Category: Blog

QOTD (2012-04-06)

As I’ve started to take stock of what it is I’ve learned and become in the past four years of college, I was much surprised by how moved I was by the following passage, from the section titled “Eros” in 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.

[…]

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

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

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

QOTD (2012-03-21)

Tony Grafton, in the introduction to his Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West:

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

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

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

QOTD (2012-03-01)

JH Newman, “The Idea of a University,” from the section on “Knowledge its own end”:

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

QOTD (2012-02-24); or, The Days When I Love My Job

This last slog toward a finished thesis and a finished bachelor’s degree is proving much more arduous than I expected. Despite what a cushy life I lead, this year has not always been so happy, especially this winter. Sometimes it’s made me strongly doubt whether I really can sentence myself to a life sentence of reading and writing and be content with that.

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

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

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

ἀρετή and Apology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

QOTD (2012-02-07); or, This Day in History

Symonds to Whitman, 140 years ago today:

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

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

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

Thesis Day: 55 days and counting down!

QOTD (2012-02-03)

E.M. Forster, “The Menace to Freedom,” 1935:

How the globe would get on, if entirely peopled with individuals, is impossible to foresee. However, Man has another wish, besides the wish to be free, and that is the wish to love, and perhaps somethingmay be born from the union of the two. Love sometimes leads to an obedience which is not servile—the obedience referred to in the Christian epigram above quoted. Love, after a dreadful period of inflation, is perhaps coming back to its proper level and may steady civilization; up-to-date social workers believe in it. It is difficult not to get mushy as soon as one mentions love, but it is a tendency that must be reckoned with, and it takes as many forms as fear. The desire to devote oneself to another person or persons seems to be as innate as the desire for personal liberty. If the two desires could combine, the menace to freedom from within, the fundamental menace, might disappear, and the political evils now filling all the foreground of our lives would be deprived of the poison which nourishes them. They will not wilt in our time, we can hope for no immediate relief. But it is a good thing, once in a way, to speculate on the remoter future. It is a good thing, when freedom is discussed, not always to be wondering what ought to be done about Hitler, or whether the decisions of the Milk Marketing Board are unduly arbitrary. There is the Beloved Republic to dream about and to work for through our dreams; the better polity which once seemed to be approaching on greased wheels; the City of God.

Some Brief Thoughts on Love

Between writing the chapter of my thesis on Symonds’ late work, and getting really seriously into E.M. Forster’s novels and essays, and having loads of conversations with my friends who are budding philosophers and psychoanalysts about the meaning of desire and love, I have been thinking a lot about the philosophy and ontology of love, and a lot about the space between loving a person and loving people, and a lot about the space between thinking about love and doing love. I was reminded that love can sometimes be very political—something that, these days, I often forget, despite my thesis topic—when I read a NYT column in which Frank Bruni criticized (as we have done here so many times) the “Born This Way” attitude to gay identity.

Bruni’s column begins with the story of the actress Cynthia Nixon, who has recently caused a storm of controversy by calling her “gayness”—in the form of her decision to, after years of partnership with a man, start a family with a woman—”a choice.” Bruni holds that, rather than thinking that Nixon has hurt the LGBT cause by declining to repeat the “being gay is not a choice” mantra, we ought to see things rather differently:

But while her critics have good reason to worry about how her words will be construed and used, they have no right to demand the kind of silence and conformity from Nixon that gay people have justly rebelled against. She’s entitled to her own truth and manner of expressing it.

Besides which, there are problems with some gay advocates’ insistence that homosexuality be discussed and regarded as something ingrained at the first breath.

By hinging a whole movement on a conclusion that hasn’t been — and perhaps won’t be — scientifically pinpointed and proved beyond all doubt, they hitch it to a moving target. The exact dynamics through which someone winds up gay are “still an open question,” said Clinton Anderson, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns Office of the American Psychological Association. “There is substantial evidence of various connections between genes, brain, hormones and sexual identity,” he said. “But those do not amount to a simple picture that A leads to B.”

Bruni goes on to point out that we shouldn’t need to argue that homosexuality is something with which we’re born to argue that it should fall under the rubric of civil liberties. As should come as no surprise, this is nothing new. As I’ve been writing about this week, Symonds knew that trying to probe the medical and psychological reasons why we are the way we are, why we desire what and whom we desire, can be one route to understanding ourselves. That’s why he read widely in the field of sexual science (though wound up dismissing as ill-founded or illogical most of its findings), was interested in the developing field of the study of human consciousness, and collaborated with a doctor, Havelock Ellis, on an academic book about “sexual inversion” that was intended to be equal parts cultural-historical and medical. (Symonds died before the manuscript was completed, and Ellis’ subsequent work shifted it heavily towards the medical side.)

But although Symonds tried to understand sexual science, I don’t think he ever wound up thinking that it had helped him to understand what it is like to love, and especially to love outside the patterns for which one’s particular society has words and rules. Some of the first questions that Symonds asked about desire and love, when he was a teenager, were about how to keep from being controlled by one’s desires, how to translate desire into something good and noble, how to better oneself through loving and being loved. The literature that Symonds used to answer questions like these was catholic, but it was overwhelmingly literary: Plato, Dante, Walt Whitman, and many others. And after a couple years of work on sexual science, he came back to the canon—the last book he ever wrote was a study of Whitman’s poetry.

I think this is because Symonds was above all a humanist, and an ethicist. Though he was curious about how many people in his culture were, like him, homosexual, and about how they got that way, he knew that wouldn’t help him to answer the questions he believed to be most fundamentally human. Knowing definitively whether our desires were determined by our genes or moulded in early childhood or culturally constructed or something we can shape through conscious effort or something else entirely does not help us to understand how to get on in the world once desire and love—for anyone, anything—are things that are part of our life experiences. Having a word like “gay” or “straight” to call ourselves doesn’t really help us to know when it is right to reach out and touch the object of our desires, and when to let well enough alone. Knowing when in our lives we first began to feel the stirrings of desire—and knowing that that slight nausea and tightness in the stomach and quickening of the heart is “desire”—doesn’t help us to translate what we want of others into our willingness to give ourselves to them. And being political about the right to marriage, as noble a cause as that may be, doesn’t help us to be married, or even more generally “companioned” or “partnered”—doesn’t help us to turn our bodily wants into the kind of connection that not only assuages loneliness but leads the soul to sprout wings and take flight.

At the end of his article, Bruni coins a phrase that’s wonderfully admitting of nuance, “moved to love”:

I use the words “moved to love” in an effort to define the significant, important territory between “born this way” and choice. That solid ground covers “built this way,” “oriented this way,” and “evolved this way”; it incorporates the possibility of a potent biological predisposition mingling with other factors beyond anyone’s ready control; and it probably applies to Nixon herself.

We love in the most unpredictable ways. Sometimes we find ourselves loving in ways that our society clearly doesn’t admit, and we write books and wage campaigns to have our love declared an equal inalienable right. But sometimes we merely find ourselves loving in ways that are a little different, or unexpected: the best friends who, without ever having sex, give all of themselves to each other, reminding those of us who study the homoerotic literary tradition that Adhesiveness and “the love of comrades” have always been more than an identity politics; the woman who finds that the shifting genders of her lovers, long past the accepted period of “experimentation,” defies the easy application of a label of sexual orientation; the woman in her early twenties who feels at the same time as if she could be fifteen or thirty-five, and who against all her expectations finds herself on the eve of her last undergraduate term feeling a desire for connection that she never dreamed she’d feel, and who turns to men who write about impossible love for other people in other times and places to explain it.

These are understandings of the muddles and fallibilities of love and the humans who are moved to it that transcend any kind of identity politics or label or taxonomic, empirical explanation. As Symonds knew 120 years ago, human feeling is a many-splendored thing that must be understood as such, not crammed into any kind of rubric. Our only duty is to ensure that this powerful force is to be used responsibly and well, purposed to the highest good of making the world better and brighter, and that the communities we build allow for this to be a central and noble endeavor.