Bettering, Adulthood, and Being Almost 22; or, Four Years is a Long Time

It is January and there is snow on the ground and the spring term does not start for another two weeks, which means that I have a lie-in every morning and the days all bleed hazily into each other. This Sunday morning I dragged myself grumpily out of bed at half ten, and stumbled through coffee and the internet; by noon I was eating a bagel in hall and frantically re-reading Symonds’ 1891 essay A Problem in Modern Ethics. Then I went to the library and spent the next five hours arguing in eight pages that Modern Ethics is a humanist critique of late-nineteenth-century Continental sexual science and cursing the monster that is my thesis, until the clock mercifully struck 6.15 and I could go to my co-op and have dinner and an hour and a half’s social time. Back to the library, then to chapel for the weekly hour where I try to exhort myself to be a better person, then home to watch TV and—the event that prompted this post—draft my first entry on the Princeton admissions office’s blog for this year’s admitted students.

Writing my post tonight, I was reminded of a time a little less than four years ago, when the world was only as large as a (admittedly sprawling) suburb in the wilds of southern California, and I sat at my desk in my second-floor bedroom that looked out over the street where the children of the parents with the “Yes on Prop 8” signs in their yards played. That was the time when I was alternately astonished that I’d gotten into Princeton and certain they’d only wanted me because my mother had graduated thirty years before. But that was also the time when I read the amazing Andy Chen‘s posts on the admitted students’ website, and I was struck so much by his understated prose style and controlled yet profoundly moving vulnerability as a writer that I wrote to him, and he wrote me back, and I began to think that, legacy anxieties aside, I would have to be stupid not to accept the gift of the next four years that I’d been given. I sent in my acceptance, and I turned the University of Chicago down.

We all know what happened next. I got through intermittent mild depression and anxiety, I made life-changing friendships, I learned how to love what I study and to study what I love, I rediscovered the thirst for knowledge and the boundless imagination that had governed my life before the hard road of adolescence ground them to dust. I sat in my future thesis advisor’s office in October of my junior year, talking about my midterm paper for his methods seminar, and suddenly I didn’t hate myself. I went to Oxford and I fell in love with the home of lost causes, fell deeply enough in love that, now that I’m going back next year, it seems impossible that I should ever do anything else. I learned to love the quests for beauty and for wisdom, and slowly I learned to start to value myself as a writer and a historian, a teacher, a friend. I started to learn that to be a whole person, I need to try to connect with others, and that if I expect them to give any of themselves to me, I need to screw my courage to the sticking-point and give all of myself that I can to them. I learned to see God—or, well, what I call God, which I suspect is not very much at all like what my religious friends call God—in moments of intellectual clarity, emotional vulnerability, and intense interpersonal connection that seem miraculous in their soul-soaring glow.

Well, that is all very well, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden. It is easy to get carried away, when one thinks one has Found Spirituality, and to forget that one is tethered to the ground and one’s work is here on Earth and there isn’t anything else, anyway. That’s what I’m trying hard to remember, now, in the dark January days spend in a library basement in which I spend so much time wishing I were anywhere but here. It’s easy to forget that Princeton got me to such mental heights, and it’s easy to want to run away. Before Oxford, I was never bored, here. Depressed and lonely and insecure, yes, but never bored. The discovery of romance as part of human experience bestows upon one a pair of rose-colored spectacles, and so it’s quite understandable that this January should seem, with the spectacles removed, exceptionally gray. It’s tough to remember that this is really how the world looks, and that if we are to make our lives within it we must learn to cherish the gray alongside the rose.

And so that’s why I was so happy to write my first blog post tonight. I wrote a letter to thousands of eighteen-year-olds I’ve never met and I told them how honored I was to be able to tell them what Andy Chen told me, more or less. Four years later, the way I remember Andy’s message is that even those who have struggled the very most with lives of not-belonging can find a Princeton for themselves—even if it’s a Princeton on the margins of campus, as far as it’s possible to be from the eating clubs. I wished that for my new correspondents, and told them I couldn’t wait to tell them more about my thesis and my college and my co-op and the importance of unstructured social time and how although I’m not a “campus radical” anymore, I’m proud of the work I did as one. And then I put my computer down on the sofa and drank the last sip of my tea and tuned back in to Thomas Tallis, who was on the radio, and closed my eyes in thanks. Because, after all, Princeton changed my life: the adult who will receive a degree in June is not only four years older; she’s not the same person as the eighteen-year-old who had no idea what those four years would hold. We all get better, every day, but it can take four years’ hindsight to realize just how much.

And now I just have to get through this last semester. And I have to do whatever it takes to ensure that I finish my thesis, that I don’t forget to value every aspect of my life here and the people in it, and that I remember that every day I wake up is a chance to be better.

QOTD (2012-01-21)

There is something awfully emotionally compelling about late-Victorian agnosticism. Symonds, “The Limits of Knowledge,” in Essays Speculative and Suggestive, 1890:

Nothing is known by human beings which is not in the consciousness of collective or individual humanity—in the mind of the race or of the person.

What this means is, that man cannot get outside himself, cannot leap off his own shadow, cannot obtain a conception of the universe except as a mode of his own consciousness. He is man, and must accept the universe as apprehended by his manhood.

It does not therefore follow that what man knows is the universe. It does not follow that man’s sense and thought create the outer world. It does not even follow that the laws of human consciousness are the laws of Being. The utmost we are justified in saying is, that man forms an integral part of the world, and that his consciousness is consequently a substantial portion of the whole.

All that Philosophy can do is to analyse the mass of human thoughts and feelings, to ascertain the limits within which we apprehend the world, and to show the direction in which our faculties may be applied. Philosophy must abandon ontological explanations of the universe. These have invariably proved their own futility, being successively left behind and superseded in the progress of relative science, by which is meant the development of human thought and knowledge about the world.

The science of God and the science of Being, Theology and Ontology, have no foundation except in the subjectivity of man. Both are seen to involve impertinences, naïvetés, solemn self-complacences, the egotism of Narcissus doting on his own perfections mirrored in the darkness of the river of the universe.

This does not preclude a sincere belief in man’s power to obtain partial knowledge of the world. Such knowledge, so far as it goes, rests on a firm basis; for man is, ex hypothesi, an integer in the universe, and his consciousness accordingly represents a factor of the universal order. The mistake of theology and of ontology is to transfer this partial knowledge to the account of the whole. These self-styled science are only doing what polytheism and mythology did. They are attempting to account for the whole by the experience of a part of it, which experience varies according to the stages of the growth of the creature we call man.

[…]

Man has the right to use time-honoured language, and to designate his apprehension of the unity in Nature by that venerable title, God. He is only doing now what all the men from whom he is descended did before him. Mumbo Jumbo, Indra, Shiva, Jahve, Zeus, Odin, Balder, Christ, Allah–what are these but names for the Inscrutable, adapted to the modes of thought which gave them currency? God is the same, and His years do not change. It is only our way of presenting the unknown to human imagination which varies.

We are at liberty to leave God out of our account, and to maintain that we can do without that hypothesis. But how shall we then stand? We must remain face to face with the infinite organism of the universe, which, albeit we can never know it in itself, is always being presented to our limited intelligence as more completely and organically one. The mystery flies before us, and will ever fly. The more we say we know, and the more we really know, the less we can afford to omit the elements of unsearchableness and awe-inspiring unity which have produced religions.

In these circumstances we are led back to the primitive conditions of human thought .We still much acknowledge a power from which we spring, which includes all things, which is the real reality of all we partly grasp by knowledge. Evade it as we will, we are driven to the conclusion, at which the earliest men arrived, that human intelligence alone is insufficient to account for the universe, and that there is a Something beyond, with which man is indissolubly connected, and which has to be approached in the spirit of devotion. This Something, now as then, compels reverence and inspires awe. We may call it God or not as we think fit. Meanwhile it subsists–the one paramount fact, in comparison with which all other facts are unimportant. It is variously envisaged by successive generations, according to the tenor of their sensibilities and the nature of their speculaiton. Was there ever, or is there now, any other God but this?

The augmentation of knowledge only increases our sense of the reality and inscrutability of Being. Science and Agnosticism are therefore paths whereby we are brought back to religion under forms adapted to present conceptions of the world we live in, and of which we are a part.

QOTD (2012-01-14)

Auden, “September 1, 1939”:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Why I Write: An Introduction

as read aloud to the 2D Co-op, 12 January 2011

I wrote my first book in the summer of 1994. I was four. It was before my mother had a computer at home, and we sat together in her study in the basement of our house in Atlanta, in front of the electric typewriter on which she’d written her dissertation. I dictated; she touch-typed. The book is called “Emily’s Book.” It has four chapters: about the human body, the solar system, tap-dancing, and the movie Aladdin. It is bound in blue cardboard, with a hand-illustrated cover. It includes such priceless gems as “It is great to have a body. I like everyone’s body,” and “The Milky Way is a vast group of stars. I don’t know so much about stars.” I wrote about what was important in my four-year-old world. I wrote about what I thought and felt. I constructed a self I could publish to the world, one who wanted to be a doctor or an astronomer, who liked “A Whole New World” but not the Cave of Wonders, and who, by virtue of omission, didn’t come home from school every day in tears.

All my life, I have written stories about myself. When I was a child, they were often false, either unconscious lies—like the time that I convinced my first-grade classmates as well as myself that I was born in Scotland—or old-fashioned fiction, like when I wrote myself into the leading role of school stories that turned classrooms that were sites of trauma into places of camaraderie and adventure. In my efforts of self-fashioning, I became a pirate, a musketeer, a posh public-school boy out of some mid-twentieth-century British novel that I was probably too young to read.

When I was a teenager, I finally got the picture that trying to be those things didn’t make me cool and glamorous. It just made me—as I was known in seventh grade—”the smart girl who wears the weird clothes.” It got me intellectual authority, but it didn’t get me friendships, or relationships. Maybe that’s why, in high school, I started to interrogate who I really am, and what I have to give to the real world. Instead of writing about “swords, ships, and Scotland”—for so I named my “obsessions” when I was twelve—I wrote about what it was like to be the sole conscientious objector in a knights-and-armor-themed summer camp, about how I felt when my high-school boyfriend would say to me, “You’re such a guy!” and about how much the poetry of Allen Ginsberg meant to me.

These became my college application essays, and what primarily seemed significant about them was that they were the only thing that I could point to that justified my acceptance to Princeton—which, for a few years, I was extremely preoccupied with justifying. The road to ending that preoccupation began, in fact, in the spring of my freshman year, when I started a blog. I still write that blog, and I know some of you read it. I do two things on my blog, and have since the beginning of freshman spring: I post quotes from my reading that speak to me, and sometimes brief responses to them; and I post longer personal essays about my thoughts, desires, and aspirations that help me to envision myself as an academic in control of my life. This year, for instance, I’ve written about my experiences studying at Oxford and then doing thesis research in England in the summer; about my increasingly complicated relationship to LGBT identities and politics; about spirituality; about the books I love and why I love them; and of course (quelle surprise!) about John Addington Symonds.

I promised my mother I would make this particular essay be as little about Symonds as possible, but I think I’m going to have to mention him. You see, in thinking about the craft of self-fashioning and life-story-writing, I’ve gotten a bit closer to understanding what it is that draws me to Symonds and the other men “of the Greek persuasion” I study. There’s a thin but very powerful strand running through modern intellectual and literary history that I like to call “the homoerotic literary tradition.” It involves well-to-do, highly educated men in Europe and North America who discover that there is something fundamentally different about how they connect with other people: not by desiring a school classmate or having paying sex with a soldier, but by reading about desire and love. They use their reading—of Plato and other Greeks, of Walt Whitman, of Michelangelo and maybe Shakespeare—and their knowledge of the lives and life-works of people whom we now consider part of the gay canon, like Oscar Wilde or Christopher Isherwood—to make sense of who they are and what they want. What brings me back to Symonds is that he, like many other, later men, wrote his own life story in the form of a long manuscript of his memoirs, and moreover that he wrote it as a narrative of self-discovery through the lens of reading and writing first, and life experiences second. It was 1889, though, and like E.M. Forster’s 1914 homosexual novel Maurice, Symonds’ Memoirs couldn’t be published until long after his death.

Maurice is about as fictionalized as Symonds’ Memoirs are true, which is to say not entirely. Both, in effect, are ways of advancing an idea of who a homosexual man is and what it’s like inside his head. Because Symonds and Forster both saw themselves—to a certain extent—as homosexual men, the Memoirs and Maurice are both ways of saying, “Here is my message to the world about what I feel and desire and about how to understand people like me.”

People often ask me why I study literary gay men, and it’s a question I find very difficult to answer. As I’ve grown up, I’ve ceased to ally myself with identity politics based in nonnormative sexual identity, and yet my attachment to what people like Symonds and Forster do as readers and writers has grown stronger than ever. So I don’t just do this to be a liberationist, to “uncover the gay past.” Of course, there’s the fairly obvious point that my study of sex and sexuality stems from the sublimation of my repressed sexual desires. Now, that may explain why when I was a teenager I’d read all of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s seminal sexological text Psychopathia Sexualis before I’d ever seen so much as a frame of pornography. But at the risk of disappointing the Freudians among you, I don’t think repression is the whole story about the homoerotic literary tradition and me. Both the identity politics and the repression theories risk reducing the HLT to sex, and to a fairly specific set of sex acts and sexual identities at that. I’ve realized recently that a literary tradition that proposes to think seriously, and beautifully, about who we are and what we want has a broad ability to move people coming from all kinds of different places with respect to loving and connecting.

One of the reasons I realized this is that over the winter break, I read Forster’s novel Howards End. The way I read it, the book is about how we fall in love, and the kinds of connections (that’s his word) that we form: family-love, sex-love, friendship-love, and even place-love. Forster shows us all these kinds of connections in all their complexities. Not every attempted connection comes to an entirely happy ending. There is tragedy in Howards End. And there is quotidian compromise and unfulfillment, which is in some ways far worse. Yet, Forster gives us to understand, we are far, far better off for having made connections at all, regardless of their eventual outcome. He voices this thought in the words of one of the novel’s protagonists, at its conclusion:

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…. And others—others go further 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 gray.

The notes in the Penguin edition of Howards End say, “with the hindsight given by Maurice, it is hard to help seeing [this] speech as a concealed plea for charity towards homosexuals.” But I don’t read it like that at all. I do think that it matters that Forster was preoccupied throughout his life with understanding his own sexual identity, and I certainly think that he wrote with care and emotion about being a homosexual man who started to understand himself through books and only then moved on to life experiences. I also think that it matters that there were things in 1910 that Forster couldn’t say in print, because there are things that we all—however confessional our styles—are scared to tell the world.

But what makes Forster one of my favorite writers is that the bit I just quoted comes out of the mouth of Margaret Schlegel: a woman, who marries a man, and altogether is a very different person who makes very different romantic choices to those that Forster himself made. I find it extraordinary that out of writing about one life—which he did prolifically, in fiction but also in a series of famous diaries and journals—Forster came to write about all our lives, about the imperative that we all “Only connect!”

It’s a tall order comparing oneself to Forster. But I write essays these days because I, too, hope that out of my one life someone else who reads or listens to what I have to say will take something of value. And I also write essays for the same reasons that I wrote a book when I was four. That I care so much about all the wonderful things in the world that I can’t keep my words to myself; and also that I am still trying to find ways of explaining myself and my peculiarities. I am given to understand that such voyages of self-discovery last a lifetime: Symonds wrote his Memoirs four years before he died, and even then—an attentive historian will note!—they are far from accurate or comprehensive. But I also believe that I owe it to myself, to Symonds, to Forster, and to all who have ever found themselves through reading and writing, to keep sailing: onwards, and upwards, and better.

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.

QOTD (2011-12-16)

Henry James wrote “The Author of Beltraffio,” about an “aesthetic” writer and his wife and child, after Edmund Gosse told him about the strange and rather ambivalent relationship Gosse’s friend J.A. Symonds had with his (Symonds’) wife. James only ever met Symonds once, briefly (though after Symonds’ death James regretted never having got to know him); what is incredible is that, only on Gosse’s hearsay, James constructed this knowing portrait of Symonds’ intellect and work:

On that high head of the passion for form—the attempt at perfection, the quest for which was to his mind the real search for the holy grail—he said the most interesting, the most inspiring things. He mixed with them a thousand illustrations from his own life, from other lives he had known, from history and fiction, and above all from the annals of the time that was dear to him beyond all periods, the Italian cinquecento. It came to me thus that in his books he had uttered but half his thought, and that what he had kept back—from motives I deplored when I made them out later—was the finer, and braver part. It was his fate to make a great many still more ‘prepared’ people than me not inconsiderably wince; but there was no grain of bravado in his ripest things (I’ve always maintained it, though often contradicted), and at bottom the poor fellow, disinterested to his finger-tips and regarding imperfection not only as an aesthetic but quite also as a social crime, had an extreme dread of scandal. There are critics who regret that having gone so far he didn’t go further; but I regret nothing—putting aside two or three of the motives I just mentioned—since he arrived at a noble rarity and I don’t see how you can go beyond that.

QOTD (2011-12-09)

E.H. Gombrich, “In Search of Cultural History.” From 1969, but more relevant than ever today:

Our own past is moving away from us at frightening speed, and if we want to keep open the lines of communication which permit us to understand the greatest creations of mankind we must study and teach the history of culture more deeply and more intensely than was necessary a generation ago, when many more of such resonances were still to be expected as a matter of course. If cultural history did not exist, it would have to be invented now.

[…]

I know that sermons against specialization are two a penny and that they are unlikely to make an impression on those who know how hard it is even to master a small field of research. But I should like to urge here the essential difference, in this respect, between the role of research in the sciences and in the humanities. The scientist, if I understand the situation, must always work on the frontiers of knowledge. He must therefore select a small sector in which hypotheses can be tested and revised by means of experiments which may be costly and time-consuming. He, too, no doubt, should be able to survey a larger field, and be well-read in the neighbouring disciplines, but what he is ultimately valued for is his discoveries rather than his knowledge. It is different, I contend, with the humanist. Humanistic education aims first and foremost at knowledge, that knowledge that used to be called ‘culture’. In the past this culture was largely transmitted and absorbed in the home or on travels. The universities did not concern themselves with such subjects as history or literature, art or music. Their aim was mainly vocational, and even a training in the Classics, though valued by society, had its vocational reasons. Nobody thought that it was the purpose of a university education to tell students about Shakespeare or Dickens, Michelangelo or Bach. These were things the ‘cultured’ person knew. They were neither fit objects for examinations nor for research. I happen to have some sympathy for this old-fashioned approach, for I think that the humanist really differs from the scientist in his relative valuation of knowledge or research. It is more relevant to know Shakespeare, or Michelangelo than to ‘do research’ about them. Research may yield nothing fresh, but knowledge yields pleasure and enrichment. It seems a thousand pities that our universities are so organized that this difference is not acknowledged. Much of the malaise of the humanities might disappear overnight if it became clear that they need not ape the sciences in order to remain respectable. There may be a science of culture, but this belongs to anthropology and sociology. The cultural historian wants to be scholar, not a scientist. He wants to give his students and his readers access to the creations of other minds; research, here, is incidental. Not that it is never necessary. We may suspect current interpretations of Shakespeare or the way Bach is performed and want to get at the truth of the matter. But in all this research the cultural historian really aims at serving culture rather than at feeding the academic industry.

This industry, I fear, threatens to become an enemy of culture and of cultural history…. But who, today, still feels this reproach? In our world it is the phrase ‘a cloistered scholar’ that reverberates with reproach. The cultural historian draws his salary from the taxpayer and should serve him as best he can.

I hope I have made it clear in what his service can consist. For good or ill the universities have taken over from the home much of the function of transmitting the values of our civilization. We cannot expect them to get more thanks for this from some of the students than the parental home sometimes got in the past. We surely want these values to be probed and scrutinized, but to do so effectively their critics must know them. Hence I do not see why we should feel apologetic towards those who urge us to concern ourselves with the present rather than with the past.

QOTD (2011-12-02); or, Advent

The following, by E.B. White, was the highlight of the Princeton Glee Club’s secular lessons and carols tonight (I mean, other than the delightful singing):

From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions in many places. Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who can’t eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time. Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities! Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes don’t fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists! Greetings to wives who can’t find their glasses and to poets who can’t find their rhymes! Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight. Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word “How” (as though they knew!). Greetings to people with a ringing in their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep, and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths! Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to people who can’t stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too, the boarders in boarding hoses on 25 December, the duennas in Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got nothing in the mail. Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; merry Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction! Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think–plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners whose conduct is unworthy of their car! Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; joy to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers to soldiers and guardsmen on land and sea and in the air–the young men doing the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such, Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the Secretaries-designate, the President-elect; Merry Christmas to our new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management! Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas to all who think they are in love but aren’t sure! Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers who can’t think of a moral, gagmen who can’t think of a joke. Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon! And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters! Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!

The fairy lights are up in my room, Handel’s Messiah is on the radio, and I’m making mulled wine for a party tomorrow night! Whatever we may have to object to in the Christian liturgical calendar, hurrah for it giving countries with Christian cultures a time when it is perfectly acceptable to be happy all the time, whatever the Puritan work ethic and the capitalist speed-up may say to the contrary!

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.

QOTD (2011-11-12)

Voltaire, Candide (English translation my own):

Toute la petite société entra dans ce louable dessein ; chacun se mit à exercer ses talents. La petite terre rapporta beaucoup. Cunégonde était, à la vérité, bien laide ; mais elle devint une excellente pâtissière ; Paquette broda ; la vieille eut soin du linge. Il n’y eut pas jusqu’à frère Giroflée qui ne rendit service ; il fut un très bon menuisier, et même devint honnête homme ; et Pangloss disait quelquefois à Candide : « Tous les événements sont enchaînés dans le meilleur des mondes possibles : car enfin si vous n’aviez pas été chassé d’un beau château à grands coups de pied dans le derrière pour l’amour de mademoiselle Cunégonde, si vous n’aviez pas été mis à l’Inquisition, si vous n’aviez pas couru l’Amerique à pied, si vous n’aviez pas donné un bon coup d’épée au baron, si vous n’aviez pas perdu tous vos moutons du bon pays d’Eldorado, vous ne mangeriez pas ici des cédrats confits et des pistaches. — Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. »

The entire little society took part in this laudable plan; each set himself to exercise his talents. The little piece of land returned a great deal. Cunegonde was, in truth, quite ugly; but she became an excellent baker; Paquette embroidered; the old woman took care of the linen. Not even Brother Giroflee refused to help; he was a very good carpenter, and also became an honest man; and Pangloss said sometimes to Candide: “All events are connected in the best of all possible worlds: for in the end if you had not been chased from a beautiful chateau with a great kick in the ass for the love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been put to the Inquisition, if you had not crossed America on foot, if you had not stabbed the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the good country of Eldorado, you would not be here, eating candied citrons and pistachios.”
“This is well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our own garden.”