can in no straightforward propositional sense be the statement—of the mind’s drive for fuller and deeper comprehension, a drive which it is the function of universities to allow to pursue its endless quest without being subject to the requirement to produce some measurable practical outcome in the present.
Please do not abandon this idea of the university, however debased you may think any manifestation of it has temporarily come to be. Tending to this idea may remind us, amid distracting circumstances, that we are indeed merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create and which it is not ours to destroy.
All twenty-one years of my life in universities, I have had the sense that I belong to something much larger than myself, much larger than my family and all the people my family knows, much larger than my friends and my colleagues and my professors and all the people my friends and colleagues and professors have ever known. This is why I’ve not left yet and could never imagine leaving: these institutions together stand for something palpable and valuable in the web of things that make us human and alive and worth wondering at.
I recommend that you follow the link above and listen to the whole of Prof. Collini’s talk, only whose last five or so minutes I have transcribed here. In fifty-one captivating minutes, he makes an eloquent and at times even fist-pumping attempt to carve out a cultural space for the university past and present that runs counter to, and at times even directly critiques, the dominant cultural rhetoric of output, productivity, and other economic terms that we today suppose universities are generally good for boosting. He points out that in the so-called “real world” that universities are claimed not to be sufficiently accountable to, people don’t just work as mindless automatons the way the language of business and industry might suggest. Rather, they wonder and wander and love and question their purpose in life, and they often actively seek out the ideas that the University (as Platonic form) stores for the sake of those who seek ways of understanding where they fit into the world and how the world fits into them.
But if there is anything that is lacking in this sermon (for so he self-mockingly calls it) by one of my all-time heroes where the cause of defending the idea of the university is concerned, it is that he presents the university as a rather static institution: withstanding the vagaries of time, of trends, of economic systems, and tended by custodians who seek to keep it true to its founding principles. To an extent, this is indeed what is so marvelous about the university, and believe in it so passionately that I hope to be fortunate enough to grow up to be one of those stewards of human knowledge myself. And to be sure, Collini does impress upon the listener the fact that the university is always moving knowledge, always stretching its boundaries further and testing every intellectual proposition put to it on the most rigorous of grounds.
But—if I may be so presumptuous—what I think he leaves out is the lifesaving grace (if you will; Collini started this off by calling his summing-up a sermon!) that universities may grant those who find human flourishing within their walls. There are reasons he might have done so: it sounds absolutely silly to talk about this, especially if you’re a rather famous, eminent, and brilliant Cambridge don. But I am a 21-year-old undergraduate, and it is my role in life to be silly, so that is precisely what I am going to proceed to do. We caretakers are not guarding all this knowledge for nothing: we are guarding it so that eighteen-year-olds may come to stay for a while and learn that they have best selves, and that their best selves are worth being. Of course, not all eighteen-year-olds discover this in universities. But some—and I can speak only from my own experience—cannot find it anywhere else. These, I find, are the ones most likely to take a life sentence, to become the next caretakers. But even those who do not know for three or four years that they are growing within and beyond themselves may find themselves years later thanking those fustian caretakers for keeping alive something eternal so that it might inside them become quite dynamic indeed.
As I write this, I find that I am sounding to myself rather Platonist and perhaps even rather Hegelian, which is either the product of a day spent writing about the influence of Hegel in Symonds’ early scholarship on Greek literature or a reflection of the reactionary Victorianism that characterizes a great deal of my own critique of political economy these days. Just about eight months ago now, it was reading Arnold and Ruskin (and not, in fact, Marx a year before) that gave me a sense of possibility outside the totalizing rhetoric of capitalism, of industry, of production, value, return, reward, winning, profiting, gaining, optimizing. Of course, as Collini argues, it’s the rational inquiry that universities support that can help us to recognize that we all live according to more discourses than that of political economy after all. But we shouldn’t forget, I think, that when that happens it’s not just that we have a better society right now, or that human understanding is safeguarded, in some abstract way, for the next generation. It’s also that hearts and minds are changed within universities. Speaking as someone who feels myself growing and becoming almost by the day, I know that’s an absolutely extraordinary and beautiful thing.
QOTD (2011-10-28); or, Slow College 28 October 2011
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From Symonds’ Memoirs:
I took to examining my thoughts and wishes with regard to the mysteries of the universe, God, nature, man. This I did seriously, almost systematically, during more than two years of reading for the Final Schools at Oxford. The studies on which I was engaged, Plato, Aristotle, the history of ancient and modern philosophy, logic, supplied me with continual food for meditation; and in the course of long walks or midnight colloquies, I compared my own eager questionings with those of many sorts of men…. A book called Essays and Reviews attracted extraordinary attention at that time; and a vehement contest about the endowment of Prof. Jowett’s chair was raging between the liberals and conservatives of the university. Theology penetrated our intellectual and social atmosphere. We talked theology at breakfast parties and at wine parties, out riding and walking, in college gardens, on the river, wherever young men and their elders met together.
I wish those who bemoan the loss, particularly in America, of this kind of liberal intellectual education, founded on the virtues of conversation and particularly of dialogue, could have been a fly on the wall of my college room last night. Last night, the night before fall break, is a time for debauched revelry in Princeton, when students attend Halloween parties and celebrate having no school for a week. I sat at home, and then over the course of the evening one, then two and three, then four friends arrived at my door. We sat around the coffee table and opened a bottle of wine and talked—and we talked and we talked, until four in the morning, about free will and the mind-body problem and whether a computer can love. I had an uncanny moment of historical déjà vu—a bit like the one I had once in the Radcliffe Camera, reading Thomas Arnold’s edition of Thucydides just like Oscar Wilde. The other week I wrote the part of my thesis that is about Symonds in 1860, reading Stallbaum’s commentary on the Phaedrus and trying to understand what Plato means when he says that love is a disease. Well into the fourth hour of our own symposium, when I found my friends and I talking about what one feels when one sees the person (or the place, or thing) one loves, I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude and pride that for us, at least, the questions college students ask haven’t changed. University is a special time when you can stay up till four talking philosophy, a time when you can inhabit that academic world that revolves entirely around the virtue of conversation. As far as I am concerned, it is a crime not to avail yourself of that chance. And as far as I am concerned, there is no question that when it comes to spending my senior year well, I’d rather be at symposia than Halloween parties.
QOTD (2011-10-15) 15 October 2011
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Sometimes Symonds writes these poems that are so thick with pathos that it makes me want to say “oh, sweetie,” and give him a big hug. This is entitled “The Fall of a Soul,” and it’s from the “juvenilia” section of his Vagabunduli Libellus:
I sat unsphering Plato ere I slept:
Then through my dream the choir of gods was borne,
Swift as the wind and lustrous as the morn,
Fronting the night of stars; behind them swept
Tempestuous darkness o’er a drear descent,
Wherethrough I saw a crowd of charioteers
Urging their giddy steeds with cries and cheers
To join the choir that aye before them went:
But one there was who fell, with broken car
And horses swooning down the gulf of gloom;
Heavenward his eyes, though prescient of their doom,
Reflected glory like a falling star;
While with wild hair blown back and listless hands
Ruining he sank toward undiscovered lands.
QOTD (2011-10-10); or, Princeton Sunday 10 October 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Ethics, Personal Life, Princeton, QOTD.1 comment so far
From Plato’s Phaedrus, 251-252C, translated by Harold Fowler:
But he who is newly initiated, who beheld many of those realities, when he sees a godlike face or form which is a good image of beauty, shudders at first, and something of the old awe comes over him, then, as he gazes, he reveres the beautiful one as a god, and if he did not fear to be thought stark mad, he would offer sacrifice to his beloved as to an idol or a god. And as he looks upon him, a reaction from his shuddering comes over him, with sweat and unwonted heat; for as the effluence of beauty enters him through the eyes, he is warmed; the effluence moistens the germ of the feathers, and as he grows warm, the parts from which the feathers grow, which were before hard and choked, and prevented the feathers from sprouting, become soft, and as the nourishment streams upon him, the quills of the feathers swell and begin to grow from the roots over all the form of the soul; for it was once all feathered. Now in this process the whole soul throbs and palpitates, and as in those who are cutting teeth there is an irritation and discomfort in the gums, when the teeth begin to grow, just so the soul suffers when the growth of the feathers begins; it is feverish and is uncomfortable and itches when they begin to grow. Then when it gazes upon the beauty of the boy and receives the particles which flow thence to it (for which reason they are called yearning), it is moistened and warmed, ceases from its pain and is filled with joy; but when it is alone and grows dry, the mouths of the passages in which the feathers begin to grow become dry and close up, shutting in the sprouting feathers, and the sprouts within, shut in with the yearning, throb like pulsing arteries, and each sprout pricks the passage in which it is, so that the whole soul, stung in every part, rages with pain; and then again, remembering the beautiful one, it rejoices. So, because of these two mingled sensations, it is greatly troubled by its strange condition; it is perplexed and maddened, and in its madness it cannot sleep at night or stay in any one place by day, but it is filled with longing and hastens wherever it hopes to see the beautiful one. And when it sees him and is bathed with the waters of yearning, the passages that were sealed are opened, the soul has respite from the stings and is eased of its pain, and this pleasure which it enjoys is the sweetest of pleasures at the time. Therefore the soul will not, if it can help it, be left alone by the beautiful one, but esteems him above all others, forgets for him mother and brothers and all friends, neglects property and cares not for its loss, and despising all the customs and proprieties in which it formerly took pride, it is ready to be a slave and to sleep wherever it is allowed, as near as possible to the beloved; for it not only reveres him who possesses beauty, but finds in him the only healer of its greatest woes.
I avoided the Jowett translation this time, because Jowett changes the pronouns, but when Symonds had tutorials with Jowett when he was the age that I am now, he read the Phaedrus and he underlined this passage. Today, almost exactly one hundred and fifty years later, far from the city of dreaming spires where Symonds set pencil to page, it was Sunday. It was not an Oxford Sunday, and so I did not wake up to churchbells and, because the library was shut, pace my room all day while listening to Radio 3. But I did have two meals with friends today, and I did write eight pages of my thesis about when Symonds was my age and learning how to read and how to think and how to love, and I did think deeply today about matters of love, and what it means to love one’s friends, and what it means to love one’s neighbors as oneself.
At 9pm in the Princeton chapel there is a high-church Episcopal choral eucharist, a service both familiar from the ritual from my Oxford Sundays and simultaneously very alien: American in unexpected ways, and in others much more demanding than an Oxford service is of a kind of devotion and religiosity that I am unwilling, unable, to give. But the sermons are smart, and today the sermon was, after a fashion, about loving one’s neighbor, about (as so many sermons are) really properly walking the walk of Jesus’s teachings and rejoicing in the love—the communion—between all the people who know and follow Christ.
Well, I channel this ecclesiastical language, but it’s not my own. Why, then, do I go to a service that reminds me whenever I go that it is not my religious tradition, not my spiritual community, not my place to take, eat the wafer and take, drink the wine? I go in part because I want to understand what the Eucharist means to the people who value it, and why it is so shrouded in mystery for them, which is something that seems important enough to western history to try to understand. But I also go because although the language of the Book of Common Prayer isn’t mine, it does give me some tools to access my own kind of religious tradition. Because this was a Princeton Sunday, when I walked down the chapel steps at a quarter past ten onto a silent, deserted plaza lit by a full moon, I immediately crossed the plaza and descended to a desk covered in books on the bottom floor of the library, and bent my head over a green Loeb volume that had something to say about love. Pagan love, idolatrous love, the love of ο παις καλος that a certain Anglican churchman who wrote about The Interpretation of Scripture once said was “mainly a figure of speech.” But you know what? It wasn’t until I started going to church in the old-fashioned atheist-humanist way of Oxford Sundays that I started to know what love, any love, could be: that it is a force with the power to transform souls and lives, to bring out all that is worst in people and all that is best, and that it is something that we can never fully apprehend but that inspires us to greatness all the same. Love can inspire us to worship gods, be they the Holy Trinity or beautiful boys, and to sacrifice ourselves—sometimes ill-advisedly, but sometimes wisely—to their might.
My Princeton Sunday ended at 11:45pm when, as deep as one can be in the bowels of the university library, the closing bell rang out once, twice, three times. I ascended from the land of beautiful boys out again into the night, and with a passing nod to the hulking figure of the land of Jesus Christ, its stained-glass murky in the moonlight, I trudged the all-too-familiar route back to my land, back to a room in college. I sit here now, the hour getting later, acutely aware that I have a 10am lecture I must not miss again, but wondering above all how to translate Phaedrus-love and Church-love into my love. For as often as I go to church, and as deep as I steep myself in the homoerotic literary tradition, neither faith is truly mine. Short a doctrine, the work of knowing what I live for, how I love, will take all the days of my life.
But I can’t help thinking that if Hellenism and Hebraism are in accord on this point, if John 13:34 (“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another”) rings out in harmony with Howard’s End (“Only connect”), the old-fashioned humanist might have a path through a lonesome valley to walk down. Term is marching on and the work is getting harder, but this week I am going to try loving: my work, my friends, my teachers, my students, my colleagues, my family far away—and maybe, in the very end, myself. I am going to mingle Hellenism and Hebraism, pleasure and pain, and try to wake up tomorrow morning strong in the desire to make myself and my world better.
QOTD (2011-09-24) 24 September 2011
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A new academic year brings new QsOTD. Plotinus, Ennead 1.3:
The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to beauty, drawn in a very rapture to it: somewhat slow to stir of his own impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus: as the timid are sensitive to noise so he to tones and the beauty they convey; all that offends against unison or harmony in melodies or rhythms repels him; he longs for measure and shapely pattern.
This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm, and design in things of sense: he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the Authentic-Existent which is the source of al these correspondences and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself….
The born lover, to whose degree the musician may also attain—and then either come to a stand or pass beyond—has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to physical beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms, springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course of life and in an admirably organized social system may be pointed out to him—a first training this in the loveliness of the immaterial—he must learn to recognize the beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues; then these severed and particular forms must be brought under the one principle by the explanation of their origin. From the virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-Principle, to the Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he treads the upward way.
The metaphysician, equipped by that very character, winged already and not, like those others, in need of disengagement, stirring of himself towards the supernal but doubting of the way, needs only a guide. He must be shown, then, and set free, willing by his very temperament and long practised in freedom.
Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science.
QOTD (2011-08-02) 2 August 2011
Posted by Emily in QOTD, Thesis.add a comment
Walt Whitman removed this verse from later editions of his “Calamus” cycle, but here it is, as it appeared in the first, 1860 edition:
Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me—O if I could but obtain knowledge!
Then my lands engrossed me—Lands of the prairies, Ohio’s land, the southern savannas, engrossed me—For them I would live—I would be their orator;
Then I met the examples of old and new heroes—I heard of warriors, sailors, and all dauntless persons—And it seemed to me that I too had it in me to be as dauntless as any—and would be so;
And then, to enclose all, it came to me to strike up the songs of the New World—And then I believed my life must be spent in singing;
But now take notice, land of the prairies, land of the south savannas, Ohio’s land,
Take notice, you Kanuck woods—and you Lake Huron—and all that with you roll toward Niagara—and you Niagara also,
And you, Californian mountains—That you each and all find somebody else to be your singer of songs,
For I can be your singer of songs no longer—One who loves me is jealous of me, and withdraws me from all but love,
With the rest I dispense—I sever from what I thought would suffice me, for it does not—it is now empty and tasteless to me,
I heed knowledge, and the grandeur of The States, and the example of heroes, no more,
I am indifferent to my own songs—I will go with him I love,
It is to be enough for us that we are together—We never separate again.
Symonds first heard of Whitman when he went to visit FWH Myers (ODNB) in Cambridge in 1865. The two were sitting in Myers’ rooms at Trinity, and Myers read this verse aloud to Symonds. That moment changed the life of the 22-year-old budding scholar, who much later would write that, “had it not been for the contact of his fervent spirit with my own, the pyre ready to be lighted, the combustible materials of modern thought awaiting the touch of the fire- bringer, might never have leapt up into the flame of lifelong faith and consolation.”
Reading this poem again, it’s really not hard to see why.
QOTD (2011-07-22) 22 July 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, QOTD.add a comment
Found amidst the manuscript of Symonds’ Walt Whitman: A Study, in his hand:
Advice to a young man on the method of Reading. 1) A real love of knowledge, curiosity to examine thoughts and approach persons through books, is indispensable. 2) Submit to the author, get inside him by sympathy. Then return to criticize in detail. 3) Read with pencil in hand, jot down striking things and thoughts, trace argument in skeleton. 4) Write out abstracts or critiques of books read. 5) Or at least keep a list of books read. 6) Study over and over again one or two classics. 7) Exchange thoughts on what you read with persons engaged in the same pursuits, if possible of a different complexion of mind from your own.
I don’t have any context for it—I don’t even know whether it’s Symonds’ own advice or whether he copied it from somewhere else—but it’s delightful all the same.
