Category: Oxford

Ninth Week; or, Making Connections

In term time, at Oxford, we teach or we do the coursework our teachers set us, we go to seminars and language classes, we run madly round town seeing people and doing things. Out of term is when the real reading and thinking gets done. This is true in all academic contexts, of course, but I think it’s particularly true in a university where the terms are such short bursts of energy. There is something truly glorious—and sincerely appreciated, after the chaos of term—about getting enough sleep, attending to your correspondence, and then making your way to the Upper Reading Room and spreading out a diverse array of texts in front of you, the day’s reading and writing interrupted only by the welcome arrival of lunchtime and the attendant chatter of the MCR classicists.

As a symbol of ninth week, and where my thinking is pleased to settle after term-time’s disarray, here is a little collage of some things I’ve read today. We’ll start with the theory: Eve Sedgwick’s expostulation, in her essay on “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” of Melanie Klein’s “paranoid position.” I first read this essay two years ago, doing my homework late at night in a deserted college dining hall, and memorably burst into tears because I didn’t understand it. It’s particularly delightful to revisit it and know just how much reading, thought, and particularly life experience has gone into the fact that I understand it now:

The greatest interest of Klein’s concept lies, it seems to me, in her seeing the paranoid position always in the oscillatory context of a very different possible one: the depressive position. For Klein’s infant or adult, the paranoid position—understandably marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety—is a position of terrible alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful and envious part-objects that one defensively projects into, carves out of, and ingests from the world around one. By contrast, the depressive position is an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting: this is the position from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or “repair” the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn. Among Klein’s names for the reparative process is love.

Yes, I know. The language is alienatingly abstruse, the subject-matter bringing to mind all those creepy Kleinian images of disembodied breasts floating in the air (okay, maybe that’s just me). But there’s a lot to work with here—let’s start with that ringingly clear last sentence: “Among Klein’s names for the reparative process is love.” Love, Sedgwick is saying via Klein, is a condition that helps us to alleviate the anxieties that the world brings upon us, that helps us to forge connections between ourselves and others and among a greater variety of humankind, or (depending on your point of view) perhaps between the human and the divine. It involves reciprocity, and the forging of something new, something greater than itself, but it still also nourishes the self—the self isn’t lost within it. And it’s reparative, something Sedgwick uses in which to ground her call for affective relations with texts (and something that’s important to me as I consider self-consciously my own more historicist reading methodology), but which is also important for theorizing about what affective relations might do for us as people living amongst other people.

Okay, so with that in mind, let’s look at a cool blog-post rendering of Stendhal’s theory of love, helpfully deposited in my email inbox by my father. The author of the post, Maria Popova, draws our attention to the concept of “crystallization” that Stendhal advances as central to the way we idealize our beloveds. Stendhal defines it as “a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one,” and in a half-way I can’t quite put my finger on, it reminds me of that bit from Phaedrus 251 we keep coming back to here. Popova connects “crystallization” to theories of “attachment” drawn from evolutionary biology, but surely it shares at least as much in common with the Kleinian version of the metaphor, forming its own fragile solid through the clustering of molecules. The important thing to emphasize, then, is not the bond itself (between mother and child, between two lovers, etc) but the reconstitution of the world that occurs through it, of love as a prism through which a worldview is refracted.

Of course, I’m actually a historian, not a theorist, and this is all getting a bit disembodied for me. So I’ll ground it in some documents by referring next to Thomas Dixon’s weighty, handsomely-produced tome on The Invention of Altruism, which I was also reading today and which traces in intellectual and linguistic terms the evolution of “altruism” as a signifier (if you will. I promise I’m not a theorist!) in nineteenth-century thought, and its role in the philosophy of writers such as Comte, George Eliot, and Darwin. It’s a rich portrait, and one I hope to have the chance to pore over at greater length and in more detail at some point very soon. But just at the moment, I was struck by Dixon’s discussion of GE Moore’s Principia Ethica in his final chapter, and how it demonstrates a turn away from the identifiably Victorian theory and practice of altruism:

More’s main achievement in writing Principia Ethica was to produce an intellectual rationale for the way of life, and the kinds of love, favoured by a group of educated young men and women in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But advocacy of this post-Victorian way of life could not be undertaken in Victorian language. While Max Nordau, Alfred Douglas, and the editors of The Eagle and the Serpent, were all still tied to the language of ‘egoism’ and ‘altruism’, Moore and his friends were not. Instead of understanding love as something that was given from the ‘ego’ to a separate ‘alter’, they understood it as an emotion that brought two people into a unity. In a paper read to the ‘Apostles’ in 1898, Moore put it this way: ‘To be in the right relations with the right persons is all that can here be good; and if you are so, you do not do one thing for self and another for them, but all simply for the sake of the whole that is you and them and what is between you.’

I don’t know enough about philosophy to really assess Dixon’s claims about Principia Ethica‘s merits, but I do know a bit about the kinds of love people like the Apostles valued. What’s interesting here, I think, is the way that, just as Forster’s love proposed to join humankind to to each other, and thereby to find a force for good in a world without God, Dixon represents Moore as interested in healing a rift between self-interest and other-interest. It’s not so different, perhaps, from what any philosopher or theorist thinks happens when we try to negotiate the boundaries between ourselves and others and our various needs and wants. What’s perhaps more striking is the ease with which it seems possible to fit Sedgwick and Klein and Maria Popova and Stendhal and Thomas Dixon and GE Moore—and perhaps even Plato?—all under the rubric of “love.” I am a splitter, not a lumper, and yet there’s something disconcertingly universal starting to creep in here.

One thing I am still batting about in a vague sort of way is the (dis)juncture between mind and body when we talk about love, and how historically contingent this can be. For the Victorians, love doesn’t seem to have been very bodily, and I’m still having a very difficult time wrapping my head around how this changes over time and the ways in which sex and lust do or don’t have to do with the more emotional or spiritual kind of connection I’ve been talking about here. But I’m arguing in the essay that I’m writing for my coursework that historians have to recognize that the intellect and the emotions exist on common ground, and that reading for either in texts means understanding the ways in which they go hand in hand. And so here is my most recent personally meaningful discovery, a poem by Goethe, from his Roman Elegies, that makes clearer than anything else I’ve encountered to date the strange ways in which mind and body come into contact:

Froh empfind ich mich nun auf klassischem Boden begeistert,
Vor- und Mitwelt spricht lauter und reizender mir.
Hier befolg ich den Rat, durchblättre die Werke der Alten
Mit geschäftiger Hand, täglich mit neuem Genuß.
Aber die Nächte hindurch hält Amor mich anders beschäftigt;
Werd ich auch halb nur gelehrt, bin ich doch doppelt beglückt.
Und belehr ich mich nicht, indem ich des lieblichen Busens
Formen spähe, die Hand leite die Hüften hinab?
Dann versteh ich den Marmor erst recht: ich denk und vergleiche,
Sehe mit fühlendem Aug, fühle mit sehender Hand.
Raubt die Liebste denn gleich mir einige Stunden des Tages,
Gibt sie Stunden der Nacht mir zur Entschädigung hin.
Wird doch nicht immer geküßt, es wird vernünftig gesprochen,
Überfällt sie der Schlaf, lieg ich und denke mir viel.
Oftmals hab ich auch schon in ihren Armen gedichtet
Und des Hexameters Maß leise mit fingernder Hand
Ihr auf den Rücken gezählt. Sie atmet in lieblichem Schlummer,
Und es durchglühet ihr Hauch mir bis ins Tiefste die Brust.
Amor schüret die Lamp’ indes und gedenket der Zeiten,
Da er den nämlichen Dienst seinen Triumvirn getan.

I feel I’m happily inspired now on Classical soil:
The Past and Present speak louder, more charmingly.
Here, as advised, I leaf through the works of the Ancients
With busy hands, and, each day, with fresh delight.
But at night Love keeps me busy another way:
I become half a scholar but twice as contented.
And am I not learning, studying the shape
Of her lovely breasts: her hips guiding my hand?
Then I know marble more: thinking, comparing,
See with a feeling eye: feel with a seeing hand.
If my darling is stealing the day’s hours from me,
She gives me hours of night in compensation.
We’re not always kissing: we often talk sense:
When she’s asleep, I lie there filled with thought.
Often I’ve even made poetry there in her arms,
Counted hexameters gently there on my fingers
Over her body. She breathes in sweetest sleep,
And her breath burns down to my deepest heart.
Amor trims the lamp then and thinks of the times
When he did the same for his three poets of love.

The Home of Lost Causes; or, Eros in Oxford

A little over one year ago, it was a late night in New Jersey, and a friend and I sat facing each other in the window seat of that beautiful big room on Holder quad where I spent my senior year. A little over one year ago, I was still waiting to hear whether I would be awarded the funding that would allow me to return to Britain for graduate school, and my friend and I were weighing my postgraduate options. There was a lull in the conversation, and silence had fallen, but then my friend spoke up.

“I don’t think you should go to Oxford,” he said. “It is a repressive place.”

My friend knows his psychoanalytic theory better than I do, and for many months I dwelt upon his declaration. True, for those fin-de-siècle types who are inclined to think that sexuality is perverted unless it is directed toward the copulative, Oxford is bound to look rather strange and cold. For centuries its begowned inhabitants lived a monastic existence within their quads and cloisters; they read and they prayed and their procreation was not sexual so much as intellectual, the particular form of sublimated eros that by the time of the period I study hovered somewhere in the background of the tutorial system. In Oxford—I told my friend many months later, in a different late-night conversation on the other side of the world, after thinking long and hard upon his declaration—life does not run on a hookup culture, or the rumor of one, the way American universities seem to do, but the stone walls and certainly those rather phallic dreaming spires seem fairly to hum with a certain erotic energy. If there is repression, it is not pointlessly so, for the more you know about the history of this place (particularly in my period, when the erotics of intellect were foremost in many dons’ and students’ minds), the more you can pick up a certain residue of all that sublimation when you participate in an Oxford evensong or hunker down in the reading room or follow the path down to the far end of Christ Church Meadow and see a perfect line of aspirational spires looking hopefully upwards in search of something greater than themselves and the work of the colleges to which they belong.

In literature and history, so much of Oxford eros is not about coition, but rather what “eros” really meant, philosophically, to people like Plato or the lyric poets. Symonds, knowing whereof he spoke, defined eros in terms of ὄρεξις: yearning or longing or, in the words of Liddell and Scott, “appetency” and “conation”: the state of longing for or desiring on the one hand, and of attempt and endeavor on the other. So would the medieval poets have told Oxonian scholars past that love is not true love if it is requited; so is modern Oxford Anglicanism about doubt and searching and tracing the lines of St. Mary-the-Virgin or Christ Church Cathedral’s spires up into the grey sky, but never quite expecting to hear anything back. So do we talk about the things we spend our lives studying as labors of love undertaken for their own sakes, undertaken because we have given something of our souls to their fruition.

Indeed, coming back to Oxford now with a comparative sense of having lived here and in other universities, so much about the intensity of living in Oxford, and particularly of that orexetic quality to it, seems to fall into place. Even as a beaten-down graduate student who seems to spend an awful lot of time running from one end of town to the other in the rain, wrestling with the all-too-twentieth-century bureaucracy of the History Faculty, or making jokes about classical reception over coffee in the MCR, it’s not so difficult, once you come to know this place, to understand why it was here that Pater wrote about burning always with a hard, gem-like flame, or even why Symonds, at Oxford in the same years, wrote that “theology penetrated [emphasis mine] our intellectual and social atmosphere,” particularly in those contexts where “young men and their elders met together.” The history of a university whose primary fields of study were for most of its history theology and classics naturally mingled to inseparability Hellenic and Hebraic forms of love. In exchange for policing the sexual behavior of fellows and students alike (viz. marriage regulations, attempts to curb prostitution in the city, sodomy trials, blackmail scandals, and much much more), the curriculum and social atmosphere of the university provided two very rich intellectual traditions in which to conceive of intensely erotic attachments to people and to ideas, both in some wise about a yearning, power-imbalanced, and exceedingly place-specific love. There is a canon of Oxford orexis, and it’s not just Hopkins or Housman or Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited but also Matthew Arnold, whose poetic and prosaic descriptions of the city of dreaming spires are nothing if not erotic; and even Max Beerbohm, whose “Oxford love story” Zuleika Dobson gives us a highly heterosexual object of desire who is nevertheless inextricable from the erotics of this city.

I could go on and on. Jude the Obscure is about yearning—for knowledge, for a woman, for knowledge of a woman—while Tolkien and Lewis and latterly Philip Pullman give us quests of tonally different but no less potent kinds. When E.M. Forster wanted to include in Howards End a character whose love for alma mater is akin to love for brother or sister, husband or wife, he didn’t use his own university, Cambridge. Instead, for Tibby Schlegel, it is Oxford that is the “place, as well as a person” that “may catch the glow.” And there is a glow, though you’d have to come here to know it, because the way the late-afternoon sun that you can see from the Upper Reading room turns the spires of All Souls golden is something that does not happen anywhere else I’ve ever been.

My bedtime reading at the moment is Ian McEwan’s novel(la?) On Chesil Beach, which evokes an innocent yet intense, very Oxonian kind of romantic relationship. The book’s gender politics are not unproblematic—let’s just say that it’s perfectly obvious it was written by a man—yet I think McEwan gets something rather right about a kind of Oxford eros that starts with yearning to know and yearning to feel before it gets on to yearning to touch. Yearning to touch is the kind of yearning that we in the larger popular culture perhaps think of when we think of desire, and it is also perhaps that which we are keen to proscribe those whom we have diagnosed as “repressed.” Yet I shall never forget sitting in the History Graduate Study Room three floors underground and reading the New Yorker profile of Derek Parfit that said that, after years of living in rooms in All Souls and dining on high table like so many unattached scholars in this city who don’t have kitchens to come home to, he met a nice lady philosopher and rather matter-of-factly moved to North Oxford, like so many dons to get married before him. Now, this is what I mean when I say that Oxford is the home of lost causes: for repression is as repression does, but sometimes loneliness is really just assuaged by moving in with a lady philosopher at long last. This is true of all the universities in which I’ve ever lived, and many academic couples I have known—but Oxford is the only university I’ve called home that knows it and admits it and makes a house in North Oxford seem as richly satisfying a fantasy as anything generated by Manhattan or Los Angeles.

The hold that psychoanalytic method has had upon modern western thought and life is a powerful one, and I appreciate many things about how it’s taught us to think critically about who we are and what we want. It’s a shame that the academy has in most respects come to see it as a way of thinking that’s so inflexibly dogmatic that it has to be discarded as unproductive—but it’s a shame, too, that the imprint it has made upon the popular culture is one of inflexible dogmatism with respect to what eros is and what it can do. Psychoanalysis’s reception, particularly in the US, seems to have consisted largely of calcifying this sense that eros need be only and most importantly about sex, about corporeality. It’s only in this other world—where my friends study papyrology and civilized conversation is a virtue—that it also seems as if there are more routes to learning to feel and to desire than seemed possible when you spent your adolescence watching others fall in and out of love.

There are downsides to the pull of this place, and if you get stuck inside it for many years I think it is often possible to forget how to keep growing. Yet almost everything I have to this point learned about how to feel, about self-knowledge and adherence to it, about human experience beyond intellect and about things in Heaven and Earth not heretofore dreamt of in my philosophy, I have learned from this city. Foremost among them is that eros isn’t about knowing, it’s about wanting to know—and the latter is something I’ve always been able to do.

Impossible Love and Victorian Values; or, In Which a Talk is Advertised

Sentences from my BA thesis, now appearing in a seminar paper I will be delivering very soon:

Symonds’ life is not a story about gayness. It’s a story about humanistic study and self-development, about a search for truth, a search for ethics, and a historian’s interest in ferreting out “human documents” and bringing them to light. A modern reader might find no shortage of problems with and limits to Symonds’ philosophy of love. Yet there is something profoundly moving about his belief that his erotic ideal was powerful enough, spiritually-driven enough, pure enough, that Victorian culture, far from considering it a disease, would have to accommodate it, too, as a bearer of “sweetness and light”—even if it proposed to love the most impossible things.

Want to hear more? I will be talking on “Impossible Love and Victorian Values: J.A. Symonds and the Intellectual History of Homosexuality” at 12.15pm on Friday, 2nd November at the Platnauer Room in Brasenose College, Oxford, as part of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Culture Forum’s seminar series. All are welcome!

QOTD (2012-10-16); or, Eros Continued

From Kenneth Dover’s memoir, Marginal Comment:

The need to expound the Symposium in lectures and in print made me sort out my own ideas on sexual love, and thinking about it in Greek rather than English was a great help. Our use of the word ‘love’ has got us into a mess: ‘love thy neighbour’, ‘I love making love’ (= ‘fucking’) ‘on the carpet’, and so on. In Greek the verb phileîn and the noun philia denote the affection, ranging form intense to mild, which one may feel for a sexual partner, a parent, a child, a friend, a colleague, a nation or a place. The verb erân and the noun eros denote ‘love’ in the sense which it has in the English phrases ‘to be in love (with…)’ and ‘fall in love (with…)’, not just simple lust (for which Greek has other words) but the exclusive and obsessive lust which one feels for a particular person. Most of us are so constituted that we necessarily desire the satisfaction of lust by orgasm. Most of us also are capable of affection, and beauty is one (but only one) of the stimuli which evoke it. Affection sometimes generates eros, especially when consummation is physiologically easy and socially tolerated. Conversely, lust commonly generates affection, and its satisfaction may generate eros. It seems to me, therefore, that eros is not like a chemical compound, possessing properties which differ from the properties of any of its constituents, but like a chemical mixture, in which the constituents may be put together in any ratios and retain their own properties.

Kenneth Dover, needless to say, was once the President of my college. My day-to-day life may be full of busywork and departmental requirements, but it’s in thinking of the ways in which what intelligent people once said about love still remain within the walls of this university that I really spend my days.

On Carnal Knowledge; or, A Modest Research Proposal

It’s long been clear to me that I can be a better historian of intellect, education, and ideas in the nineteenth century if I can read the dead languages that were at the base of my research subjects’ body of knowledge. Yet I never had a good working example for why this was the case. Then, a month ago, under a blazing midday sunshine that only the Mediterranean (and similarly-latituded regions) in August can muster, I had occasion—and finally the ability—to do something that someone my age with a similar level of education a hundred fifty years ago could easily have done: spend a couple hours pulling together a scrappy translation from Plato, of a passage that by now will be quite familiar to regular readers. In so doing, I learnt a powerful lesson about my work and about life in general, particularly life as a young adult just starting to come to know the world: translation (from Greek, from Latin, from those barely discernible emotions which it is impossible to express in any language) is very difficult. And bowdlerization (or simplification, or even dehumanization) is very easy, and at times unavoidable.

Phaedrus 251-252, the most soul-stirring speech about love that I know, contains many references to παῖδες, children, or, more accurately here, boys. There is the darling boy (παιδικοῖς) to whom the lover would sacrifice as if to a god if he did not fear a reputation for madness (251a), the beautiful boy (παιδὸς κάλλος) the sight of whom produces a “thrilling feeling” in the soul, ceasing its pain and filling it with joy (251c-d), and everywhere masculine adjectives and participles that give no doubt as to the gender as well as the beauty and youth of the beloved. And when you are faced with the text in front of you, and a blank sheet of notepaper onto which to transcribe it in the vernacular for a general audience, it is awfully difficult to know what to do with all those boys. Your audience can be as well-versed as anyone in Dover’s Greek Homosexuality, as unruffled as can be by the knowledge that they did things differently back then, but how to make Socrates’ account of love’s mania instructive and inspiring to a modern audience without allowing them to be distracted by the suggestion of one of the most unpardonable sexual sins of our time? Reader, you bowdlerize. Benjamin Jowett, feeling himself helplessly caught, changed many of the pronouns, to my man Symonds’ chagrin; Harold Fowler, whose translation appears in the older Loebs, satisfied himself with using “beloved” where “boy” became a problem. Modern translators at times make bolder choices, but I think these texts are as much living guides to our own times as they are historical documents, and I went only as far as I dared—at one point using “beautiful youth” to get the original sense across, but for the most part sticking to “beloved,” preserving an echo of the erastes/eromenos dynamic but trying at the same time to universalize it. I had never before wondered so much as I did then what it really means to teach these texts and to use them as guides. It’s easy, from the 21st century, on the other side of gay liberation, to sympathize with Symonds’ outrage at Jowett’s hypocrisy in covering up the truth of the Platonic eros. When you try to translate παιδὸς κάλλος into the English of your own time, it’s a little more possible to see Jowett’s side of the story too.

I’ve related this anecdote because to me the difficulties of this translation—and the reminder within it of Jowett’s difficulties—tell us a lot about how to start thinking about love for the Victorians, and why to start thinking about it. Contemporary media sensationalize all the time about love in our day, and how broken it is and how misunderstood, how a dehumanizing “hookup culture” has come to take its place, and how we can get love back. But just as we wouldn’t know a παιδὸς κάλλος if it fell on us out of a tree, I don’t think we quite know what we mean by “love” either, or where to find it. I do think, however, that we are living with the legacy of the nineteenth century, and that understanding better the lines that Victorians drew betwixt love and sex and eros and related things, the people who developed such ideas and the places and cultures in which they developed them, might tell us a bit about why it does seem as if the Youth of Today (or at least the ones the magazines write about) lack a really viable, to say nothing of beautiful, discourse of human connection.

I’ve been thinking about how to think about this since the spring, when, a few days after I handed in the labor of love that was my thesis, I ran across Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind:

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…. The easy sex of teen-agers snips the golden thread linking eros to education.

In many respects, Bloom comes across as patronizing and oblivious, unaware that what it means to be an American university student has changed in the years since it became possible for more than those who read dead languages to be awarded a bachelor’s degree. Yet he’s right that students want something of eros, though don’t quite know what it is, or how to explain what dissatisfies them about the so-called “hookup culture”—witness a recent piece in the Daily Princetonian, in which an anonymous author writes that going out most weekends to drink and find partners for sex (or something sexual but not-quite-sex) left her feeling lonely and confused. And, at the opposite end of a not-so-wide spectrum, witness the Atlantic‘s seemingly annual article about sex and the college girl, which this time round notes that the so-called “hookup culture” works for women because it’s not too emotionally troubling, since modern women have more important things like their careers to worry about:

The sexual culture may be more coarse these days, but young women are more than adequately equipped to handle it, because unlike the women in earlier ages, they have more-important things on their minds, such as good grades and intern­ships and job interviews and a financial future of their own. The most patient and thorough research about the hookup culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment or all that much shame, and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t get in the way of future success…. Women in the dorm [in a sociological study conducted at Indiana University] complained to the researchers about the double standard, about being called sluts, about not being treated with respect. But what emerged from four years of research was the sense that hooking up was part of a larger romantic strategy, part of what Armstrong came to think of as a “sexual career.” For an upwardly mobile, ambitious young woman, hookups were a way to dip into relationships without disrupting her self-development or schoolwork.

This, to me, is a problem, and one that our current attempts to figure out what the “hookup culture” is don’t help us to answer. We privileged college-educated Westerners who have nothing more important on our minds than how young people are discovering themselves erotically are very good at, variously, talking about the “hookup culture” as something that, booze, objectification, and all, detracts from the educational mission of a university; or at mockingly writing off the conservative pro-abstinence-and-chastity argument that casual sexual contact is degrading to all concerned. We argue that casual sex is oppressive or that it is liberating, but we lack a middle view: a way to recover Allan Bloom from his ridiculous naïveté, a way to respond to what’s dehumanizing as well as confusing about our culture’s sexual expectations for young adults (want proof? watch an episode of HBO’s Girls) without excising eroticism entirely from our sentimental educations or endlessly postponing it until it’s too late, as I think many social conservatives would like to do. My 2010s take on Allan Bloom—which, like his original, comes from thinking a lot about what “παιδὸς κάλλος” means—is that there’s nothing wrong with having lots of sex with lots of partners per se (as long as you use proper protection, etc.), but that there is something morally wanting in doing so in a way that’s instrumentalizing and objectifying, that prefers the pleasure of consumption and boxes ticked to a deeper pleasure of human connection in soul as well as body. Like Bloom, I think that sex as part of the culture of consumption denies young adults the opportunity to see sexual relationships as part of their liberal-arts education, something that will help them to understand how to take an ethical approach to relations with others and to figure out what a good life is and how to pursue it for themselves. It’s worth challenging ourselves to be both sex-positive and serious, and to make room for sentiment and affect within education.

My Victorians knew all too well that where knowledge lay, eros wasn’t far behind. Otherwise those with the cultural capital (wealthy, educated, white, heterosexual-or-something-like-it men) wouldn’t have poured so much energy into keeping knowledge out of the hands of women and children, the poor, Imperial subjects from far-flung lands, or those who stood to gain from the knowledge that Plato (the guide to civilization!) is full of some awfully sexually-charged masculine nouns. Double standards proliferated: the Lambs published their Tales from Shakespeare, and, as Symonds wrote to Jowett, “It is indeed impossible to exaggerate the anomaly of making Plato a text-book for students, and a household-book for readers, in a nation which repudiates Greek love,” yet commonplace books and letters that flowed in and out of the universities of the period are charged with the inextricability of learning and love.

Times are different—empires are no longer in fashion; universities are, theoretically, places where more than the most privileged are welcome—yet eros is still an essential part of the sentimental education, and denying its existence either by divorcing sex from the people having it or by refusing it a place in college life together isn’t the answer to trying to engage with it healthily and productively. Building an environment in which young people can approach their bodies and relations with each other in a psychologically healthy way entails acknowledging the myriad ways in which eros suffuses life, especially the life of the mind. It needs to acknowledge that eroticism doesn’t only happen in intercourse (or a hasty blowjob in a (eating) club’s cloakroom), but can happen in a class, in a tutorial, in a late-night conversation in a dorm room, in the pages of reading assigned or not, in the process of writing essays like this one. On the one hand, this is sublimation at its most classic and most Victorian, sure—but on the other hand, it needn’t stop there. Maybe those conversations, among well-adjusted individuals living in a well-adjusted university community with a healthy attitude to sexual matters, could also be the starting point for meaningful erotic relations that contribute to intellectual, psychological, emotional, etc. growth, regardless of whether they take place between friends, acquaintances, strangers, or steady significant others of any gender. This kind of thinking has the benefit of putting pleasure back at the center of what we expect to gain from knowledge and education, and allows us to think about college as part of the process of growing up and maturation rather than as a credential. And, by combining carnal knowledge with book knowledge, it also offers the possibility that when students are hurt by those with whom they enter into close and vulnerable relationships—as they invariably will be—they have some tools that will help them to deal with the pain. The women in the Indiana University study in the Atlantic seemed to prefer hookups because, while it can be disappointing when the boy doesn’t text, or when the relationship never morphs into something more emotionally meaningful, no-strings-attached assignations aren’t supposed to come with the potential for heartbreak’s soul-crushing pain. But (leaving aside the fact that hookups can be soul-crushing too) young people who have never let themselves hurt inside because they are too busy with their grades and their career prospects don’t know how to put themselves in the shoes of people who are hurting. They don’t know when it’s essential to exercise compassion. And I wonder if what’s wrong with Wall Street, etc., and all the inhumanity in modern American professional life is that students who come out of universities whose mottoes are “work hard, play hard” (I’m looking at you, Princeton and Oxford) never, by keeping those spheres so separate, let themselves be open to the most profound vulnerability.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, on the other side of my bachelor’s degree, it is a rare sunny day, and I am over the moon to be back in a city that has more to say about the seductive allure of the tree of knowledge than any other. I’m fresh from the first week of work on a master’s thesis that is going to be, in some wise, about classical education and what tools it gave young Victorian adults—both men and women—to think about love. This week I read Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s excellent new book The Origins of Sex, which among other extremely interesting and insightful cultural analysis discussed the transition from an 18th-century Britain of sexual liberty and libertinism to a nineteenth century that was far more confused about what it would accept, socially, with respect to sexual expression. That confusion is evident in phenomena like Symonds’ call for an out and proud homosexuality that at the same time employed a moral code largely indistinguishable from that which governed opposite-sex “chivalric love.” Indeed, it seems to me, the Victorians in general rediscovered chivalry (see pre-Raphaelitism) as a way of doing something with one’s bodies that’s not just having fun: that instead mingles love’s pleasure and pain, and that involves a deep connection to the past and sense of one’s place, as a lover, with respect to it.

This is the “glukúpikron” love that Anne Carson’s wonderful Eros the Bittersweet discusses, and its reception is just as fascinating as the original. I’m interested in the connection between, in Anne Carson’s words, “falling in love and coming to know,” which are “not like anything else, but they are like each other.” Back in the Upper Reading Room, now, reading about learning and loving, I feel more alive than I have ever felt since I crashed into crushing despair on the day that I handed in my Symonds thesis. It’s enough to reawaken in me the feeling of that line from Howards End: “a place, as well as a person, may catch the glow.”

I hope to write more in the months to come about pedagogic eros, about carnal knowledge. I hope to write about how being back in Oxford is going to help me get my head around the extent to which the repressive hypothesis about Victorian culture is true, and the extent to which it isn’t. I hope to tell my gentle reader a little bit more about why this city makes my heart stir, why it has made me feel more human than any hookup ever has or, I have come to believe, could. And, finally, I want to work out a little anti-repressive hypothesis of my own, one that needn’t oppose repression with sexual liberation but instead with a different, rather Victorian, kind of freedom: the freedom to jettison short-term satisfaction and the distraction of physical wants and instead to work towards carnal knowledge of a more profound kind. Unpacking the sublimation humming in the walls of this city might, in the end, send us back down a path of bodily discovery, albeit one richer and with more potential for connection than those experiences related in the Atlantic or the Daily Princetonian. Or it might send us down myriad other paths entirely, paths of comradeship or discipleship or companionate marriage (not so much passion as contentment) or the path of the sunset I saw last night from my kitchen window, the sky streaked purple and gold behind Old Tom Tower and casting its dwindling light on the empty Christ Church School playing fields. Everyone has to find their own route to goodness. In Oxford, home of lost causes, where they always knew that what “παιδὸς κάλλος” meant wasn’t so much obscene as just plain untranslatable, it is possible for someone like me to learn to be human and humane in a way that it never was in America.

QOTD (2012-09-25); or, -1 Week

There are sunbeams breaking through the clouds over the Radcliffe Camera, back at my old vantage point of desk U95 in the Old Bodleian Upper Reading Room, and I’m starting my MPhil by reading Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. Here is what she has to say about that passage in the Phaedrus to which I (see below) keep returning:

As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be. What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception that it is well described as madness? How is it that when you fall in love you feel as if suddenly you are seeing the world as it really is? A mood of knowledge floats out over your life. You seem to know what is real and what is not. Something is lifting you toward an understanding so complete and clear it makes you jubilant. This mood is no delusion, in Sokrates’ belief. It is a glance down into time, at realities you once knew, as staggeringly beautiful as the glance of your beloved (249e-50c).

The point of time that Lysias deletes from his logos, the moment of mania when Eros enters the lover, is for Sokrates the single most important moment to confront and grasp. ‘Now’ is a gift of the gods and an access onto reality. To address yourself to the moment when Eros glances into your life and to grasp what is happening in your soul at that moment is to begin to understand how to live. Eros’ mode of takeover is an education: it can teach you the real nature of what is inside you. Once you glimpse that, you can begin to become it. Sokrates says it is a glimpse of a god (253a).

Here in the home of lost causes, my heart is full of hope and the will to knowledge. As I sit in the library waiting for term to start, I feel more alive than I have in months—my life seems pregnant with new possibilities. I think it’s going to be a good term.

QOTD (2012-02-10)

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.

A Year in Review: Lessons Learned and Things to Be Done; or, On What Matters

This has been a year of comings and goings. I ended 2010 with a post on that theme, suggesting that I had it All Figured Out: that the university qua idea was my home, that I was at ease with myself and my place in the world, that I was psychologically prepared to spend the majority of the coming calendar year living abroad alone.

Of course, things were a bit trickier than that. I filled the pages of this blog quite a bit over the coming year, and particularly those parts that I spent in the UK. All year, as I travelled from British Columbia to Princeton, from Princeton to Oxford, from Oxford to Dublin, Edinburgh, Paris, London, Bristol, and back again, from Oxford to Princeton and New York and Rhode Island and southern California and back to Princeton and finally back to the sun-drenched kitchen table with a view of the San Juan Islands where I wrote last year that I was done searching—well, dear reader, I searched. I searched for myself, I searched for others, I searched for places to live and people to love, I searched for goodness and for emptinesses and ways to fill them. I got some answers, then found I had still more questions.

Sitting again at the kitchen table with the Christmas tablecloth, catching up on the Radio 3 Christmas programming, rejoicing that the sun is out and warming the house for the first time in a week, I find myself facing a year of more comings and goings. On the fifth of June I am finally going to have my long-dreamt-of bachelor’s degree, and the university and town where I have lived for much of the past three and a half years isn’t going to be my home anymore. Yesterday, I was researching flights and looking at a map of Europe and dreaming very big indeed about the new places I want to see this summer. In October I will cross the Atlantic again, I will come back to the city of dreaming spires, I will spend a day parading around in subfusc and just like that I’ll be a member of a university again.

But it will be so different from the last time: my eyes won’t widen in alarm at all the trappings of Oxford pomp and circumstance—in part because I’ve seen it all before, but in part because I will be a grad student, an adult, who lives in a flat and cycles into town every day to go to work in the Upper Reading Room. And what, I have to ask, does this mean for comings and goings, for people and places, for my presently long-distance relationship with the city of Oxford, my first love? What does this mean for loving? What does this mean for connecting?

I first heard E.M. Forster’s name seriously mentioned over a year ago. Of course, I’d heard it before; of course, me being me, most of what I knew about him was that he was gay, or something like it. But I didn’t think that he was someone I ought to read until, in September 2010 or thereabouts, a friend whose literary acumen I highly esteem happened to say that reading Forster in high school had determined him to study literature. This remark had a strong impression on me, and it percolated in the back of my mind until one morning towards the end of last Trinity term when I woke up with a strong desire to Get Into Forster right then and there. I dashed out of college and down Broad Street and into Blackwells and up the stairs to the secondhand department; I bought Howards End, Maurice, and Wendy Moffat’s new Forster biography, which another literary friend had suggested I would enjoy. I came home, I put the books on my shelf, and then I went back to Symonds, and the moment passed. I read the Moffat biography in Paris, and found it very interesting. I read Maurice in London, saw Symonds’ ideas in it, and thought it would be quite useful to the reception chapter of my thesis. But Howards End languished in a suitcase in Oxford, and then it languished on my overflowing bookshelves in Princeton. And then a few weeks ago it was midnight in the room of another friend whose literary acumen I esteem, and we were both trying very hard indeed not to do our schoolwork. He read aloud to me from Howards End and A Room With a View, and I saw what all the fuss was about. As soon as I’d discharged my obligations to my graduate seminar in the history of sexuality and my survey of modern British history and my art history seminar on natural history in America and that literary theory class I decided to audit for some reason, I opened the cover of that Penguin paperback with the Blackwell’s pricetag still on it: One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.

It took me two days to read the book, out here in semi-annual Canadian exile. Very near to the end, there is this exchange between Helen and her sister, Margaret:

“… There’s something wanting in me. I see you loving Henry, and understanding him better daily, and I know that death wouldn’t part you in the least. But I—Is it some awful appalling, criminal defect?”
    Margaret silenced her. She said: “It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. Don’t fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have; love your child. I do not love children. I am thankful to have none. I can play with their beauty and charm, but that is all—nothing real, not one scrap of what there ought to be. And others—others go farther still, and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don’t you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.

The Penguin paperback is now dog-eared and pencilled beyond all recognition, but of all the monologues where Forster’s own ideas about love and connection burst through the narrative, this is my favorite. I think it speaks better to the more quotidian questions we might have about how to get on in our oh-so-human lives than does the earlier, perhaps more famous, “Only connect!… Live in fragments no longer” bit. I think it has something special to say about the fact that what we may regard as a failure in ourselves—inability to love sufficiently—may simply be evidence that we love differently. And I like that it acknowledges—as Forster does in Howards End several times—that “A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow.”

Because, you see, this year I feel as if I’ve fallen in love with everything but people. I fell in love with Oxford, which I hope I’ll always hold dear as my first love: the only passionate amour I’ve had that I felt was alive, was reciprocated, in terms equal to my own. I fell in love with the idea, or perhaps the ideas, of love: with ἀγάπη and ἔρως, with the universalist commandment to love thy neighbor and with what Plato says happens when one beholds one’s particular beloved: one’s soul “is moistened and warmed, ceases from its pain and is filled with joy.” I fell in love with the idea of the salvific, grace-giving force of humanity. I fell in love with the idea that only connecting will help us through our muddles and heal the wounds of our messed-up world.

By the time I read Howards End last week I felt as if I knew this—I’d been working toward it all year. It was there in what I thought about Symonds and in what he thought about l’amour de l’impossible. (For, after all, I have written more words about Symonds this year than I have ever written about anything in my life, and the love—for a rather small and unimportant man who has been dead over a hundred years—that it requires to sustain a project of this length and type is great indeed.) It was there when I thought about how we all make our own cultural compasses, and how so often what teaches we lonely dorky kids to love is the books that tell us that we’re not alone. It was there when I thought about the meaning of theology, of grace, of taking love on faith.

I know that my discovery of Christianity as a discourse that makes sense to me has unnerved, disturbed, and troubled some of my readers. But in a funny way it’s what really made Howards End the apotheosis of this Year in Emily’s Ideas. Christianity is a system of religious devotion that people have created to help them to access the universe’s great mysteries, and the beautiful words of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are therefore a part of the “religion of humanity,” of all that is good in our world where people live—where, since we can’t answer the most fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and its first causes and why what is good is good, we’ve just got to get on with loving each other, since each other and the things we can create are all we have. Sometime between Episcopalian Lessons and Carols in the last week of term and Christmas Day, I was much impressed by this excerpt from a post UMass-Amherst philosophy professor Louise Antony wrote on the NY Times’ “Stone” blog:

Suppose that you do something morally terrible, something for which you cannot make amends, something, perhaps, for which no human being could ever be expected to forgive you.  I imagine that the promise made by many religions, that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry, is a thought would that bring enormous comfort and relief.  You cannot have that if you are an atheist.  In consequence, you must live your life, and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make contributes, in one way or another, to the only value your life can have.

Some people think that if atheism were true, human choices would be insignificant.  I think just the opposite — they would become surpassingly important.

If the Earth is our world and it is all we have, it is our responsibility to do all the loving, all the forgiving, all the good works, all the bettering. We’ve got to make the most of our time in it, no matter what we might or mightn’t think will happen to us when we die. We’ve got to make sure that every day, we wake up sure in the knowledge that today we will get better, we will be better, we will do better, we will treat others better. I thought a lot this year about bettering, about how we treat others, about how we behave amongst others. Now, having the Forsterian language at my disposal, I might say that a prerequisite for connecting is sociability—by which I mean keeping yourself open to meeting others and learning from them and being willing to teach if there is something they can learn from you. I mean seeing the attempt to make connections as a good in itself, I mean setting up institutional structures so that this kind of connecting can take place, and I mean valuing conversations that mean something and get somewhere. I noted this year that, for all its faults, Oxford is very good at doing this, and I noted that Princeton is rather less so, but that it’s worth working to make Princeton better.

It is universities where I live; unsurprisingly, I have a keen interest in university policy. I take a great deal of pleasure in asking, what does my university life have to do with sociability? How can we build a wider world where it is Good to come round for a cup of tea? Let a thousand flowers bloom, of course, but in my life it’s the humanities that help me to connect, to find in me that which is universally human and therefore that which I owe to others and to myself. I’m thinking about a really lovely article that Mary Beard wrote in the last issue of the New York Review of Books, which talks about how the study of the classics helps us to understand “the gap between antiquity and ourselves,” and how it also occasions “a due sense of wonderment” at the copious quantities of “human documents” (Symonds) that survive to sing, O Muse, of the ideas people thought and the feelings that they felt two millenia ago. I thought a lot this year about what being a humanist has taught me about these themes of continuity and change, and I thought a lot about how we can demonstrate that “a due sense of wonderment” and the self-knowledge that, I hope, ensues are goods without slipping into the realm of another discourse, like that of political economy. To get there, I had to work through modes of apology and of hysteria. But I ended the year rather at Mary Beard’s position: that not everyone needs to be a humanist, but that we do as humans need to believe that some people should be. That sublimity is something that we’re capable of as humans, and that beauty is something we can all seek, study, and share. That beauty is Homer and Shakespeare and the Bhagavad Gita, and beauty is young adults sitting up all night talking because they are young enough to think so much and feel so much and love so much.

This is an optimistic note on which to end my twenty-second year. But where do we go from here? This year, I learned to value love, and to love the idea of people, to love humanity. But how, now, do I love persons? How do I love myself? If I have discovered the secret of loving humanity, why do I feel lonely so often, experience so many dark nights of the soul? Well, perhaps I haven’t really discovered anything; after all, I’m still so very young and naïve and inexperienced of the world. And perhaps dark nights of the soul are as much a piece of humanity as sublimity is, the price we pay for the moments of ecstasy that sit alongside them in the panoply of things we feel that make us certain we are alive. But I have to keep wondering whither this state of mind will lead, in 2012. I can’t help but think that if I were truly one of Forster’s people who “catch the glow” from a place rather than a person, I wouldn’t feel the void of people-loving so much in my soul. Will going back to the city that I love keep me from learning to love people, too? I think about how Matthew Arnold figures Oxford as an alluring woman in the 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 nearer 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 Tubingen. 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! what example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which Goethe, in those incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend’s highest praise (and nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight behind him;— the bondage of ‘was uns alle bandigt, Das Gemeine’! She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son; for she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?

You could hardly fail to fall in love with a city like this. Which means that sublimation can, at times, be just a little too successful.

Yet, even in Oxford, it is possible to connect. Perhaps, for those of us who find connecting rather hard, it may be possible to do so more successfully in the “home of lost causes” than anywhere else. The September 5 issue of the New Yorker included Larissa MacFarquhar’s excellent profile of the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, who recently wrote an enormous ethics tome called On What Matters. I don’t have a subscription to the magazine, and so can’t access the article anymore, but I remember that amidst explanations of Parfit’s ideas about ethics was the moving story of how this shy, almost reclusive man, a quintessential bachelor don who lived in his rooms in All Souls, recently met a woman philosopher and moved into a little Oxford terraced house with her. They married, I think, just for tax reasons, but the important point is that they made a life together and made each other less alone. I think that story is what I’m going to take with me most this year, as the message for this year ending and the one to come. It tells me that there is hope yet for connection—even when the causes seem most lost, even when the beliefs seem most forsaken—and that love and bettering and goodness and connection come in many forms, and are furthered by many kinds of people.

Keeping the Faith

Since Oxford, my life has followed, more or less, the rhythms of a more ancient academic life. Since Oxford, I have passed my days in quiet scholarly contemplation, doing my best even in the hustle and bustle of Princeton for time spent at my desk in the library basement or over meals in quiet conversation about academic matters. And since Oxford I have ended my week, every week, with an evening church service, and I have tried to use the discourse of the Anglican tradition to formulate ways of keeping faith in what I do. When I was being a tourist round the Evensongs of Oxford colleges, I discovered the Anglican liturgy as a way of making sense of, and expressing, the moral call to wake up every morning full in the desire to do better and to be better. I saw the church as one of the few institutions in the modern Anglo-American world that believes in contemplation as a good in itself and as a route to human flourishing. And although in the months since I have struggled with the implications of being a churchgoer, and with the metaphysical, supernatural aspects of Christianity that simply don’t help me to make sense of the world, my churchgoing has become intrinsically entwined with my sense that my scholarship, and my academic aspirations, are a vocation in the service of a future promise greater than myself.

There are many reasons why this is true for those who make their lives in universities, many of which I’ve discussed before. And it is of course no coincidence that it is through a particularly scholastic religious tradition that owes a lot to Oxford and Cambridge that I found ways of thinking about the moral value of what it is that I’m doing with my days and with my life. But I often feel as if faith in the academic mission—in the good of universities, of teaching and learning, of spending one’s day in the library, of devoting oneself to abstract concepts rather than material things, of teaching intellectual curiosity rather than skills—entails leaping off an epistemological cliff in a manner similar to what’s required of the person who aspires to religious faith. Grappling with the faith expected of a churchgoer has helped me to realize just how hard it is to explain to outsiders what you naturally, emotionally, intuit. But it’s also helped me to realize that there are points of entry into faith-based ways of thinking even for those of us who remain fundamentally and unashamedly agnostic. The Anglican tradition is fantastically admitting of metaphor (and so is the Bible itself, of course—just look at Jesus’ parables), and just as this allows non-Christians access to its precepts, it also allows anyone to repurpose its precepts into tenets of right-living outside the immediate boundaries of worship. The intellectual and cultural structures of Anglican worship make me think a lot about what it means to have a vocation, to think about texts and ideas, and to have an emotional connection to the texts and ideas one studies. And they also have helped me to understand what it means to have faith.

In my attempts to understand various parts of the Christian, and specifically Anglican, worldview, faith has been one of the greatest sticking-points. I remember sitting in my Victorian Intellect and Culture seminar last Hilary term being completely outraged by the kind of faith-based logic Newman proposes in his Apologia: Newman basically says that he started from a point of religious faith, and that living his life in accordance with that faith and the principles it preached led him to feel spiritually rewarded and thus to shore up his faith. But I didn’t understand: where did the faith come from in the first place? I’ve never been an especially faithful person: with low self-esteem, cynical about politics and world affairs, requiring external affirmation from others to believe in what I do. I didn’t understand how you could just posit this positive feeling for what seemed to me to be no reason. And hence, I suppose, why I have had so many tortured conversations over the past several years, with my parents and my advisors and my friends, about whether it is possible to ethically justify spending my life in universities, learning and teaching the things that give me the greatest joy. I didn’t believe that I could give to others by giving to myself; I thought I had to give everything of myself until there was nothing left. And I didn’t know how to say that some things are just good, regardless of whether—as my British colleagues might say—we can track their impact in empirical terms.

Discovering the Anglican discourse, on the other hand, has made this calendar year—my junior spring and senior fall—my most intellectually fulfilling year so far. It feels strange saying that, as someone with so little connection to the supernatural aspects of Christianity. But instead, now, I am starting to develop frameworks in which I am spiritually equal to all my neighbors—in which, just as I am to love them, they are also to love me, and I am to love myself. I am starting to believe that I need to be spiritually whole before I can do my best work to help others, that peace and beauty and joy are goods to work towards, that part of being good people is waking up every day with a firm commitment to getting better. I am starting to believe this now because I have knelt in college chapels and prayed with words like this now countless times. I’m starting to perform that kind of illogic logic that I read nine months ago in Newman. I’m starting to think that I can do my part to help the world by rejecting the assumption that a good person works until they cannot work anymore and then works some more after that, and instead slowing everything down. I’m trying to think of my research and my conversations, both in their own ways efforts to expand human knowledge (whether of the past or of ourselves) as the kind of mental upkeep that we need as much as we do the physical to really, properly be whole. And I feel safe, and relatively unashamed, in saying that without Oxford Anglicanism, I wouldn’t have the framework to believe that being good to myself allows me to be good to others; and that nurturing my own unique talents, my own deep sense that I would not be truly happy outside of universities, is a legitimate way to increase the general good of those around me.

I’m not trying to make this all seem facile: like any believer, from day to day I find that once I’ve struggled out of bed, this Onward-Wisdom’s-Soldiers kind of determination evaporates all too quickly. My diary is full to bursting and I pound the pavements through my days: not always doing the reading, not always being any more than instrumentalist about my undergraduate education, and usually so exhausted when I reach dinnertime that all I can do is bitch instead of being charitable to my classmates, my professors, and why we’re all here. I while away hours procrastinating, lingering at meals or on the internet, not quite so ready to practice the virtues of scholarly devotion as I am to preach them. But every night, I say my confession. And every morning, I try again.

There’s one more thing I’ve learned from the Anglican tradition, and while this is something I want to talk more about in a future post in order to really round out the lessons of this calendar year, I think it bears mentioning here. Between Symonds’ own brand of Anglicanism and the one I encountered in today’s Oxford, I started to know what “love” means. This was a word that in my adolescence I never really felt as if I understood, and the more than purely academic understanding of sexual desire it seemed to require was never something I felt I could engage with. Religion—Phaedrus beautiful-boys religion, or Jesus love-thy-neighbor religion—has helped me to access a register of emotional ecstasy for the people and the places and the texts and the ideas in one’s life that places desire not quite so much in the body as in the soul. The search for spiritual communion—to feel a little less lonely, to connect, to be responsible for another’s soul, in the Platonic Socrates’ words, taking flight—is something to which I can aspire, and something which I sense has the best shot of anything of making me whole.

Of course, there are still the moments like this one, when all is quiet on the quad at quarter to midnight, I am too exhausted to start the next of my mounting pile of things left undone, the Christmas lights in my room burn through the silence, and I reflect on how isolated I feel, and how little energy I have to do my schoolwork or write my thesis or keep on giving my life to my work. These moments have been happening very frequently of late, and until I understand a bit better what it really means to leap off that epistemological cliff of faith, I’m not sure I will be able to gin up fiery passion out of this kind of ennui. But I know enough about faith to know that it means that even if logic tells you that you will never reach the summit of your steep uphill climb, you have to keep going anyway. You have to keep trying to love all your neighbors, you have to keep trying to love all your work, you have to keep trying to love yourself, and you have to keep hoping that someday someone will love you back. And if you fuck up, nothing too bad will happen. It’s not the end of the world. But you have to say that you’re most heartily sorry, and you have to try harder next time.

On nights like this, when I don’t know how I’m going to do history, much less love, tomorrow, I say my own kind of non-supernatural prayer: O, Wisdom: Grant me the grace to love what I do, and through loving what I do to love myself. Grant me the grace that I may, through a life of moderation in your service, be a more fitting recipient of the love of others. And through the love of you and of all who walk in your way, may I be a better servant to the causes of peace, of happiness, and of human flourishing. In Wisdom’s name, Amen.

On Responsible Drinking and Reverse Culture Shock; or, In Which Adulthood Is Again Pondered

I have been thinking a lot since I returned to the U.S., and to Princeton, about the different cultures of drinking that manifested themselves in my higher ed experiences on either side of the Atlantic. I think that perhaps the foremost cultural difference between Princeton and Oxford (which are in many respects quite similar) is how I saw alcohol consumed at the two institutions: the juvenile way I saw it consumed for the two and a half years I spent as an under-21 student at Princeton; and the adult way I saw it consumed and consumed it in Oxford, in an environment where I was not only legal, but where most of my friends were graduate students and thus the tenor of social drinking was different. Being an RA this year—as well as reading about the dangers of student drinking from a faculty perspective—reminds me how important it is to talk openly about how college students drink, why they drink, and how to encourage them to drink like adults. Now that I am actually 21, I can not only drink much more openly and responsibly, but also talk openly and responsibly about why and how I drink and have drunk at college. This is obviously very important, and we need to be having more conversations about this.

I spent my share of my orientation week at Princeton lurking awkwardly behind eating clubs, a member of one of the furtive crowds around kegs on back porches of the clubs to which a roommate’s OA leaders belonged. I felt uncomfortable, disoriented, out of place, overtired, but there didn’t seem to be much else to do. And in orientation week, of course, freshmen travel in packs, and they follow the throngs of people heading east to Prospect Avenue because it is such a clear visual marker of the direction of the campus social scene. I kept this up first semester. Culture-shocked to all hell, convinced I didn’t belong here and didn’t deserve to be here, I repeated the routine once or twice a week, going to an eating club to drink cheap watered-down beer because drunk people are always happy to see you. At the time I didn’t know how to drink, and was unused to it, and would often end my nights crawling back home alone to throw up the three or four watered-down beers I’d had. I wasn’t endangering myself much, or slipping into alcoholism, but I wasn’t drinking maturely, I wasn’t drinking healthily, and I wasn’t happy.

The thing going for me was that I knew this. I knew this kind of drinking was childish, different to the kind of drinking that my over-21 friends did and in which I wasn’t allowed to join them, since most of them had advisory roles in my college that prohibited them drinking with their advisees. But I didn’t know how to find for myself the middle ground between drinking childishly or drinking as a coping mechanism, and not drinking at all. Until, that is, I turned 19. When I turned 19 I was legal in the other country where I live, Canada, and the first summer that I was 19 I started drinking wine at home with my parents, and my dad and I went to the local pub. In however small a way, I finally got access to a world where consuming alcohol was something adults did. It was exciting, a sense of Things to Come—and when I returned to Princeton for my second year, it made me feel more embarrassed by the emotional and social distance between me and my older friends, and the extent to which they had to make allowances for me. When I was around, we couldn’t go to the bars where they might have liked to go. I spent a memorable portion of ages 19 and 20 standing inconspicuously across the street from liquor stores: no big deal for some, but for me a constant reminder of how far I had to come, how much I had to grow up, to be the adult my friends were.

A few weeks before I left Princeton for Oxford, one of my older friends jokingly said to me, “People drink a lot in Oxford! You’ll have to improve your tolerance!” I knew this—I hadn’t drunk much thus far, and knew I didn’t do it well—but it took going to Oxford for me to really hit the alcohol learning curve. I had no idea what many kinds of things I would be expected to drink (and to develop a discerning palate for), what diverse social contexts in which I would be expected to drink, and how important it was not to get sloppy-drunk on starting the third glass of wine. But, as this blog shows, I learned. I learned not to show disorientation when I was making it through those weird Oxford marathon formal dinners, and similarly to reevaluate my process of alcohol consumption as something where drinking, but not drunkenness, is the goal. I’d go to the pub with my friends and have one or two drinks after a long day. And thus I learned also to do my drinking in public: instead of cheap vodka out of those opaque red cups in the claustrophobic confines of a dorm room, I’d be drinking beer or wine or gin and tonic out of a clear glass. And it felt, even when I went out dancing, that I was acting much more like an adult. I felt like I had what I’d always wanted: access to this mystical world where grad students lingered at the reception instead of running away right at the end of the lecture, hobnobbing with famous scholars, the motif of their hobnobbing the little plastic glasses of red wine they’d clutch with the tips of their fingers. In Oxford, with access to that talisman, I felt I had the ability to hobnob, too.

I came back to Princeton as a 21-year-old, and so have been able to replicate a lot of what I liked about social drinking in Oxford in a way I couldn’t before. I can go to the nearest equivalent to a pub in Princeton and order a pint of a good ale. I can go to the liquor store and buy a bottle of gin and have a g&t with my friends on a Saturday night. This past Thursday, I attained what for me has always been the apotheosis of adulthood and, at the reception after a talk, had a glass of wine. For me, drinking without getting drunk is always something that has been made possible by having the legal and financial ability to order and/or buy one’s own alcohol. I can’t practice responsible drinking behavior if I don’t have any control over the environment in which I come across accessible alcohol. Now that I can drink at departmental receptions, I don’t have to vomit from eating-club beer anymore.

I went to one party during this year’s orientation week (when, before everyone’s classes and workloads begin, there’s a lot of revelry). I had one of the biggest moments of reverse culture shock I’ve had since being back when I noticed that everyone at the party was acting much drunker than two or three drinks over the course of a couple hours should have made them. I went home early: whether it was Oxford or the age of majority, I just didn’t know how to relate to this culture anymore. Two weeks later, though I’ve done plenty of moderate social drinking in other settings, I haven’t “gone out” again.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the atmosphere of juvenility at Princeton: how much hand-holding there is, how much in loco parentis attention we get from grown-ups, how freshman orientation so much resembles a summer-camp atmosphere, how despite claims to the contrary in the brochures, there’s not a lot of institutional support for undergrads who want to do the work of and be treated like grad students. We’re coddled, we’re treated like children still, and while that seemed normal when I was 18, three years later it’s all gotten a little bit boring—not to mention ridiculous. People our age are learning how to shoot AK-47s and going to risk their lives in Afghanistan. We’re being given matching college t-shirts to wear in a parade during orientation and an intramural sporting event in the gym, and then the adults who manage our lives are surprised that we drink excessively, shirk our academic work, and otherwise behave with little attention to consequence, so determined are we to forget the strains placed upon us by a pointlessly uber-competitive academic atmosphere and the uncertainties of the grad school and employment opportunities (or lack thereof) that we face upon graduation.

I have been quite angry this week with a collegiate culture that places so many parameters on what we do in some fields, and so few parameters on what we do in others. I have spent much of the week fighting to get allocated my own reserved desk and bookshelf at which to write my thesis (as of now, I’m expected to share with another person). Many of my friends have been frustrated at the unexpectedly low intellectual level of some of their classes. I don’t think any of us are perfectly happy with the social scene on this campus, as much as we make do. And yet there is still so little effort on the part of the otherwise overinvolved administrative layer to help us to see ourselves as adults academically and socially. Call it reverse culture shock, call it getting older, but whatever it is, I’ve been frustrated.

But the thing is, we all make our own cultural compasses. Now that I’m 21, I can be the one who models responsible drinking, who treats herself to a drink when she’s put in an eight-hour day on her thesis. I can behave like an adult as much as I feel able, and hang out with people who do the same. And when I’m the RA on-call tonight, I can do the job that I signed up for: the job that entails making sure that 18-year-olds in their second week of college are staying safe and are learning how to grow up and to be better. Growing up means giving back, doing for the kids next to come along all that was—and wasn’t—done for you.