QOTD (2011-11-04)

Some of the most exciting moments in one’s education are when one finds oneself circling round, reading primary texts one has been hearing or reading about for quite a long time, but that one could never have understood without the tools one has gained since. Pater, Plato and Platonism:

The treatise, as the proper instrument of dogma—the Ethics of Aristotle, the Ethics of Spinoza—begins with a truth, or with a clear conviction of truth, in the axiom or definition, which it does but propose further to explain and apply.—The treatise, as the instrument of a dogmatic philosophy begins with an axiom or definition: the essay or dialogue, on the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does not necessarily so much as conclude in one; like that long dialogue with oneself, that dialectic process, which may be co-extensive with life. It does in truth little more than clear the ground, as we say, or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one may have a fair chance of knowing, or seeing, perhaps: it does but put one into a duly receptive attitude towards such possible truth, discovery, or revelation, as may one day occupy the ground, the tablet,—shed itself on the purified air; it does not provide a proposition, nor a system of propositions, but forms a temper.

What Plato presents to his readers is, then, again, a paradox, or a reconciliation of opposed tendencies: on one side, the largest possible demand for infallible certainty in knowledge (it was he fixed that ideal of absolute truth, to which, vainly perhaps, the human mind, as such, aspires) yet, on the other side, the utmost possible inexactness, or contingency, in the method by which actually he proposes to attain it. It has been said that the humour of Socrates, of which the famous Socratic irony—the pretence to have a bad memory, to dislike or distrust long and formal discourse, to have taught nothing, to be but a mid-wife in relation to other people’s thoughts—was an element, is more than a mere personal trait; that it was welcome as affording a means of escape from the full responsibilities of his teaching. It belonged, in truth, to the tentative character of dialectic, of question and answer as the method of discovery, of teaching and learning, to the position, in a word, of the philosophic essayist.

[…]

If Platonism from age ot age has meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of “being,” or the nearest attainable approach to our substitution for that; for others, Platonism has been in fact only another name for scepticism, in a recognisable philosophic tradition. Thus, in the Middle Age, it qualifies in the Sic et Non the confident scholasticism of Abelard. It is like the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates himself again, in those endless conversations of Montaigne—that typical sceptic of the age of the Renaissance—conversations with himself, with the living, with the dead through their writings, which his Essays do but reflect. Typical Platonist or sceptic, he is therefore also the typical essayist. And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does but commence the modern world, which, side by side with its metaphysical reassertions, from Descartes to Hegel, side by side also with a constant accumulation of the sort of certainty which is afforded by empirical science, has had assuredly, to check wholesomely the pretensions of one and of the other alike, its doubts.—”Their name is legion,” says a modern writer. Reverent and irreverent, reasonable and unreasonable, manly and unmanly, morbid and healthy, guilty and honest, wilful, inevitable—they have been called, indifferently, in an age which thirsts for intellectual security, but cannot make up its mind. Que sais-je? it cries, in the words of Montaigne; but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socrates, with whom such dubitation had been nothing less than a religious duty or service.

Sanguine about any form of absolute knowledge, of eternal, or indefectible, or immutable truth, with our modern temperament as it is, we shall hardly become, even under the direction of Plato, and by the reading of the Platonic Dialogues. But if we are little likely to realise in his school, the promise of “ontological” science, of a “doctrine of Being,” or any increase in our consciousness of metaphysical security, are likely, rather, to acquire there that other sort of Platonism, a habit, namely, of tentative thinking and suspended judgment, if we are not likely to enjoy the vision of his “eternal and immutable ideas,” Plato may yet promote in us what we call “ideals”—the aspiration towards a more perfect Justice, a more perfect beauty, physical and intellectual, a more perfect condition of human affairs, than any one has ever yet seen; that κόσμος in which things are only as they are thought by a perfect mind, to which experience is constantly approximating us, but which it does not provide. There they stand, the two great landmarks of the intellectual or spiritual life as Plato conceived it: the ideal, the world of “ideas,” “the great perhaps,” for which it is his merit so effectively to have opened room in the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all, through our affinities of nature with it, which, however, in our dealings with ourselves and others we may assume to be objective or real:—and then, over against our imperfect realisation of that ideal, in ourselves, in nature and history, amid the personal caprices (it might almost seem) of its discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate attitude on our part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts. Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.

QOTD (2011-10-30); or, On What Matters

Professor Stefan Collini, concluding his remarks at Cambridge on “The Very Idea of the University,” 11 October 2011:

We all in our way have an obligation to try to hand on to our successors an institution that has managed, through difficult times, to keep alive and embody what is most precious in this particular idea of the university. Organised scepticism is one of its animating principles: that questioning of all claims to truth, no matter how familiar or well-established, and no matter how elevated the academic or political authority who makes them….

As I hope every student who passes through this university comes to realise, the house of intellect is in one sense necessarily a democracy. Yes, of course we have our rituals and our hierarchies, but in the end, across a supervision room or seminar table or lab bench or wherever, the powers that ultimately govern our doings are the better arguments and the better evidence, and it doesn’t matter who puts them forward.

So whatever decisions we make in the present about our funding or our institutional structures or our forms of teaching or assessment, or the hundreds of other practical things we have to decide about, I think we have no choice but to be committed to handing on to our successors an institution which is still able across the whole field of human activity to challenge the current state of understanding, and which is always free to suggest that there are other places to start and other things worth understanding. And keeping that spirit of inquiry alive—really alive, not just paying lip service to it when we put all those lifeless abstract nouns into those life-destryoing report forms, but keeping that spirit of inquiry alive—is what all of us, in this room and in this university and in other universities, have to regard as our priority.

I should make clear that this does not seem to me a comfortable or easy position. In fact, it’s a very radical notion in its way, because it says that we’re committed to this kind of freedom of inquiry come what may. And what may come are not just government directives or external decisions that we may regard as misguided and even damaging, but—an even truer test of our mettle—what may come includes those moral and political values to which we, as ethical agents and responsible citizens, feel a strong commitment: values which these days often take the form of, for example, ensuring for others a genuine respect and equality of treatment and improvement of life chances, and so on. Those are all hugely important things, but they’re not, I submit, primary and distinctive responsibilities of universities, and at times they may even conflict with the prime task of extending understanding. This is not the least of the ways in which the very idea of the university is such an outrageous one.

If we are only trustees for our generation of the peculiar cultural achievement that is the university, then those of us whose lives have been shaped by the immeasurable privilege of studying and teaching in a university are not entitled to give up on the attempt to make the case for its best purposes and to make that case tell in the public domain, however discouraging the immediate circumstances. We owe it to those who preserved and enriched the traditions of inquiry which we have inherited, and we owe it too to the generations yet unborn who should not be denied the precious opportunity to wander through the galleries of the human mind with no more fixed purpose than a curiosity to understand how such mangifience came to be and how it can be renewed and extended. A sense of our place in this longer history chastises the petty vanities and foolish crotchets of the present, but it can be inspiring; and we reflect that, even in circumstances that may have looked to them as little propitious as ours do sometimes to us, no previous generation entirely surrendered this ideal of the university to those ontological fantasists who think they represent the ‘real world’. I deliberately choose there that rhetorical excess, because, as Newman well knew, such verbal serpents can be the carrier—even though it can in no straightforward propositional sense be the statement—of the mind’s drive for fuller and deeper comprehension, a drive which it is the function of universities to allow to pursue its endless quest without being subject to the requirement to produce some measurable practical outcome in the present.

Please do not abandon this idea of the university, however debased you may think any manifestation of it has temporarily come to be. Tending to this idea may remind us, amid distracting circumstances, that we are indeed merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create and which it is not ours to destroy.

All twenty-one years of my life in universities, I have had the sense that I belong to something much larger than myself, much larger than my family and all the people my family knows, much larger than my friends and my colleagues and my professors and all the people my friends and colleagues and professors have ever known. This is why I’ve not left yet and could never imagine leaving: these institutions together stand for something palpable and valuable in the web of things that make us human and alive and worth wondering at.

I recommend that you follow the link above and listen to the whole of Prof. Collini’s talk, only whose last five or so minutes I have transcribed here. In fifty-one captivating minutes, he makes an eloquent and at times even fist-pumping attempt to carve out a cultural space for the university past and present that runs counter to, and at times even directly critiques, the dominant cultural rhetoric of output, productivity, and other economic terms that we today suppose universities are generally good for boosting. He points out that in the so-called “real world” that universities are claimed not to be sufficiently accountable to, people don’t just work as mindless automatons the way the language of business and industry might suggest. Rather, they wonder and wander and love and question their purpose in life, and they often actively seek out the ideas that the University (as Platonic form) stores for the sake of those who seek ways of understanding where they fit into the world and how the world fits into them.

But if there is anything that is lacking in this sermon (for so he self-mockingly calls it) by one of my all-time heroes where the cause of defending the idea of the university is concerned, it is that he presents the university as a rather static institution: withstanding the vagaries of time, of trends, of economic systems, and tended by custodians who seek to keep it true to its founding principles. To an extent, this is indeed what is so marvelous about the university, and believe in it so passionately that I hope to be fortunate enough to grow up to be one of those stewards of human knowledge myself. And to be sure, Collini does impress upon the listener the fact that the university is always moving knowledge, always stretching its boundaries further and testing every intellectual proposition put to it on the most rigorous of grounds.

But—if I may be so presumptuous—what I think he leaves out is the lifesaving grace (if you will; Collini started this off by calling his summing-up a sermon!) that universities may grant those who find human flourishing within their walls. There are reasons he might have done so: it sounds absolutely silly to talk about this, especially if you’re a rather famous, eminent, and brilliant Cambridge don. But I am a 21-year-old undergraduate, and it is my role in life to be silly, so that is precisely what I am going to proceed to do. We caretakers are not guarding all this knowledge for nothing: we are guarding it so that eighteen-year-olds may come to stay for a while and learn that they have best selves, and that their best selves are worth being. Of course, not all eighteen-year-olds discover this in universities. But some—and I can speak only from my own experience—cannot find it anywhere else. These, I find, are the ones most likely to take a life sentence, to become the next caretakers. But even those who do not know for three or four years that they are growing within and beyond themselves may find themselves years later thanking those fustian caretakers for keeping alive something eternal so that it might inside them become quite dynamic indeed.

As I write this, I find that I am sounding to myself rather Platonist and perhaps even rather Hegelian, which is either the product of a day spent writing about the influence of Hegel in Symonds’ early scholarship on Greek literature or a reflection of the reactionary Victorianism that characterizes a great deal of my own critique of political economy these days. Just about eight months ago now, it was reading Arnold and Ruskin (and not, in fact, Marx a year before) that gave me a sense of possibility outside the totalizing rhetoric of capitalism, of industry, of production, value, return, reward, winning, profiting, gaining, optimizing. Of course, as Collini argues, it’s the rational inquiry that universities support that can help us to recognize that we all live according to more discourses than that of political economy after all. But we shouldn’t forget, I think, that when that happens it’s not just that we have a better society right now, or that human understanding is safeguarded, in some abstract way, for the next generation. It’s also that hearts and minds are changed within universities. Speaking as someone who feels myself growing and becoming almost by the day, I know that’s an absolutely extraordinary and beautiful thing.

QOTD (2011-10-28); or, Slow College

From Symonds’ Memoirs:

I took to examining my thoughts and wishes with regard to the mysteries of the universe, God, nature, man. This I did seriously, almost systematically, during more than two years of reading for the Final Schools at Oxford. The studies on which I was engaged, Plato, Aristotle, the history of ancient and modern philosophy, logic, supplied me with continual food for meditation; and in the course of long walks or midnight colloquies, I compared my own eager questionings with those of many sorts of men…. A book called Essays and Reviews attracted extraordinary attention at that time; and a vehement contest about the endowment of Prof. Jowett’s chair was raging between the liberals and conservatives of the university. Theology penetrated our intellectual and social atmosphere. We talked theology at breakfast parties and at wine parties, out riding and walking, in college gardens, on the river, wherever young men and their elders met together.

I wish those who bemoan the loss, particularly in America, of this kind of liberal intellectual education, founded on the virtues of conversation and particularly of dialogue, could have been a fly on the wall of my college room last night. Last night, the night before fall break, is a time for debauched revelry in Princeton, when students attend Halloween parties and celebrate having no school for a week. I sat at home, and then over the course of the evening one, then two and three, then four friends arrived at my door. We sat around the coffee table and opened a bottle of wine and talked—and we talked and we talked, until four in the morning, about free will and the mind-body problem and whether a computer can love. I had an uncanny moment of historical déjà vu—a bit like the one I had once in the Radcliffe Camera, reading Thomas Arnold’s edition of Thucydides just like Oscar Wilde. The other week I wrote the part of my thesis that is about Symonds in 1860, reading Stallbaum’s commentary on the Phaedrus and trying to understand what Plato means when he says that love is a disease. Well into the fourth hour of our own symposium, when I found my friends and I talking about what one feels when one sees the person (or the place, or thing) one loves, I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude and pride that for us, at least, the questions college students ask haven’t changed. University is a special time when you can stay up till four talking philosophy, a time when you can inhabit that academic world that revolves entirely around the virtue of conversation. As far as I am concerned, it is a crime not to avail yourself of that chance. And as far as I am concerned, there is no question that when it comes to spending my senior year well, I’d rather be at symposia than Halloween parties.

Past and Present; or, Sesame Street and Lilies: A Scene of Academic Life

I remember when I was a radical, and when I was an activist. I remember my “welcome to college” moment, in the days before I was a historian, before I discovered Symonds, when I sat up late with some friends and a guitar writing comedic and ultimately nonsensical lyrics about keeping freshmen off the grass to the tune of “This Land is Your Land” because my friends and I had a bright idea about how to make fun of California’s Proposition 8. I remember meeting one of my best friends when we got together to blast “It’s Raining Men” at the headquarters of the so-called National Organization for Marriage across the street from our dining hall. I remember going alone to talk to the Board of Trustees about gender-neutral housing. I remember being attacked for being too masculine-looking in the right-wing press from here to Washington. I remember when I took the early morning bus down to Washington and marched in the streets.

A couple weeks ago I was walking with a friend through a collegiate neo-Gothic arch at dusk, prattling on about virtue ethics, or the evils of political economy, or the value of agrarianism, or maybe that particular neo-Gothic arch, or something, and this friend—whom I had not hitherto taken as particularly familiar with the canonical Victorian essayists—said to me, “You’re really a Ruskinian conservative, aren’t you?”

Reader, I am.

The thing is, I am honestly exhausted by social engagement, by participating in a marketplace of ideas whose undergirding metaphor I am uninterested by. I do not believe in the values enshrined by the government of the country in whose elections I have voted, and I cannot be bothered to play along with its discourse to the extent required to try to fix it. I have never made change through statistics and “accountability,” and I have no intention of starting now. I don’t believe in “winning the future,” or indeed in winning full-stop. And I haven’t marched in the streets many times, but I have marched in the streets enough times to have gained the sense that the great change marching in the streets promises is not something I can believe in.

What can I believe in, then? Well, a lot actually. I can believe in going to class or going to a meeting with my advisor or another professor and coming home with a new idea. I can believe in spending an hour over lunch in hall bitching with my friend about the school newspaper, and coming up with a cogent critique of a campus problem; or in spending months with the same friend building up complex theoretical models to describe the world around us and the texts we’re reading. I can believe in helping the freshman advisee who wants course advice, or the fellow senior who wants to vent to me about her job hunt, or the sophomore torn between joining her friends’ eating club and her general distaste for the Street, or the junior who wants to know how I handled my workload when I was writing my first JP. I can believe in the community of my cooking co-op, where we all (mostly) do our part absent any reward but each other’s satisfaction. I can believe in the transcendent beauty of seeing Symonds work his ponderous Victorian dialectical way to a vision of sexual freedom no one has ever had before. I can believe in the transcendent beauty of a freshman, coming out for the first time, recreating that process, or an upperclass student, redefining his sexual identity having gained a little more theoretical apparatus, doing the same. I can believe in the big-government best intentions of our administration’s efforts to keep grading fair and to make sure there are social options on campus in which everyone can feel included. I can believe in the camaraderie in my college, in my co-op, and in my new home, the History Graduate Study Room. I can believe in the value of a place that tells undergraduates, “Here are four years that are yours. We’re fortunate enough to be able to give you all the resources you could ever possibly want to realize your best self in those four years. Use them well.” And I can believe in the value of being, year after year, part of an institution that helps young people have a shot at being better. I can believe in the value of a place that, to its graduate students and its faculty and its staff, embodies the only lifestyle they could ever possibly live and live well. And I can believe in the value of being, year after year, there for the next kid who comes through it and needs to discover that there is actually a place for those who love knowledge and wisdom above all else, and that they can be taken care of, respected, and even perhaps loved in turn therein.

Defending the ivory tower—the impregnable fortress of the world’s knowledge, guarded by its lovers of wisdom—is, as readers will no doubt know, nearly impossible in today’s politico-economic discourse. In a world whose terms are so much set by the calculus of utility, how can we defend something whose virtue lies precisely in its un-usefulness? Well, after years of asking this question, I’m beginning to think that we can’t—not in so many words.

Instead, we have to live it. We have to turn conversations toward why we love what we study and away from our anxiety about what we’re going to do about it afterwards. We have to make space for unstructured free time in our lives, and we have to talk about not why you should do one job instead of another, but why everyone, no matter their job, deserves the right to an eight-hour day and a forty-hour week. We have to demonstrate that two hours spent playfully joking and arguing over after-dinner cups of tea isn’t (as one friend suggested to me last night) a luxury, but is rather the just desserts of stepping off the hamster wheel. Think of it like slow food: this is slow college. This is living deliberately, learning deliberately, learning for its own sake, and loving to learn: about our fields of academic study, yes, but also about others and about ourselves. And maybe, in the process, some of us will become conscious of our own alienation, and resent that the wringer of elite universities in the western world today has turned us into automatons trained to produce. And maybe we will think more about how to be good, whole, loving beings.

Why haven’t I picked up shop and moved to Occupy Wall Street? Because refusing to engage with the terms of a discourse of wealth and production that I loathe is my job. Because spending every day in a basement three floors underground writing about a subject I adore is my job. Because helping freshmen—and everyone—find their way is my job. Because making food and eating it with my friends at my co-op is my job. Because being home if someone knocks on my door needing to talk is my job. Because I love any one of these things that I do more than a job, and more than I love standing outside with a sign. I love that I make a living—a spiritual as well as a material living—through my mind, through my pen, and through my conversation. I love that my conversations have the power to change hearts, and minds, and lives—or, well, if they don’t now, they will someday. I love that when the world seems very, very dark and I feel very, very alone, it is a life full of books and ideas that makes me feel as if I can go on.

This is my world. This is a world that I believe in—that I will always believe in—and that I will always fight for. I may have long since ceased to be “the campus radical,” may have long since stopped caring about gay marriage, but I will always be on the front lines for the right to sit and think. Knock on my door, and sit on my window seat next to my Bert and Ernie plush figures, and let me make you a cup of tea.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

And then sing with me: Solidarity forever. We shall not be moved.

QOTD (2011-10-15)

Sometimes Symonds writes these poems that are so thick with pathos that it makes me want to say “oh, sweetie,” and give him a big hug. This is entitled “The Fall of a Soul,” and it’s from the “juvenilia” section of his Vagabunduli Libellus:

I sat unsphering Plato ere I slept:
Then through my dream the choir of gods was borne,
Swift as the wind and lustrous as the morn,
Fronting the night of stars; behind them swept
Tempestuous darkness o’er a drear descent,
Wherethrough I saw a crowd of charioteers
Urging their giddy steeds with cries and cheers
To join the choir that aye before them went:
But one there was who fell, with broken car
And horses swooning down the gulf of gloom;
Heavenward his eyes, though prescient of their doom,
Reflected glory like a falling star;
While with wild hair blown back and listless hands
Ruining he sank toward undiscovered lands.

QOTD (2011-10-10); or, Princeton Sunday

From Plato’s Phaedrus, 251-252C, translated by Harold Fowler:

But he who is newly initiated, who beheld many of those realities, when he sees a godlike face or form which is a good image of beauty, shudders at first, and something of the old awe comes over him, then, as he gazes, he reveres the beautiful one as a god, and if he did not fear to be thought stark mad, he would offer sacrifice to his beloved as to an idol or a god. And as he looks upon him, a reaction from his shuddering comes over him, with sweat and unwonted heat; for as the effluence of beauty enters him through the eyes, he is warmed; the effluence moistens the germ of the feathers, and as he grows warm, the parts from which the feathers grow, which were before hard and choked, and prevented the feathers from sprouting, become soft, and as the nourishment streams upon him, the quills of the feathers swell and begin to grow from the roots over all the form of the soul; for it was once all feathered. Now in this process the whole soul throbs and palpitates, and as in those who are cutting teeth there is an irritation and discomfort in the gums, when the teeth begin to grow, just so the soul suffers when the growth of the feathers begins; it is feverish and is uncomfortable and itches when they begin to grow. Then when it gazes upon the beauty of the boy and receives the particles which flow thence to it (for which reason they are called yearning), it is moistened and warmed, ceases from its pain and is filled with joy; but when it is alone and grows dry, the mouths of the passages in which the feathers begin to grow become dry and close up, shutting in the sprouting feathers, and the sprouts within, shut in with the yearning, throb like pulsing arteries, and each sprout pricks the passage in which it is, so that the whole soul, stung in every part, rages with pain; and then again, remembering the beautiful one, it rejoices. So, because of these two mingled sensations, it is greatly troubled by its strange condition; it is perplexed and maddened, and in its madness it cannot sleep at night or stay in any one place by day, but it is filled with longing and hastens wherever it hopes to see the beautiful one. And when it sees him and is bathed with the waters of yearning, the passages that were sealed are opened, the soul has respite from the stings and is eased of its pain, and this pleasure which it enjoys is the sweetest of pleasures at the time. Therefore the soul will not, if it can help it, be left alone by the beautiful one, but esteems him above all others, forgets for him mother and brothers and all friends, neglects property and cares not for its loss, and despising all the customs and proprieties in which it formerly took pride, it is ready to be a slave and to sleep wherever it is allowed, as near as possible to the beloved; for it not only reveres him who possesses beauty, but finds in him the only healer of its greatest woes.

I avoided the Jowett translation this time, because Jowett changes the pronouns, but when Symonds had tutorials with Jowett when he was the age that I am now, he read the Phaedrus and he underlined this passage. Today, almost exactly one hundred and fifty years later, far from the city of dreaming spires where Symonds set pencil to page, it was Sunday. It was not an Oxford Sunday, and so I did not wake up to churchbells and, because the library was shut, pace my room all day while listening to Radio 3. But I did have two meals with friends today, and I did write eight pages of my thesis about when Symonds was my age and learning how to read and how to think and how to love, and I did think deeply today about matters of love, and what it means to love one’s friends, and what it means to love one’s neighbors as oneself.

At 9pm in the Princeton chapel there is a high-church Episcopal choral eucharist, a service both familiar from the ritual from my Oxford Sundays and simultaneously very alien: American in unexpected ways, and in others much more demanding than an Oxford service is of a kind of devotion and religiosity that I am unwilling, unable, to give. But the sermons are smart, and today the sermon was, after a fashion, about loving one’s neighbor, about (as so many sermons are) really properly walking the walk of Jesus’s teachings and rejoicing in the love—the communion—between all the people who know and follow Christ.

Well, I channel this ecclesiastical language, but it’s not my own. Why, then, do I go to a service that reminds me whenever I go that it is not my religious tradition, not my spiritual community, not my place to take, eat the wafer and take, drink the wine? I go in part because I want to understand what the Eucharist means to the people who value it, and why it is so shrouded in mystery for them, which is something that seems important enough to western history to try to understand. But I also go because although the language of the Book of Common Prayer isn’t mine, it does give me some tools to access my own kind of religious tradition. Because this was a Princeton Sunday, when I walked down the chapel steps at a quarter past ten onto a silent, deserted plaza lit by a full moon, I immediately crossed the plaza and descended to a desk covered in books on the bottom floor of the library, and bent my head over a green Loeb volume that had something to say about love. Pagan love, idolatrous love, the love of ο παις καλος that a certain Anglican churchman who wrote about The Interpretation of Scripture once said was “mainly a figure of speech.” But you know what? It wasn’t until I started going to church in the old-fashioned atheist-humanist way of Oxford Sundays that I started to know what love, any love, could be: that it is a force with the power to transform souls and lives, to bring out all that is worst in people and all that is best, and that it is something that we can never fully apprehend but that inspires us to greatness all the same. Love can inspire us to worship gods, be they the Holy Trinity or beautiful boys, and to sacrifice ourselves—sometimes ill-advisedly, but sometimes wisely—to their might.

My Princeton Sunday ended at 11:45pm when, as deep as one can be in the bowels of the university library, the closing bell rang out once, twice, three times. I ascended from the land of beautiful boys out again into the night, and with a passing nod to the hulking figure of the land of Jesus Christ, its stained-glass murky in the moonlight, I trudged the all-too-familiar route back to my land, back to a room in college. I sit here now, the hour getting later, acutely aware that I have a 10am lecture I must not miss again, but wondering above all how to translate Phaedrus-love and Church-love into my love. For as often as I go to church, and as deep as I steep myself in the homoerotic literary tradition, neither faith is truly mine. Short a doctrine, the work of knowing what I live for, how I love, will take all the days of my life.

But I can’t help thinking that if Hellenism and Hebraism are in accord on this point, if John 13:34 (“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another”) rings out in harmony with Howard’s End (“Only connect”), the old-fashioned humanist might have a path through a lonesome valley to walk down. Term is marching on and the work is getting harder, but this week I am going to try loving: my work, my friends, my teachers, my students, my colleagues, my family far away—and maybe, in the very end, myself. I am going to mingle Hellenism and Hebraism, pleasure and pain, and try to wake up tomorrow morning strong in the desire to make myself and my world better.

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.

QOTD (2011-09-24)

A new academic year brings new QsOTD. Plotinus, Ennead 1.3:

The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to beauty, drawn in a very rapture to it: somewhat slow to stir of his own impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus: as the timid are sensitive to noise so he to tones and the beauty they convey; all that offends against unison or harmony in melodies or rhythms repels him; he longs for measure and shapely pattern.

This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm, and design in things of sense: he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the Authentic-Existent which is the source of al these correspondences and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself….

The born lover, to whose degree the musician may also attain—and then either come to a stand or pass beyond—has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to physical beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms, springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course of life and in an admirably organized social system may be pointed out to him—a first training this in the loveliness of the immaterial—he must learn to recognize the beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues; then these severed and particular forms must be brought under the one principle by the explanation of their origin. From the virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-Principle, to the Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he treads the upward way.

The metaphysician, equipped by that very character, winged already and not, like those others, in need of disengagement, stirring of himself towards the supernal but doubting of the way, needs only a guide. He must be shown, then, and set free, willing by his very temperament and long practised in freedom.

Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science.

Activism at Princeton

Over on tumblr, Aku writes:

College rankings are an audience-grab and a crapshoot, I know. They’re not scientific. Still, I couldn’t help but be disappointed that Princeton was #7 on Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s list of Top Colleges for Activists. (ETA: Disappointed that we made it so high, that is.) I’ll get into this in a more sustained way later, but I actually think there’s a lot of resistance to activism on campus (particularly with regards to feminism and gender activism, see above), and that in some ways it’s been institutionalized out of existence. I’d rather not congratulate us just yet; there’s lot’s of work to be done.

What do Princeton people think?

I spent the first half of my Princeton career as an activist. I helped to organize two anarchic, eye-catching protests, one against Proposition 8 and one against the National Organization for Marriage; I helped get Princeton its first gender-neutral housing policy; I wrote about left-wingy and gay things for campus and national periodicals; I put eighty kids on a bus and got us all to D.C. to participate in the 2009 National Equality March. The Tory (a campus right-wing magazine) called me a “campus radical” as if it was a slur. Minor national far-right celebrities character-assassinated me. I was all set to become a minor celebrity too, for being loud and in-your-face and An Activist.

Then I stopped—thanks to Princeton. For one thing, as my academic obligations multiplied, I had no time to organize protests or take days off to go to D.C. or write for campus publications. In my junior fall, my JP took up every spare moment, and there has literally not been a day since then that I have done no academic work. Furthermore, Princeton—and its faculty—helped me to see myself as a historian, a scholar, and to see my academic work as something worthwhile. My mentors helped me to begin to shut off the voices in my head that tell me I am a terrible person, and so I threw myself into my academic work as the Thing I Am Going to Do With My Life. In light of that, I saw aggressive political stances as something antithetical to being a good teacher. I took the partisan bumper stickers off my computer and notebooks. As I started to become an expert in the history of sexual identity, I also began to doubt many of the core assumptions about the “LGBT rights movement” that had informed a lot of my previous activism, and to disagree with the goals of many of the activist projects I could have continued to be involved in.

It’s true that there is a culture at Princeton that punishes taking aggressive political stances on anything. One is supposed to be seen as too clever for partisanship, hence the “apathy” that is also said by those outside Princeton—and anyone inside it who has ever tried to get people to show up to a protest or demonstration—to characterize its students. Maybe this culture permeated my unconscious while I was strategizing about how to be taken seriously by my peers and mentors. But I’ve never really toned down my political views—to many readers, my Facebook page remains as “radical” as ever, and I’ve taken to my blog or the pages of the Prince when I’ve really felt as if I have something to say. Instead, I think I stopped organizing protests because I need to focus on my thesis; because I don’t want “campus radical”—or “queer”—to be the only thing people think of when they hear my name; and because Princeton has taught me that a Facebook post, a dining-hall conversation about my Victorian men who found identity in the writing of Plato and Whitman, or coming to class having done the reading and ready to engage with its and my classmates’ ideas are all forms of activism too.

Going Back

On my last day in Princeton in January, before a frantic dash through a foot of snow to finish packing, move a sofa to my friend’s room, and make the train in time for my red-eye to Heathrow, I invited all my friends to lunch in my favorite place in Princeton, the Rocky dining hall. It was the day after Dean’s Date, the day that all written work for the semester was due, and so the vast majority of my undergrad friends were running on one or maybe two nights without sleep. Some of them showed up only to say goodbye before crashing into bed (by which I was touched); others stayed, and our party spread over tables as I flitted about, chattering manically and making sure to see everyone. One of my friends asked me if I was sad to be leaving. I reflected for a minute, but gave a simple answer: “No.” I assured my friend I’d miss the people, but the place? Not so much. Princeton is a small campus, a small town, and after two and a half years in that little world I felt like I had it figured out. I was ready to move on to pastures new.

And so we slogged back and forth through the snow that day, my friends all performing small acts of heroism at one of the busiest times of the year to get me on my way, and a small party went down to the station to see me off on the 6:09 train. Until one brief visit to campus when I was in the New York/New Jersey area the other week, my last sight of Princeton was two of my best friends waving me goodbye from the platform, as the train chugged its familiar, ponderous way past parking lots and graduate-student apartments and the lake and the canal. No more than twelve hours later, in those startling shifts of time and place that long-distance flights thrust upon one, I was dragging three suitcases up Oxford High Street in the early-morning light, having gotten off the bus one stop too early and not knowing where to turn for Trinity College.

From here we have the pattern of quickly alternating comfort and alienation that regular readers of this blog in the past several months will have come to recognize: the reassuring sight of my exchange partner there to meet me at the porter’s lodge; the seeming crowds of otherworldly students talking about their drinking exploits and using the word “banter” one out of every five; the comforting consistency of tutors’ rooms and library reading rooms and the HQ shelves of the History Faculty Library; the terror of what I had gotten myself into that surfaced in the midst of tipsy disorientation when I was handed a glass of port after my first Trinity Guest Night, my first big Oxford dinner.

At the end of that first week, the port was the last straw: throwing away my resolution not to go on the identity parade at my new university, I begged a friend from America to go with me to the LGBTQ Society’s weekly drinks/social. A series of overtures of friendship, chance meetings, and kindred spirits later, I found myself in different mental spaces entirely: ready to work 8-10 hours a day on my JP over the Easter vacation; and ready to live a life of decadence the whirlwind last few weeks of Trinity term. The middle of June found me not only with a group of close friends whom I ate and drank and danced and laughed and talked about dead languages with, but with whom I also dined once on Trinity high table, passing the port afterwards in the SCR as if six months ago I hadn’t almost cried at the thought of a world where port is drunk. On one occasion, a friend and I dashed through the center of Oxford in a downpour from a lecture to a black-tie dinner, literally tying bow-tie and changing to heels en route. On another occasion, three of us went punting, and it was only when we were halfway up the High Street from Magdalen Bridge, giggling madly, our plastic cups of Pimms still in hand, that we realized how ridiculous we must have looked. On more than one occasion, I walked home to college late enough that a rosy-golden glow just starting to cast its aura over the gray sky. Those last weeks of Oxford were nothing like my life has ever been. And they were some of the happiest weeks of my life.

I left Oxford for the first time on the last day of Trinity term, my emotions and my sleep schedule frazzled after a good three weeks of burning always with this hard, gem-like flame, and when I got off the Eurostar and met a Princeton friend in Paris, I resolved to her my intention to hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life (or, you know, appropriately Hebraic words to that effect). I easily shocked my Princeton friends with stories of how much everyone drank in Oxford, and how I had spent my last few weeks there. It was a good reminder of how at odds I had felt with the culture when I first arrived, and how much had changed that the things I had been scared of in January were things I enjoyed doing with some really good friends in June. And I did reset my equilibrium by living more abstemiously for much of the summer: spending my life working and living for my work, seeing friends where I saw them, and relishing life as a grown-up historian, spending the summer steeped in research as grown-up historians do.

But Oxford is a Siren, and all summer she kept calling me. She called me as I read Symonds documents and thought, as I always do, about the Oxford of his day; she called me as I sought out pleasure reading like Maurice and Jude the Obscure and Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Stranger’s Child, that reminded me of her; and she called me most especially the two times I went back to visit, when my friends were happy to indulge me with all the things I love most in Oxford, and I could be excused—just as I was in the last three weeks of term—for thinking I had stepped into the Paradise of any one of a number of Oxford novels, the Paradise that in novels generally comes before the Fall.

But I forestalled the Fall by leaving, and my last full day in Oxford—either three weeks ago or a lifetime, I’m not so sure—we basked in the sun on the Trinity lawns, visited the Greek gallery of the Ashmolean with its pottery inscribed to beautiful boys, heard my last Christ Church evensong, and wound up at night on my friend’s sofa, watching the TV adaptation of one of the most deeply unsettling—and truest—Oxford stories of a Fall from Paradise, The Line of Beauty. I started reading The Line of Beauty last October, in Princeton, and put it aside because I wasn’t so into it. But I brought it along to Oxford, and I finished it over the Easter vacation, filled with passionate unease for a world of politics and poses and aestheticism that by that point I recognized. The protagonist of The Line of Beauty is a would-be academic seduced by a world of surfaces, and well: which of us isn’t? The novel reminds me how easily young love for a place, for an idea, for sun-drunk excursions on slow-moving rivers and the “delicate satisfaction” of “a most subtle and exquisite curve” (Symonds, not Hollinghurst!), can consume one. Though an unhappy note, it was not an unfitting one on which to end my sojourn.

But all seemed brighter and clearer and less bleak on the afternoon that I left Oxford for the last time (for now), and when I retraced my steps of seven months before from Trinity to the bus station, I had my friends to help me with my bags, to convince me that it was a good idea to stop at the pub on the way, and to toast my speedy return. The image of my friends waving me goodbye as the bus pulled out of the station was an uncanny doubling of the last time I’d left, really left, a university I loved. And just like before I bridged time and space and found myself with alarming speed back in New Jersey, jet-lagged and dazed, my body still burning with that ecstasy that my love affair with Oxford had caused me to maintain.

But I saw in New Jersey the friends who were there to wave goodbye in January, and we made one of our regular madcap road trips (Rhode trips!) to Rhode Island, and I came out here, to my parents in the wilds of British Columbia, far enough away that those weeks and those weekends of decadence seem like a hallucination. And yet I am hatching plans, and dreaming rose-colored dreams. The Fall from Paradise may loom, “et in Arcadia ego,” but I keep thinking of that ecstasy—and wanting it back.

And yet. The thing is, Princeton was home for years, and it is still home now. Today I sat down with my email inbox and my diary and wrote in my class schedule, my work schedule, my appointments, and all the events for freshmen I will have to attend in my new capacity as what we call a Residential College Adviser. Today I became involved in a few conversations on Facebook about a recent change in University policy, and reminded myself that Princeton policy is something I have a stake in, care about, and have helped to shape over the past few years. I remembered how, after a spate of culture shock and alienation in my first semester at Princeton, I found a niche, and I found some wonderful friends, and I made my mark on a school I once worried would swallow me whole. It seems, perhaps, that I was all-too-willing to submit to Oxford and let it have its way with me, let it swallow all it liked, and Line of Beauty-style consequences be damned.

After all, I think that what happened in Oxford is that I fell in love: an intensity of emotion and disregard for rationality that I have never experienced for an individual or indeed for any other place. And it is good, I think, for someone to be 21 and to know what it is like to fall in love, as well as good to know that moderation in all things is important and that self-bettering and the ability to do good come through many kinds of feelings and emotions.

I can’t wait to see what happens when, in one week’s time, I come back to Princeton after having done so much and learned so much and grown so much and felt so much. I can’t wait to write a thesis about places I have been and documents I have seen and mentalités I have known. I can’t wait to feed my advisees tea and cake and talk to them about ideas and maybe, if I’m lucky, light a spark of wanderlust in them that wasn’t there before. And most of all, I can’t wait to have my first meal in the place in Princeton where I had my last: the Rockefeller College dining hall, the only place in the world into which I have ever waltzed as if I owned it. Love affairs aside, the Rocky dining hall was where I gained my first sense of self-worth, purpose, and belonging. For that, it’s worth “going back to Old Nassau.”