Surprise is the natural companion of research. Like Ted Widmer, I have also recently read through seven decades of the SCHOLAR and along the way made a series of unanticipated discoveries. The first was that, in almost any volume one chooses to open, the stream of voices that comes pouring out—sober or blithe, precise or deeply speculative, angry or meditative— retains a startling freshness and relevance.
The second was the repetition over many decades of certain themes, as different generations of editors and writers returned to several tantalizing, vital questions, including the place and purpose of the academy in society and the nature of a scholar’s responsibility to his or her discipline and nation. Every major discipline (from philosophy to religious history, the sciences to the social sciences, the arts to contemporary politics) has been repeatedly addressed. Pressing questions from war to race to the environment are explored from different perspectives. A number of influential essays appeared first in the SCHOLAR, as did urgent reports on discoveries and new theories in the sciences and new concepts in the humanities. Other persistent themes include the nature of scientific investigation, the evolution and uses of the arts, and how the lives of teachers, leaders, or artists can instruct, correct, or cheer us. Over and over, reports on new research in history and the social sciences suggest, sometimes subtly and at other times urgently, how the results of those studies shape our society.
Every magazine or journal participates in its age and reflects it. But a particular sense of how one age emerges from another is never far from the best pieces in the SCHOLAR. Also present is the unspoken assumption that intellectuals should be able to speak to concerned lay readers, that such readers compose a substantial audience, and that they are curious about their own and other societies.
One might assume from this that the many voices in the magazine would share a measured tone. But even casual browsing reveals a variousness in prose styles, ranging from the elegiac to the salty, and from the personal to the abstract and meditative. Poetry made repeated appearances over the decades, before becoming a standard element in recent years. Satiric pieces, playing on scholarly preoccupations, have appeared, as have records of travel, reports of new cultural trends, timely and often heated pieces on questions of religious belief, and some shrewd if playful essays on such elements of popular culture as comics, film, and television.
The thousands of contributors to the magazine—the academics, administrators, scientists, writers, critics, artists, and researchers—many now all but forgotten, can be linked by the profound beliefs that ideas matter and that the right expression of them is a necessary part of the thinking life. Perhaps that explains the undiminished energy of so much contained in the several hundred issues of the SCHOLAR. Hard-earned and original knowledge, matched to disciplined expression, has a lasting life that opinion or speculation does not. Taken together, the whole run of the publication is not only a remarkable archive of original thought, but a paradigm of the rational, examined life, one in which no branch of knowledge is alien, each part matters, and every problem is susceptible to reason. To read the magazine carefully is to become part of the community it has quietly, stubbornly tried to identify and sustain.
What follows is a sampling from 75 years.
The belief in man—man as an individual—man as an individual free to think as he pleases and say as he thinks—man as an individual answerable only to his conscience and his God—this belief is not easy to articulate in realistic and self-evident terms in an industrialized society and in such a world as modern physics has revealed to us. And yet, without a new and convincing articulation of belief in the unqualified right of the individual human being to think as he pleases and say what he thinks, regardless of the preconceptions and the creeds, the opinions and the prejudices, of governments or parties or organizations or churches, civilization as we have known it—civilization crowned by science and by art—civilization carried forward by the creative spirit and the inquiring mind—would be unthinkable.
FROM “THE AMERICAN STATE OF MIND”
by Archibald MacLeish, Autumn 1950
The modesty of the true scholar is neither a gesture nor a joke. To him it is quite literally the case that a science of anything presupposes a vast ignorance concerning it: an ignorance, indeed, so vast that even its very nature may never be understood. He as a scientist, in other words, may never become clear as to what it is of which he is ignorant, or ought to consider himself ignorant; he may never learn just what it is that he should seek to know. Meanwhile, however, he has his method; he does know how to proceed within the field of ignorance he has managed to define. . . . So he is always busy, with scarcely the time to pause and tell us, should we ask, how much he knows; and more particularly, how much of what he knows.
FROM “THE KINDS OF KNOWLEDGE”
by Mark Van Doren, Autumn 1955
Those who think of the truth as the sum of what we read in the newspapers or may find in the Encyclopaedia Britannicamove sanely enough at one conventional level. Such reports are not ordinarily false. They designate real events, objects truly discoverable on the scale of the human senses; and they trace the relations of these objects and events on the plane of human action. But the form thus assumed by those facts is a mere image. In their aspect and individuality our ideas are signs, not portions, of what exists beyond us; and it is only when experiment and calculation succeed in penetrating beneath the image, that (for instance, in mathematical physics) we may gain some more precise, although still symbolic, notion of the forces that surround us. We and our knowledge are a part of nature: it is therefore inevitable that the rest of nature, in its concreteness, should be external to us. . . . Absolute truth is hidden from us, and the deeper our science goes, the more ghostly it becomes. In entering that temple we have passed out of the sunlight. We are no longer surrounded by living objects, but by images of the gods.
FROM “SPIRIT IN THE SANCTUARY”
by George Santayana, Winter 1963–1964
The long history of man, besides its ennobling features, contains also a disrupting malice which continues into the present. Since the rise of the first neolithic cultures, . . . man has hanged, tortured, burned and impaled his fellow men. He has done so while devoutly professing religions whose founders enjoined the very opposite upon their followers. It is as though we carried with us, from some dark tree in a vanished forest, an insatiable thirst for cruelty. Of all the wounds man’s bodily organization has suffered in his achievement of a thinking brain, this wound is the most grievous of all, this shadow of madness, which has haunted every human advance since the dawn of history and which may well precipitate the final episode in the existence of his race.
FROM “PAW MARKS AND BURIED TOWNS”
by Loren Eiseley, Spring 1958
Through the 18th and 19th centuries—from Crèvecoeur’s notion that America had produced a new man, through Jefferson’s belief in the wealth, promise and magnificence of the continent, and Turner’s faith in a frontier-born culture and frontier- nourished institutions—runs the refrain that American values spring from the circumstances of the New World, that these are the secret of the “American Way of Life.” This has been both an example of our special way of dealing with ideas and an encouragement to it. For lack of a better word, we may call this a leaning toward implicitness, a tendency to leave ideas embodied in experience and a belief that the truth somehow arises out of the experience.
This carries with it a preference for the relevance of ideas as against their form and a surprising unconcern for the separability of ideas. We have seldom believed that the validity of an idea was tested by its capacity for being expressed in words. The beliefs that values come out of the context and that truth is part of the matrix of experience (and hardly separable from it) become themselves part of the way of American thinking—hence the formlessness of American thought, its lack of treatises, schools and systems.
FROM “THE PLACE OF THOUGHT IN AMERICAN LIFE”
by Daniel J. Boorstin, Spring 1956
Faith in science is faith in the hope, the fruitfulness and value of the human adventure. It is a faith that action will be, within limits, effective, and that the effects of action will be humanly rewarding. There will be little time or inclination to speculate on the meaninglessness of life, or to allege meaninglessness. Inquiry itself will render so much possible in the way of new discriminations and hitherto unsuspected varieties of goods and value in the world that the world itself will become charged not with one preordained meaning, but with ever-new awarenesses and interests. The habit of inquiry will liberate the spontaneities of imagination. The human adventure, in science itself, in art, in human relations will be sufficient nourishment for a faith in humanity and its future.
FROM “SCIENCE AND THE DREAM OF HAPPINESS”
by Irwin Edman, Autumn 1946
Whole philosophies have evolved over the question whether the human species is predominantly good or evil. I only know that it is mixed, that you cannot separate good from bad, that wisdom, courage, and benevolence exist alongside knavery, greed, and stupidity; heroism and fortitude alongside vainglory, cruelty, and corruption.
It is a paradox of our time in the West that never have so many people been so relatively well off and never has society been more troubled. Yet I suspect that humanity’s virtues have not vanished, although the experiences of our century seem to suggest that they are in abeyance. A century that took shape in the disillusion which followed the enormous effort and hopes of World War I, that saw revolution in Russia congeal into the same tyranny it overthrew, saw a supposedly civilized nation revert under the Nazis into organized and unparalleled savagery, saw the craven appeasement by the democracies, is understandably marked by suspicion of human nature. A literary historian, Van Wyck Brooks, discussing the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, spoke of “an eschatological despair of the world.” Whereas Whitman and Emerson, he wrote, “had been impressed by the worth and good sense of the people, writers of the new time” were struck by their lusts, cupidity, and violence, and had come to dislike their fellow men. . . .
We must keep a balance, and I know of no better prescription than a phrase from Condorcet’s eulogy on the death of Benjamin Franklin: “He pardoned the present for the sake of the future.”
FROM “MANKIND’S BETTER MOMENTS”
by Barbara Tuchman, Autumn 1980
I could scarcely sleep for excitement the night after seeing the periodic table—it seemed to me an incredible achievement to have brought the whole, vast, and seemingly chaotic universe of chemistry to an all-embracing order. . . . To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God.
FROM “MENDELEEV’S GARDEN”
by Oliver Sacks, Autumn 2001
One of the mysterious things about newspapers is that the items in them have no connection except the dateline . . . and it is this dateline that enables us to enter the world of the news, as it were, by going through the looking glass. Just as Alice in Wonderland went through the looking glass, when you enter the world of the telegraph or of the circuit, you really become involved in the information process. When you enter through the dateline, when you enter your newspaper, you begin to put together the news—you are producer.
FROM “ADDRESS AT VISION 65”
by Herbert Marshall McLuhan, Spring 1966
Instead of offering us freedom, the uncontrolled flow of pictures distracts us from the task of determining for ourselves what might be real enough to really matter. We face the prospect of being reduced to the status of consumers who, given a hyperabundance of choices, lack the ability to choose. Those in power benefit from this abandonment of discernment; they get to make the choices for us. Thus the liberty of an unchecked image environment may prove to be less a blessing than a subtle form of tyranny, and the democracy of the camera a perverse kind of fascism.
FROM “POINT AND SHOOT:
HOW THE ABU GHRAIB IMAGES REDEFINE PHOTOGRAPHY”
by Andy Grundberg, Winter 2005
Is the scientific and technological revolution now in progress actually any more sweeping than that which took place more slowly during the 3,000 years since Homer wrote? Is not the difference between the scienceless and machineless world of his time and that which the 20th century now possesses and cowers under as great as any that is likely to be between our present world and that of the 21st century? The heroes of the Iliadwould be as bewildered in New York or San Francisco as we would be distressed by Troy, Ithaca or Mycenae. But if we could meet together in some grove or porch where nothing need remind us of the presence or absence of those changes that time has made in our environment, and if we were to discuss not religion, technology or science, but love, hate, tragedy, pathos, and the paradox of man’s persisting inhumanity despite his capacity for pity and tenderness, then I think we would understand one another quite well and realize that . . . we are not new men but the same old paradoxical creatures, “the glory, jest and riddle of the world.”
FROM “IF YOU DON’T MIND MY SAYING SO”
a column by Joseph Wood Krutch, Autumn 1966
Nothing comes harder than original thought. Even the most gifted scientist spends only a tiny fraction of his waking hours doing it. . . . The rest of the time his mind hugs the coast of the known, reworking old information, adding lesser data, giving reluctant attention to the ideas of others . . . , warming lazily to the memory of successful experiments, and looking for a problem—always looking for a problem, something that can be accomplished, that will lead somewhere, anywhere.
There is, in addition, an optimal degree of novelty in problem seeking, one that is difficult to measure and follow. Stick to the coast too tightly and only minor new data will follow. Venture out of sight and you risk getting lost at sea. Years of effort might then be wasted, competitors will hint that the enterprise is pseudo-science, grants and other patronage will be cut off, and tenure and election to the academies denied. The fate of the overly daring is to sail off the rim of the world.
FROM “THE DRIVE TO DISCOVERY”
by Edward O. Wilson, Autumn 1984
A challenge is being mounted to some of the central assumptions of mainstream social science. The strict separation of theory and data, the “brute fact” idea; the effort to create a formal vocabulary of analysis purged of all subjective reference, the “ideal language” idea; and the claim to moral neutrality and the Olympian view, the “God’s truth” idea—none of these can prosper when explanation comes to be regarded as a matter of connecting action to its sense rather than behavior to its determinants. The refiguration of social theory represents, or will if it continues, a sea change in our notion not so much of what knowledge is, but of what it is we want to know. Social events do have causes and social institutions effects; but it just may be that the road to discovering what we assert in asserting this lies less through postulating forces and measuring them than through noting expressions and inspecting them.
The turn taken by an important segment of social scientists, from physical process analogies to symbolic form ones, has introduced a fundamental debate into the social science community concerning not just its methods but its aims. It is a debate that grows daily in intensity. The golden age (or perhaps it was only the brass) of the social sciences when, whatever the differences in theoretical positions and empirical claims, the basic goal of the enterprise was universally agreed upon—to find out the dynamics of collective life and alter them in desired directions—has clearly passed.
FROM “BLURRED GENRES: THE REFIGURATION OF SOCIAL THOUGHT”
by Clifford Geertz, Spring 1980
Mercurial ribbon licking the cut lip of the Blue Ridge—
daybreak
or end, I can’t tell
as long as I ignore the body’s marching orders, as long as
I am alive in air . . .
FROM “LOOKING UP FROM THE PAGE,
I AM REMINDED OF THIS MORTAL COIL”
by Rita Dove, Spring 2004
Science has been uncommonly successful as a strategy to command the future because it admits no distinction between ends and means. There are no higher ends in science than truthful knowledge, and there are no other means allowed on the way than truthful knowledge. In an age in which ideologies claim, not so much arrogantly as insolently, that they are justified in using men as means, this central value in the ethic of science has a right to be put at the center of the Reformation.
FROM “TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE IN EVOLUTION”
by J. Bronowski, Spring 1972
The scientist himself does not want to go to the moon; he knows that for his purposes unmanned spaceships carrying the best instruments human ingenuity can invent will do the job of exploring the moon’s surface much better than dozens of astronauts. And yet, an actual change of the human world, the conquest of space or whatever we may wish to call it, is achieved only when manned space carriers are shot into the universe, so that man himself can go where up to now only human imagination and its power of abstraction, or human ingenuity and its power of fabrication, could reach.
FROM “MAN’S CONQUEST OF SPACE”
by Hannah Arendt, Autumn 1963
From the records of history it seems to be clear that the theologies and philosophies which take time too seriously are correlated with political theories that inculcate and justify the use of large-scale violence. . . . For those whose philosophy does not compel them to take time with an excessive seriousness, the ultimate goal is to be sought neither in the revolutionary’s progressive social apocalypse, nor in the reactionary’s revived and perpetuated past, but in an eternal divine Now, which those who sufficiently desire this good can realize as a fact of immediate experience. The mere act of dying is not in itself a passport to eternity; nor can wholesale killing do anything to bring deliverance either to the slayers, or the slain, or their posterity. The peace that passes all understanding is the fruit of the liberation into eternity.
FROM “ETERNITY AND TIME”
by Aldous Huxley, Summer 1945
Our democracy has overripened to the point where our politicians poll us before they speak their minds, which creates no leaps of inspiration, but instead a circle of confusion. Agility isn’t buoyancy, doesn’t make us happy. This reliance on the common wisdom puts the cart before the horse because of course the theory was not that the people might somehow formulate enlightened national policies—rather that collectively, intuitively, they could best fathom who ought to be entrusted to do so.
FROM “THE GLUE IS GONE”
by Edward Hoagland, Winter 2005
The uncontrollable brute whom I want to put out of the way is not to be punished for his misdeeds, nor used as an example or a warning; he is to be killed for the protection of others, like the wolf that escaped not long ago in a Connecticut suburb. No anger, vindictiveness or moral conceit need preside over the removal of such dangers. But a man’s inability to control his violent impulses or to imagine the fatal consequences of his acts should be a presumptive reason for his elimination from society.
FROM “IN FAVOR OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT”
by Jacques Barzun, Spring 1962
René Descartes
Murmured: “For my part,
If I cogitate, it must be clear
That I am here.”
Robert Frost
Turned and tossed.
His nightmare was, What to do
If the road branched into more than two?
Henry Fielding
Was unyielding
On some points of English diction.
What a terrible affliction!
FROM “CLERIHEWS FOR THE CLERISY”
by Jacques Barzun writing as Roger du Béarn, Summer 1992 and Summer 1996
A few months ago I read an interview with a critic; a well-known critic; an unusually humane and intelligent critic. The interviewer had just said that the critic “sounded like a happy man,” and the interview was drawing to a close; the critic said, ending it all: “I read, but I don’t get time to read at whim. All the reading I do is in order to write or teach, and I resent it. We have no TV, and I don’t listen to the radio or records, or go to art galleries or the theater. I’m a completely negative personality.”
As I thought of this busy, artless life—no records, no paintings, no plays, no books except those you lecture on or write articles about—I was so depressed that I went back over the interview looking for some bright spot, and I found it, one beautiful sentence: for a moment I had left the gray, dutiful world of the professional critic, and was back in the sunlight and shadow, the unconsidered joys, the unreasoned sorrows, of ordinary readers and writers, amateurishly reading and writing “at whim.” The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or an article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy and powerful hours of our lives; but during the contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence: Read at whim! read at whim!
FROM “POETS, CRITICS AND READERS”
by Randall Jarrell, Summer 1959
A poem is not the same poem from reading to reading, because the reader is not the same reader.
FROM “COMPRESSION WOOD”
by Franklin Burroughs, Spring 1998
The rise of mass communications, the growth of large organizations and novel technologies, the invention of advertising and public relations, the professionalization of education—all contributed to linguistic pollution, upsetting the ecological balance between words and their environment. In our own time the purity of language is under unrelenting attack from every side—from professors as well as from politicians, from newspapermen as well as from advertising men, from men of the cloth as well as from men of the sword, and not least from those indulgent compilers of modern dictionaries who propound the suicidal thesis that all usages are equal and all correct.
A living language can never be stabilized, but a serious language can never cut words altogether adrift from meanings. The alchemy that changes words into their opposites has never had more adept practitioners than it has today. We used to object when the Communists described dictatorships as “people’s democracies” or North Korean aggression as the act of a “peace-loving” nation. But we are no slouches ourselves in the art of verbal metamorphosis. There was often not much that was “free” about many of the states that made up what we used to call, sometimes with capital letters, the Free World. . . . Social fluidity, moral pretension, political demagoguery, corporate and academic bureaucratization and a false conception of democracy are leading us into semantic chaos. We owe to Vietnam and Watergate a belated recognition of the fact that we are in linguistic as well as political crisis and that the two may be organically connected. As Emerson said, “We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language.”
FROM “POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE”
by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Autumn 1974
Why do expatriates yearn for home? For they do yearn for it. The paradigm is those thousands of Englishmen in colonial India who dreamed their whole lives of a rosecovered cottage in Surrey. Is it a sentimental attachment to family and clan? Patriotism, after all? Are we all, in the end, involuntary exiles? Surely we voluntary ones long for home in another way. We chose to go. We are where we want to be. Is our homesickness a theatrical pose, just another facet of our disponibility? . . .
Beyond freedom there is a secret nostalgia for boundaries, a reverence for old habits and habitats. Colored by the sadness of lost youth, home becomes a beacon, the single place where you always belonged, the envelope of generations, the parents and the children who shared this place, this house, this neighborhood. Under their savoir vivre, expatriates wistfully think about immortality and know that they will not have it in foreign parts.
FROM “ROOTLESS”
by Dorothy Backer, Spring 1987
The superrich make lousy neighbors—
they buy a house and tear it down
and build another, twice as big, and leave.
They’re never there; they own so many
other houses, each demands a visit.
Entire neighborhoods called fashionable,
bustling with servants and masters, such as
Louisburg Square in Boston or Bel Air in L.A.,
are districts now like Wall Street after dark
or Tombstone once the silver boom went bust.
The essence of the superrich is absence.
They’re always demonstrating they can afford
to be somewhere else. Don’t let them in.
Their money is a kind of poverty.
“SLUM LORDS”
by John Updike, Autumn 1998
I nap well on airplanes, trains, buses, and cars and with a special proficiency at concerts and lectures. I am, when pressed, able to nap standing up. In certain select company, I wish I could nap while being spoken to. I have not yet learned to nap while I myself am speaking, though I have felt the urge to do so. I had a friend named Walter B. Scott who, in his late 60s, used to nap at parties of 10 or 12 people that he and his wife gave. One would look over and there Walter would be, chin on his chest, lights out, nicely zonked; he might as well have hung a Gone Fishing sign on his chest. Then, half an hour or so later, without remarking upon his recent departure, he would smoothly pick up the current of the talk, not missing a stroke, and get finely back into the flow. I saw him do this perhaps four or five times, always with immense admiration.
FROM “THE ART OF THE NAP”
by Joseph Epstein writing as Aristides, Summer 1995
For many years I kept my uneasiness about becoming a success in education to myself. I did so in part because I wanted to avoid vague feelings that, if considered carefully, I would have no way of dealing with; and in part because I felt that no one else shared my reaction to the opportunity provided by education. When I began to rehearse my story of cultural dislocation publicly, however, I found many listeners willing to admit to similar feelings from their own pasts. Equally impressive was the fact that many among those I spoke with were not from nonwhite racial groups, which made me realize that one can grow up to enter the culture of the academy and find it a “foreign” culture for a variety of reasons, ranging from economic status to religious heritage.
FROM “GOING HOME AGAIN: THE NEW AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP BOY”
by Richard Rodriguez, Winter 1974–75
Jessy has not lost her capacity for autistic delight. What makes her happy today? Once she’d exult over her discovery that “70003 is a prime!” Then numbers became what she calls “too good,” so good that she would speak them only in whispers, or refuse to say them at all. Then her interest subsided; other things evoked her secret smile. Stars. Rainbows. Clouds. Weather phenomena. Quartz heaters. Odometers. Street lamps. A strange procession of obsessions, eliciting for a year or two an intensity of emotion approaching ecstasy, then subsiding into mere pleasure. Wordless once, now she could be thrilled by a word, a phrase. “Asteroid explosion.” “Digital fluorescent number change.” Recently it’s anything to do with banks, checks, above all fees. “There’s a fee in feeling! And feet!” We know that special smile, that faraway gaze. But don’t, don’t ask her “Why are you smiling?” The phrase itself (and there are others) invites desolation, the banshee wail. We don’t know why.
FROM “EXITING NIRVANA”
by Clara Claiborne Park, Spring 1998
One dubiously sunny Irish summer day in Dublin I was walking along the city’s eastern beach-rim when my friend told me that this wasn’t just any eastern beach-rim— the kind of place in, say, Barcelona or Sydney where you might casually toss Frisbees—but in fact literary holy ground: Sandymount strand. A sophisticated modernist shiver, dressed in a bow tie and a bowler hat, with a pince-nez and a small mustache, sauntered up and down my spine.
We had been reenacting, accidentally, the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus’s morning beachwalk: probably the most famous moody-brooding in world literature since Hamlet’s soliloquies. The episode’s opening phrase, “Ineluctable modality of the visible,” is one of the best-known moments in the world’s least-read best-known novel—most likely because it’s the last thing most people see before giving up on Ulysses forever.
FROM “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: JOYCE:
A PRIVATE SUMMERLONG BLOOMSDAY”
by Sam Anderson, Summer 2004
I fell in love with Gilbert and Sullivan at a tender age, and imbibed all the words and music before I could possibly understand their full context and meaning. I therefore, and invariably, enjoy a bizarre and exhilarating, if mildly unsettling, experience every time I attend a performance today. An old joke, based on an ethnic stereotype, that may pass muster as a mock on a privileged group in an age of political correctness, asks why the dour citizens of Switzerland often burst into inappropriate laughter during solemn moments at Sunday church services: “When they get the jokes they heard at Saturday night’s party.” Similar experiences attend my current Sundays with Gilbert and Sullivan, although my delays between hearing and comprehension extend to 40 years or more!
FROM “THE TRUE EMBODIMENT OF EVERYTHING THAT’S EXCELLENT”
by Stephen Jay Gould, Spring 2000
After September 11, I saw for the first time that the flag—along with all its red, white, and blue collateral relations—is what a semiotician would call “polysemous”: it has multiple meanings. The flag held aloft by the pair of disheveled hitchhikers who squatted next to their backpacks on Route 116, a mile from home, meant We will not rape or murder you. The red, white, and blue turban worn by the Sikh umbrella vendor a friend walked past in Dupont Circle, not far from the White House, meant Looking like someone and thinking like him are not the same thing. The flag on the lapel of a Massachusetts attorney mentioned in our local paper—on seeing it, his opposing counsel had whispered to a colleague, “I’m so screwed, do you have a flag pin I can borrow?”—meant I am morally superior. The flags brandished by two cowboyhatted singers at a country fair we attended on the day the first bombs fell on Afghanistan meant Let’s kill the bastards. The Old Glory bandana around the neck of the well-groomed golden retriever I saw on a trip to Manhattan meant Even if I have a Prada bag and my dog has a pedigree, I’m still a New Yorker and I have lost something. The flag in our front yard meant We are sad. And we’re sorry we’ve never done this before.
FROM “A PIECE OF COTTON”
by Anne Fadiman writing as Philonoë, Winter 2002
Though it may seem sacrilegious to say so, I can’t help feeling that in certain respects the Internet has a lot in common with the Talmud. The Rabbis referred to the Talmud as a yam, a sea—and though one is hardly intended to “surf” the Talmud, there is something more than oceanic metaphors that links the two verbal universes. Vastness, a protean structure, and an uncategorizable nature are in part what define them both. When Maimonides, the great medieval commentator, wanted to simplify the organization of the Talmud, and reduce its peculiar blend of stories, folklore, legalistic arguments, anthropological asides, biblical exegesis, and intergenerational Rabbinic wrangling into simplified categories and legal conclusions, he was denounced as a heretic for disrupting the very chaos that, in some sense, had come to represent a divine fecundity. . . .
I have often thought, contemplating a page of Talmud, that it bears a certain uncanny resemblance to a home page on the Internet, where nothing is whole in itself but where icons and text-boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of cross-referenced texts and conversations. Consider a page of Talmud. There are a few lines of Mishnah, the conversation the Rabbis conducted (for some 500 years before writing it down) about a broad range of legalistic questions stemming from the Bible but ranging into a host of other matters as well. Underneath those few lines begins the Gemarah, the conversation later Rabbis had about the conversation earlier Rabbis had in the Mishnah. Both the Mishnah and the Gemarah evolved orally over so many hundreds of years that even in a few lines of text, Rabbis who lived generations apart give the appearance, both within those discrete passages as well as by juxtaposition on the page, of speaking directly to each other. The text includes not only legal disputes but fabulous stories, snippets of history and anthropology, and biblical interpretations. . . . One feels, for all the Talmud’s multiplicities, an organizing intelligence at work.
And yet when I look at a page of Talmud and see all those texts tucked intimately and intrusively onto the same page, like immigrant children sharing a single bed, I do think of the interrupting, jumbled culture of the Internet. For hundreds of years, responsa, questions on virtually every aspect of Jewish life, winged back and forth between scattered Jews and various centers of Talmudic learning. The Internet is also a world of unbounded curiosity, of argument and information, where anyone with a modem can wander out of the wilderness for a while, ask a question, and receive an answer. I find solace in thinking that a modern technological medium echoes an ancient one.
FROM “THE TALMUD AND THE INTERNET”
by Jonathan Rosen, Spring 1998
