December 23: Refined and sensible, sane and beautiful

I don't really have a good photo that goes with the reading, so here's a Christmasy picture of the house with all the Davids in front of it in my neighborhood.

I remember reading someone who used this quote from Renata Adler: "Sanity is the most profound moral option of our time." Then I read the actual Renata Adler novel ("Speedboat," maybe) and didn't like it. But I still like the quote, and these difficult times bring it home: it's easy to think of sanity as our default condition, but I doubt that it is, you have to choose it. It's a lot easier, really, to let yourself get carried away -- all you have to do is just sit there.

The above thought is brought to mind by today's essay by Sainte-Beuve, a name which is fun to say in a phony French accent. It's titled "What Is A Classic?" and the translation, sadly, is not supple:

It is true that in writing of such subjects, always slightly abstract and moral, it is advisable to speak of them in a season of quiet, to make sure of our own attention and of that of others, to seize one of those moments of calm moderation and leisure seldom granted our amiable France...

I suspect that this is what my writing sounds like. Maybe (a little like that character in Moliere) I have been writing translationese all along.

Sainte-Beuve's answer to the question doesn't occur till halfway in. I would have totally abandoned the piece by then if I hadn't had to read it. But I liked it:

A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time.

Some of this is tautological -- a classic is something that's great! -- and some of this is in response to the idea that a classic must be very old, but the part that stands out to me is "refined and sensible, sane and beautiful." These are old-timey adjectives, pre-modern adjectives -- I wouldn't limit a classic to only those that have these qualities, but the classics I love, by and large, do. (Sainte-Beuve's great example, in fact, is Moliere; but he also loves Shakespeare who, in my opinion, is not refined. Refinement actually seems more appropriate to the French than to us Anglos -- it's why we needed to import the word "finesse".)

Another thing I came to like in this essay is that Saint-Beuve is looking to cast his net widely. To be sure, he wants to make distinctions, like a good French critic should, but I got the sense he'd rather include than exclude:

Meanwhile there is no question of sacrificing or depreciating anything. I believe the temple of taste is to be rebuilt; but its reconstruction is merely a matter of enlargement, so that it may become the home of all noble human beings, of all who have permanently increased the sum of the mind’s delights and possessions.

Exactly so. The feeling I enjoy here is that even us no-talents ought to share in the progress of the human project. Even in satire, I prefer art that's for something, not against something -- especially in satire, because how can you eviscerate someone for falling short of something if you yourself don't know what the "something" is that they're falling short of?

Anyway. The essay ends with a little fantasy of all his favorite writers sporting themselves around what appears to be a first-class retirement home, and which we can skip, but the last lines are a description of why one loves the classics, and it's a little sentimental, perfect for the holidays:

...of some one of those excellent and antique minds shall we request an interview at every moment; of some one of them shall we ask a friendship which never deceives, which could not fail us; to some one of them shall we appeal for that sensation of serenity and amenity (we have often need of it) which reconciles us with mankind and with ourselves.

Photo by flickr user solyanka used with a Creative Commons license.

September 23: Montaigne, corpse groom

At home in Bordeaux.

I was excited about today's reading, because one of the useful things my undergraduate education accomplished is that it exposed me to Montaigne, who is right up my alley, and then I remembered that the free translation is from the 1500s and is almost impossible to follow:

Allthough they say, that in vertue it selfe, the last scope of our aime is voluptuousnes. It pleaseth me to importune their eares still with this word, which so much offends their hearing. And if it imply any chief pleasure or exceeding contentments, it is rather due to the assistance of vertue, than to any other supply, voluptuousnes being more strong, sinnowie, sturdie, and manly, is but more seriously voluptuous.

Even the fact that they occasionally use the word "lustie" doesn't help. Fortunately a brief Google found a free translation from Australia, and here's the same passage:

Let the philosophers say what they will, the main thing at which we all aim, even in virtue itself, is pleasure. It amuses me to rattle in their ears this word, which they so nauseate to hear; and if it signify some supreme pleasure and excessive contentment, it is more due to the assistance of virtue than to any other assistance whatever.

That's a little clearer, and kicks off my favorite passage in this Essay, "To philosophize is to learn how to die," which (typical for Montaigne, IIRC), veers almost immediately away from how a philosophy helps you get ready for the inevitable end, and takes up the subject about how Montaigne is ready for his inevitable end. Step 1 is "Brooding." Step 2 is, "See Step 1":

In the company of ladies, and at games, some have perhaps thought me possessed with some jealousy, or the uncertainty of some hope, while I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one, surprised, a few days before, with a burning fever of which he died, returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full of idle fancies of love and jollity, as mine was then, and that, for aught I knew, the same destiny was attending me....I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long before.

He doesn't write like a Tim Burton character, but I guess he thinks of himself as one. He is also one of our first collectors of "oddly enough" manners of death:

Hast thou not seen one of our kings killed at a tilting, and did not one of his ancestors die by the jostle of a hog? Aeschylus, threatened with the fall of a house, was to much purpose circumspect to avoid that danger, seeing that he was knocked on the head by a tortoise falling out of an eagle’s talons in the air. Another was choked with a grapestone; an emperor killed with the scratch of a comb in combing his head. Aemilius Lepidus with a stumble at his own threshold, and Aufidius with a jostle against the door as he entered the council-chamber. And between the very thighs of woman, Cornelius Gallus the praetor; Tigillinus, captain of the watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and (of worse example) Speusippus, a Platonic philosopher, and one of our popes.

That put me in mind of this Onion piece:

In the grief-management retreat I attended after Brad died, I met a lot of people who share my point of view. How would you feel if your wealthy relative careened into a swimming pool on a runaway golf cart that had been sabotaged by "slobs" and then drowned? It wouldn't seem quite so funny then, would it? Especially if those responsible had never been brought to justice and had, in fact, won the big tournament by sinking a lucky putt at the very last second.

But to return (Montaigne style) to my favorite part, which isn't at all on theme. It's about virtue v. pleasure:

Those who preach to us that the quest of it [virtue] is craggy, difficult, and painful, but its fruition pleasant, what do they mean by that but to tell us that is always unpleasing? For what human means will ever attain its enjoyment? The most perfect have been fain to content themselves to aspire unto it, and to approach it only, without ever possessing it. But they are deceived, seeing that of all the pleasures we know, the very pursuit is pleasant.

In other words, if Virtue is really its own (and only) reward, then what's the point of getting off the couch to seek it? But what if, instead of thinking about whether it makes us good, we only thought about whether it makes us happy? (Or "lustie.")

May 27: Wrong!

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing has three awesome names, the last of which is on this big pile of oversize books in what I believe passes for a theme park in Germany:

Bring the kinder to "Supergymasium!"

Nevertheless, I think Lessing is wrong right from the get-go in justifying God's ways to Man:

1 THAT which Education is to the Individual, Revelation is to the Race.
2 Education is Revelation coming to the Individual Man; and Revelation is Education which has come, and is yet coming, to the Human Race.

(Note: this is one of those weird Bartelby formatting issues that I'm too tired to reformat into blockquote.)

Nice try, liberal! (Lessing, according to Wikipedia, was one of those eighteenth-century Enlightenment types. Couldn't have proved it by me.) If God thought we needed education, then why does He allow TV and licentious dancing -- frequently mixed together? I'm not even sure the non-revelation part of this thesis is correct:

4 Education gives to Man nothing which he might no educe out of himself; it gives him that which he might educe out of himself, only quicker and more easily. In the same way too, Revelation gives nothing to the human species, which the human reason left to itself might not attain; only it has given, and still gives to it, the most important of these things earlier.

Really? I might be able to educe out of myself -- or "teach," to use a slang term -- molecular biology? To say nothing of the fact that it tries to make Revelation reasonable, which is not only not possible, but also -- and I say this as someone with a certain amount of sympathy to Revelation -- not desirable. If Revelation is reasonable, what's the point of it? It's like when, after a lifetime of Catholicism, I first went to a Protestant service -- all they're gonna do is talk? Where's the magic trick?

But I suspect Lessing is trying to reconcile the fundamentalist fire-breathers with the newfangled book-learnin', like the guy in your dorm who wanted to use the Big Bang as a way to prove Genesis. He's trying hard to please both sides -- Lessing spends much of the excerpt trying to placate the smartasses who point out that God forgot to mention an afterlife in the Old Testament:

In the same way, in the writings of the Old Testament those primers for the rude Israelitish people, unpractised in thought, the doctrines of the immortality of the soul, and future recompenses, might be fairly left out: but they were bound to contain nothing which could have even procrastinated the progress of the people, for whom they were written, in their way to this grand truth. And to say but a small thing, what could have more procrastinated it than the promise of such a miraculous recompense in this life? A promise made by Him who promises nothing that He does not perform.

See, God didn't think the Israelites could handle the truth, so he "forgot" to tell them. How surprised they must have been after they died! "And such small portions," I hope they said.

But, lest the fire-breathers start complaining that Lessing only wants to meet the needs of the smartasses, he also throws in some anti-Semitic red meat:

8 But when He neither could nor would reveal Himself any more to each individual man, He selected an individual People for His special education; and that exactly the most rude and the most unruly, in order to begin with it from the very commencement.

In other words, God could have chosen any people, but to make it doubly hard on himself, he chose Jews. He's like Paul Bunyan or something! A small-g god would have chosen, I don't know, Hittites, but not Yahweh, the guy who drinks hot sauce in 55-gallon drums. It's a good thing the Daily Reading Guide mentions that Lessing was a pioneer of tolerance or I might get the wrong idea, (although by what I imagine the standards of Harvard faculty clubs to be back in 1908, this was a tolerant attitude).

To leave the theological part aside, I have another question, which is -- Lessing seems to assume that we, the human project, need our baby steps; we are in the process of being educated, and progress is slow. And I do wonder: are we doing as well as we can? Or are all the innovations that make life so different than it was in Lessing's time (1729-1781) -- is all the stuff we should have come up with centuries ago, and it's just that we're kind of idiots?

I think it's mostly a factor of having the surplus population to spare for the think tanks, myself. The downside of that is that you also have plenty of extra people who go into the law. But all progress comes at a price, I guess.

May 16: Racism!

Celtic racism, that is -- we're back in Renan's Poetry of the Celtic Races, back when an academic was proud to talk about all the different races, and how the shapes of their ears proved they'd never learn Latin, or something. Of course, for something like Renan's essay, you could substitute "peoples" for "races" and you'd be perfectly fine, since this is a historical appreciation, not a prediction that Celtic-type people will always and everywhere have a "singular vivacity" when it comes to their "deep feeling for nature."

Renan was a Celt himself, from Brittany, Land of Forgotten Celts. And today he's talking about the Welsh, which means you're going to chip a tooth on the consonant-heavy names:

Kilhwch, the son of Kilydd, prince of Kelyddon, having heard some one mention the name of Olwen, daughter of Yspaddaden Penkawr...

Well, of course you'd hear the name "Olwen," it's the only word there that doesn't sound like a tape going backward. And while "Owen" is a fashionable kid name in these parts, you hardly hear anyone at preschool picking up little Yspaddaden.

Thus begins a long tale (characteristic, we are told of the Mabinogion) involving Arthur and the seeking of Mabon the son of Modron. It has the characteristic of all folk tales, which is that the original audience for folk tales were people who had nothing to do during those long winter nights in Wales, and so weren't driven crazy by repetition. Arthur and Kilhwch consult an ousel, stag, owl, and eagle, and finally ride on a salmon's shoulders to Gloucester. After all this (and believe me, I am summarizing), Renan says, "We shall not follow the Cymric hero through trials the result of which can be foreseen." Great.

Right at the end Renan says something kind of provocative, which I think you'd never be allowed to try in today's academy, although it's the kind of thought you'd hear on Bill Moyers, maybe:

...every time that the old Celtic spirit appears in our history, there is to be seen, re-born with it, faith in nature and her magic influences. One of the most characteristic of these manifestations seems to me to be that of Joan of Arc. That indomitable hope, that tenacity in the affirmation of the future, that belief that the salvation of the kingdom will come from a woman,—all those features...are in many respects Celtic...The cottage of the family of Arc was shaded by a beech tree, famed in the country and reputed to be the abode of fairies. In her childhood Joan used to go and hang upon its branches garlands of leaves and flowers, which, so it was said, disappeared during the night. The terms of her accusation speak with horror of this innocent custom, as of a crime against the faith; and indeed they were not altogether deceived, those unpitying theologians who judged the holy maid. Although she knew it not, she was more Celtic than Christian. She has been foretold by Merlin; she knows of neither Pope nor Church,—she only believes the voice that speaks in her own heart.

For those of us temperamentally inclined to believe that there's nothing new under the sun this is interesting, although Renan warns us, in a footnote, that we can't handle the maybe-its-a-truth: "very few people are capable of delicately appreciating questions of this kind, relative to the genius of races."

Yes, well, I guess the 20th century proved that.

May 9: Monstrousness in the Harvard Classics

I almost didn't post on this, because I'm kind of feeling like a day off, and when you see this in the third paragraph:

In truth, I will not keep back from you that the assertions which follow rest chiefly upon Kantian principles;

It only emboldens the "take a day off" voice in your head. However, I persevered, had that sixth cup of coffee, and was then able to actually be somewhat offended by a dangerous doctrine that has lurked unread in my family for generations.

The author today is Schiller, and the work is enticingly titled "Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man". He is also the lyricist of the hit tune "Ode To Joy" (the 11 o'clock number from Beethoven's Scandals of 1824), and there is also a statue of him in Lincoln Park in Chicago, apparently. I find myself touched that the people of Chicago, or some subset of them, put up a statue to Schiller. I have the same emotion when I go on a college campus, or even to a high school building from, like, the 1920s, and there are all the names of The Greats carved into the frieze -- Moses, Plato, Newton, etc. How quaint it seems now, the thought that everyone in this college would know who Hammurabi was! It's like the belief in jet cars -- a failed optimism concerning the human project. Sorry, people who built this auditorium or library or classroom -- you were hoping we'd get smarter, but instead we only got taller. (And fatter.)

But to the outrageousness! I apologize in advance because I found every third sentence or so incomprehensible, so I may be misreading things indeed. Sentences like these:

But when the survey taken is complete and embraces the whole man (anthropology), where the form is considered together with the substance, and a living feeling has a voice, the difference will become far more evident.

Despite trying this sentence a couple of times without success, I will attempt to summarize Schiller's argument. It goes like this:

• Beauty is great.
• But political beauty (freedom) is better, because more moral ("the most perfect of all works of art—the establishment and structure of a true political freedom.")
• But a moral political establishment, available to reason, is going to be hard to get to, because we can't just wreck the existing, more primitive political establishment. ("When the mechanic has to mend a watch, he lets the wheels run out, but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.")
• So (this is the fourth of our four letters, and the one that's hardest for me to follow), we need a force besides reason to mold the people into a moral political establishment ("and he must be led by natural impulse to such a course of action as can only and invariably have moral results.") This, I guess, is where the artist would come in -- it's not in our excerpt.

Well, I think this is monstrous. It's weakly monstrous to place artists in the service of a moral agenda, but it's strongly monstrous to place the state there. Here's a money quote -- I'm going to give it line breaks in the hope of making it clearer:

If the internal man is one with himself, he will be able to rescue his peculiarity, even in the greatest generalisation of his conduct,
...and the state will only become the exponent of his fine instinct, the clearer formula of his internal legislation.
But if the subjective man is in conflict with the objective and contradicts him in the character of the people,
so that only the oppression of the former can give the victory to the latter,
...then the state will take up the severe aspect of the law against the citizen, and in order not to fall a sacrifice, it will have to crush under foot such a hostile individuality, without any compromise.

Doesn't this sound, I don't know, totalitarian? Here's another quote: "The state... will only respect [its citizens] subjective humanity in the same degree that it is ennobled to an objective existence."

In other words, if you don't ennoble the state, the state does not have to respect your humanity. Or maybe it just has to take measures against you in order to make you see the light.

(Political note: one of the reasons the U.S.'s torturing is so pernicious is that it fails to respect the prisoner's humanity, and America's supposed to stand for something better than that, particularly when we are in a hearts-and-minds battle.)

Schiller was writing this...actually it doesn't say when he wrote this, but it was well before states had the technology to crush hostile individualities as effectively as they later did. So maybe he didn't see the conclusions of his writing as clearly as we can see them. (Nor could the editors of the Harvard Classics, for that matter.) But I think this is a pernicious doctrine; one shudders to think what it would be like if it were written more comprehensibly.

Apr 22: Funny videos about Kant

Kant's "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals" sounds even more difficult in the German: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. But it's not so bad. The excerpt is short enough to be a tidbit -- barely a Fundamental Principle, singular, which is, you don't get points for doing things you want to do, you only get points for doing things because you have to do them. In Kant's (translated) words:

...there yet remains in this, as in all other cases, this law, namely, that he should promote his happiness not from inclination but from duty, and by this would his conduct first acquire true moral worth.

Happiness is for the animals, you see. I think it's okay if you enjoy your duty, but you have to make sure that you're not doing it because you enjoy it. Kant also goes on to say that you don't need highfalutin philosophers to know what your duty is:

Here it would be easy to show how, with this compass in hand, men are well able to distinguish, in every case that occurs, what is good, what bad, conformably to duty or inconsistent with it, if, without in the least teaching them anything new...

It would be easy, that is, except:

there insensibly arises in it a dialectic which forces it [practical reason, or common sense -- ed.] to seek aid in philosophy, just as happens to it in its theoretic use; and ...it will find rest nowhere but in a thorough critical examination of our reason.

Which leads to the Kant which I read in a theology class and promptly forgot even before the final(unfortunately).

Now, to the funny videos. (Warning: only funny if you find academic humor funny. I know, it can be a little leaden, but I have a soft spot for it.) First, from this Crooked Timber post, a Kant attack ad:


Which prompted this response (the video is not so great, but some of the comments are funny:


Interactivity is fun! And it's also, for the blogger, a duty.

Mar 17: The stereotypes of the Irish

It's too tempting today. Most days I try to take the reading seriously, on its own terms, and keep the jokes in proportion, but to be given "The Poetry of the Celtic Races" -- well, it's hard to stop oneself. Here, let's get started:

"Poor Ireland, with her ancient mythology, with her Purgatory of St. Patrick, and her fantastic travels of St. Brandan, was not destined to find grace in the eyes of English puritanism."

Oh, here's another one, from earlier in the piece (which was written by Ernest Renan in the 19th century when it was very progressive and P.C. to talk about the characteristics of the "races" -- the fact that today the very opposite is what's progressive is what's making it hard for me to stop with the jokes):

Other legends related that when St. Patrick drove the goblins out of Ireland, he was greatly tormented in this place for forty days by legions of black birds people.

See what I did there? Because the Irish were supposed to be famously racist. Another passage that gives rise to a stereotypical joke is:

... With the consent of the abbot of the neighbouring monastery, they descended into the shaft, they passed through the torments of Hell and Purgatory, and then each told of what he had seen. Some did not emerge again; those who did laughed no more, and were henceforth unable to join in any gaiety.

Those were the ones who went to teach in Catholic schools. Again, I apologize to all Irish or part-Irish (such as myself), but if "30 Rock" and "The Simpsons" can't resist, how can I, who don't even have Standards and Practices? (Deadspin, too.) Somehow Irish-bashing has become an acceptable comedy meme. Renan, for his part, is "an equal opportunity offender":

Among the features by which the Celtic races most impressed the Romans were the precision of their ideas upon the future life, their inclination to suicide, and the loans and contracts which they signed with the other world in view. The more frivolous peoples of the South saw with awe in this assurance the fact of a mysterious race, having an understanding of the future and the secret of death.

Yes, if there's one adjective that leaps to mind when you think about the Romans, it's "frivolity."

I do have some sympathy towards Renan at the end of this piece, when he speaks up for the crazy Irish and their wacky tales which leave us cool, rational, 19th-century people shaking our heads as we head for our phrenologist appointment:

Which is worth more, the imaginative instinct of man, or the narrow orthodoxy that pretends to remain rational, when speaking of things divine? For my own part, I prefer the frank mythology, with all its vagaries, to a theology so paltry, so vulgar, and so colourless, that it would be wronging God to believe that, after having made the visible world so beautiful he should have made the invisible world so prosaically reasonable.

This guy agrees:

"The decided leaning of the Celtic race towards the ideal, its sadness, its fidelity, its good faith, caused it to be regarded by its neighbours as dull, foolish, and superstitious. They could not understand its delicacy and refined manner of feeling. They mistook for awkwardness the embarrassment experienced by sincere and open natures in the presence of more artificial natures."

Feb 28: Under the weather

I have read my Montaigne today, but I am not feeling up to writing about him, except to note that the translation is from the 1500s. To quote the Introductory Note, it's "in a style so full of the flavor of the age that we still read Montaigne in the version which Shakespeare knew." Not really, but we do read him in this version when we don't want to pay someone to translate it into our English.

Having had to read this style and spelling a lot in my college days, I can take it, but it's still tough to read:

...as even now I did in Plutarke, reading his discourse of the power of imagination, wherein in regard of those wise men, I acknowledge my selfe so weake and so poore, so dull and grose-headed, as I am forced both to pittie and disdaine my selfe, yet am I pleased with this, that my opinions have often the grace to jump with theirs, and that I follow them a loofe-off

I kind of feel like a loofe-off myself. (I do like "hony" for "honey," though; I find it charming, somehow.)

The essay is "On the Education of Children," and more than that I will not say. Montaigne's super discursive style -- the first two pages are about quoting the classics without attribution -- does not lend itself to the achy.

Jan 26: Yarns of the Ancients

I have to pay bills, and start thinking about an actual project, one that might make me money. But I know if I don’t do this reading now, I won’t get to it today. Today it feels like an olive-bound millstone.

Perhaps a “delightful story of old Egypt” from Herodotus will change the mood. It’s from Volume 33: Voyages and Travels. (There’s a certain “ripping yarns” subtheme in the Harvard Classics – “Two Years Before The Mast” gets its own volume – and all to the good, I say. You’re not a sissy because you read classics! On the contrary! Now don’t hold your glasses like that, you’ll get them smudged. )

The whole of page 65, where I’m supposed to start, is the middle of one paragraph. I have no idea where to start, but helpfully the DRG’s description (“a king who entombed his daughter in a golden cow” – that sounds delightful) allows me to scan down in the middle of the paragraph and get started.

-- perhaps, they say, the daughter was entombed because she killed herself because her father “ravished her”. Delightfuler and delightfuler!

-- you wouldn’t think you’d be reading a capital-K Classic and see the word “cow” so much. But that’s the thing about the classics -- they're surprising.

-- I like this also:

This king also left behind him a pyramid, much smaller than that of his father, of a square shape and measuring on each side three hundred feet lacking twenty, built moreover of Ethiopian stone up to half the height. This pyramid some of the Hellenes say was built by the courtesan Rhodopis, not therein speaking rightly: and besides this it is evident to me that they who speak thus do not even know who Rhodopis was…

The whole rest of the paragraph is about Rhodopis. Then we shift back. It’s like a stereotypical country yokel tellin’ yarns (or Grandpa Simpson), but even more breathless.

There follows a yarn about the time when the Ethiopian was a-rulin’ Egypt, and he stops because of a dream. This seems odd, but then we have rulers who also invade Middle Eastern countries because God tells them too, so maybe it’s not so different. Is the Ethiopian ever named?…you have to flip back…yes, there he is: Sabacos. Btu the rest of the time he’s just “The Ethiopian”. Herodotus might have just as well called him “that black fella.” Although the Ethiopian is both preceded and succeeded by “the blind man”. Who can keep track of all their funny names?

-- Then the next guy lost his throne because field mice ate his army’s quivers and bows. Again with the mice! Maybe Burns should have plowed that nest up after all.

-- Herodotus keeps translating the Egyptian gods into Greek Gods -- “Osiris in the tongue of Hellas is Dionysos” Is this common? It’s interesting – just the assumption that of course they’re the same gods, they just go native wherever they are.

There now, all done. I’m not particularly delighted, but it wasn’t so bad, all things considered.

Jan 11: Hamilton -- Father of Wall Street

(Note: this excerpt has nothing to do with Wall Street.)

It has come to pass – friends came over for dinner, my head is full of wine, I want to go to bed but I have to do my homework. It’s a recipe for perfunctoriness but it somehow builds character -- as these Ivy League schools were reputed to do back in the day. The kind of character that you couldn't get by going to college with a lot of Jews and Catholics. But I digress...

Today is “Hamilton: Father of Wall Street.” Hamilton was born on this day in 1757; I hope you spent a 10-dollar-bill, or were shot by someone in a duel, to commemorate this. It is introduced in the reading guide by this sentence, which I find obscure: “He penned most of the Federalist papers, which were greatly influential in bringing New York into the Union - the first step toward its eminent position in national and world finance.”

I guess it’s the antecedent I don’t get – or maybe it’s, because I am an ex-New Yorker, I resent the idea that New York owes something to the Union, instead of the more natural position of the other way around.

Okay, here we go, Federalist #1, (Vol. 43, pp. 199-207):

Right from the start he echoes Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address:

“It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.”

I also like this: “Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished, than seriously to be expected.” Hamilton really like the “x and x” formulation – no “omit needless words” devotee he! Of course, they had nothing else to do in those days but read pamphlets, so you wanted to make sure people got their money’s worth.

Further on...I challenge the reader to drink some wine and then read this sentence:

“I am well aware that it would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views: Candor will oblige us to admit, that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted, that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable; the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears.”

It’s not as easy as I make it look. Of course, in Hamilton’s day they had beer for breakfast, a tradition I hope they continue at Columbia.

In the next paragraph, which I am not going to quote, Hamilton comes out and says that big government is the true guardians of the liberties of the public. Big Government! And he’s on the 10, people!

Okay, now we have #2, by John Jay (of the high school whose football players I used to see on the F train). And, perhaps appropriately, it’s about teamwork – we should all be one country rather than a bunch of separate states, an issue that, as we know all too well, still burns unto our own time.

“Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of Government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights, in order to vest it with requisite powers.” Does the Federalist Society know that this stuff is in the Federalist?

Okay, I’ve done my work, and so to bed (which I don’t think is in the Harvard Classics).

Jan 5: Soaring Eagle and Contented Stork

But it’s not Animal Week at the Harvard Classics – instead, it’s something from Mazzini (who “labored for the freedom of Italy, but was exiled.”), and his comparison so Byron (eagle) and Goethe (stork). The hook is that Byron arrived in Greece on this day in 1824 to fight for Greek independence, and nothing so far has told me that the Harvard Classics are from another world as this – the fact that Dr. Eliot and friends consider, not even Byron’s writing, but an event from his life, to be celebration-worthy.

One begins to understand the hostility of the old guard when they started writing about cinema in the quality magazines…Pop was the death of the world where Byron’s fight for Greek independence was an appropriate sticker to put on one’s intellectual baggage.

Point for me: I did know that Byron had swum the Hellespont.

Okay, on to Vol. 32, pp. 377-396.

But first another note about volume 32! It’s “Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German, and Italian.” the lineup is :

• Montaigne (whom I loved in college)
• Sainte-Beuve (who I’ve never heard of, but who is pictured opposite the title page wearing a hat that is almost certainly not a yarmulke, but if it were a yarmulke it would be worn at the jauntiest, Frenchiest angle ever. Presumably this is before the Dreyfus Affair.)
• Renan (who I’ve heard of, but c’est tout)
• Lessing (what’s German for “ditto”?)
• Schiller
• Kant (Kant! No wonder the spines on this edition – and probably all editions – of the Harvard Classics are so smooth! I couldn’t make heads or tails of Kant back when I didn’t get so sleepy. And just shoved in volume of essays with Montaigne and jaunty quasi-yarmulke wearing dudes! )
• And Mazzini. So the volume should really be called “Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German, and an Italian.”

All right, here we go, here we go. As I turn to the essay (it’s the last one), there’s the crackle you get when you go deep into a hardcover book for the first time. Clearly Great-Grandpa wasn’t having any future metaphysics of morals.

Hey, an introductory note! Mazzini (1805-1872), fought tooth and nail for Italian independence, mostly from London, which I guess was lousy with political rabble-rousers. Apparently finding Italian government disappointing is a long tradition.

Okay, first of all, Byron is compared to a falcon, not an eagle. And Mazzini, or his translator, uses “from whence” (one of the irritating things about the Harvard Classics is that they never tell you who the translator is).

Summary: We overreacted in hating Goethe for his (unnamed) politics. I can only assume they were quasi-reactionary, because he’s being compared with Byron who, as we know, fought for Greek independence.

Then:

Our earthly life is one phase of the eternal aspiration of the soul towards progress, which is our law; ascending in increasing power and purity from the finite towards the infinite; from the real towards the ideal; from that which is, towards that which is to come. In the immense storehouse of the past evolutions of life constituted by universal tradition, and in the prophetic instinct brooding in the depths of the human soul, does poetry seek inspiration.

One waits for Groucho to reply to a Dumontian outburst like this.. The Harvard Classics definitely takes place in a pre-Groucho world.

Onward…it turns out they are the last individualists:

The Poetry of the epoch had represented individuality in its every phase; had translated in sentiment what science had theoretically demonstrated; and it had encountered the void. But as society at last discovered that the destinies of the race were not contained in a mere problem of liberty, but rather in the harmonization of liberty with association—so did poetry discover that the life it had hitherto drawn from individuality alone was doomed to perish for want of aliment; and that its future existence depended on enlarging and transforming its sphere...

Jesus. Maybe poetry was doomed to perish because of criticism like this. I can’t even finish this, not with the children fighting like they are downstairs. Maybe I’ll finish reading it tonight. Maybe it would have helped having read a little more Byron and Goethe before reading a dense second-order essay about them.