The Consequence of a Distorted Will is Passion

For it is not the discovery but the mere search for wisdom which should be preferred even to the discovery of treasures and to ruling over nations and to the physical delights available to me at a nod. But I was an unhappy young man, wretched as at the beginning of my adolescence when I prayed you for chastity and said: ‘Grant me chastity and continence but not yet.’ – Confessions VIII.17

the holleycarbines – st. augustine

Classics

I grew up listening to Gerard Manset, of whom I was almost as fond as of Jacques Brel. They competed for my affections with Hector Malot, whose Sans Famille eased me through childhood and whose bushy portrait I attempted to draw from the back cover of the book on a number of occasions.  (This all long before my discovery of Dickens, who beat Malot hands down even in Romanian translation). In any case, I ran into an acquaintance last week with whom I eventually ended up having coffee and who hummed all of Il Voyage En Solitaire to me! It was wonderful to hear the song after all this time, and I can’t resist including it here in honor of lost time, as it were.

Il Voyage En Solitaire

Bits and Pieces

Winter is a busy time for me, and I have not had the chance to properly update in the last few weeks. I hope, however, to resume with the posts in the days to come. For now, just a short list:

1. A friend, Gabriela Adamesteanu, is featured in the Observatorul Cultural. Her work is nothing short of brilliant, I highly recommend it.

2. Kermode finds Milton’s manifest magical and goes misty-eyed for Paradise Lost (as any person in his or her right mind most certainly would).

3. The Winter 2009 issue of Daedalus turns out to be a full-blown epic of the humanities in present-day academia. (More on specific articles later.)

4. The online version of Apostrof: Revista Uniunii Scriitorilor is up and working again. I still get excited when I see my name alongside the others (shameless self-promotion, I know).

5. Michael Berube expresses GREat doubts in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

6. It is almost Valentine’s Day. Alas, despondency! (For all the wrong reasons.)Perhaps we should rethink our chosen saint and celebrate Aquinas instead. He’s the one who got it right, after all. As he says,  ”minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum desiderabilius est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minibus rebus.” - Summa Theologica, I, q.1, a.5, ad.1

That Pesky “Life of the Mind”

I have suspected that there might be something seriously wrong with me ever since, at the age of twelve, I declared that I wanted to be sent away to a boarding school and promptly packed my suitcase. The desire to be shipped off for an education was at least partially due to the image of Castalia I had formed as a result of reading Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, through which I was fumbling at the time, but even after my infatuation with the Magister Ludi subsided in the months to come, the suitcase nevertheless stayed packed. I lugged off its nearly identical contents (though in somewhat larger sizes) six years later when I finally left for college. Even now, I am still lugging about its deformed and bulging shape.  

This morning, I was reminded of that bizarre escapist fantasy of my tween years when I ran across Stanley Fish’s column in the Times. As usual, he was surprised by sin, though this time the fault lay on the side of too little rather than too much knowledge. Fish reviews Frank Donoghue’s new book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities and sums up Donoghue’s argument very nicely (though you can surmise yourself what the book is about, given its title). He states: ”One vision, rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he [Donoghue] tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.” Indeed, this seems to be the case, at least where American institutions are concerned. There are more adjuncts than tenture-track faculty, freshmen classes reach astronomical proportions, assembly-line grading is standard procedure, the classics are hardly ever taught, and graduate students can’t tell the a Greek from a Roman. You will, moreover, often find professors bemoaning that classics majors do not know their Latin, French majors their French, and English majors their Shakespeare. This is not so much the case at Columbia, but every time I have attended a public lecture on reading, or on literature today, or on the liberal arts, these are the sorts of comments that I hear. Honestly, I do not understand how the idea of a ”corporate university” came about, or of what use it may be, unless my friend Ilana is right, and the the university is now the new high school.

Even if this is the case, however, all universities, even the corporate type, cater to their students’ demands. The students are, after all, the ones who are paying. In the late Middle Ages, it became common practice to nail the seats in the lecture hall to the ground, because displeased students were in the habit of picking them up and throwing them at the lecturer if his lecture was not up to par. Not paying for a bad lecture was, after all, the unspoken rule. So, why have we not picked up the chairs too? Why do we not demand to be taught by tenured senior faculty, by experienced connoisseurs of culture, by linguists and scholars and master crafstmen? (That is not to say that I do not appreciate adjuncts; I know some great, and I mean great young professors.) Institutions which are especially concerned with profits (and all modern universities are) generally will pay attention to their students’ demands if they begin to fear loss of revenue. So, it is not unresonable to suppose that if enough students were to demand it, both content and teaching methods would change. The system, as Donoghue points out, is a system that works like a business.

If this is so, then the question should be not what has happened to the professors, but what has happened to the students. Why do the young masters no longer want to learn their Aristotle and demand a good job of it? God knows, after suffering through the Metaphysics with a professor who went through the text argument by argument (“killing me softly”) on the blackboard at 10 am twice a week, spewing Greek every which way, I have an idea of how daunting the prospect of a “liberal education” can be. And yet, that did not seem to dampen the spirits of previous generations, nor did not make the thirty people in my class less appreciative of what the professor was trying to do. 

I have no real point to make here, simply that I think the myth of Castalia has finally been put to rest, at least publicly. The intellectual is no longer the ideal. The researcher has taken his place and has replaced the quest for knowledge with the quest for information. What we are experiencing now is a sort of post-transitional period. Perhaps my bags should just stay packed for good. That is, unless I can make a post out of them. After all, this is the age of the least publishable unit.

“Nu mi-ati spart cerul din fereastra odata cu geamul”

“You have not broken the sky in my window, having broken the glass.” 

The Moldovan poet Grigore Vieru passed away a few hours ago, in Chisinau, from cerebral injuries resulting from a car accident that took place on the 16th of January. A great admirer of Eminescu and a stern if star-struck lover of the Romanian tongue, as well as an advocate for the union of Basarabia and Romania, he was one of the last great writers of Nichita Stanescu’s generation. May his slumber be deep and his rest never again troubled by the flow of the Prut. 

I don’t usually like to post video, but I have always enjoyed this rendition of his poem “Tu,” set to music by Iurie Sadovnic:

I heard a fly buzz when I died

I am just now beginning to recuperate from all the guests and gluttony of the past week, the overdue library books, the freeze-dried laundry (read: wet laundry that is left in the washer for an extended period of time), the day-job demands and the evening coffee-house charters (manifestos of biscotti consistency). Tuesday, classes resume at Columbia. Though I am certainly glad the summer is slowly is approaching, both for thermal and academic reasons (spending a month on the Black Sea and two months in Bucharest will certainly bring some relief, as will graduating and knowing which graduate program I am to attend), quite honestly, I don’t want the roller-coaster of papers and exams to take off just yet. I always get motion-sickness at the beginning of a term.

More in the way of books and bookends to come after I straighten out my daily existence. In the meantime, though I am sure many have already taken note, I simply must point to this delicious appraisal of Mr. Updike’s latest. It’s too bad Wolcott won’t give up his toasty little cubicle at Vanity Fair and do this sort of thing on a regular basis. I can’t resist posting one particularly tasty quote, because I too had an editorial apprentice fling at the New Yorker and heartily concur with the assessment of both the man and institution (an assessment Wolcott makes by means of others’ assessments, thus managing to avoid biting the hand that feeds him). As I tried to explain to my thesis adviser, who does not understand why I gave up future prospects in publishing, I would much rather wail with the academics than ail with the publishers.

‘The New Yorker and John Updike are both deeply immersed in the image of man as trivia,’ Alfred Chester wrote when panning Updike’s short story collection Pigeon Feathers. ‘Reading Updike, like reading the New Yorker, gives one the impression that the pages would turn to ash at the mere suggestion that life was other than a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total vacuum.’

Questions of Method

Leave everything.

Leave Dada.

Leave your wife, and your mistress.

Leave your hopes and your fears.

Sow your children in the corner of a wood.

Leave the prey for the shadow.

Leave if need be an easy life, what you are

      offered for a future situation.

Hit the road.

                                 – Andre Breton