I’ll be speaking at 9am on Friday on a very cool panel that will be taking a variety of disciplinary perspectives to queer masculinities. I’ll be talking about Symonds’ life and work in relation to methodological issues that arise at the intersection of the history of sexuality/queerness and intellectual (and other forms of) history, and I hope that it’s going to be a lively conversation. Should you, dear reader, by any chance happen to be in the area, I’d love to see you there!

Finishing undergrad is a strange, special, and difficult time, about which I hope I’ll have the energy and the inspiration to write in the couple weeks (!) between now and graduation. But until then, it’s time to sit my last exam, and then fly to Ohio.

The University sent we seniors a long and detailed survey about our lives these past four years, and told us that we can’t collect our caps and gowns and other graduation accoutrements unless we complete it. I also heard a rumor that our responses are actually read, so I took some time and some honesty with the final, free-response questions. I wanted to share some excerpts, because I want to illustrate how it’s possible to leave this rather strange place a little bit bitter but still profoundly grateful—how possible it is to be extremely ambivalent about Princeton and to value it while simultaneously being skeptical about some of its most visible aspects. When that column about Annual Giving that I wrote for the Daily Princetonian attracted so much vitriol a couple months back, I was disappointed to see how little space there is here for a discourse of nuance and complexity surrounding students’ and alumni’s relationships to their alma mater. When I wrote my comments on this survey, I wanted to give balance and ambivalence another go:

I have not necessarily found it easy, over the past four years, to find a “home” at Princeton. Too often, in my experience, the attempts to artificially inculcate community through university or residential-college team spirit, and the overwhelming attitude of orange-and-black exceptionalism that dogs eating-club culture, overshadow what is truly remarkable about forming connections and community with other people here. I have flourished through close friendships and mentoring relationships with faculty and grad students, and found a few close friends my own age. I feel at home here when I’m sitting on a university policy committee, talking to faculty at a reception after an academic talk, in a meeting with my thesis advisor, or lingering after dinner at my co-op, talking about ideas or just complaining about my day. But all this community has come at the expense of a powerful sense of exclusion from “mainstream” Princeton. It has been years since I attended a major undergraduate event like Lawnparties; I don’t feel as if I belong at even the undergraduate events that attempt to be most inclusive, like this fall’s Orange and Black Ball. Princeton has given me the opportunity to achieve academically beyond my wildest dreams, but I have a lingering sense of regret that I haven’t been able to have a normal undergraduate experience because I feel like such a cultural misfit.

Yet, over the past four years, I have grown from a child into an adult, and from a student into a scholar. Thanks to intellectual and moral support from my academic mentors, I began to see myself as someone capable of carrying out large-scale research and of making innovative intellectual discoveries, and then I actually did that, writing an original and smart senior thesis into which I poured my soul and my intellect and of which I’m extremely proud. Princeton helped me logistically to write that thesis: through preparation from my writing seminar to my departmental independent work; through extremely good academic advising (my thesis advisor is truly a gentleman and a scholar); through financial support that enabled me to do copious research overseas and (in a few weeks) to present my research at a conference alongside senior faculty; through the provision of a life-changing opportunity to study abroad at the same university that my research subject attended. But as important to the process were the books I’ve read in my classes and in my spare time, the conversations I’ve had, and the interpersonal connections I’ve made that have helped me to bring a truly humane element to my scholarship. In all honesty, I’ve spent more of my time here frustrated that the opportunities for those conversations and connections aren’t thicker on the ground than I have spent inspired by the ones that have materialized. Yet I’ve learned that this is a place where academic drive and ambition make all kinds of remarkable conversations and connections possible. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be able to grow out of Princeton and out of being an undergraduate, and I wouldn’t feel emotionally and intellectually capable of moving to another country and beginning graduate school next year.

On another note, I’m a member of the 2 Dickinson St. Co-op, and I think it’s worth emphasizing to my reader how special that place is, and how unlike any other part of Princeton. It’s an organic community (the fruits and vegetables, literally!), in which each participant has a stake and commitment, and it’s a building in which one always feels at home. Our membership is the most diverse of any organization I’ve been involved in, from freshmen to post-docs and everyone between, including students who have taken time off or otherwise have a broader diversity of life experiences than your average, say, eating club. We cook tremendous food, we are moderate and mature social drinkers, we have talent shows and go on hikes, we sit outside in the hammocks on our porch and read for pleasure. Some of our members who aren’t in grad school already are grad-school-bound, but those who aren’t are equally intellectually curious, invested in their coursework and independent work and in the idea of a collegial academic community such as is extremely rare among undergraduates here.

This is all to say that I know that the administration are interested in learning how to build more close-knit and intellectually and socially stimulating communities here, and have struggled with how to encourage the ones that are healthy and discourage the ones that aren’t. 2D is a community that I think those who make decisions at this university often forget about–and while perhaps that’s one reason that we’ve flourished so organically and autonomously for decades (learning to manage our own efficient and successful financing and accounting system, for instance), it seems to me that the University may well want to take an interest in what we’re doing and how well we’re doing it. 2D and the other co-ops could be models for how to build communities elsewhere on campus that are truly student-driven, self-sustaining, and socially healthy.

And now I’m off to read and write, to socialize, to think and feel, to see if I can squeeze in any more soul-growing in these last few weeks—after all, golden youth doesn’t end until the fifth of June!

The eroticism of our students is lame. It is not the divine madness Socrates praised; or the enticing awareness of incompleteness and the quest to overcome it; or nature’s grace, which permits a partial being to recover his wholeness in the embrace of another, or a temporal being to long for eternity in the perpetuity of his seed; or the hope that all men will remember his deeds; or the contemplation of perfection. Eroticism is a discomfort, but one that in itself promises relief and affirms the goodness of things. It is the proof, subjective but incontrovertible, of man’s relatedness, imperfect though it may be, to others and to the whole of nature. Wonder, the source of both poetry and philosophy, is its characteristic expression. Eros demands daring from its votaries and provides a good reason for it. This longing for completeness is the longing for education, and the study of it is education. Socrates’ knowledge of ignorance is identical with his perfect knowledge of erotics. The longing for his conversations with which he infected his companions, and which was intensified after his death and has endured throughout the centuries, proved him to have been both the neediest and most grasping of lovers, and the richest and most giving of beloveds. The sex lives of our students and their reflection on them disarm such longing and make it incomprehensible to them. Reduction has robbed eros of its divinatory powers. Because they do not trust it, students have no reverence for themselves. There is almost no remaining link visible to them between what they learn in sex education and Plato’s Symposium.

[...]

I believe that the most interesting students are those who have not settled the sexual problem, who are still young, even look young for their age, who think there is much to look forward to and much they must yet grow up to, fresh and naive, excited by the mysteries to which they have not yet been fully initiated. There are some who are men and women at the age of sixteen, who have nothing more to learn about the erotic. They are adult in the sense that they will no longer change very much. They may become competent specialists, but they are flat-souled. The world is for them what it presents itself to the senses to be; it is unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals. This flat soul is what the sexual wisdom of our time conspires to make universal.

The easy sex of teen-agers snips the golden thread linking eros to education. And popularized Freud finishes it for good by putting the seal of science on an unerotic understanding of sex. A youngster whose sexual longings consciously or unconsciously inform his studies has a very different set of experiences from one in whom such motives are not active. A trip to Florence or to Athens is one thing for a young man who hopes to meet his Beatrice on the Ponte Santa Trinità or his Socrates in the Agora, and quite another for one who goes without such aching need…. Such longing is what students most need, because the great remains of the tradition have grown senile in our care. Imagination is required to restore their youth, beauty and vitality, and then to experience their inspiration.

A significant number of students used to arrive at the university physically and spiritually virginal, expecting to lose their innocence there. Their lust was mixed into everything they thought and did. They were painfully aware that they wanted something but were not quite sure exactly what it was, what form it would take and what it all meant. The range of satisfactions intimated by their desire moved from prostitutes to Plato, and back, from the criminal to the sublime. Above all they looked for instruction. Practically everything they read in the humanities and social sciences might be a source of learning about their pain, and a path to its healing…. The itch for what appeared to be only sexual intercourse was the material manifestation of the Delphic oracle’s command, which is but a reminder of the most fundamental human desire, to “know thyself.”

]]> http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/04/06/qotd-2012-04-06/feed/ 0 echomikeromeo http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/04/03/thesis-day-or-in-which-a-milestone-is-achieved/ http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/04/03/thesis-day-or-in-which-a-milestone-is-achieved/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:00:39 +0000 Emily http://worthlessdrivel.net/?p=1560 ]]>
216 pages. 75,839 words. 423 footnotes. 221 printed sources and untold numbers of archival documents. Two years—and more—of my life.

]]> http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/04/03/thesis-day-or-in-which-a-milestone-is-achieved/feed/ 2 echomikeromeo thesis thesis wordle http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/03/21/qotd-2012-03-21/ http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/03/21/qotd-2012-03-21/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2012 23:51:00 +0000 Emily http://worthlessdrivel.net/?p=1557 ]]> Tony Grafton, in the introduction to his Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West:

Thirty years and more spent living within the modern university—as well as the larger media and publishing worlds outside it—have sometimes left me shaken, even despairing. Times have been, and are, dark. But even in dark times, the social worlds of scholarship provide room for human warmth and the desire and pursuit of the truth and promote deep scholarship and intelligent writing. And these abide.

Even after only four years in Princeton—but especially now, just under two weeks before my thesis is due—this is the heart-gladdening ideal in which I try to keep faith. I have been fortunate beyond all measure to have learnt it from those who know how to express it so beautifully, warmly, and comfortingly, and who are there for the few undergraduates who really need to hear words like these.

Relatedly, Tenured Radical had a lovely post today about the lessons of her college years, and I mean to take it as my model once I turn in my thesis, my own college years wind to a close, and I’m called to reflect on the use to which I’ve put this sojourn in the wilds of suburban New Jersey. But I can say now that most of all what I’ve learned here is the pressing importance of building intellectual communities that, if not quite ever spreading sweetness and light to civilization far and wide, at least help people like me, who have always struggled to be in the present as easily as we are in the past, to achieve the kind of human connection we need to become better, to love more, and to be more human and more whole.

]]> http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/03/21/qotd-2012-03-21/feed/ 0 echomikeromeo http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/03/01/qotd-2012-03-01/ http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/03/01/qotd-2012-03-01/#comments Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:49:04 +0000 Emily http://worthlessdrivel.net/?p=1554 ]]> JH Newman, “The Idea of a University,” from the section on “Knowledge its own end”:

It is a great point then to enlarge the range of studies which a University professes, even for the sake of the students; and, though they cannot pursue every subject which is open to them, they will be the gainers by living among those and under those who represent the whole circle. This I conceive to be the advantage of a seat of universal learning, considered as a place of education. An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect, to consult, to aid each other. Thus is created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes, though in his own case he only pursues a few sciences out of the multitude. He profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of particular teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses. He apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that his education is called “Liberal.” A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what in a former Discourse I have ventured to call a philosophical habit. This then I would assign as the special fruit of the education furnished at a University, as contrasted with other places of teaching or modes of teaching. This is the main purpose of a University in its treatment of its students.

]]> http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/03/01/qotd-2012-03-01/feed/ 0 echomikeromeo http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/24/qotd-2012-02-24-or-the-days-when-i-love-my-job/ http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/24/qotd-2012-02-24-or-the-days-when-i-love-my-job/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:53:16 +0000 Emily http://worthlessdrivel.net/?p=1551 ]]> This last slog toward a finished thesis and a finished bachelor’s degree is proving much more arduous than I expected. Despite what a cushy life I lead, this year has not always been so happy, especially this winter. Sometimes it’s made me strongly doubt whether I really can sentence myself to a life sentence of reading and writing and be content with that.

But then I read beautiful things, and I am sincerely grateful that I get paid to be an intellectual and literary historian and that I am currently at an institution where the librarians will special-order recently-published and very expensive volumes for me, such as the new Philip Gardner-edited edition of E.M. Forster’s diaries and journals. My thesis ends with Forster, who is one of the most interesting twentieth-century readers of Symonds, and the following entry in Forster’s “Locked Diary” explains why. He wrote it on 10 January 1912, after a visit to Symonds’ old friend Graham Dakyns reminded him of Symonds himself:

J.A. Symonds. Feel nearer to him than any man I have read about — too near to be irritated by his flamboyance which I scarcely share. But education — (Classics, Renaissance, Eng. Lit.) — , health — (tendency to phthysis) — literary interest in philosophic questions, love of travel, inclination to be pleasant and above all, minorism. True, he married,but he had better not have. His contrary inclinations only dragged him asunder till the strongest triumphed. He was a brave & intelligible man, and I am proud to be in some ways so like him, & mean to think of him in difficulties, though having a weaker brain and a stronger sense of humour, I may get through life more easily. Such a fine passage — end of Vol I of his life — about never acting from moral reasons. What wouldn’t I give to read the Autobiography entire but Horatio Brown will never let me. ‘Rough handsome young man.’ It is odd. He has met Walt Whitman by now, if the dead are meetable, and has rebuked him for his hypocritical letter, & on that supposition I too shall meet them, and though Whitman will have most to say to me, I shall have most to say to Symonds. Samuel Butler would be nice for a little. Then there are the big people whom one feels one has to want to meet, like Keats and Petrarch and Michelangelo.

Reading that means something human. Accessing the universal through the particular. The promise that even three floors underground, elbow-deep in books at a little boxy desk, reading others’ commonplace books and filling in my own, the books and the world will, on the best of days, work together—and I will learn how to connect.

]]> http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/24/qotd-2012-02-24-or-the-days-when-i-love-my-job/feed/ 0 echomikeromeo http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/18/virtue-and-the-good-or-yes-intensive-greek-is-going-very-well-thank-you/ http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/18/virtue-and-the-good-or-yes-intensive-greek-is-going-very-well-thank-you/#comments Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:44:08 +0000 Emily http://worthlessdrivel.net/?p=1547 ]]> Sometimes I suddenly feel the urge to make this blog into one of those blogs wherein I actually discuss what’s happening in my life. Well: it’s still February (it seems as if it’s been February for a very long time), the sky outside my west-looking window is a rosy-grey, and the bare branches of the trees are taunting me with their lack of buds. It’s the weekend after the second week of classes, and I haven’t been sleeping well, and I could be working on my thesis or reading Descartes or Beckett or learning some more Greek verbs, but instead I’m clinging for dear life to my appealingly aubergine teacup and turning up the volume as loud as it will go on Leonard Bernstein conducting the first movement of the Pathètique. Since fall classes ended, I’ve really only been listening to classical music, and there are a few things I keep coming back to: the Art of the Fugue, Tallis’ Spem in Alium, this or that Vaughan Williams, the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, the Chopin Nocturnes, the Pathètique. Sometimes, pretending that I’m an intellectual from an age before pop music grounds me. It makes it easier to believe in the whole, the good and the beautiful, in knowledge for its own sake, in moral imperatives and self-bettering. But then sometimes the search for ἀρετή—one of this week’s Greek vocab words—needs to go down different timelines. Sometimes what we’re tested on isn’t our knowledge of history—or the classics—but our knowledge of ourselves. Yes, I know I sound cryptic—let me explain.

So there’s a fable in my family, one I’m especially proud of, of “the time when I stopped the battle.” I was five, it was “Camp Castle” summer camp, and amidst all the dressing-up and kings and queens and whatnot there was this game whereby if you accumulated a certain number of points for good behavior and “chivalry” you could become a knight and then, hurrah, you could ride into battle on the final day of camp. Now, a good left-wing child raised on the Weavers’ version of “Down By the Riverside” and Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, I respectfully declined, and carried on quite happily with my turn at being queen for the day and getting to serve the medieval-themed snack (usually cheese and crackers, for some reason). And then it was circle-time on the final day, the day of the battle, and some kids started handing out weapons, and one dropped a purple cardboard dagger in my lap. I had no idea what it was doing there. I handed it back—surely it was a mistake—but a teacher told me I had been drafted and was now being called up (or, you know, age-appropriate words to that effect). So I did what any sensitive five-year-old conscientious objector would: I started crying, and then I stood up and gave a speech about how war was wrong and I was going to have no part in it. This being Montessori school, the teachers realized I had a point and cancelled the battle. When my parents picked me up, they were so proud.

We told that story again and again in my house, and I told it again in one of the essays I included with my Princeton application. In that essay, thirteen years later, I wrote about how I could only hope and strive to have the courage of my convictions that my five-year-old self had. Somehow, though, I sense that I’ve never quite attained that level of courage and independence again. I’m not so much of an iconoclast, these days. I’m non-confrontational. I don’t like to stand out. I sit in the corner and read a book, sure, but I don’t exactly burn my draft card.

Witness last night at 11pm, when—not really knowing what I was getting into—I agreed to join a team of members of my co-op to play intramural laser tag. I’d never played laser tag before, thought it might be a mildly entertaining new experience, and hied myself naively down to the recruiting office (err… replied to the recruiting email). But there are a lot of things I should have done since I sent that email last week. When I saw a poster for the laser tag tournament that showed people on an obstacle course firing what looked like guns at each other, I should have backed out. When I showed up to the gym last night and saw camouflage everywhere and ROTC recruiting, I should have offered to watch my friends’ coats and quietly step back. When someone put a heavy plastic toy that looked for all the world like a machine gun in my hands, I should have put it down on the ground and left. I don’t care if it’s just a beam of light: I am ashamed to look my five-year-old self in the eye and tell her that I aimed a gun at a member of the Ballroom Dancing Club and pulled the trigger.

I lay awake long into the night, nauseous and wracked with guilt that, more concerned with being a good sport and a fun person than with my core principles, I hadn’t said no at any point. My mind raced through other memories: the occasional first-person-shooter video game at a friend’s house in high school, sure, but also every other time when I should have uttered a serious moral objection and didn’t. How are the five-year-olds going to know that it’s okay to stand up in circle time and stop the battle if the 22-year-olds don’t show them how to do it?

Ancient Greece being ancient Greece, I have learnt a lot of words in the past four chapters about war. I can send men into battle and destroy the peace and order the strangers to free the brothers from the island so that they may write books about war. Maybe, last night, I just got a little carried away. But I shouldn’t let myself forget that the reason I decided to learn Greek in the first place is what Plato has to say about love.

I was going to try to draw this post to a neat conclusion with a tidy didactic moral lesson, but I’ve realized that I don’t know what the lesson is. I suppose that’s because I’m too young, still, and because the balance between love and war is one which entire civilizations have failed to strike. But a five-year-old could do it—which I suppose means that there is never any excuse for a 22-year-old. It is always imperative to try to be better, and more virtuous—and, contra my common-knowledge understanding of ἀρετή, being virtuous needn’t include being a hero in battle more than it should being someone who is kind and able to love.

And so I’d like to offer a public apology to my five-year-old self: I am most heartily sorry. Tomorrow, I will try to be as good and as strong as you were.

]]> http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/18/virtue-and-the-good-or-yes-intensive-greek-is-going-very-well-thank-you/feed/ 0 echomikeromeo http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/10/qotd-2012-02-10/ http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/10/qotd-2012-02-10/#comments Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:15:08 +0000 Emily http://worthlessdrivel.net/?p=1545 ]]> This afternoon found me in the Princeton University Library Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, poring over some 1890s Oxford undergraduate periodicals that became rather notorious because they were edited by Alfred Douglas and were thus made much of in the Wilde trials. They were fabulous as a window into late-nineteenth-century student life, featuring everything from ads for High Street businesses to original verse in Greek and of course endless commentary on Summer Eights and bad attempts at humor about scouts. And, naturally, there’s quite a lot of homoeroticism of the neoclassical sort, including some poems by Symonds, Douglas, and Wilde. But this anonymous poem jumped out at me in a way the others didn’t—it seemed to me to be actually about the unique romanticism of Oxford, not the romanticism of other times and places:

Love in Oxford

When the shades of the twilight come
Hiding the face of the flow’rs,
My heart yearns blind and dumb
In a city of mist-girt tow’rs,
In a place of shadows and spires
The love of my heart goes forth
To the sea and the clear cold north,
To him whom my soul desires.

The southern skies and the mist
Chill me and blind my sight.
I long for the lips I kiss’d,
And the eyes that were brave and bright;
I long for the touch of his hand,
And the sound of the voice I knew
When the breeze of the evening blew,
And the stars shone cold on the sand.

Out of his northern home
I call him here to my side,
On his face is the salt sea-foam,
In his ears is the song of the tide;
He shall come with his soul aflame,
His voice shall be sweet and strong,
He shall sing me a golden song,
He shall rob me of fear and shame;
He shall steep my spirit in bliss,
He shall triumph and set me free,
For love is as deep as the sea,
And sweet as the core of a kiss.

]]> http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/10/qotd-2012-02-10/feed/ 0 echomikeromeo http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/07/qotd-2012-02-07-or-this-day-in-history/ http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/07/qotd-2012-02-07-or-this-day-in-history/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:30:20 +0000 Emily http://worthlessdrivel.net/?p=1542 ]]> Symonds to Whitman, 140 years ago today:

I have pored for continuous hours over the pages of Calamus (as I used to pore over the pages of Plato), longing to hear you speak, burning for a revelation of your more developed meaning, panting to ask–is this what you would indicate?–Are then the free men of your lands really so pure & loving & noble & generous & sincere? Most of all did I desire to hear from your own lips–or from your pen–some story of athletic friendship from which to learn the truth. Yet I dared not to address you or dreamed that the thoughts of a student could abide the inevitable shafts of your searching intuition.

Shall I ever be permitted to question you & learn from you?

What the love of man for man has been in the Past I think I know. What it is here now, I know also–alas! What you say it can & shall be I dimly discern in your Poems. But this hardly satisfies me–so desirous am I of learning what you teach. Some day, perhaps–in some form, I know not what, but in your own chosen form–you will tell me more about the Love of Friends! Till then I wait. Meanwhile you have told me more than anyone beside.–

Thesis Day: 55 days and counting down!

]]> http://worthlessdrivel.net/2012/02/07/qotd-2012-02-07-or-this-day-in-history/feed/ 0 echomikeromeo