N is for Neville

Heareing a learned Philosopher discourse of death and how it is not to be feared, and the stroake passes and the dead feele no torment. How, sayth M. Gaulard, doe they not feele the ffleas? Then, haueing the Philosophers answere No, Truly then I beleeue it is good some tymes to be dead.

— Étienne Tabourot, Bigarrures or the Pleasant and Witlesse and Simple Speeches of the Lord Gaulard of Burgundy, tr. "J. B. of Charterhouse", from a manuscript circa 1660.

From our bathroom window can be seen, in the indigo night, a far distant object, large and bright, like a cinema-screen, but still, and unanimated. I would stare at it every evening, in an attempt to decipher and identify it, but without success. In the dark it sat, silent and unknown.

Finally curiosity got the better of me. From the family home I fetched a pair of binoculars, and later that evening, after supper, I opened the window and trained my new lenses upon the far light. As I turned the focus, my vision extended slowly into the distance, alighting momentarily on other windows, and on their inhabitants, moving silently, as if in a camera obscura. At last I could see the mysterious object. It seemed to be some sort of communiqué, with words, black on white, but I could make out only letters. I was inclined to think it was a large lane-indicator by the side of the road.

The next evening I returned to the window, this time resting the binoculars against the sill, for a steadier vision. Now I found I could discern words. World; place; home. Important place. I felt rather like Marvin in the climactic scene of So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, descrying God's last message to his creation. The next night I returned again, and this time I could finally see the whole. Home is the most important place in the world. What was this quasi-philosophical banality doing in huge letters by a distant road? I turned to Google, and soon learnt that the phrase is used as a slogan for the furniture company Ikea. The great screen is merely, it turns out, a commercial hoarding. All the sublime has gone out of the world—the mysteries of our city are now only opportunities for product. It's enough to make one a fucking Marxist!

*

In the face of this vulgarity we grow bored. Don't we? Boredom seems to have become an integral part of my outlook, as if by accident. It is a double-faced vise: on one side, we struggle to avoid it, constantly seeking the new; on the other, we embrace it, accepting boredom, and contempt, as the markers of an ironical and urbane sophistication. We take pleasure in boredom as we take pleasure in incessant and unwinnable combat against it. When I wrote against the appreciation of literature, here, I imagined of my pupils:

Shown a Renaissance sonnet, they would yawn, Oh! Another wittily inverted pentameter. Shown a passage from Henry James they would sigh, Ah, yet another meticulous character-portrait. Have you nothing more interesting for us? They would revel sybaritically in their grand scorn. The world could show nothing to them—and they would die content at their mastery of it.

This summer, rereading Candide, I realised I had been anticipated, 250 years ago, in the character of Pococurante, a Venetian noble whose palace the hero visits in chapter 25. Candide and Pococurante discuss the latter's maids, his paintings, his large collection of classic books, and his gardens. Candide admires it all, but Pococurante despises everything, weary with the greatest masters.

As soon as our two travelers had taken leave of His Excellency, Candide said to Martin, "Well, I hope you will own that this man is the happiest of all mortals, for he is above everything he possesses."

"But do not you see," answered Martin, "that he likewise dislikes everything he possesses? It was an observation of Plato, long since, that those are not the best stomachs that reject, without distinction, all sorts of aliments."

"True," said Candide, "but still there must certainly be a pleasure in criticising everything, and in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties."

"That is," replied Martin, "there is a pleasure in having no pleasure."

Last weekend I saw the same again, in a modern setting, watching Armando Iannucci's surreal and poignant sketch about the unappeasable. As a doctor explains, 'Sammy's developed a syndrome which means that he's literally being bored to death. If he ever has the same experience twice, his internal organs will haemorrhage simultaneously. We're desperately trying to invent as many completely new experiences as we can.' We see the aged Sammy, utterly jaded by a surfeit of information and entertainment, confronted by his wife with a cascade of bathetic novelties:

— It's a new shaped teabag!

— It doesn't interest me.

— A book about Ronnie and Reggie Kray!

— I'm bored of bastards. . .

— They're starting a new round of Champions League football-matches!

— Christ.

Upon discovery of some unreleased John Lennon material, Sammy's eyes start bleeding, and when presented with a documentary about the International Space Station, he curls up with a pillow, whimpering pathetically. Here is Pococurante, but rather than revelling in his grand bored scorn, he is suffering. I feel a little of either, sometimes revelling, sometimes suffering. It was a condition diagnosed with philosophical sympathy by Kierkegaard, who immortalised the thrill-hunting aesthete as A in his Either / Or. This is not one of those times that the world shows its wares to me. Giornale Nuovo has closed shop, having apparently grown tired of its own endless succession of nice pictures. Novelty palls, or turns out to be an Ikea advertisement. Novelty palls—one wants to stop sorting through the flotsam for once, stop skimming, and start digging, properly. A blog, naturally, is more suited to skimming than to digging, so what this change of heart spells for the dear old Varieties—well, time will tell, eh?

Bibliophily

There are few activities more pleasurable than transferring one's collection of books, theretofore coacervated all hobson-jobson in unlabelled boxes, to a newly-acquired set of shelves. Thanks to the munificence of neighbours, my wife and I have recently landed, gratis, no fewer than five bookshelves, of various sizes and shapes. Some of them are even antiques. I spent the evening turning over the piles sprawled out from upturned boxes, unexamined since our departure for Arizona three long years ago. As each item surfaces, I can recall exactly the time and place of its purchase; and so the experience as a whole recapitulates my life, and also, in a peculiar way, the structure of my mind.

*

The collector Robert Cotton (1571-1631), whose enormous library—or at least what remained of it in the wake of a great fire (1731), the remnants nonetheless replete with priceless treasures—was later donated to the national collection, arranged his books on shelves marked by the busts of Caesars. Thus, our sole surviving copy of Beowulf was (and still is) designated 'Vitellius A.xv', denoting that the manuscript was found on the top shelf (A) below Vitellius, fifteen along. (One rather suspects that Vitellius was too nugatory a Caesar for a text of such importance.) At any rate, I have decided to revive the practice, only using great literary figures instead of Roman clown-emperors. Thus, atop the first case I have placed a small bust of Goethe, presiding. I have yet to pick my next hero.


The Warburg Library is organised to maximise suggestiveness, all chronological and alphabetical plans having been abandoned, so as to provoke thought (and, dare I say it, often confusion) by unusual, though rarely irrational, juxtapositions. I like the idea. Indeed, it is difficult to know quite how to sort. As with translations, all solutions fall short one way or another. So I tend towards a loose order, with books grouped by size and vaguely by subject, though arranged for a pleasing curve on each shelf. I wanted to get Substantific Marrow onto the shelf of literary essayists, but there was no room, so instead I put him between Duval on Rabelais, and the copy of Mineshaft magazine I picked up in San Francisco. (I offer Emerson the choice of switching Mineshaft for an Aporia Press reprint of a few Thomason pamphlets (1642-61), collectively entitled Anomalous Phenomena of the Interregnum.) I have Hegel next to Lewis Spence and Extraordinary Popular Delusions, which, I'm sure you'll agree, is a fitting apposition. Phineas Fletcher's anatomical epic The Purple Island is next to George Chappell's neo-Rabelaisian Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera, which in turn neighbours an old, peeling Béroalde de Verville. Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters makes a cute companion to Christopher Ward's Gentleman into Goose.

Some conjunctions just amuse me. The Book of Mormon sits next to Josiah Royce's Principles of Logic; a biography of Mao next to a two-volume Leben und Werke of Schiller, in Fraktur, kindly given to me by my dear uncle; the works of Molière beside The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí; und so weiter. I'd like to get an octavo Shakespeare to put next to the contes of Voltaire, just to spite the pair of them. At the moment Voltaire's next to Swift and a 1906 Kommersbuch, which is almost as good, I think.

The shelf above the Loebs and other classics is too small for almost any book, so for now I have left it empty. Perhaps in shelving, just as in jazz, and Chinese painting, the notes you leave out count just as much, if not more.


The 200-odd books on these new shelves account for about 20-25% of my total collection, by my estimate. It is mostly second-tier material; although I refuse to have anything on my shelves that I dislike. (There is, of course, plenty that I haven't read.) I once read—damn if I can't remember where—about a French collector so determined to possess a perfect library that he would buy the Works of an author, cut out all the bad bits, and have the book rebound. Now that's my kind of collector. The ordonnance of these shelves is not perfect yet. It needs some tweaking. But it's almost there. I have heard the human body with its DNA compared to a vast library in which every book is the same. I like to imagine that when all my books are assembled in one place, perhaps at the end of my life, and placed in the correct order, I will have disclosed myself to the world more perfectly than in any book or conversation—shemhamphorasch.

Update: As it happens, I stumbled within a week across the reference to that French collector. My mind had embellished the matter, from Matthew Arnold's essay on Joseph Joubert, referring to 'the treasures of a library collected with infinite pains, taste, and skill, from which every book he thought ill of was rigidly excluded—he never would possess either a complete Voltaire or a complete Rousseau'. My version, as usual, is better.

Update #2: More book collections assembled here. Mine is the smallest, but then, it's quality that matters.

Crosswords

In the middle of Plato's treatise on the creation of the world, the Timaeus, the Demiurge—for centuries readily identified with the Christian God—divides up the fabric of the World Soul into strips, which he then fastens together:

The entire compound was divided by him lengthways into two parts, which he united at the centre like the letter X [chi], and bent into an inner and outer circle or sphere [kuklos], cutting one another again at a point over against the point at which they cross.

Plato is describing the universe as two circles with a common centre, at right angles. (He then adjusts this and has the second sphere at a non-right angle to the first—on the exact process, see Taylor's commentary.) The two circles meet at two points, each of which resembles the Greek chi, a cross. And the two circles are the circles of the Same and Different—the Same is the circle of the fixed stars, and the Different the circle of the planets, which moves in an opposite direction. This is the Greek origin of all those astronomical cycles and epicycles that remained almost unchallenged until Copernicus.


Bernard of Chartres, the twelfth-century Neoplatonist best known for the maxim ascribed to him by his pupil John of Salisbury—We are but dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants—composed a commentary on the Timaeus in about 1110, using the partial translation made by Calcidius in the fourth century. For Bernard, Plato is writing by involucrum, by the principle of allegory. Per diuisionem significantur duo motus animae: unus rationalis, alter irrationalis. By 'division' is meant two movements of the soul: the one rational, the other irrational. Just as the fixed circle turns smoothly from east to west, and back to east, so the rational soul moves from its Creator, to a consideration of earthly matters, and back to the Creator. The planetary circle turns from west to east to west, returning constantly from the Creator to earthly matters.

*

Some time in the second quarter of the second century AD, a Samaritan Neoplatonist named Justin converted to Christianity; his work is the earliest (still extant) serious body of Christian literature following the New Testament. In about 150 AD, Justin Martyr, as he is now called, composed his First Apology, online here. Chapter 60 wrestles with Plato's Timaeus.

And the physiological discussion of the Son of God in the Timæus of Plato, where he says, "He placed him crosswise in the universe," he borrowed in like manner from Moses.

This is a bit of a stretch—but delightfully so! The Demiurge, really a sort of careful artisan in Plato, becomes the Christian God, and the World Soul becomes the Son of God. The joining of soul-strips in a chi becomes the crosswise placing of Christ. As in, yes, the Crucifixion. The Moses part is even more far-fetched: 'Moses, by the inspiration and influence of God, took brass, and made it into the figure of a cross, and set it in the holy tabernacle, and said to the people, "If ye look to this figure, and believe, ye shall be saved thereby".' Moses does no such thing: he has a serpent, not a cross (Num 21.8). (And in case you're wondering, the Septuagint has a serpent too.) The point is that Plato gets his ideas about the universe from Moses—the author of the Pentateuch—who in turn is only foretelling the crucifixion. 'It is not, then, that we hold the same opinions as others, but that all speak in imitation of ours'.

When you think about it, this is a clever gambit. Justin is addressing Antoninus Pius, the cultivated Roman emperor, and adoptive father of Marcus Aurelius. If you were a literate intellectual of the second century Greco-Roman world, chances are you were a Platonist of some stripe. All philosophical traditions of the period, including Stoic and Peripatetic, traced themselves back to Plato. And so when Justin argues not only that his Christianity is compatible with Platonism, but moreover that it preceded and inspired Plato, he is one-upping the philosophical fashions of his milieu.

The Holy Cross thus becomes a symbol uniting pagan and Christian thought. The Cross is also treated in Chapter 55: here Justin argues that its symbolic importance is revealed by its morphological recurrence throughout human life. He does not use phrases like 'morphological recurrence', of course.

For consider all the things in the world, whether without this form they could be administered or have any community. For the sea is not traversed except that trophy which is called a sail abide safe in the ship; and the earth is not ploughed without it: diggers and mechanics do not their work, except with tools which have this shape. And the human form differs from that of the irrational animals in nothing else than in its being erect and having the hands extended, and having on the face extending from the forehead what is called the nose, through which there is respiration for the living creature; and this shows no other form than that of the cross.

The Cross is here almost an object of visual, visionary obsession, appearing again and again, informing all that it touches with a Christian spirit. The faith is given not just in Scripture, but in Nature itself.

*

Perhaps you have some difficult visualising all these objects, supposedly cruciform. In which case, you're in luck. Now, we have no surviving manuscripts illuminating Justin, at least not to my knowledge. But we do have a charming little book by the Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius, first published in 1594, entitled De Cruce, or On the Cross. In 1.9 he illustrates the patristic sources for the Crux Immissa or the standard transverse cross we readily visualise today. Jerome's commentary on Mark is quoted:

Ipsa species Crucis, quid est nisi forma quadrata mundi? Aues quando volant ad athera [sic], formam Crucis assumunt. Homo natans per aquas, vel orans, forma Crucis visitur.

What is the shape of the Cross, unless it is the quadrate form of the world? When birds fly through the air, they assume the shape of the Cross. A man, swimming through the water, or praying, seems to have the form of the Cross.

Then Minucius Felix is quoted.

Signum sane Crucis naturaliter visimus in naui, cum velis tumentibus vehitur, cum expansis palmulis labitur, & cum erigitur iugum, Crucis signum est: & cum homo porrectis manibus Deum pura mente veneratur.

Truly, we naturally see the sign of the Cross in a ship, when it moves with swollen sails, when it glides with oars outstretched, and when the yoke is erected, it is a sign of the Cross; and also when man venerates God with hands aloft and a pure mind.

Then Maximus Taurensis is quoted. Most of this, like Minucius Felix, is a repeat of Justin and Jerome, but he adds a little bit:

Caelum quoque ipsum huius signi figura dispositum est. Nam cum quatuor partibus distinguitur, Oriente, Occidente, Meridiano, ac Septemtrione, quatuor quasi Crucis angulis continetur.

The sky, also, is arranged by the figure of this sign. For when its four regions are distinguished, East, West, South, and North, it seems to contain the four ends of the Cross.

Then Justin Martyr is quoted, from the above passage. And then, finally, we get a nice picture, illustrating all of the analogies from Justin, Jerome, and Maximus. Here is the more attractive 1594 version (from this online copy):


And here the ugly 1595 version (from here):


In the following chapter, Lipsius 'proves' that Christ was crucified on the transverse cross, and not on a Crux Simplex or upright stake. (It was this chapter, incidentally, that the Jehovah's Witnesses who compiled the New World Translation failed to read, when they claimed that Lipsius supported their wacky notion that Christ was crucified on a stake. Catholics quickly got hold of the book, and as soon as they'd mastered enough Wheelock to read the damn thing, were able to point and jeer at the Witnesses' incompetence.) Here, Lipsius starts playing around with the notion of the cross having four points. Sedulius is quoted, from the fifth book of the fifth-century neo-Vergilian epic Carmen Paschalis (Easter Song):

Neue quis ignoret speciem Crucis esse colendam,
Quae Dominum portauit ouans, ratione potenti,
Quatuor inde plagas quadrati colligit orbis.
Splendidus auctoris de vertice fulget Eous,
Occiduo sacrae labuntur sidere plantae,
Arcton dextra tenet, medium leua erigit axem.

For who but knows the Cross we should revere
Which joyful bore the Lord: He gathered here
The symbolled Quarters of the World’s great Sphere.
The Orient shineth from His Head supreme—
Beneath His feet the Vesper planets beam,
And either Pole at either hand shall seem.

This is not my translation, but the rendering of George Sigerson from 1922. I believe there is a pun in the word plagas, here translated 'Quarters', but with the additional meaning of 'wounds'. Sigerson (1836-1925), a patriotic Irish polymath and translator of Charcot, has this to say about the above lines of Sedulius, who was probably Irish himself:

Usually, as in English, men speak of north and south, east and west; children at school are taught that by facing the sun at noon-day they look south, with back to the north, and left and right hands to the east and west respectively. But the terms of the Irish language indicate quite a different position. In Irish, the same word designates both the right hand and the south; the left and the north are named alike; whilst 'behind' and 'west' are identical. . . Thus the symbolism of the Cross, as given by St. Sedulius in the fifth century, which seems strange to modern readers, would appear quite natural and familiar to the Irish-speaking peasant of to-day.

You see, human beings did not stop reading what they wanted to read when the Middle Ages suddenly came to a halt, somewhen between 1350 and 1650. When Sir Thomas Browne dropped his double A-side, Hydriotaphia / The Garden of Cyrus in 1658, he was still playing silly buggers with cross imagery.

Where by the way we shall decline the old Theme, so traced by antiquity of crosses and crucifixion: Whereof some being right, and of one single peece without traversion or transome, do little advantage our subject. Nor shall we take in the mysticall Tau, or the Crosse of our blessed Saviour, which having in some descriptions an Empedon or crossing foot-stay, made not one single transversion. And since the Learned Lipsius hath made some doubt even of the Crosse of St Andrew, since some Martyrologicall Histories deliver his death by the generall Name of a crosse, and Hippolitus will have him suffer by the sword; we should have enough to make out the received Crosse of that Martyr.

[. . .]

Of this Figure Plato made choice to illustrate the motion of the soul, both of the world and man; while he delivereth that God divided the whole conjunction length-wise, according to the figure of a Greek X, and then turning it about reflected it into a circle; By the circle implying the uniform motion of the first Orbs, and by the right lines, the planetical and various motions within it. And this also with application unto the soul of man, which hath a double aspect, one right, whereby it beholdeth the body, and objects without; another circular and reciprocal, whereby it beholdeth it self. The circle declaring the motion of the indivisible soul, simple, according to the divinity of its nature, and returning into it self; the right lines respecting the motion pertaining unto sense, and vegetation, and the central decussation, the wondrous connexion of the severall faculties conjointly in one substance. And so conjoyned the unity and duality of the soul, and made out the three substances so much considered by him; That is, the indivisible or divine, the divisible or corporeal, and that third, which was the Systasis or harmony of those two, in the mystical decussation.

And if that were clearly made out which Justin Martyr took for granted, this figure hath had the honour to characterize and notifie our blessed Saviour, as he delivereth in that borrowed expression from Plato; Decussavit eum in universo, the hint whereof he would have Plato derive from the figure of the brazen Serpent, and to have mistaken the letter X for T.

Naturally, if you've never read The Garden of Cyrus, you must immediately desist from your leisurely perusal of the Varieties, and devote your next hour to a study of its manifold richnesses. Browne has both Justin and Bernard, and a thousand other crosses, lozenges and quincunxes, from the most marvelous texts, and from the variety of the natural world. He is especially good on plants, if you like that sort of thing.

Human beings did not even stop reading what they wanted to read after 1658. We've already seen what patriotism (or should that be 'patrickotism'?) can do to an erudite Irishman. But think also of Justin's 1885 editor, Philip Schaff, who in his introduction exclaims:

And in spite of Gallios and Neros alike, the gospel was dispelling the gross darkness. Of this, Pliny's letter to Trajan is decisive evidence. Even in Seneca we detect reflections of the daybreak. Plutarch writes as never a Gentile could have written until now.

Seneca, that is, who throughout the Middle Ages was believed to have corresponded amicably with St. Paul. And Plutarch, whose De sera numinis vindicta allegedly demonstrates the influence of the Gospel. Later, A. E. Taylor's 1928 commentary on the Timaeus would be denounced by Francis Cornford (in the excellent Plato's Cosmology, 1937) as merely a 'Christianization of Plato'. Christians, like Plato and the rest of the classical pagans before them, have always needed to make analogies. It is a way of dealing with absurd doctrines. It is a way of making sense of that from which sense cannot be made. I write that last line as a chiasmus, so called because it resembles in structure the shape of the Greek letter chi.

I too, it seems, need analogies.

Oceanography

It is simply the programme of the pleasure principle that determines the purpose of life. This principle governs the functioning of our mental apparatus from the start; there can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at odds with the whole world—with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. It is quite incapable of being realised; all the institutions of the universe are opposed to it; one is inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ has no part in the plan of creation.

Freud was, in many respects, the great successor of Montaigne. Pessimist, leisured humanist, maker of statements—and a writer of exquisite prose, even in translation. I find comforting this high rationalist, so contemptuous of that ‘oceanic feeling’ articulated by the theistical unreligious, lamenting, with all emotional candour, the condition of an animal in a universe ranged against its weal. That man should be happy has no part in the plan of creation.

Freud goes on to claim, in Civilization and its Discontents, that ‘What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon.’ It is only natural, then, after my rush of excitement last week, the satisfaction of pent-up needs, that the novelty should have palled, leaving me wound and nervy by the end of the week. It is not so much a misery as a loss of meaning and colour from the world—I have been unable to concentrate, disinclined to activity and interaction, blank, and distrustful. The thesis, before it is even begun, is haunting me, an uncharted and fearful expanse of possibilities, an oceanic swell of innavigable ignorance. Don’t worry too much, says my tutor. Still, I worry. There is a comfort in worrying, shared.

*

Shared with you, also. My life is starting to take on some sort of recognizable form. For the last three years I have been crying in the wilderness, with little end—only momentary pleasures and anxieties, diverse varieties of experience. But now there is a telos towards which I am moving, irrefragably. I like to imagine my facility with Latin, how good it will have to be in three years. Yes, if my life has already been made narrative as text in 21.5 months writing for you, it is now becoming narrative not as text, not as art, but simply as life.

Literary historians from Auerbach to John Gardner have traced the way in which the cultural place of narrative has been diminished and the modes of interpretation of narrative have been transformed until it has become possible for modern theorists to understand the form of narrative, not as that which connects story-telling with the form of human life, but precisely as that which segregates narrative from life, which confines it to what is taken to be a separate and distinctive realm of art.

That's what Alasdair MacIntyre thinks, at any rate. Is it true? Does it sound good, at least? For MacIntyre, we have lost, since the Enlightenment, a sense of our lives as parts in a broader narrative—and we have lost a sense of our own life as tending towards a specific goal—the cultivation of virtue and achievement of eudaimonia, which, in the context of modern ethics, is a meaningless word. But was it not Romanticism that called for Bildung? Bildung is teleological in that it has no goals outside itself—its telos is only self-completion and self-perfection. For Gadamer, Bildung is the 'condition of existence' for an authentic humanism. If I have been trying to think, lately, about problems of justification for the pursuit of humanistic discourse—and to no great solution—it is because, for the first time in years, and really for the first time ever, my life smells of Bildung. This must be more, surely, than the vague aesthetic dowsings of a life alone with the library and a keyboard. It must be something constellated, hierarchical.

My tutor talks casually about the stylistic variations in humanist Latin. The man next to her at the lunch table can dissert, for as long as you have, on the manuscript tradition of late Arabic astrology. And, next to him, in turn, a man with Tibetan and Sanskrit, making comments about John Dee.

At this imaginary lunch, I mumble something about Plutarch, and dream of the future, of self-perfection—a perfection which can never be finished, until I feel the fingers of Davy Jones at my throat, and prepare to give my speech, which I have ready, failing, naturally, not only to deliver my last words, carefully sculpted so as to be quotable in biographies—but even to complete my first line, which is, as it turns out, left only as an ellipsis (. . .), a series glittering as the last points of light on a great ocean of souls, occaso sole.

I think it impossible that narrative should not be an integral part of a man's life.

Guachapear

Friends, apologies for my recent silence. I have been a little lacking in inspiration of late, and I would not want to bore you with banalities. True, I do have a post's worth of material on the Great Books, but I'm not ready to fashion it quite yet. Last week I began my doctoral sojourn at the Warburg Institute, and have spent the first days in a state of rapturous excitement. Do you know, there are people there to whom one can actually talk about Brunetto Latini, or illuminated Aristotle opuscula, or Walter Pater, or Renaissance geomancy? It seems hard to fathom without choking up in delight.

I was sitting in the Institute's rather crepuscular library yesterday, reading a Montaigne essay. ('Of Coaches', one of his more rambling ventures.) The sheer thrill of the Institute had not yet worn off, and so I found my eyes distracted by shelves and shelves of neighbouring possibilities. I got down on my hands and knees and peered at the linguistics section. From the lowest shelf I plucked the Variorum edition of Yakov Malkiel's collected papers. I opened it at random and immediately my attention alighted upon this passage—from the 1948 essay ‘Italian guazzo and its Hispanic and Gallo-Romance Cognates’:

Guachapear, basically ‘to strike and stir up stagnant water with the feet’ (its second component is reminiscent of apear), has been known since Covarrubias to apply to the rattling of a poorly adjusted iron plate, e.g. a horseshoe. The Academy Dictionary of 1936 records the further meaning of ‘doing something hastily and crudely’; perhaps the compilers had in mind two passages of La Picara Justina in which the word had been interpreted by the editor of the text, J. Puyol y Alonso, signifying ‘to write in a slipshod fashion.’ Guachapear has also been identified at widely scattered points of Seneca’s former colonial empires. In Honduras, guachapeado is a ‘sickly old man’; in Chile, the verb stands for ‘stealing trash just for fun’; along Colombia’s Atlantic coast, it means ‘to clear the ground (superficially) of brambles and bushes.’ It would seem that the idea of inadequacy, of “things done by halves,” which pervades the derivative meanings of guachapear, goes back ultimately to the image of muddiness and thus fits again into the general configuration of the AQUATIO family.

Have you ever seen such a sublimely broad and elaborate range of meanings?

Decameron 8.9: pun and pumpkin

Gourds have always been important in human culture. In the late Middle Ages, schoolteachers would cut Latin words onto the surface of squashes and gourds as an aide-memoire for young children. This is, in fact, where we get the very word 'word', via the earlier Anglo-French guord (cf. Guillaume > William, guard > ward), which in turn is simply a variant of gourde or coorde (Latin cucurbita), and from which we have gourd and courgette.

*

Boccaccio was well aware of the symbolic significance of gourds, as we discover in Decameron 8.9, one of the work's pithiest novelle. In this story, two painters named Bruno and Buffalmalco—a recurrent duo—play a trick on Simone, a greedy and foolish physician from out of town. They convince him that they are secretly wealthy, thanks to the machinations of a cabal of necromancers; they encourage him to come along to a meeting, then push him in a ditch at night. So far, so mediaeval. But it is the imagery that here interests us.

Maestro Simone arrives back in Florence from Bologna (the university for law and medicine par excellence), where he settles in a street named Via del Cocomero—'Watermelon Road'. When Bruno addresses him early on, he calls him zucca mia da sale, 'my salt squash', and praises vostra qualitativa mellonaggine da Legnaia. Legnaia is a region of Florence then noted for its large pumpkins, and 'mellonaggine', which connotes stupidity, comes from the mellone or melon. Later on, Buffalmalco addresses Simone as Pinca mia da seme. Pinca, the etymological dictionary of Pianigiani (online here) tells us, is an archaic word for a species of cetriuolo or cucumber, and da seme means 'full of seed'. Finally, Buffalmalco mocks Simone: it is evident that the physician 'non apparaste miga l'abicí in su la mela, come molti sciocconi voglion fare, anzi l'apparaste bene in sul mellone, ch'è cosí lungo'—'did not learn the ABC on an apple, as so many idiots do, but instead learned it well on a melon, which is rather longer'. (J. M. Rigg's 1903 translation perhaps renders the pun best: 'twas on no pippin, as many a dolt does, but on the good long pumpkin that you learned your A B C'.)

So, what's with all the squashes? Wikitalia's article on the melon claims that it was originally considered a symbol of fecundity because of its large quantities of seed, later coming to symbolize a wild, generative capacity, opposed to intelligent reason—a fool. 'Uno stolto veniva chiamato mellone e una scemenza, mellonaggine'. But it is not just the melon—the entire family of Cucurbitaceae recurs through the novella as an unstated leitmotive, tying Simone's foolishness to his environs (cocomero), his education (mellone), and his interpersonal relations (zucca and pinca). He cannot escape it.

Exhaustive enumeration

Recently Aaron Haspel linked to a review of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day from the Virginia Quarterly Review. I wrote a little piece on Pynchon here—but never got around to reading Against the Day. The reviewer, William Logan, quotes this passage:

The rooms seemed to run on for blocks, stuffed with automata human and animal assembled and in pieces, disappearing-cabinets, tables that would float in midair and other trick furniture, Davenport figures with dark-rimmed eyes in sinister faces, lengths of perfect black velvet and multicolored silk brocade a-riot with Oriental scenes, mirrors, crystals, pneumatic pumps and valves, electromagnets, speaking-trumpets, bottles that never ran empty and candles that lighted themselves, player pianos, Zoetropic projectors . . .

Logan comments, 'The list may be the manifest sign of research the novelist can’t bear to throw away', adding that 'the matter of matter is almost always farcical in accumulation, from Dickens’s dust heaps in Our Mutual Friend to Imelda Marcos’s shoes'. He continues:

The meaning of the title, should Against the Day mean anything, lies in shoring up the present against those ruins of the future—and to that end, the list stockpiles odds and ends, like boxes of Civil Defense crackers, as a specific against destruction.

I'm not going to write a history of lists. (The canonical figures of literary listmaking are Rabelais and Joyce; many accounts see a precursor in the catalogue of ships from Iliad 2. I think that textual listmaking also has two important extra-literary sources—religious ritual and anatomical catalogues.) But this list, with its last two members, and with its mention of 'perfect black velvet', tips its hat in subtle reference to another striking literary list—this, from Vonnegut's 1952 Player Piano:

In the early light, the town seemed an enormous jewel box, lined with the black and gray velvet of fly-ash, and filled with millions of twinkling treasures: bits of air conditioners, amplidynes, analyzers, arc welders, batteries, belts, billers, bookkeeping machines, bottlers, canners, capacitors, circuitbreakers, clocks, coin boxes, calorimeters, colorimeters, computers, condensers, conduits, controls, converters, conveyers, cryostats, counters, cutouts, densitometers, detectors, dust precipitators, dishwashers, dispensers, dynamometers, dynamotors, electrodes, electronic tubes, exciters, fans, filers, filters, frequency changers, furnaces, fuses, gages, garbage disposers, gears, generators, heat exchangers, insulators, lamps, loudspeakers, magnets, mass spectrometers, motor generators, motors, noisemeters, oscillographs, panelboards, personnel machines, photoelectric cells, potentiometers, pushbuttons, radios, radiation detectors, reactors, recorders, rectifiers, reducers, regulators, relays, remote controls, resistors, rheostats, selsyns, servos, solenoids, sorters, spectrophotometers, spectroscopes, springs, starters, strain-gages, switchboards, switches, tape recorders, tachometers, telemeters, television sets, television cameras, testers, thermocouples, thermostats, timers, toasters, torquemeters, traffic controls, transistors, transducers, transformers, turbines, vacuum cleaners, vacuum gages, vacuum tubes, venders, vibration meters, viscosimeters, water heaters, wheels, X-ray spectrogoniometers, zymometers. . .

Player Piano is not one of Vonnegut's great books—it lacks the perfect irony and beauty of Slapstick, and the linguistic invention of Cat's Cradle. It is clearly an early work. But this passage is a masterstroke. It comes toward the end of the novel: the protagonist is admiring the wreckage left by a group of Luddites (the 'Ghost Shirts') in a dystopian techno-future. The list is thus not so much 'shoring up the present against those ruins of the future', but rather shoring up the past against the ruins of the present.

There are two brilliant things about Vonnegut's list: firstly, its unremitting alphabetization (only 'radios, radiation' and 'television sets, television cameras' seem to break the law), and secondly, the local effects created by the total pattern. It's terrific that we have 'dynamometers, dynamotors' and 'motor generators, motors', because the standard logic of prose rhythm would give the reverse order in each case. 'Fans, filers, filters' is a more traditional tricolon, and there is a delightful jangle on 'calorimeters, colorimeters'. Another nice touch is 'wheels, X-ray spectrogoniometers', which moves from the simplest machine to the most abstruse, purely by alphabetic place.

These local effects serve by contrast to make the listening reader more aware of the flatness of standard prose structures. The list defamiliarises both the language and the mechanical world now reduced to rubble: that world is now to be described not by a bystander, casually, but as if by an archaeologist, in systematic order. The world is dead, unrevivable; fully objectified.

Vonnegut's list thus takes the reader out of the lull of the text—which, in a pretty standard bit of science fiction, is a bold writerly move. But Vonnegut makes two mistakes. Firstly, he ends the passage with an ellipsis (. . .), and secondly, he then continues the novel, with some rather weak dialogue and narrative dribble, for another few pages, adding nothing. It would have been better to put a full stop after 'zymometers' and leave the novel at that.

Academic humanism: a diagnosis

We are to address the role of the university in providing and sustaining an intellectual life; more specifically, a life in the humanities—a humanist life. So let us begin at the beginning, with an account of the earliest universites, which evolved from earlier schools some time around 1200. There is a fair amount of history and quotation in this post, gentle reader, but I hope you will not let that put you off from the body of my actual arguments.

*

The mediaeval liberal arts curriculum was oriented towards careers at court (eg. arithmetic for accounting) or in the Church (eg. astronomy for the computus). The best liberal arts students graduated to theology, the most prestigious subject of study; others to law or medicine. The Church stood by, with blessing or condemnation, ready to snap up the cream for its own. In this respect it resembled the rich multinationals that finance university programmes today (eg. Hewlett Packard at MIT), only its authority was paramount. It was the Church and its minister Bernard that condemned Abelard in 1130 and again in 1144; it was the Church that condemned Aquinas in 1277, along with the heretical Averroist Siger of Brabant; it was the Church that fostered the growth of the friars at the Sorbonne in the mid-thirteenth century. So it would seem a little strange, would it not, if someone were to claim that the mediaeval universities were in any way autonomous?

The university corporations of the Middle Ages at the height of their power were not responsible to anybody, in the sense that they could not be brought to book by any authority. They claimed, and succeeded in making their claim good, complete independence of all secular and religious control.

Thus Robert Hutchins, in The University of Utopia (1953). The American reformers of the mid-century were, in fact, full of mediaeval dreamings. In a recent book, William Haarlow quotes Stringfellow Barr, co-author, with Scott Buchanan, of the massively influential 1935 Virginia Plan, which outlined a university curriculum based on the Great Books:

The [reading] list reflected the title of [Buchanan’s] Poetry and Mathematics and the connection between these two modes of thought and expression; between the medieval trivium and quadrivium that he and Adler and McKeon had argued about in the days of his seminars for the People’s Institute.

And indeed, in Poetry and Mathematics (1929), Buchanan has more to say about Richard McKeon, the great mediaevalist scholar (and student of the Neo-Thomist Etienne Gilson), whose work on the liberal arts curriculum would prove so influential to the educational theories of his contemporaries. Only a year after the drafting of the Virginia Plan, Hutchins could already write, in The Higher Learning in America:

The medieval university had a princple of unity. It was theology. . . The medieval university was rationally ordered, and, for its time, it was practically ordered, too. But these are other times; and we are trying to discover a rational and practical order for the higher learning of today.

He goes on to deny any specific system, but he insists that his ideal university would consist of three main faculties—natural sciences, social sciences, and metaphysics. Metaphysics, in other words, is for Hutchins the queen of the humanities. And he had good precedent: Newman (Idea of the University, 1852) had written that ‘all branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator’. Before that, Coleridge and Bentham had drawn up schemata showing the interrelation of different fields of knowledge, and their ultimate Platonic unity—a project going all the way back, through Peter Ramus and John Dee, to classical antiquity.

How strange this seems to us! Some of us are positivists; others postmodernists—all of us firmly against metaphysics. If you go to a second-hand bookstore, at least in America, ‘metaphysics’ now means ‘New Age gibberish’. Wittgenstein, we suspect, is chuckling maniacally from the clouds. But Hutchins is squirming: for as he has it, ‘consciously or unconsciously we are always trying to get’ a metaphysical system. The intellectual trends of the next sixty-odd years would prove him quite wrong: we have drifted further and further away from wanting any sort of system. We have drifted towards Toulmin and Wittgenstein, towards the postmoderns and Feyerabend, towards an anthropological sort of relativism. Nobody, it seems, except perhaps a handful of desparate Catholics, still wants a metaphysics at all, let alone a metaphysics at the hierarchical summit of the humanities. Even before the surge of relativism, J. A. Rice had complained that St. John’s College, still famous for its Great Books programme, ‘trains its students not for the church, as Oxford did then, and not for any office in or under an oligarchy, but for something pleasantly vague: to be artists in the art of thinking, Neo-Thomist dialectitions [sic], lawyers, without law’.

And yet the historical and prescriptive beliefs of Hutchins and his ilk stand as the vague foundation for the way a large proportion of our humanities departments are today structured. We still, most of us, believe in the ‘liberal arts’ and the ‘Great Books’: and the liberal arts and the Great Books are, for better or worse, essentially a metaphysics.

*

In 1408, the humanist Guarino of Verona returned from his studies in Constantinople to open a school in Florence. Later, the school moved to Venice, and then to d’Este Ferrara, where it eventually became the arts faculty of the new university. Guarino’s course began with an ‘elementary’, which taught students to read and pronounce Classical Latin; it continued with the teaching of grammar, and then of history, geography and mythology. Large amounts of memorisation and repetition were not only required—they were, naturally, the very basis of the education. Students would proceed to learn tropes from the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetoric, and to a lesser extent from the orations of the real Cicero, and finally build up an insider’s knowledge of Latin by reading authors like Pliny and Augustine.

When Guarino’s students left his school, they could read and speak Latin extempore, compose formal letters and orations, imitate poems and recite ‘facts’ of etymology and classical history. More to the point, their attitude to social authority had been irrevocably shaped by an awe and deference towards classical texts. They had become good, contributing members of society, and would go on to get well-paid jobs at the court or papal chancery. Their parents, of course, lapped it up. In Guarino’s school, as in the mediaeval universities, education was in the service of civil obedience—of the State. (It was, Mencius, much more a 'pretext for Party training' than it is now.) The same sort of conditions held in late Victorian and Edwardian England, and the last, scant vestiges of it can be seen in the sort of education I received at public school—Latin and Greek from age 10, lucky me!

The practices of Italian humanism, unlike those of thirteenth-century Paris, do not depend on a hierarchical metaphysics or theology. But they still depend on a Platonic understanding of human character, an unfailing faith in the moral value of classical literature, and a social structure still essentially aristocratic and authoritarian. Both paedagogies trained for uniformity and diligence; neither for creativity or freethinking. Both, amazingly, managed to produce young men of astounding creativity and free thought.

*

If our modern educational ideals can be described, with any accuracy, as a confluence of the mediaeval liberal arts programmes (as interpreted by mid-century American theorists) and the revival of text-based humanism, how can we make sense of a system whose social and metaphysical foundations have been almost eradicated?

One of the most common complaints about traditional liberal arts paedagogy is that it is inherently élitist—‘dead white males’ and all the rest of it. An education, it is claimed, should be for all. Anti-élitism, curiously, was one of the motivations of the liberal arts theorists as well—although the arguments are, invariably, rather confused. In The University of Utopia Hutchins writes that ‘everybody can and should learn’—and adds the rather sinister corollary, ‘I should welcome any method by which people are seduced into forming the habit of learning’. In his 1953 critique of Hutchins (‘one of the best, wittiest and most unanswerable things I’ve ever done’), F. R. Leavis accuses him of naïve democratism. Hutchins is quoted—

If leisure and political power are a reason for liberal education, then everybody in America now has this reason, and everybody where democracy and industrialization penetrate will ultimately have it. If leisure and political power require this education, everybody in America now requires it, and everybody where democracy and industrialization penetrate will ultimately require it.

Mortimer Adler, Hutchins’ co-conspirator on the Chicago Great Books project, had similar ideals in mind when he extolled the 'learning which belongs to everybody and should be the common culture in which everybody participates’. The liberal arts programmes are proposed to create a generalist educated democracy alongside the specialist departments of academia, with the Great Books providing society with a common currency of historical thought. Democracy, in fact, cannot reasonably function in a society lacking a liberal education—as Hutchins writes: 'If the people are not capable of acquiring this education, they should be deprived of political power and probably of leisure. Their uneducated political power is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrading and will be dangerous.'

Leavis thinks this ridiculous: élitism, of a sort, after all, is necessary for any stable society: 'It is disastrous to let a country’s educational arrangements be determined, or even affected, by the assumption that a high intellectual standard can be attained by more than a small minority'. Or again:

The attempt to establish a democratic educational system in Great Britain has gone on the assumption that far from everybody has the capacity to justify his or her presence at a university—if ‘university’ is to mean anything—and that there must consequently be a severe sifting.

Leavis, no less than Hutchins, wanted an 'educated public'. But although Leavis approved of Alexander Meiklejohn's liberal arts programme at Wisconsin (1927-32), he was sceptical of 'unrooted global eclecticism', of the mish-mash of classics of all disciplines proposed by Hutchins and Adler. Like many critics, he advocated the expansion of higher education, but wanted to restrict the growth of the university, which he identified with Oxbridge and put in the role of a dominant centre; as R. P. Bilan puts it in his 1979 book about Leavis, 'if the university is to help create the new educated public it must itself be a real centre and thus attempt to counter the increasing specialization that has, ultimately, led to the loss of a centre in society'. And at the centre of the university would be not metaphysics or the sciences, but a humanities structured around literature: and then not a canon of Great Books, but a 'living tradition'.

Despite his criticisms, Leavis was much like Hutchins. Both, for instance, deplored the positivists like Snow, who equated life with 'mortality tables' or 'standards of living'. But Leavis' arguments, unlike Hutchins', were entirely ignored. Universities have multiplied and fragmented—the 1963 Robbins Report, which Leavis denounced, promoted science over the humanities, and advocated more universities in response to growing demand. The Further and Higher Education Act (1992) allowed polytechnics to start calling themselves 'universities', leading to an even more crowded marketplace.

Even more damagingly, for a Leavisite—the university has grown drastically farther away from the common man. Academics are perceived as an irrelevance at best; at worst, as a threat. Professional writers hardly talk to English professors, just as, if Mencius is to believed, programmers hardly talk to computer science departments. There has developed a professional—not an intellectual—élitism, or rather a ghettoisation. And the 'school of resentment', as Harold Bloom has termed it, has sprung up to level charges of social élitism wherever it can. The feminists, post-colonialists, Marxists and so on—all reject the Hutchinsian notion that the Great Books represent a common culture: they see in it only the vested interest of the all-encompassing Patriarchy.

*

So the academic humanities have lost their metaphysical justification, their wider place in a social or political hierarchy, and their noble humanist purpose. Is there anything else, Doctor?

The causes of the media’s sniping at the University are not individual resentments but a more general uncertainty as to the role of the University and the very nature of the standards by which it should be judged as an institution.

I quote Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1996). Readings diagnoses yet another problem with the humanities: their unhappy transition from being the ‘custodian of national culture’, and thus the Koh-i-Noor in the nation-state's ideological crown—whether Humboldt’s Germany or Wilson’s America—to being the useless appendage of a ‘transnational bureaucratic corporation’. And Readings is quite right to note the trend—he discusses, among other things, the rise of the university’s administrative sector and the development of corporatisation and branding. Like me, he sees the university as having outlived its own purpose, only he has a different purpose in mind:

I would prefer to call the contemporary University “posthistorical” rather than “postmodern” in order to insist upon the sense that the institution has outlived itself, is now a survivor of the era in which it defined itself in terms of the project of the historical development, affirmation, and inculcation of national culture.

Despite his misgivings, he does not propose a radical answer:

So what is the point of the University, if we realize that we are no longer to strive to realize a national identity, be it an ethnic essence or a republican will? In asking such a question I am not suggesting that I want to blow up the University, or even to resign from my job.

His prognosis, in fact, is pretty weak, and amounts to a subaudible mumbling about 'dissensual dialogism' and 'thought beside itself'. Perhaps he would have been able to flesh out a more worthwhile response one day—but he died before his book's publication. Ah well. Still, Mencius is on hand with the solution turned down by Readings: 'the Henry VIII treatment—unconditional abolition and confiscation' of the universities. I wrote a short rhetorical reply here, which was flippant but nevertheless contained the germ of my actual views expressed in this post. The problem with Mencius' post is that its proposals rest on a wild and totally unsubstantiated claim that the 'universities are directly responsible for almost all the violence in the world today', on a few charming anecdotes about 1970s Hegelianism and 1990s computer science, told at considerable length, and. . . well, that's about it. But the cages rattle and the Menciophilical mob roars with delight, as it so often does. (He really is a very convincing demagogue, especially if, like me, your judgements are easily swayed.) The other problem with his post is that he doesn't address the humanities at all. For some reason he seems to prefer them to science departments. So his post is of no use to us here.

*

But why preserve the academic humanities? What would we lose if they went? What could we imagine in their stead? Could they be replaced, as our commenter Michael has suggested, with a sort of unofficial academy or society of study? It's a tempting thought. We can think of the standard examples: Ficino's Florentine Academy, Gresham College, the Royal Society, the circles of Erasmus and later the various Republics of Letters—even the Académie Française. Why couldn't we restore groups like this, and restrict our own humanist activities to them? We wouldn't need any metaphysics, any political hierarchies, any justification to the taxpayer, any Noble Social Purpose. The problem of bureaucratization would be irrelevant. We would be amatores.

The problem with this is a question of leisure. The members of the above societies all had proper jobs—and jobs, moreover, that fed and sustained (and thus legitimated) their interests and talents. But they also had considerable free time in which to study. As Mencius notes, in a recent comment here, 'a humanist was either an aristocrat, or a professional serving a largely aristocratic market'. Because they were operating in an essentially aristocratic milieu, they could afford the leisure time required for amateur study. Court and Church alike are conducive to educated leisure.

But we don't have the leisure any more. We can't afford it. And the work that most of us do—whether in finance, media or the service sector—hardly sustains our interests and talents. Those who fiddle numbers by day, and read old books by night—those few—are forced to lead a divided life hardly conducive to serious reflection or intellectual progress. Some of us might be patronised by loved ones, or subsidised by earlier financial success—but such situations are scarce. This is the situation of a society oriented around the middle classes.

And while it is nice to be Chris Miller—a non-academic lover of the arts—if we were all Millers, the sorts of books that Millers like to read wouldn't get written. We would never make any new discoveries; our thoughts would tread the old paths again and again. In the modern world, if not in Ficino's or Newton's, academic study makes possible non-academic study.

So while we may, like Michael, wish that universities 'as officially sanctioned diploma mills were eliminated', we are forced to conclude that in order to satisfy large numbers of humanist-minded individuals—or even to satisfy those intelligent and talented enough to produce worthwhile results—the existence of professional institutions is necessary.

*

The problem, then, is how to establish a professional environment for humanism, without being prey to all those factors that might render the institutional humanities retrograde, obsolete, and lacking in social function? How do we come to terms with a world increasingly inimical to 'purposeless' intellectual enquiry? How can we do what we like to do, as a paid community, and do it with dignity?

I'm not sure I can answer this yet. But there's the problem at least.

Koto ba

Heidegger's late book, On the Way to Language (1959), opens with a philosophical dialogue on the nature of language, between Heidegger himself, identified only as 'Inquirer' (though explicit reference is made to Heidegger's academic life and previous works), and an unnamed Japanese interlocutor, apparently based on Tomio Tezuka, who met Heidegger in 1954. Their conversation overtly centres on one of Heidegger's old students, Count Kuki Shuzo, who died in 1941, and his analysis of iki. In the middle of this dialogue comes the following exchange:

I: What is the Japanese word for “language”?

J: (after further hesitation) It is “Koto ba.”

I: And what does that say?

J: ba means leaves, including and especially the leaves of a blossom-petals [sic]. Think of cherry-blossoms or plum blossoms.

I: And what does Koto say?

J: This is the question most difficult to answer. But it is easier now to attempt an answer because we have ventured to explain Iki: the pure delight of the beckoning stillness. The breath of stillness that makes this beckoning delight come into its own is the reign under which that delight is made to come. But Koto always also names that which in the event gives delight, itself, that which uniquely in each unrepeatable moment comes to radiance in the fullness of its grace.

I: Koto, then, would be the appropriating occurrence of the lightening message of grace [das Ereignis der lichtenden Botschaft der Anmut].

J: Beautifully said!

My bullshit-detectors were, at this point, raging out of control. (I concede the possibility—certainly not the likelihood—of this passage being less stercorine in the original German.) So I pulled out the resources of my address-book and asked Gawain and Steve Languagehat (who in turn asked his friend Matt, of the excellent Japanese-studies blog No-Sword) if there was any validity to the claims Heidegger here makes about koto ba. I was relieved to discover, first of all, that koto ba (or kotoba) is in fact one of the Japanese expressions for language. It's a start! Kotoba seems to be the everyday word, with a semantic range from 'word' and 'speech' through to 'language' itself; it contrasts with the more technical term gengo, used in linguistics. Steve and Gawain were unanimous on this point.

But what is the origin and analysis of kotoba? Matt writes that 'in an earlier period, there were two phrases: "koto-no-ha" (言の葉,"leaves of words/speech") and "koto-ba" (事端, "tips of speech")'. The former referred to 'refined, artistic things like poetry', the latter to 'regular speech'. However, the two words were so similar that they 'proceeded to merge into one'. For this theory, he helpfully cites a number of sources: an 1835 book called Meigentsu, Ōtsuki Fumihiko's Daigenkai (1932-37), and Ōno Susumu's dictionary of Old Japanese (2004 edition). (Can you imagine Heidegger being this pragmatic and concrete?) Matt notes the older theory, that kotoba itself (and not koto-no-ha) means 'word-leaves', but observes that the latest source for this is the 18th-century Wakun no Shiori, and that it has since been discredited. Despite this, Matt thinks it remains a popular etymology, given the superficial identity of ba ('leaves') and the ending of kotoba: 'If you asked the average Japanese speaker (native or otherwise), they would probably give the "word-leaves" definition'. By contrast, Chris Drake, on this 1998 thread, writes that 'even if you personally interviewed 130 million Japanese, very few of them. . . would give 'word leaves' as the primary meaning or consider kotoba vegetative, although more people may have made the association during the period nationalism of the 30s and 40s'.

Gawain gives us some different information. He writes that 'in oldest Japanese (pre-Nara times), as far as we know, koto meaning "business" or "affairs" or "Things" was used interchangeably with the koto meaning speech or words'. [Incidentally, it fascinates me that koto should exhibit the same semantic development of affair to thing as English thing (cf. Old Norse Thing, German Ding) and Latin causa (case, affair) > French chose, Italian cosa.] So we a dichotomy between koto (thing) and koto (word). In fact, Tomio Tezuka himself recalls part of his conversation with Heidegger about the word kotoba, thus (cited by Drake):

I think that the koto is connected with koto [meaning "matter"] of kotogara [meaning "event" or "affair"]. . . the koto of "language" and the koto of "matter" are two sides of the same coin: things happen and become language (kotoba).

Drake adds that this connection of the two kotos 'isn't accepted by any historical linguist I know of; it resembles more of a pun'. Gawain, likewise, remarks that

there is no reason to think that "koto" meaning things and "koto" meaning words are actually the same word; they are written with the same ideogram, but ideograms have sometimes been used purely phonetically.

Perhaps Heidegger would praise Tezuka's remarks, in his own words, as 'playful thinking that is more compelling than the rigor of science'. Gawain also draws a similar distinction to Matt's, between koto ['meaning somehow important speech (sayings, teachings, possibly also magical formulas?)'] and kotoba ['meaning "stuff you said"']. Gawain, like Chris Drake, admits that he doesn't know when kotoba came to mean 'language' in general, although Drake speculates:

Up until 1868, a variety of characters were used, although kotoba was often simply written in hiragana or katakana phonetic scripts. A wild guess would be that the 'word-leaves' combination was chosen to become the official standard because of its elegant courtly heritage by Japanese modernizers and supporters of the imperial system sometime between 1868, when Japan definitively began to "modernize," and the end of the 1880s, when mass literacy (and universal conscription) and a "rationalization" of the language were in full swing.

So this is where Heidegger got his account of ba as 'leaves'. But where does this leave us with regard to the 'appropriating occurrence of the lightening message of grace'? Not very far. Gawain was sceptical from the outset: 'if it's Heidegger, then it is almost certainly mumbo-jumbo'. When I gave him the koto definition, he quipped that it 'sounds like a Chinese menu in Phoenix, AZ'. (He is referring to this sort of thing.) Steve, meanwhile, called the koto definition 'what you call a load of bollocks over there on your side of the Channel'. Matt, finally, admits:

it sounds like nonsense to me. I suppose it depends on if he's already set up definitions for "appropriating", "lightening", "message of grace", etc. If they're all in place, then it might make sense on its own terms, but then it would mostly be about his definitions rather than the Japanese itself.

Heidegger's project, in this book, and this dialogue, is to come to terms with (or at least address) the alterity of Japanese thinking, and consequently of its language. This was a hot topic in the mid-century, when Whorf was still all the rage, and not yet dismissed as a charlatan. It is still a hot topic, and psychological experiments are still being performed, as you can read in Nisbett's The Geography of Thought (2003). But Heidegger's real project is to make strange even Western thinking and language. He has not set up, in any serious way, definitions for the terms listed by Matt. And so we are left with the result that Heidegger's gloss on a supposedly arcane Japanese word is far more arcane, or, less charitably, far less coherent and meaningful, than the word itself. When it comes to Japanese words that few of his readers are likely to know, and still fewer likely to know the history of, Heidegger is apparently quite happy with any old 'playful thinking'.

Heidegger here defines iki as 'the pure delight of the beckoning stillness'. Wikipedia articulates the word's meanings with the adjectives 'simple, improvised, straight, restrained, temporary, romantic, ephemeral, original, refined, inconspicuous'. One can only conclude that there are few minds less iki than that of Martin Heidegger.

(With thanks to my contributors, Gawain, Steve and Matt.)

Update: Gawain has more to say about koto ba. Steve links, requesting more information on the mysterious Sei Shonagon and her putative rivalries. I admit to being much delighted by Steve's description of the Varieties as a 'philosophitorium'—first Google hit! I like to think that he reserves this on-blog approach to words for references to me, but that is probably unsupported by the data. The Laughing Bone links, and tells a cannibal joke.

Update 26/07/08: Peony links, refuting me. To others, my use of the word stercorine seems to be causing problems. One commenter on del.ici.ous wonders what it means; another glosses it with '[sic: better, stercorous]'. I like this! That 'better' is the language of the editor or lexicographer, for instance the OED, which glosses acheilous with 'better achilous'. As for stercorine, the OED doesn't have it, though it does have stercorous, stercoreous, and stercoraceous. For me, the suffix of stercorine has the pejorative connotation of a saccharine, a bovine, or even an anodyne. So I invented it.

Humanism and the virtue of anxiety

[17.01.08: This post could be taken as a response to Kugelmass' riposte to Stanley Fish's reply to Anthony Kronman's expression of defeat in the face of nearly everything—a riposte, it might be added, that will not be written for almost four months. Fish says the same again. Kugelmass says the same again. Mark Liberman weighs in. 02.11.08: Kugelmass again, on a related subject. nihil sub sole novum, etc.]

Last year, at dinner with a spitzer of art-history graduates, I suggested—perhaps that is too polite a word—that art-history, and in fact the rest of the humanities, were useless disciplines. (I was bored!) Sure enough, it was a rock broke in a byke, and the graduates swarmed up angrily in defense of their occupation—they attacked a sterile ‘world without art’, said they were learning about ‘humanity’—one even used the word ‘redemptive’. The problem with these responses was that I was not proposing a world without art, not even a world without art-history. I was merely observing that art-history served no particular function, unlike, for instance, cancer research. Whether that uselessness is grounds for termination is another question. I posed the problem out loud to a tableful of graduates—but really, as you no doubt already suspect, I was posing it to myself. I wanted a good answer to the question—I hoped they might have some idea. And so I was disappointed with the whobub of inarticulate responses.

Now it is obvious that, when one attacks, or seems to be attacking, another’s professional work, and moreover the basis of her values, that person will get angry. But I heard too the note of anxiety. Frankly I can’t imagine the same heated outquarks from a party of scientists. The point of their work would be transparently obvious to them, and would require only a patronising lecture, like C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’, to communicate. There might be contempt in their voices, but not likely anxiety.

This episode seemed to me a microcosm of the last fifty years in humanist academia—and more broadly of the entire history of humanism, from the Greeks onward. What is the point of studying literature and history? As I began to think again about the issue, other questions crowded in on me, each clamouring for attention. They may be answered, or may to an extent have already been answered, on these pages. But the most general question of all was: For what should we be fundamentally striving?

*

The humanist’s traditional defence of his discipline is that it cultivates virtue. This is what the proto-humanist Gorgias says to Socrates, although he later comes a-cropper when he admits that his students can go on to use their rhetorical training for evil.

The more subtle modern reflex of this idea is that studying the humanities cultivates self-awareness and self-knowledge. Distinction is made between a kind of learning that tells us facts, and a kind of learning that changes who we are—a study that informs and thus transforms us. The terms differ—one speaks of useful as opposed to liberal knowledge, another of information and understanding—but the core idea is common. This distinction was first clearly formulated by the Victorians, although its roots are in the German notion of Bildung, ‘cultivation of the self’. As Bill Readings observes, Bildung was at the heart of the German university-project in the early nineteenth century; and so it is only natural that Cardinal Newman, who provided the first major modern formulation of an ideal university in England, should put Liberal Knowledge—that is to say, humanist learning—at the heart of the university enterprise. But where the Germans explicitly associated Bildung with classical arete (virtue), Newman explicitly dissociates them:

To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object as intelligible. . . as the cultivation of virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it.

On the other hand, Matthew Arnold, that apostle of late Victorian paedagogy, reassociates humanist learning with virtue, which he calls our ‘sense for conduct’. He describes ‘specialist’ scientific knowledge, rather clumsily, as:

knowledge not put for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty, and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while, unsatisfying, wearying.

He goes on to argue that if faced with the choice between natural science and ‘humane letters’, the ‘great majority of mankind’ would be better to choose the latter for study: ‘Letters will call out their being at more points, will make them live more’. This core distinction remained very common in the twentieth century. Robert Hutchins, the controversial president of the University of Chicago in the 1940s, asserts that ‘the aim of education is not to gain more and more detailed knowledge of the world but to understand the world and ourselves in it’. Hutchins again, ten years earlier: ‘if the aim of education is the communication of useful information, we may as well abandon the enterprise at once’—and ‘the primary object of institutions with this aim will be the cultivation of the intellectual virtues’—and ‘Education is the deliberate attempt to form human character in terms of an ideal’. Allan Bloom: ‘the impression that our general populace is better educated depends on. . . a fudging of the distinction between liberal and technical education’. Mortimer Adler calls for a ‘philosophy as everybody’s business’—a ‘humanistic and philosophical learning of the generalist, learning which belongs to everybody and should be the common culture in which everybody participates’. So, too, Frank Leavis, insistent that the ‘creation of the human world’ is prior to scientific knowledge, and keen to make the university ‘a centre of human consciousness: perception, knowledge, judgment and responsibility’. And so on, through the whole canon of modern cultural conservatism. R. S. Crane, who pushes this line back to Vives and Philip Sidney, observes:

The great defect of all these attempts to define the humanities in terms of the lofty ends they may be made to serve is their persistent vagueness about the means by which these ends are to be accomplished in the everyday affairs of education.

This is true—though I go further. It is not just that these texts are vague about the way humanist learning leads to ‘cultivation’ or ‘consciousnesss’: the problem is with ‘cultivation’, under all its many names, itself. It is intangible, immensurable, indefinable—a secular sort of tao or holy spirit. It is just what ‘we all know’ to be important—for who would want to lack, or be thought to lack, understanding, or judgement, or sagacity, or taste, or responsibility, or flexibility, or a sense for conduct and for beauty?

One cannot help but feel that these are words made up by humanists to defend their discipline, catchphrases that sound significant but in fact conceal only an emptiness, and an anxiety. In modern academia, another such word is ‘excellence’. Newman writes that the object of Liberal Education is ‘nothing more or less than intellectual Excellence’. R. S. Crane, after criticizing woolly accounts of the humanist project, concludes that the humanities are simply those studies having as their objects ‘those human achievements, like Newtonian or modern physics, the American Constitution, or Shakespearean tragedy, to which we agree in attributing that kind of unprecedented excellence that calls forth wonder as well as admiration’. Excellence becomes a catch-all word denoting superiority in any discipline; and Readings devotes a hilarious chapter—probably his best—to the use of this word in today's academy, as an empty currency of general value, equivalent to 'Total Quality Management' in the business world.

*

A witty young skolastikos sold his books when short of money. He then wrote to his father, 'Congratulate me, father, I am already making money from my studies!' — Philogelos, fourth century AD.

Imagine three brothers going off to university—Alfred to read Business and Finance, Bertrand to read Biochemistry, and Gerald to read Literature. After eight years they reunite in the family home over sherry, and compare notes. Alfred drives up in his Ferrari, fresh from a holiday in the Bahamas. Bertrand waxes lyrical about the tremendous progress his department is making towards the manipulation of enzymes, with important repercussions for various problems in contemporary medicine. And Gerald. . . well, Gerald says proudly that, despite his own penury and the lack of professional and/or governmental interest in his research, he is at least more human than his two brothers—or perhaps he will say, more modestly, that he has a better grasp of the ‘human condition’—or else simply that his ‘intellectual virtues’ have been thoroughly ‘cultivated’. Alfred and Bertrand will just laugh in his face! And they’ll both have whiter teeth in those broad grins, to boot.

*

Is it possible to rescue some aspect of character as a defence of humanism? As a defence I think not. Still, we must talk about character. When I was at university, I met students in all disciplines, and I noticed a pronounced—though not a precise—divide of character, between those in the sciences and those in the humanities. My library experiences aside, I found I could talk comfortably with the latter, but not with the former. This was not merely because I knew more about Shakespeare than about the Casimir effect: it was moreover because the humanists wanted to talk about their work. They did not see their studies as a 'job', whereas the scientists did. For the scientists, what they learnt was merely the means to an end, and after five o'clock they preferred to wind down over a pint and talk about the football results. When, therefore, I tried to talk to one about zero-point energy, the discussion went nowhere. But the humanists—well, more of the humanists—continued thinking about their studies after hours, and were happy to discuss them. Some even believed that what they were reading had relevance to their life.

Whether or not humanist studies do have relevance and importance outside of humanist studies is a significant question; but it is also significant whether or not a person has that attitude. Sometimes it is the existence of a belief, not its accuracy, that we want to evaluate. And so if humanists do not have a better character than non-humanists—if, in other words, they are no more virtuous, no more 'cultivated'—they do at least have a different character. That has been the case in my experience; and I hasten to add that it is a statistical, not a categorical, generalisation.

Humanists may be less brilliant, and certainly will be less rich, than their non-humanist brothers at university, but I warm more to their character. I don't think that their character is shaped by their choice of subject, but rather the reverse—they have chosen the humanities because of who they are. One of the best things about humanists—about the best humanists—is their anxiety. Upon reflection I began to admire the inarticulacy of the art-history graduates in their attempt to justify themselves, or rather, I admired what it revealed about their character. Those who are not anxious, reason; those who are anxious, attempt to persuade. The attempt to persuade—rhetoric—is at the heart of the humanist enterprise, and thus, so is anxiety. You can read the texts of the Snow-Leavis controversy and conclude that Snow had better arguments than Leavis—I think it is a difficult matter—but powerfully clear to me is Leavis's superior character. Snow is smug and self-assured—a 'smiling, jovial face' in Roger Kimball's words—where Leavis is impassioned and righteous (if not self-righteous), but also rude, unsettled, even anxious behind his rhetorical thunder.

Now, while some will regard anxiety as a failure of character, I regard it as a strength. It is, I would say, a more authentic, a more emotionally-realised form of the erotetic questioning, and especially self-questioning, that has been at the heart of philosophy since Socrates. The humanist who is anxious is better than the humanist who (like the scientist, or anyway the ideal scientist) questions dispassionately, because his emotions are better integrated with his reason, his intellectual quest. He is, we might say, more whole. Unashamedly, it is an aesthetic criterion. To me, dissatisfaction and unease are better signs than any other that I will like a person.

What I would like to have done with the art-history graduates is make their anxiety more explicit. One of the problems with academia, present and past, is that it tries to bury anxieties in a nest of imposed truths, for instance that of the Great Books, on which I intend to write a post soon. Such an attempt is, naturally, unavoidable in any institutional setting. Nevertheless, there is at least an inherent level of resistance, however small, among those characters drawn to the humanities; less present, I think, in those who pursue science or business. And character is so much more important than brains.

*

This does not yet offer us a reason to study the humanities, nor a reason to support the existence of humanist disciplines. After all, my preference for intellectually anxious characters cannot be an objective criterion upon which to build an argument! I am certainly not arguing that the humanities are superior to the sciences because the character of those who pursue them is a better one. I am not even saying that humanist characters are better at all.

But I do think that one argument for the support of the humanities, and for the pursuit of humanistic disciplines by those who are instinctively drawn towards them, is simply that their existence allows likeminded persons—specifically, those of a similarly anxious character—to meet and interact at a common level. I support liberal arts programs for the same reason that I support Alcoholics Anonymous, or BDSM clubs, or the Esperanto Society. It goes back to the problem of camaraderie, dismissed so lightly. And it is one reason I blog: not purely for the pleasure of writing, for the pleasure of the text—though there is that, undoubtedly—not even to put my thoughts in order; but for the opportunity to mingle with the likeminded, to feel not alone, and best of all, to be challenged where my convictions are strongest. They are not strongest on this matter, but then—that is the nature of the problem.

This is not my only response to that problem. But to my earlier question—For what should we be fundamentally striving?—the answer 'camaraderie' is not a bad one. Not an answer, certainly, to be ashamed of.

Update: Caressing the lovely face of the humanities, with The Nonist.

Wayang

Shadows we are, and like shadows depart.
— Pump Court sundial

It's almost five o'clock in the morning, and I've just woken up.

I've been sleeping for the best part of an hour, fitfully, on a hard leather sofa overlooking the ballroom floor at the Royal Festival Hall. The gamelan is still playing against the wayang kulit (shadow-puppetry), as it has been since eleven pm, and will be until seven. The star singer, Sukesi, seems to be chanting my name, over and over. Even if not, the sound of her voice is horrendously beautiful. Six hours of droning bells, gongs and voices are not natural on a man's ears—but all the better. Something turns in me, a switch. I pull myself up and wander about—it is as if I am floating above the noise—an intense feeling of elation and freedom. I can't even hear the gongs any more.


This is not, in some sense, an authentic performance. Ness and Prawirohardjo, in their 1980 introduction to Wayang Kulit, paint a vivid batik of a traditional Javanese recital:

More often than not, the air is festive and in a word, pleasantly chaotic. Many of the onlookers will come and go from the performance area as they wish, participating in those points of the play which they find interesting. Many will quietly engage in conversation over sweet Javanese tea, often gossiping about the characters in the play as if they were real. Children will usually position themselves as near the dalang [puppeteer] as possible, imitating his play and voices with paper versions of the wayang kulit puppets. Through their play they are learning as generations before them have learned of the great traditional stories of wayang kulit. There are always some who choose to doze off after the first hour or so, to be awakened with a jolt by the raucous clanging of the fight scenes. The air is laden with the piquant aroma of kretek, Indonesian spiced cigarettes, succulent sweets and snacks of food sellers around the performance area.

At the RFH Wayang Kulit, where I spent the tail-end of Saturday, and the entirety of predawn Sunday, the performance took place in a rather clinical interior, with industrial inflatable cushions lining the floor, stout white columns, a nondescript bar offering pints, coffee and sandwiches, and a hundred-odd punters in various states of waking. But despite its dull setting, the show did feature the cream of Javanese and British gamelan talent: the dhalang Ki Purbo Asmoro, the drummer and director Rahayu Supanggah, two first-rate pesindhens (singers), and a small host of percussionists, all in natty costumes. The group performed 'The Building of the Kingdom of Amarta', a story very loosely adapted from early chapters of the Mahabharata. Ki Purbo burbled the dialogue incomprehensibly—in Kawi, I presume—using his feet to clatter and jangle metal plates, cueing the gamelan-players, and with his hands manipulating leather puppets against a screen. Here he is from the orchestra-side, centre:


This, meanwhile, is a tiny fragment of performance from the shadow side, where about half of tonight's audience are sitting, a much greater proportion than is traditional in Java:


Here the epic's prime hero Arjuna, on the left, sizes up against arch-baddie, the Goliathesque Cakil. I wish I'd got a more exciting part on film. Possibly the biggest laughs were drawn by a motorcycle-puppet, which Arjuna's brother Bhima 'mounts' in lieu of a chariot. The wayang was studded with these moments of incongruous modernity: a snatch of some jazz standard starts up out of nowhere during an interlude, someone mentions Harry Potter, and cigarettes, and Ki Purbo jokes about erectile dysfunction. The whole thing is translated, in real time, on video-screens, by an American in the thick of the orchestra. Nobody cares about her grammar, although a small titter goes up when she renders 'blind' as 'bling'. This occurs only a few minutes into the proceedings—five hours later, no one would have batted an eyelid.

*

The story is not deep. When Peer Gynt goes into the wilderness to confront demons, he encounters the riddle of existence itself—the Great Boyg. (PEER: Who are you? VOICE: Myself. Can you say the same?) But that is urbane 1860s proto-existentialist Europe masquerading as a fairy-tale. The real fairy-tale does things differently. When Bhima, second son of Pandhu, and for tonight the chief protagonist, goes into the forest to confront demons, he encounters only ogres and spirits, the antithesis of alus (cultivated) Bhima, and overcomes them with ease. On a motorbike. The commentator tells us that the battles are an allegory for Bhima's inner conflicts (naturally), a parallel that will become more explicit, towards the end of the Mahabharata, in Arjuna's dialogue with Krishna about metempsychosis and the strife of the soul. Likewise, Clifford Geertz, in his classic 1957 essay 'Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols', quotes a Javanese interlocutor to the effect that:

Well, in the wajang the various plagues, wishes, etc.—the godas—are represented by the hundred Korawas, and the ability to control oneself is represented by their cousins, the five Pendawas [including Arjuna and Bhima] and by Krisna. . . the wajang is full of war and this war, which occurs and reoccurs, is readily supposed to represent the inner war which goes on continually in every person’s subjective life between his base and his refined impulses.

Finally Bhima encounters his demon-double—whose name, damn it, I forget—and with whom he is equally matched. They struggle awkwardly together, each puppet spinning back from the other, or somersaulting in ritualised agony, before the demon casts a 'poisonous fog' (or 'magic net') over Bhima—Ki Purbo achieves this effect by superimposing a tree-shaped puppet (you can see this in his left hand, above) over Bhima, in such a way that its diffuse penumbra envelops the smaller, sharper shadow of the hero. It's a neat effect. At some point Bhima is rescued by an ogress, Arimbi; but I was asleep during that. At least, I think I was.

The story is not deep, and at any rate, you're supposed to know it beforehand. As Ness and Prawirohardjo point out, these legends have been cultural touchstones for generations in Java. And that was one of the problems with Sunday's performance: few of the punters knew a damn thing about the Mahabharata, let alone its wayang kulit adaptation. I asked one of my acquaintances there why they kept referring to Bhima as 'Bratasena'. (It turns out that the latter is just his name as a youth.) His response was, 'Which one is Bhima?' The material is so alien, and the names so long and hard to remember, that appreciation of narrative goes right out the window. And it's not just that—we effete Londoners are not accustomed to rambling gamelans going on for eight hours, nor to the pure texture of the song, nor to sleeping through a performance—we're used to paying close attention to a subtle plot for two or three hours, not to wandering in and out of focus over the course of a night. We are, I suppose, not alus enough: we will not take our time. This is why our appreciation of the wayang kulit—and appreciate it we did—could only be superficial and second-hand. For it was not so much participatory as downright mystifying, and of course, extremely tiring. And at best, magical, in the undiluted sense of that word: theurgical. The applause, when it comes, lasts.

*

At six the mallets are beserking marvelously, and I stumble outside for some air. In morning twilight the Thames is a sight for sore ears: calm, cold, untroubled, and so silent. I get up on the Golden Jubilee Bridge with my camera; there's another person, way down the bridge over the wide water, and we take pictures of each other inadvertently, tiny and distant against the vastness of the steel. Perhaps he does not even see me.


It is as if I have emerged from a cave. One wonders, in fact, if Plato had ever seen a wayang kulit performance when he composed the seventh book of the Republic. 'Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.' Plato knew the power of music on a man's soul, which is why he was so determined to control the musicians in his projected city.

Geertz writes that, in the wayang kulit, 'the shadows are identified with the outward behavior of man, the puppets themselves with his inward self, so that in him as in them the visible pattern of conduct is a direct outcome of an underlying psychological reality'. In the dim morning there are no shadows yet. Except, perhaps, myself. Part of me is still floating, still elated and free. Lily is sleeping at home; I will wake her gently when I return, soon, but for now I'm alone. . . yes, for the moment, not quite part of the world.