Saturday commute cvii: Baccalaureate advice of our chum

The other day, the estimable

Tim Egan, one of the few col-

umnists condemned to recom-
mendation in our Context,

offered an attitude toward

Commencement speaking - or,

rather - listening, which I

was cheerfully disagreeing

with, to a much more recent

sufferer of the rite than I.

There's no doubt, that Egan

has the better case, that a

capstone occasion to a quad-

rennial opening of minds is

little disserved by indul-

ging a climactic Fool, even

in the guise of an antagon-

ist. Yet, if that's so, I'd

still argue for quality in

this mental bloodsport, and

we know where to find that:

      For two jars stand on Zeus'

      threshold whence he gives of

      his evil gifts, and another

      of the good; and to whom Zeus

      delights in thunder gives a

      mixed portion, to him befalls

      now evil, now good; but to

      whom he gives of the baneful,

      him he scorns, and evil misery

      chases him over the noble earth,

      a wanderer honored neither by

      gods nor by mortals.

Just sayin', Achilles was, as

the Iliad wound to its close;

yet for a fellow much then oc-

cupied by pressing matters, a

not-unsympathetic synopsis of

what's what. Yes, a whiff of

religiosity appears to taint

the offering, but it blows a-

way beneath a gentler breeze,

indifference. Pretty classy.

Homer

Iliad

  xxiv, 527 - 533

Sir Moses Finley

  translation and criticism

The World of Odysseus

op. cit.

NB: Professor Finley (1912 - 1986)

was a more than ordinarily distin-

guished teacher and Classicist, of

of luminous standing in American

academia, until subpoenaed in 1952

by the Republican-controlled Senate

Sub-Committee on Internal Security,

and commanded to state whether he

had ever been a member of a Com-

munist Party. He declined to answer

and the Trustees of his University

summarily expelled him. Immediate-

ly, at Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper,

future Regius Professor, agitated for

his appointment at Christ Church; 

but Cambridge was faster to act,

and Finley's career at that Univer-

sity found him flourishing among

peers then and to this very day in

opened, grateful minds. He was

knighted by the Queen in 1979;

and only last month, a teacher of

my own baccalaureate years, was

recommending him to me anew.

This posting is for such keepers.

Suppose it were Friday xcv: the last morels

     If it were up to me, one would not

     harvest the last morels. They hide

     to allow for this discretion, even

     as we pluck all we want in the ten

     days of their season; and when one

     does go back, connoisseurship as a

     mask for greed and aggrandizement,

     I like the experience of an admon-

     ition that reminds an unmasked de-

     sire, that it all has been plumbed

     enough for one season, soil rising

     to gather the share of its origin,

     our truest, deserving connoisseur.

Origins of arrest

   The young man's movements,
   however, betrayed no con-
   sistency of attention -
   not even, for that matter,
   when one of his arrests had
   proceeded from possibilities
   in faces shaded, as they 
   passed him on the pavement,
   by huge beribboned hats, or
   more delicately tinted still
   under the tense silk of para-
   sols held at perverse angles
   in waiting victorias.

     I admit to having needed
     to be trained in the in-
     heritance of literature,
     as in anything else, for
     this comes down and does
     proceed from possibility.
     
     I never mind, not having
     written a sentence I see
     as brilliant, but I have
     been astounded to be un-
     prepared for it. I know,
     it is customary to comp-
     lain of Henry James, for
     his preservation of pos-
     sibility beyond ordinary
     endurance. Is there any-
     thing worthier enduring?

   

Henry James
The Golden Bowl
  page 1
1904
Alfred A. Knopf
Everyman, 1992©

Another turnstile turned

We turned another turnstile in vis-its to rmbl yesterday, at lunch-time. One of those meaningless yet diverting milestones which assail us all, in an unguarded corner of the eye, yet touch upon neither process nor substance in any il-luminating way. I thought I might be at a loss to depict an occasion so negligible, but given that I'm taking something of a holiday, I applied myself to that puzzle with heightened gainlessness, borrowing an attitude from Santayana.

Literature .. cannot long forget, without forfeiting all dignity, that it serves a burdened and per-plexed creature, a human animal struggling to persuade the univer-sal sphinx, to propose a more in-telligible riddle. Irresponsible and trivial in its abstract im-pulse, man's simian chatter becomes noble as it becomes symbolic; its representative function lends it a serious beauty, its utility endows it with moral worth.

George Santayana, possibly to be under-
stood as a Harvard man, could often be
mistaken for a draughtsman of Nobel ac-
ceptance speeches, in spare moments be-
tween dispensing towels at a turkish
bath. It is unnerving to summon an echo
of his superheated sympathies, but we
find them in the loftiest libraries of
our hereditary aristocracies, seething
to be preached, and they resound equal-
ly in the depredations of critics, and
other soi-disant mentors of our time:

  

Taste is formed in those     moments when aesthetic emotion is massive and distinct; preferences then grown conscious, judgments put into words, will reverberate through calmer hours; they will constitute prejudices, habits of apperception, secret standards for all other beauties.

Literature, Santayana might have recalled to the enhance-ment of his argument, is full of rogues who cherish their troubles as flowerings of taste. Was this the origin of the restaurant as we know it? 

George Santayana
The Life of Reason
  Reason in Art
Scribner, 1905©

David Cecil
Library Looking-Glass
  A Personal Anthology
op. cit.

Justice Kagan envisions a rotating gavel for everybody's god

  Meticulous application

  of equal oppression, a

  conciliating remedy of

  liberty: just possibly

  a solecism prefiguring

  a benign shambles.

  An air of biding time,

  of grave confusion un-

  der due lip service to

  equality, and an obvi-

  ous groping for a less

  regressive Court major-

  ity, bear the hallmark

  of a more fertile dis-

  integration than were

  expected in the senti-

  mental lunge to revive

  icons. We've seen such
  ferment, and it can be
  a pleasure to reclaim.

           Presumably, there is much

           here that was part of the

           inherited bardic formulas,

           repeated and perpetuated

           after much of primitive be-

           lief had degenerated into

           mere clichés of speech and

           storytelling. The essential

           difficulty is to find the

           proper line between a

           thought-world that was gone 

           and a rationality that was 

           yet to come.

        

Supreme Court

  of the United States

Town of Greece v. Galloway

May, 2014

Sir Moses Finley

The World of Odysseus

  Morals and Values

Viking, 1954©

Memo to the degree candidate

   What is being

   tested?

   

   It could be said of his

   philosophical method that

   its aim is to change the

   aspect under which certain

   things are seen - for ex-

   ample, to see a mathematical

   proof not as as a sequence

   of propositions but as a 

   rule, to see first-person

   reports of psychological

   states .. not as descriptions

   but as expressions, and so on.

   The 'understanding that con-

   sists in seeing connections',

   one might say, is the under-

   standing that results from a

   change of aspect.

Ray Monk

Ludwig Wittgenstein

  The Duty of Genius

1990

Penguin Books, 1991©