In the Interests of Accountability; or, Lost Causes, the Good, and the Beautiful

Since I last wrote here, the first of my two Oxford terms came to an end. In the past two weeks, I’ve enjoyed visits from my father and from some friends from Princeton, I’ve made lots of new friends at Trinity, particularly among the graduate student body (or, as they say here, the MCR), and I’ve switched academic gears in a big way. From churning out one or two eight-page essays a week, I’ve gone to major big-picture conceptualizing of my senior thesis, and starting work on what will one day be the first chapter of it, my spring JP. In little moments snatched between languid walks across Port Meadow, harried sightseeing in London, and several pints of bitter, I wrote a five-page proposal for my thesis, which I’m submitting as a part of my applications for summer research funding. As I emailed drafts back and forth with my adviser, I became terrified by the enormity of the project I am taking on; as I walked miles through the green spaces of Oxford and rode miles underground across London, my mind drew scary blanks on how I would start to write my JP, which is not as far along as my fall JP was this time last semester. The last of my guests left this afternoon and college has emptied itself eerily out for the vacation. I went to Tesco this afternoon and bought £15 worth of ingredients I can make into meals with a single saucepan and a hob in the JCR kitchen. I dithered: uploading pictures to Facebook, catching up on magazines and iPlayer, writing letters to the editor. And it wasn’t until 10pm, after I’d submitted my first thesis funding application and dithered in front of the Victorian literature shelves in the college library, the dinner dishes glaring at me from the washbasin in my room, that I realized I needed a plan, and a method by which I can remain accountable to it, if I am to have a draft of my JP in to my adviser by May 1. (“A draft?!” I hear you say, Princeton juniors? Yes: because I am doing a JP on top of a full Oxford courseload, and because Oxford’s academic year goes well into June, I have a month-long extension.)

And so here, for the whole internet to read, it is: tomorrow I will return to the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian for the first time in two weeks, write some deadlines and benchmarks for the next six weeks in my diary, and start to make a skeleton outline of my JP. A week from tomorrow, I am going on holiday to Ireland for a week, but by then I will have read all my primary sources, and a reasonable number of secondary ones. When I return, I will have just over three weeks to pull together 30 pages on three themes in the intellectual background and Victorian cultural context of John Addington Symonds’ writing on homosexuality—yes, that’s a week on Henry Sidgwick, T.H. Green, and ethics; a week on Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, and Hellenism; a week on Walt Whitman, democracy, and the British fantasy of America; and a few days in which to hash out my critical space with respect to the historiography and to draw some conclusions about what is innovative about Symonds’ theory of male homosexuality in his late-Victorian context. Frankly, dear reader, I am terrified.

But after eight weeks at Oxford, I can just about manage to write at least a draft of an intellectually interesting essay in a week, and I know how fortunate I am to have the vacation to focus on only this, and a month after next term starts to revise and make it good. I know how fortunate I am that when writer’s block strikes, I can leave the Bod and walk through the Parks and think, “Symonds would have known this path.” I know how fortunate I am that I can go in the same day to the University Museum and to hear Evensong sung in Christ Church Cathedral, and can think about how much Symonds and others like him struggled to reconcile the conflicting identities of those two very different Gothic buildings.

I have been in England ten weeks, now, and I am starting to miss Princeton—or, to be specific, Rocky College and my Princeton family—desperately. I am thinking daily about the friends who are growing and changing every day without me to see them do so, and the friends who will leave Princeton in June whom I worry I will never see again. Following the life of my home for three years on the Internet, I come across gems like this which make me proud to represent my university (and more particularly my own small community and university family) abroad, and which far outweigh the number of times I have had to explain to a new acquaintance here in Trinity College that Princeton makes admissions decisions based on academic merit as well as on athletic ability or legacy status. I did not think that I would find myself identifying with Princeton even in another academic institution. I have always thought of myself as someone who lives in and is defined by the culture of universities, but I did not realize that one University with a capital U would loom so large in a life with so much academic peregrination still ahead of it.

But even as I nearly cried putting my friends from Princeton on a bus to Heathrow this afternoon, I knew it was right for me to come to Oxford. Reasons of cultural diversity and realizing that Princeton really is, as someone once said to me, the Disney version of Oxford aside, I could not have written as good a JP as I am now writing if I had never seen the place where Symonds’ intellectual and cultural compass was formed. I am discovering (with thanks due to some key observations from my adviser and from my Victorian history tutor this term) that the primary problem I have with much of the existing work on Symonds is that it does not invest itself fully in what it meant to be and to think like a Victorian, Oxford-educated intellectual. It does not adjust its outlook to a very narrow circle of men (and the very occasional women) preoccupied with large-looming questions about how to live a good life in a modernizing, industrializing, capitalizing, secularizing age—questions which we oh so (too?) rarely consider as vital as someone like Symonds must have done. We in the 21st century can’t really know what it was like to think like a Victorian, I suppose, but we can get flashes of realization when the Magdalen choir sings the Magnificat or when we see Ruskin’s watercolors up close in the Ashmolean Print Room or when we walk out along the Isis into countryside that is literally the stuff of poetry. When one lives in Oxford one sees how someone like Symonds, or someone like Arnold, or someone like Ruskin, or someone like Pater, or someone like Wilde (for they were all such different individuals and thinkers), built an aesthetic compass, and rendered it so central to their cosmologies that the pursuit of happiness or of knowledge or of beauty, as well as the building of a better world, seemed possible. In Oxford, where dreaming spires reached to Heaven and no dark Satanic mills could pour coal dust into the sky, the search for “sweetness and light,” the quest “to burn always with [a] hard, gem-like flame,” the mission “to live with steady purpose in the whole, the Good, the Beautiful,” the possibility that one might be able—as Wilde wrote in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”—”to live,” seemed realizable. To Symonds, who died before the Wilde trials sounded out loud and clear all sorts of appellations for the love that dare not speak its name, it was worth dedicating one’s life to a particular strain of humanistic inquiry whose overarching purpose was to develop a cultural and literary history and a set of ethical precepts governing what he was the very first person to call male homosexuality. And would he have done so had he not learned to think in the “home of lost causes”? Back here in the present in a room on Broad Street, the Trinity bells are sounding midnight, and I can’t help but think that without Oxford so many things—from Symonds’ first forays into academia to mine—would have been quite impossible.

A Brief Moral Lesson

American Historical Association President Anthony Grafton wrote in last month’s Perspectives on History (only just brought in front of the paywall for non-AHA members) about, among other things, the gap between the work professional historians do and the public’s perception of that work (full, as they say in the biz, disclosure: I am lucky enough to be Grafton’s student and advisee):

Ann Little and Jeremy Young, the bloggers who responded at length, pointed out, in different ways, that my title was imprecise: “it is not history, but historians, who are under attack.” They’re absolutely right. Americans love history. Tens of thousands of them reenact battles, hundreds of thousands visit historical sites and exhibits, and a million a week on average watch the History Channel. Thousands of them buy the works of history that appear on best-seller lists. From Tea Partiers to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s readers debating the Civil War, they’re passionate about the past. What they don’t love, to the same extent, are professional historians.

Many believe that professional historians are no better than, or indeed worse than, amateurs (a traditional American view that often encompasses experts in other fields, from medicine to climate). Some find that professionals are too politically correct to see the past as it really was. Many, especially journalists, insist that professionals just can’t write.

The biggest problem, though, is rooted in the core of our practices. Professional historians, Little argues, “are, by nature, splitters rather than lumpers. We aren’t united by a methodology or single set of disciplinary practices, and our writing and teaching more often than not seeks not to impose order on a given topic but rather to provide nuance and complexity. This is intellectually satisfying, but it sure makes it difficult for us to explain to the general public what we do and why it’s important that professionally trained historians do it rather than Cokie Roberts or Glenn Beck.”

This resounds with me today because yesterday I was reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a work which I have been learning about for much of my school-going life, but never read in its entirety. In eighth-grade US history in Massachusetts, we were taught how special Tocqueville thought this new American kind of democracy was; in eleventh-grade AP US history in California, we likewise learned about de Tocqueville as someone excited and optimistic about this new liberal, democratic project. In a college class at Princeton called “American Society and Politics,” taught out of the sociology department, we read Tocqueville on voluntary organizations, and Americans’ unique predilection for being heavily involved in civil society on their own terms. In the past eight years, the people without Ph.D.s in history who have taught me Tocqueville have never suggested that Tocqueville was in the least bit skeptical about the American experiment—and yet there the skepticism is in the document itself. The first volume of Democracy in America ends with some uncertainty; though Tocqueville believes that “the Anglo-Americans will alone cover the immense space contained between the Polar regions and the Tropics,” he is not so certain that the American political system will endure, or that the rule of the majority will not become tyrannical. He, like his British translator, who introduces the book some twenty years later at the height of the Civil War, is not as taken in by the rhetoric of American exceptionalism as the American teachers who taught Tocqueville to me. (He does, however, accurately predict the Cold War a hundred years early, which is rather impressive.)

My incredulity, as a reasonably-well-educated American who did well in high-school history, on reading Tocqueville yesterday illustrates to me why we need professional historians, and why professional historians need to work harder to bridge the gap between them and the people who teach history to the general public. I would have thought that, by this time in my life, I would have overcome the ability to be surprised by historical fact that differs from what I was taught at school. Clearly those of us thinking about careers as professional historians need to ensure that we can reach and preach not only to our own choir, but also to those who would prefer to attend a gospel of American exceptionalism—or who, as per a QOTD last week, don’t think gender has a role to play as a historical lens.

QOTD (2011-02-24)

You know this one. Wilfred Owen.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

So many boys, sent to their deaths for so little. And what’s more, we learned nothing from it—not in 1919, not in 1939 or 1945, not now. Certainly not now, in the last decadent days of the withering western empire.

QOTD (2011-02-24)

While in fact the real, very best quote of the day so far is that Whitman, apparently, called Symonds “wonderfully cute” (or so Eve Sedgwick says in Between Men), I do have another lengthier one that’s worth sharing. I was rereading Joan Scott’s classic AHR review essay from 1986, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” and found this paragraph worth quoting:

The subject of war, diplomacy, and high politics frequently comes up when traditional political historians question the utility of gender in their work. But here, too, we need to look beyond the actors and the literal import of their words. Power relations among nations and the status of colonial subjects have been made comprehensible (and thus legitimate) in terms of relations between male and female. The legitimizing of war—of expending young lives to protect the state—has variously taken the forms of explicit appeals to manhood (to the need to defend otherwise vulnerable women and children), of implicit reliance on belief in the duty of sons to serve their leaders or their (father the) king, and of associations between masculinity and national strength. High politics itself is a gendered concept, for it establishes its crucial importance and public power, the reasons for and the fact of its highest authority, precisely in its exclusion of women from its work. Gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticized. It refers to but also establishes the meaning of the male/female opposition. To vindicate political power, the reference must seem sure and fixed, outside human construction, part of the natural or divine order. In that way, the binary opposition and the social process of gender relationships both become part of the meaning of power itself; to question or alter any aspect threatens the entire system.

In Oxford, where I’m in with a much more random sample of history students than I generally am when I choose my classes more freely at Princeton, I’ve been encountering for the first time in years intelligent people who nevertheless are skeptical about the utility of gender as an analytical paradigm in the study of history. I can talk all I want from my fairly narrow area of expertise about how the history of Oxford itself can only be understood through its centuries of homosociality, and that today’s Oxford owes itself in large part to the university reform of the masculinized, Hellenist-in-all-kinds-of-ways Victorian intellectual age. But that hasn’t been sticking among those who do really largely understand history in terms of kings and emperors, wars and revolutions. I hope Scott’s words, then, can speak to the inextricability of not just gender, but society and culture, from the histories of even the most canonical dead-white-men history. And I hope that I, in turn, can learn to be a better teacher, to improve my ability to interact intellectually with those who come from different backgrounds to mine, with different assumptions about the meaning and practice of history. If the theories and methods I use and concepts I explore in my research don’t seem important, that’s because I’m not teaching them well enough.

QOTD (2011-02-23)

From John Tyndall’s Address Delivered Before the British Association [for the Advancement of Science] at Belfast, 1874:

The world embraces not only a Newton, but a Shakespeare—not only a Boyle, but a Raphael—not only a Kant, but a Beethoven—not only a Darwin, but a Carlyle. Not in each of these, but in all, is human nature whole. They are not opposed, but supplementary—not naturally exclusive, but reconcilable. And if, unsatisfied with them all, the human mind, with the yearning of a pilgrim for his distant home, will still turn to the Mystery from which it has emerged, seeking so to fashion it as to give unity to thought and faith; so long as this is done, not only without intolerance or bigotry of any kind, but with the enlightened recognition that ultimate fixity of conception is here unattainable, and that each succeeding age must be held free to fashion the Mystery in accordance with its own needs—then, casting aside all the restrictions of Materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faculties, may be called the creative faculties of man.

Intellectual Curiosity, Hope, and Charity; or, The Humanist’s Progress

In my memories, my childhood of not-belonging is characterized, above all, by my atheism. Raised in a household which celebrated Christmas with Santa, Easter with the Easter Bunny, Hannukah with candles, and Passover with a heavily edited Haggadah that removed all mention of God, I had no qualms about announcing to a series of classmates and teachers in a series of schools in reasonably conservative and religious areas of America that I did not believe in God. I remember shocking and awing third-grade classmates who told me I was surely going to Hell, a sixth-grade English teacher who didn’t understand how anyone could be “just coldly rational,” and person after person after person who denied the possibility of my living a just and moral and good life without faith, who wondered why, although I sometimes stood and sometimes did not for the Pledge of Allegiance, I never, ever said the words “under God.” I was bullied for a variety of reasons at school—my cleverness, my unorthodox (read: weird) dress sense, as time went on my gender nonconformity. But above all I can remember having to put forth complex intellectual arguments to defend my atheism to all comers, long before I was in high school. As history tells us, there is seemingly nothing so threatening to many people as to tell them you deny their articles of faith—and I can attest to this from a life of being told I was going to Hell, not for my sexuality or my gender nonconformity, as the “It Gets Better” videos might suggest, but for my atheism.

Of course, though, I was raised an academic brat in an upstandingly, old-fashionedly humanist family which always, always educated. When I was a child I read the illustrated Children’s Bible along with D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and illustrated versions of the creation myths of various non-western cultures; as I grew older, I came to cherish the intricacies of a Bach fugue or a stanza of Miltonic verse, to respect a tradition which seeks “to justify the ways of God to man” even if I felt as though I could never understand the intellectual position which might compel a Milton, or a Bach, to do so. I entered churches for concerts, played my violin and viola in a string quartet for weddings. I went to bar and bat mitzvahs. Once, I attended a Catholic funeral mass; another time, I stood at a graveside and heard a priest intone the Anglican funeral liturgy. Through the rituals of life in which people are born, reach adulthood, marry, die, I have come to have the familiarity we all have with the words of ceremonial religious services. I have phonetically memorized the Hebrew of some of the primary Jewish prayers; I can say the Our Father in English and in Latin. And because I am an intellectual historian, I have become conversant in the language of spirituality and spiritual doubt, and have come to have the greatest sympathy with those of my Victorians who sought to reach an understanding of God, the Church, and Jesus’ teachings that would allow them to integrate science and faith, or else to reach an understanding of virtue and morality and the call to live a good life that is both virtuous and moral without needing to use Jesus’ death and resurrection as a guiding light.

Because I am a visitor in Oxford, I have been going to many Christian services, to see inside the college chapels and the city churches and to hear the music, which is of an impressively high standard. Because I am studying more than anything else the intellectual history of this university community, and the time in which it became a secular rather than a faith-based place of intellectual inquiry, I have been paying close attention to aspects of the services beyond the architecture and the singing. I have been engaging intellectually with the language of the liturgy, and I have been mentally and spiritually joining in when the priest intones a prayer for peace, or for the continued health and good fortune of the university community. I have been noticing a combination that speaks to the recent history of religion in this university: the High-Churchiness of the pageantry, the vestments and the singing and, once in a while, the incense; but also the fact that every sermon on a text is a practice of close-reading, a search for unapparent meaning that takes as its guiding force the understanding that, as Benjamin Jowett once controversially contended, the Bible is a literary text, which speaks in the language of metaphor. One does not need to be a Christian to hope for peace, and one does not need to be a Christian to take lessons of individual self-development from the beautiful words of the King James Bible. One knows one is not a Christian when one stands quietly while those around one intone their belief in the Trinity, in Jesus’s death and resurrection and future return, in the promise of salvation, in Heaven and in Hell; one knows one is not a Christian when one sits quietly while those around one move to kneel before a priest who places a piece of wafer and a drop of wine in their mouths, which we are to understand, either literally or metaphorically, as the body and blood of the God-man who died to save us. One knows, full well, that one is not a Christian when one finds oneself unable to make this leap of faith.

But this is Oxford, this is one of the more liberal homes of the already-liberal Church of England, and these are no longer the days of primary school, when I had no choice but to take pride in being hellbound. No one here will shun me if I come for the words and the music but not for Communion, and if I take from Jesus’ teachings the call to better oneself but only the loosest, most absolutely metaphorical understanding of the promise of salvation. No one will cast me out if I choose to say the responses to some parts of the service but not to others, and there are always more besides me—as there must always have been, to a certain extent, in these churches and chapels—who are not believers. And it is in this context that I have found myself growing up, and growing more credulous of what religion can do to supplement—though not to supplant—the moral compass of those of us who were raised with no belief in God, but who have come to believe in the goodness in all of us, calling us to be better.

It was in this spirit today that I attended the first Sunday-morning church service of my life, which I did because Philip Pullman was giving the University Sermon at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. The University Sermon is of longstanding tradition in this university which began life as a seminary; in the 1820s, Newman launched his theological career from the St Mary’s pulpit. It is thus remarkable that the leaders of the church and of the university had invited a noted atheist to preach to them, and it was worth attending this service only for that reason: to watch a secular-humanist sermon mingle with prayers of faith, and to watch the vicar come rather awkwardly to the lectern after Pullman’s sermon to say the prayers that the preacher is traditionally meant to, but in this case would not, say. But the thing is, Pullman’s sermon was only out of joint with the liturgy if you (as, I imagine, many do) consider the core of religious worship to be faith in God. No doubt that faith is the reason why many of the people who come to St Mary’s every Sunday do so—but when Pullman, in white tie and bands and academic gown, expressed his skepticism about the meaning of faith, it seemed right and proper and in the best traditions of the theological history of Oxford that he should do so. When he spoke about the cardinal virtues; about the greatness of Charity, or Love; about the faith in the laws of physics as a more sense-making, but no less inductive, humanist’s faith; about the necessity of a superstructure, like concert orchestras and institutions of learning and the National Health Service, which can help us to enshrine virtue in our society; and about, finally and gloriously, the proposal that Intellectual Curiosity replace Faith in the canon of virtues; I was in awe, grinning and nodding right along, even though I knew that no one around me was seeming quite so physically engaged, and I found myself wondering if it was all right to express such enthusiasm in church. Pullman began by stating his lack of belief in God, the incongruity of his appearance before the Oxford congregation; but by the end of his piece, in the course of which he’d cited as higher authority not only the Bible, but also William James and John Ruskin, he’d articulated a vision of morality, in adhering to which I think we all ought to consider ourselves good and Godly.

Though it seems as if St Mary’s posts the texts of past University Sermons on its website, it of course has not posted Pullman’s yet. So I hope you will take my word for it when I say that the shape of Pullman’s speech seemed to me to resemble so much my own trajectory of religious understanding, from up-front apostate to Ruskinian; from rhetorical rationalist to believer in the value of good works. Though this belief has been enhanced recently in light of all the Victorianism, all the Oxonianism, I have been absorbing, and all the Anglican services I’ve sat through and in my own funny way believed in, I think it was set in motion the day I matriculated at Princeton, just shy of two and a half years ago. That day in the middle of September the freshman class filled the University Chapel and heard a service which had all the form of a religious convocation (bespeaking the seminarian history of my home university, too!), but consisted of a mix of prayers, blessings, and songs of which as many were secular as were grounded in a religious tradition of a belief in God or gods. I shall never forget that, instead of the prayer to God which graces every Oxford service, asking Him to protect the university, its faculty and its students, the Princeton Dean of the College, Nancy Malkiel, offered up a prayer to Wisdom, asking that loosely pagan deity to grant to that university all the good that is done by the spirit of teaching and learning and (in the words of Pullman) intellectual curiosity. I think it was at that moment that I became interested in, and in a certain sense convinced by, the language and the form of a religious tradition to help us to understand the good, the true, and the beautiful—whether they inhere in God or in ourselves.

It is for this Platonic reason that, when Pullman said somewhere in the middle of his sermon that he considered himself something of a Greek or Roman pagan, I smiled as broadly as I did. For Pullman was drawing on a tradition I have known since I read D’Aulaire’s alongside the Children’s Bible; which I sensed I could consider myself a part of when I was moved for days, and for years, afterwards by Dean Malkiel’s prayer to Wisdom; which I have become conversant in since reading Matthew Arnold’s articulation of the relationship between Hellenism and Hebraism; and which (it must be said!) characterizes John Addington Symonds’ vision of an ethics given us by ancient Greece, with which we can live in accordance in our own times, adopting as our creed Goethe’s exhortation, Im Ganzen Guten Schönen/Resolut zu leben, “To live with steady purpose in the whole, the Good, the Beautiful.”

So Philip Pullman is a Hellenist, and so am I; if Pullman calls himself an unbeliever, then so am I. I still cannot, and have no desire to, make my leap of faith in the direction of the man in the sky. But to be honest, I don’t think either of us are unbelievers full-stop. The devout Christian organizes her devotion around her faith in God; Pullman and I have a creed which calls us to revere—if not to worship—intellectual curiosity, or Wisdom. What is this but another inductive precondition for an ethical and virtuous life, another belief (we needn’t call it a Faith) in something Better?

QOTD (2011-01-18)

William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children”:

I.
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way–the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II.
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy–
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III.
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age–
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage–
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV.
Her present image floats into the mind–
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once–enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V.
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI.
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII.
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts–O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise–
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII.
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Shameless Self-Promotion

In response to an op-ed in the Daily Princetonian on Monday, which argued that Princeton should institute a core economics requirement, I have written a jeremiad:

Princeton does not require that its undergraduates take courses in any particular department, and so Berger’s call for an economics requirement reads as an assumption that the discipline is more valuable to the world than others. But it is problematic to prioritize economics as a lens through which to view the world. As critics of political economy have been arguing since Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” viewing historical and individual development primarily in terms of the creation, accumulation and transfer of wealth is dehumanizing. It erases from our understanding of the world all the things which differentiate us from computers: our abilities to love, to empathize, to feel happiness and sadness, to make decisions for ourselves and for our families and communities, to organize our actions around a desire to be better people — and “to form a more perfect Union.”

It is for this reason that Princeton’s ideal of a liberal arts education “in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations” does not privilege economics above any other discipline. Students are given a grounding in many analytical methods but not in any one set of assumptions about the values which should guide national and international development. The philosophy of a liberal arts education holds that young people can better serve their nation and all nations if they have four years during which they can develop their critical faculties and their moral compasses and decide for themselves what it means to live a good life. It holds that we are at university to develop our minds and our souls, not our “Monopoly” properties.

Please read the rest. Then read my friend and colleague Luke Massa’s thought-provoking piece, also in today’s Prince, which articulates a theory of positive liberty with respect to our coursework. And then think about where you stand on the question of education for education’s sake.

QOTD (2011-02-13)

Matthew Arnold, Preface to Essays in Criticism:

And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us near to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

When, back in September, my exchange partner asked me why I’d wanted to come to Oxford, I struggled to find an answer more credible than simple Anglophilia. But now I understand that I am here because, if there is anything I live for, it is lost causes, truth, and beauty.

QOTD (2011-02-12); or, Past and Present

Today’s episode of History and Morality dawned on me on an absolutely glorious sunny Saturday morning in the Upper Reading Room, as I sat at my usual desk, U95, with the dreaming spires of All Souls pricking the beams of sunlight right in my field of vision, reading Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy:

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and she has heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth, – the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements. And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries’ advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries’ position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future….

And who will estimate how much the currents of feeling created by Dr. Newman’s movement, the keen desire for beauty and sweetness which it nourished, the deep aversion it manifested to the hardness and vulgarity of middle-class liberalism, the strong light it turned on the hideous and grotesque illusions of middle-class Protestantism, – who will estimate how much all these contributed to swell the tide of secret dissatisfaction which has mined the ground under the self-confident liberalism of the last thirty years, and has prepared the way for its sudden collapse and supersession? It is in this manner that the sentiment of Oxford for beauty and sweetness conquers, and in this manner long may it continue to conquer!

My essay this week is on how criticism and the role of the critic were gendered in Victorian Britain, and it is this critical-of-the-critics attitude I had in the back of my mind as I read the passage in Arnold. I remembered a conversation I had a few days ago with a fellow history student who told me that she couldn’t get interested in Ruskin because of the strangeness, to us today, of his relationships with young women; that, as someone who studied women’s history, she didn’t approve. Sitting in the Upper Reading Room, I remembered that it is always difficult to reconcile romance with reality, the seductive allure of the city of aquatint with the knowledge that it seemingly only was so because so many women for so many centuries were denied a place in it. When Arnold sings his hymn to Oxford, and locates culture there and in the Church and in Hellenism and in the other great institutions of Victorian homosociality, it is important to remember that there are many who are and have been excluded from the promise of perfection through “sweetness and light.”

But there’s something about sunlight that encourages optimism, and the sweetness and light in the air of the Upper Reading Room this morning caused me to remember that our human impulse to perfect ourselves and our institutions and our culture has exceeded Arnold’s intentions, because here I am doing right by my academic ancestors, the early faculty wives who fought for their Bodleian readers’ tickets before there was even any such thing as an Oxbridge women’s college, and reading about culture in their time from the vantage point of my Upper Reading Room desk. Here I am, a woman in academia with a room of my own, and trying to live by a version of “sweetness and light” that I’ve learned by carefully paying my respects to my Victorians, men and women alike. My job right now, learning to be a critic of the critics, must entail goodwill and generosity: the moral character not to overlook the faults by our measures of writers like Arnold and Ruskin, but to forgive them; to take from them and their contemporaries what they give us as decriers of Mammon and Moloch, as believers in truth and beauty, but to retain enough critical distance to know that seeing them as they really are entails realizing that they are not the apogee of the perfection they promise.

I love my Victorians despite their faults because their utopianism can transcend their own time while still retaining the values that their time caused them to hold dear. I love my Victorians because they were not perfect, but they wanted to be. I love my Victorians because they gave those of us who labor in a world changed (but not so changed) the language to say that our lives must be guided by more than material concerns, and that the fight against evil—the fight for sweetness and light—can take many forms, and can be furthered by many kinds of people.