*

CONTENTS

The afterlife has commonly been conceived of in the Judaeo-Christian tradition as the "end of time". The requirements of God’s all-goodness, however, call for time to continue somehow after mortal existence.

I can’t remember ever having been more proud of an edition of Praesidium. I am delighted to be able to offer to our devoted readers the matter between this winter edition’s covers. All that’s missing is more poetry from Ralph Carlson; and I want to express in these opening lines my humblest apologies for having made a hash of my proofreading in the fall issue, whereof Ralph was the preeminent victim. A couple of egregious typo’s slipped past my tired eye which should have been flagged down at once. At least I was able to purge these in short order from the journal’s online version. Those of you who follow our quarterly via the Internet will, I hope, not even have noticed my gross offense.

Thomas Bertonneau’s previous essays have not only autopsied our post-literate state with a full and sober awareness of how our "quality of life" must suffer (our intellectual keenness, our moral acuity, etc.) but have also provided close-ups of the "corpse" in college classrooms. The essay he has submitted for this edition is in many ways a climax to his investigation. Those of us who protest poor student performance are often written off as cranks, and maybe we are such (teaching is enough to make anyone cranky after a while). Yet it is impossible to dismiss Dr. Bertonneau’s literary relics from more or less a century ago (drawn from a precious trove of family correspondence) as smoke and mirrors. People wrote better at the end of the nineteenth century, when they wrote at all. Not only that, but people with little formal education wrote better than most Ph.D. candidates do today. The word "better", of course, is prima facie argumentative. As Tom demonstrates, however, one may take the argument in any direction one wishes—grammar, diction, rhythm, drama, depth of content—without finding a ground whereon the present vanquishes the past. Our writing has deteriorated, categorically and across the board. What this must necessarily mean at its most alarming level is that our thinking has deteriorated. We do not perceive clearly, we do not assimilate fully, we do not compare justly, we do not infer logically, we do not prioritize maturely. We run the gravest peril of becoming slaves, in the Shakespearean sense. "Give me that man who is not passion’s slave," says Hamlet to Horatio, "and I will wear him in my heart—aye, in my heart of heart, as I do thee." Well… today "passion" is one of those warm-and-cuddly "positive" words in our ailing culture. We have indeed surrendered our freedom to carnal impulse and spiritual whim, as surely as if we had placed shackles upon our wrists and ankles—and we congratulate ourselves upon the transition! One must truly stand back and wonder what Frederick Douglass and his fellow bondsmen, who risked severe penalties in order to become literate, would make of this self-defiling hysteria.

Thanks to a curious magnetism which I did nothing to generate consciously, about half a dozen fine book reviews converged upon me this past month. Though Praesidium has usually left the chore of reviewing books to millions (it seems) of other journals, these reviews were all penned by writers who understand our special interests and who had chosen their matter accordingly. The subject of the afterlife comes up in one of them (although facetiously, as Mark Wegierski suspects)—and that daunting subject happened to be my own in the essay which follows the reviews. I really can’t recall ever having read a paper in any contemporary journal with any scholarly or philosophical pretensions which seriously ponders the nature of life after death. I suppose I should have interpreted that great lacuna as a warning. On the other hand, I’m not very good at reading tea leaves (my zeal is for other kinds of literacy), and I honestly cannot think of a good reason why thoughtful people should not discuss the most consequential of human questions in a mildly scholarly setting. In some form or other, I have wanted to write this paper for years. To my mind, it makes but the tamest of assertions if only one accepts the reality—the full and supreme reality—of goodness: i.e., of a loving and purposeful creator. My intention has not been to make anyone uncomfortable, but to dispel, rather, some of the discomfort which must constantly nag at thoughtful believers in our "post-reflective" age of electronically enhanced delirium.

There is yet another serendipitous echo set up by Mr. Davies’ uproarious chronicle of one day in a mellifluously jabbering Spanish teacher’s life. Dr. Bertonneau’s essay treats lengthily of altering language to suit the street-speak du jour. At the far end of this issue, Mr. Davies shows us a winsome academic whose career mission is precisely to advance that doubtful cause; but his busy tongue is at last stilled, at least temporarily, by none other than… well, see for yourself.

I dedicate my closing poem about one boy and one Christmas to everyone who has children and loves them.

The desire for "absolute relaxation", in Keyserling’s term, has vanquished a hard-won intellectual discipline before. The surviving chunk of Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon (penned around 50 A.D.) begins in medias res with a discussion of the corruption, indeed the collapse, of Roman education under the reign of Nero. The protagonist of this great Latin picaresque, Encolpius, although a cheat, a fornicator, a sponger, and a thief, is nevertheless classically and competently educated. When he actually earns his living, however rarely that might be, he does so as an itinerant instructor of rhetoric, an office he has been filling lately in Agamemnon’s school. The author of Satyricon gives plenty of evidence of having observed social conditions carefully and of having understood the causality of social behavior clearly. Encolpius presumably speaks for Petronius—if perhaps at one or two degrees of ironic distance—so readers should take seriously the details when Encolpius makes his diagnosis of the prevailing pedagogical malaise. The passage quoted in the epigraph, for example, speaks to what today we would call grade inflation and the "dumbed-down" curriculum. Students have little interest in the difficult mental work demanded by rigorous study as traditionally constituted, Encolpius says; they seek, on the contrary, those "short cuts" to this or that achievement which the teacher-hucksters cynically purvey, and which the parents wittingly abet. Encolpius’ rhetoric suggests that his insights weigh him down with a double onus of outrage and melancholy, as though he were contemplating, in its full awe, the closing of the Roman mind. A bit later in the same sequence, Agamemnon (equally a cheat, a fornicator, a sponger, and a thief) confirms Encolpius’ grim assessment, but gives reasons why he runs his school, as he does, on a basis of pandering standards and sycophantic practices.

As it is with the fisherman, Agamemnon says, so too is it with the teacher, because "he has to bait his hook with what he knows the little fishes will rise for; otherwise he’s left on the rocks without a hope of their biting" (38). Warming to his subject, the lecturer continues:

It’s the parents you should blame. They won’t allow their children to be properly controlled... If only parents would not rush them through their studies! Then young men who are prepared to work would cultivate their minds with solid reading, mould their characters with sensible advice, and prune their words with a stylish pen. They would wait and listen before they try themselves and they would realize that an adolescent taste is quite worthless. (38)

Many a contemporary high-school or college teacher might issue the same complaint: assigning Johnny his well deserved "F" or even his gentlemanly "C" brings threats of a lawsuit from the aggrieved mommies and daddies, the frowning displeasure of the department chairman and the dean, and contemptuous charges of distemper and immoderation from all around. It is beside the point that college students now no longer rush but tarry, some taking five or six years to earn a degree. History professor Thomas Reeves, recently emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Parkside in Kenosha, has written of his students, in an Academic Questions article, that they display a "proud ignorance [that] rests on a seemingly invincible anti-intellectualism" (65). Like Agamemnon, Reeves sees it in large part as a literacy problem. Entering freshmen exist outside the realm of books, libraries, and a sense of literature: "These amiable, polite, almost invariably likeable young people read little or nothing... Reading books and magazines outside the classroom is not something they would even consider doing" (66). My own freshman and sophomore students (Fall 2003) candidly report the same about themselves. "I mostly read the sports pages," is a typical answer to the inquiry.

In Cynthia Ozick’s terms, Reeves’ students or mine possess only a pragmatic literacy rather than a genuine literacy. Beyond a limited technical application, written language simply does not exist for them. In Reeves’ summation, the students "have no intellectual life and see no need for one" (66). Reeves’ observation corresponds to Jose Ortega’s analysis in The Revolt of the Masses (1930), where the Spaniard notes of the new "mass man" that "he is satisfied with himself exactly as he is" (62) and that "his surroundings spoil him" (106). My students, too, like those of Reeves, wish to do as little work as possible and to receive high grades whether they acquit themselves well or not. Most do not. What has produced such intellectually flaccid young people? The obvious answer is: a prior education that eschewed all rigor, that probably eschewed phonics in the lower grades and so lamed students for reading, and that offered little in the way of a meaningful bookish curriculum and less in the way of any discipline for assimilating it. In a word: the regnant ease produced them.

Keyserling’s "absolute relaxation", fostered by visual mass media, has also played a role in creating the current spiritual fiasco among the young. The widespread cult of entitlement, the whole pedagogy of self-esteem as it plays out in the schools and society, communicates intimately with the wish-fulfilment narratives of television and the movies, rooted as they are in vulgar resentment and in the primitive desire for revenge over anyone or anything that forms a barrier between desire and gratification. Petronius, in his day, linked the disintegration of the classical paideia, centered in rigorous rhetorical training, with a general derailment of social behavior—and with a decadence of the arts and sciences. In a later section of the extant fragment of Satyricon, another scoundrel-philosopher, Eumolpus, advises Encolpius on the state of sculpture and painting: "Lysippus was so preoccupied with the lines of one statue that he died of poverty, and Myron, who almost captured the souls of men and animals in his bronzes, left no heir. But we, besotted with drink and whoring, daren’t even study the arts with a tradition. Attacking the past instead, we acquire and pass on only vices" (99). The reference to "drink and whoring" as an abrogation of the "tradition" implicates the classical custom of symposiastic learning, or tells rather of its demise. The notion that the lapse from traditional discipline leads to an "attack" on the past anticipates our own condition.

The most famous section of Satyricon, "Dinner at Trimalchio’s", parodies Plato’s Symposium to show up the difference between a noetically disciplined and a mentally lazy society—a fatally mentally lazy society. Yet the billionaire-freedman and dinner-host Trimalchio has tried, even though he has failed, to get an education. When he comically confuses Homer’s characters with Euripides’ or Sophocles’ with Virgil’s, he at least acknowledges that one ought to conversant with such things. Petronius, who seems to have believed that he lived in the twilight of learning, as of much else, portrays the complete corruption of the old Socratic eros into its rudest and most illiterate forms. If Trimalchio were the best that the age could offer, what then of the worst? Keyserling, who took for granted that post-Versailles Europe was an era of dissolution, worried, as did Petronius, whether any sense of a tradition might survive: "Present-day humanity, which has discarded all inherited melodies, no longer hears the basic tones at all" (412). A willful optimism nevertheless sustained him: "Spirit only grows," he judged, "by the overcoming of natural inertia" (81).

Keyserling’s Creative Understanding offers his pedagogy for a Time of Troubles: it describes the philosophical basis and sketches the syllabus of the Count’s own "Wisdom School", founded in Darmstadt in 1924 and shut down by the Nazis ten years later. Keyserling believed that education had become too much a matter of routine and was latterly too prone to substitute dishonest formulas for the honest discipline of heavy mental labor, to foster genuine thinking. Education, as Keyserling saw it, was ideologically reductive and insipid. He discerned these tendencies at work even in such putatively rational causes as simplified spelling and the reform of the alphabet. "Democracy," he writes, "is considering everywhere and with gusto the introduction of purely phonetic orthography" (76). Not content with the easiest writing system ever devised—twenty-four or twenty-six alphabetic characters and a few guidelines for combining them, as opposed to the scores of characters and amorphous regulation required by the pre- and non-alphabetic systems—the latter-day beneficiaries of the alphabetized consciousness seek the ever easier yet. In the 1920s and 30s, the historical sedimentation in orthography with its vestiges of medieval pronunciation had already begun to make spelling difficult for modern, only superficially educated people. A word like "though" in English, with its materially unpredictable u and gh, will affront a sedulously aural consciousness. What it signifies is also probably a mystery. My students, for example, rarely use the vocabulary of subordination or qualification. Keyserling observes with irony that "Greece should be a warning" (77). He means modern Greece, for "if I am rightly informed, it was the first to take the plan of a new orthography into practical consideration, because of the excessive discrepancy there is in modern Greek between orthography and pronunciation" (76). Fortunately, Keyserling adds, the new Hellas dropped its plan; but the Soviet Union, bound to Greece through Russia and Byzantium, was at the same time considering a reform of Cyrillic so as to write according to a "tempered ear" (77).

The so-called phonetic recasting of the written language would not be phonetic at all, but would represent, rather, a preference for what might be called phonemic literal-mindedness, and would require (as such a system must) many more characters than the minimum of them contained by the alphabet with its attendant finitude of rules. Reform of this sort would help almost no one and would be a backwards step towards the craft literacy required by the cumbersome pre-alphabetic systems. Ortega writes, in Revolt of the Masses, that to be against something that has emerged in the historical course is to be for that which prevailed before its emergence. This is an inescapable law, in application to the written word as much as to anything else.

The settled alphabet represents not a maximally but an optimally phonetic system, with a few rules and conventions making up for whatever discrepancies exist between the characters in their combinations and the words of the language. The optimal system results from centuries of observation and refinement and already represents the non plus ultra of orthographic ease. Meddling with the optimum does not therefore ameliorate the system; it merely propagates phonological confusion.

Blixen accurately perceives that the demand for so-called simplified spelling originates with people whose language usage is primarily in speech rather than in script. Such people record language as they hear it; they tend to express themselves only within a restricted vocabulary and, from not reading, to lack a sense of words as stemming from a sedimentary past represented by a literary archive. Who recognizes no gross distinctions, as between there and their, will recognize no subtle ones either. According to the ear, there and their are identical, so why should two separate spellings bedevil the issue? The devolution from a settled spelling thus runs in parallel with a devolution from settled semantics. In the penchant for an improvised orthography, lexical equivocations begin to infiltrate the subject’s written language until the mess of phonemically literal-minded ad hoc spontaneities makes coherent prose impossible. It is necessary to add: for those who have enjoyed no real grammar in their prior education and who are probably too old, at nineteen or twenty, to learn any now.

Once functional illiterates become socially predominant, however, the capacity meaningfully to designate the lapse will also have disappeared. There is a connection, moreover, between the disintegration of spelling (only home-schooled children now win spelling bees) and the random mental stabs that students substitute for the thinking that no one has taught them. The rules of spelling, however arbitrary they might be, are nevertheless the school-child’s paradigm for rules of a higher order: the ones that govern logic and rhetoric, for example, and so facilitate any search for truth. This is part of the meaning in the two episodes of Satyricon, where Petronius understands the simultaneity of scholastic indiscipline and moral degeneracy in the empire, the former being but a sign of the latter and the latter rebounding to intensify the former. The journey of Encolpius through the slums of Greek-speaking Southern Italy is also a quest, with many allusions to Odyssey, through the moral shadow-world of the times. The cut-purse, the prostitute, the con-man people the setting at all times. Encolpius has been made impotent by a curse and seeks the cure. He seeks more than that, although he can hardly say what. In the century after Petronius (after Plutarch and Seneca), Longinus would complain in On the Sublime, as Encolpius does in Satyricon, that affluence had first bred ease and ease then impatience with all that is difficult and noble: "This must inevitably happen, and men no longer look upwards nor take any further thought for their good name... their greatness of soul wastes away from inanition and is no longer their ideal" (Fyfe’s translation 251). Longinus sees the chief sign of cultural morbidity of his day in "the world-wide dearth of literature" that "besets our times" (247). A reduction of life to pragmatics—in which people see education only as technical training for a lucrative career—banishes the spiritual dimension, fosters an elite of cretins, and issues in endless confusion and grief.

Blixen turns prophet, too, in her essay, the topic of which might at first seem trivial to a reader. Orthography, however, provides the basis for literacy:

A child who has learned a language through the ear alone has need of what he has learned when he is together with people who speak that language... But the person who has learned a language grammatically and has understood its construction and inner relationships acquires an understanding and a sense for cause and effect; he has learned to reason...

Those modern pedagogues who, by relinquishing the development of the whole human being, want to train youth in such skills as they have need for and can use immediately—they are not less barbarian than those parents who, in the old days, enrolled their sons in the choir of St. Peter’s in the conviction that they had more need for a sure income with a promise for a pension than for anything else. (154)

To implement a readjustment of the alphabet along the lines proposed by the Danish pedagogues of just before and just after the war—for the sake of some imagined simplification—would amount to nothing less than the spiritual emasculation of Danish thought, Blixen argues. She arrives at this radical conclusion because she grasps the relation between the restructuring of consciousness inherent in alphabetic literacy, not to mention in the literature that it has generated over the centuries and millennia, and the general intellectual acuity among a people. Blixen’s analysis of spelling reform meshes with Keyserling’s nearly contemporary critique of the same phenomenon. Both Blixen and Keyserling are in accord, finally, with Petronius, who declared two thousand years ago that a tie exists between pedagogic rigor in the schools and the integrity of the body politic. Throw in the contentions of the theoreticians of literacy (Havelock, Luria) and the consensus is remarkable, right down to Blixen’s acute insight that the demand for greater ease in spelling arises from what one might call the "oral" stratum of a given people, those who have least assimilated the optical sense for language inherent in writing and who cannot therefore see that a mild inconvenience, namely the small effort required to learn an optimal system, is already minimal. In the contemporary North American context, spelling undergoes virtual reformation through the "whole language" pedagogy of K-12, which divorces reading and writing from their phonetic basis. Children who receive such training read and write poorly, but instead of attempting to remedy the default, the schools and later the university respond by reducing the demands built into the curriculum. In the end, one sees what Reeves reports.

Sven Birkerts confirms the pervasive uneasy feeling in a passage in The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), where he tells how his undergraduates reacted when he asked them to read Henry James: "These students were entirely defeated by James’ prose... as well as by the assumptions that underlie it" (18). Birkerts reports that it was neither the vocabulary nor the syntax as such in the face which students came to a full stop, although they struggled with these; it was rather that "they didn’t get it, and their not getting it angered them" (18). "It", I suppose, means the indirectness of James’ style, his Victorian settings, the assumption that the reader will figure things out on the basis of the well-placed clues, absent any authorial pronouncement that "this is what the story means." James definitely does not do his readers’ thinking for them. What happens when the author refuses to think for his readers? There is confusion, bafflement. But Birkerts seems to me to emphasize the wrong clause. The phenomenon to which one ought, in fact, most closely attend is the "anger" that "not getting it" provokes.

One must indeed delve deeper into this anger, as into its relation with literacy, but there are some preliminaries.

The present essay assumes, as do its forerunners Thinking is Hard and Literature and Literacy, that the situation today represents a decline in comparison to the more or less recent past. The late Jeanne Chall found that, when they took a vocabulary examination first given to undergraduates in 1930, University of Michigan students in the 1980s did poorly by comparison. The fact that remedial English—euphemistically called by other titles, so as not candidly to name it—is now necessary for at least half of public university freshmen suggests the same debacle more massively. Another item in evidence is the richness of pre-World War Two schoolbooks, readers as one formerly called them, by contrast with contemporary printed matter not only for primary and secondary but also for college use at the undergraduate level. Cynthia Ozick writes movingly about the reader from which her newly immigrated Russophone grandmother learned to be literate in English in the New York City Public Schools of eighty or ninety years ago. Statistical evidence interests me less than actual books bought by school districts or samples of student writing, which is why I have introduced the latter, especially, in making my case. I now wish to introduce a different type of document.

The man I knew as my paternal grandfather was really my father’s stepfather. According to the family history, Augustine Aloysius Hamilton married my grandmother, Nellie (née Gayaut) Bertonneau, in Los Angeles in 1925. She was a graceful widow with three children. "Ham", as everyone called him, hailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, via Boston, where he had worked as one of the city’s finest until, a participant in the famous policemen’s strike of 1922, he found himself without his chosen employment. By twists and turns that no one can any longer reconstruct, Ham became a repairs supervisor for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and "ran the shop" in its Los Angeles yards until some years after World War Two. The diesels had come in. He found them dirty and unpleasant after the elegance of steam. Ham was born in the early 1880s. My father thinks it was 1883. He died, a widower of five years, in 1971. He belongs to the same generation as Cynthia Ozick’s grandmother, although he stemmed from a different milieu. Ham maintained the image of a tough and altogether practical character who wrestled with big machines and enjoyed the outdoors, but in whispered asides my grandmother always insisted that he was "educated". She meant that he had gone to school, all the way through the eighth grade, in Halifax, and that he not only could but did read and write. He liked local, which implied California, history.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the engine repairman drove in rickety automobiles to remote places to tramp and camp. Among his favored destinations, Death Valley loomed large. In spring, 1944, with the nation at war and with the federal government making heavy demands on the transportation industry, Ham and his friend Jim French, another Southern Pacific man, decided that, after a long stretch of labor without hiatus, they needed rest and recreation. Rationing made the venture doubly difficult. "Our tires were too worn to take that trip into rough country," Ham wrote, and "even if they were not, still we could not go" because of the scarcity of gasoline: "Uncle Sam... was using most of the gas, tires and auto accessories to fight the war."

The words in quotation come from a typescript that Gus Hamilton prepared, based on notes taken in pencil during the period of ten days starting on April Fools’ Day, 1944. The typescript, double-spaced and with only one or two inked corrections, bears no title. I believe that it appeared as an article, possibly with illustrations, in the monthly magazine of the Automobile Club of California, but I cannot say this for certain. I call attention preliminarily to the correct application of the conditional tense in the phrase about worn tires beginning with "even if they were not..." and concluding with "still we could not go." A fin-de-siècle Halifax eighth-grade education might at least do that for a fellow—teach him the conditional, the if-then pattern, which baffles my freshmen unanimously. During the expedition, Ham kept notes in his "little brown book". These must have been precise, judging by the references to them in the manuscript itself: "We were in our sleeping bags at 12 p.m."; "we breakfasted at 7 a.m. Sunday morning"; "it was about 11 a.m. when we started a short cut up the rough side of the Slate Range." Ham has logged the entire expedition in this manner, endowing his narrative with a remarkable precision. Even when he recounts the preliminary discussions that he had with French, he couches it in particulars. He does not say vaguely that they thought out loud about hiking in Death Valley. He says: "Jim French and I had talked over the possibilities of taking a trip to Trona on the bus from Los Angeles, hiking with a back pack from Trona over the Slate Range to Ballarat; then proceeding up Surprise Canyon to the Panamint Mountains and down Six Springs Canyon to the floor of Death Valley, then to Furnace Creek Ranch where we hoped we could get a ride out of the Valley on some truck… The return home was to be by busses." Trona… the Slate Range… Ballarat…

The two trekkers obviously planned ahead with the appropriate cartography and other relevant matter at hand. I should like therefore to emphasize the literate character of their preparations. The expectation of a healing sabbatical from the weekly grind of the war-pressed locomotive shops, already pleasant and restorative merely as a prospect, gains piquancy in the details of a carefully considered itinerary. Veteran hikers in the Mojave and beyond and habitual readers of Death Valley lore, Ham and his buddy know a great deal about their journey even before they hit the trail. They would have known and they would probably have consulted Bourke Lee’s two books, Death Valley (1930) and Death Valley Men (1932), and Dane Coolidge’s Death Valley Prospectors (1937), not to mention a wide range of periodical literature. Gus and Jim respond to more than the intrinsic allure of the Valley, powerful though that be. The human—the historical—sedimentation in a place that has challenged human residency and where people have written a chronicle both grim and colorful also beckons them.

Ham needed not only to foresee the logistical problems of the trek, but he had to reckon with the ethical side of it, too. It was more than a problem of pneumatic tires: "Cooking utensils… extra clothing, towel, soap, razor"—these things the two could obtain. Victuals, rather like tires, posed a difficulty, "as foods for such a trip were from the ration-list and taking from home supplies meant sacrifice." A sense of restricted goods, either from natural or from emergent scarcity, has dropped out of the contemporary consciousness, but war-regulations made of essentials a real challenge: "Of course, we had friends—old people and youngsters—so we put in bids to swap foods and thereby got bacon and ham, which were easy to preserve, which helped our problem somewhat." When the bus stopped in Adelanto, out of San Bernardino, the two men drank beer "in an atmosphere of soldiers off duty or on short leave from nearby posts or camps." In Red Mountain, Ham writes, "Jim and I looked over the Silver Dollar," a public house, "where a couple of old dolls leaned a hand on each of our shoulders, but the bartender brushed them away… I guess he sized us up rightly and did not wish to have them waste their time." Ham does not aspire to the station of a littérateur, nor is his document literary in any sophisticated sense. Even so, he has endowed it with touches that tell, not only of facility with the written language, but of his sense—but by no means his theory, as he does not have one—for the relation in narrative of accidentals to essentials. He belongs to Friedrich Schiller’s category of the naïve as opposed to the sentimental. The lessons that constitute adult literacy have taken root deeply in Ham’s psyche and they yield a spontaneous type of competent articulation.

A phrase such as "an atmosphere of soldiers on leave" belongs elsewhere than in the register of casual, of purely spoken, language. The appearance in the Silver Dollar of those same "soldiers on leave" reminds readers again of the wartime context of the story, of the rationing and transportation difficulties. The two explorers reached Chris Wichts’ cabins, a nucleus of abandoned shacks just beyond Ballarat, on foot, on Monday of their journey after a day’s walking. They "were quite surprised to find a man, Russell J. Elliot, in another one of the cabins." They talked to Elliot, who "seemed to be… watching who was going up and down the canyon or possibly ducking the draft board." Here again, the war obtrudes into the nearly uninhabited desert of dilapidated camps and desiccated ghost-towns.

Ham has a keen eye for the elements that contribute to a landscape, as in this description of the foot-path up Surprise Canyon: "We stopped many times on this steep trail for a rest and a drink from the stream that sometimes disappeared into the ground and then came up again. The shadows here are ever-changing and the surfaces of the canyon walls change too as a result of sudden cloudbursts, which are peculiar to this area in August and September. Occasionally we would stop and look back and the scenes made many a beautiful picture…" At the top of the Canyon, Ham writes, "we got our first glimpse of Panamint City – a chimney at the ruins of Louis Munsinger’s Brewery… and the old mill chimney."

French has visited the abandoned town before, so he serves as Ham’s guide:

The first place [that French led Ham] was up to Panamint City boot hill. Gravestones tell many tales. Up in Sourdough Gulch, about 1,000 feet higher elevation, there is only one grave left, and that one, showing much disturbance by the elements is a wood plaque bearing the inscription

IN MEMORY OF ROBERT McHENRY

DIED APRIL 17^TH, 1876

AGE 30 YRS. 3 MOS. 13 DAYS

Nearby there was a well-preserved rock cabin and down lower a spring of good water. The sides of the mountain were covered with juniper and pinion pine. We walked down the gulch and over to the once famous part of Panamint City—"Maiden Lane." The gals are long gone—not even a powder puff left—but the memories for some might still be there. We looked around the old mill, all in ruins now, but with enough left to show the marks of workmen who were artists at their trade. The chimney was built of red bricks made a short distance away from clay procured in the immediate vicinity. The quality of the work done at this mill in the building would put many a mechanic of the present day to shame.

Ham sees more than nondescript wreckage in the ruined mill. He sees the practical merit in the building and infers from it the competence of the builders, those "artists at their trade". He even makes a comparison unfavorable to the contemporary counterparts of the vanished carpenters and stonemasons. This non-literal view of things (to give it its inevitable yet ironic name), this ability to grasp the missing cause in the remaining empirical effects, suggests a mind subtle rather than gross in its habits, one attuned to the ironic caroming of human intentions across the billiard table of uncontrollable decades. Indeed, simultaneous beginnings can give rise to side-by-side itineraries of aspiration or failure. Thus the missing "gals" and the missing "workmen" form a parallelism in the sequence, the moral and other implications of which may be worked out by the reader.

Did Ham plan the paragraph this way? I have already said that he writes, in Schiller’s sense, naïvely rather than sentimentally, so I doubt that one could attribute to him any calculation of poetic or oratorical effects. What is my claim? I nominate Ham for what Blixen, in her essay on orthography, calls "a whole person". This ex-Boston cop and railroad mechanic has assimilated a literate attitude, knows his way around language, and finds it natural to sum up an important experience in a written narrative. Ham’s curiosity about Death Valley springs from an historical interest that can only have its basis in a type of bookish lore. That lore animates and enriches the actual foray, when Ham and French undertake it: Ham then makes a record of the trek in a more or less formal chronicle, exploiting a notion—genuine if not explicit—of expressive eloquence combined with specific observation. Now and again in his narrative, the Death Valley literary tradition even asserts itself explicitly. Thus when the two men misplace their packs after a side-trip, wondering whether thieves might have snagged them, they think of "the Small and MacDonald gang", for they "had read about the banditry of the old days."

Perhaps because Ham sees the world naïvely rather than sentimentally, his account can achieve a degree of poignancy—as he and French make their way through the detritus of the Nineteenth-Century attempt to tame and exploit the inhospitable Low Desert—that a more self-conscious writer would fail to achieve. The spectral quality of the landscape itself, the elegy of ruin and retreat, no doubt contributes to the ambiance.

Everywhere in the outlying sand-acres of the Panamint City ghost-town, Ham finds "stone structures of… small buildings with all the woodwork gone and bushes and trees growing up within the foundation… remains of tin, as from a tin shop or a blacksmith shop where probably many a wagon was fixed and horse shod." In Death Valley proper, they poke through the remnants of the Eagle Borax works, near which they note "the graves of Jimmy Dayton and Shorty Harris, two colorful characters of the early day history." On their way out of the deep desert, at Death Valley Junction, they stay in the old hotel: "There were a few men left around cleaning up after the scrapping of the old Tonopah and Tidewater narrow gauge railroad, the roundhouse of which was at Death Valley Junction." In the evening Ham and Jim converse in the bar with "Johnny Mills—a rough-talking old character who had much to do about the twenty-mule teams; also Frank Tilton, who was on crutches." Another colorful fellow, Ole Western, had "worked on many different jobs, including the building of the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad and, like any old timer, was full of stories." Quite apart from Ham’s delight in the peculiar flavor of these survivors of the "Twenty-Mule-Team" days, let us note one or two points of moderate elegance in his presentation: the phrase "many a wagon fixed and horse shod", for example, with its unusual plural-singular; or the qualification "as from a tin-shop"; or, at last, the honor done to grammar in the phrase—concerning the narrow-gauge railroad—"the roundhouse of which was at Death Valley Junction." As from a tin shop… Of which… It requires no particular effort for Ham to adhere to grammar or use a figure. I must again emphasize that the writer of these phrases had formally only an eighth-grade education, that he belonged to the laboring class, that he preferred the outdoors and would never have pretended to be a scholar.

My family has also preserved a letter in the hand of my actual paternal grandfather, Gaston Bertonneau (1885-1918), New Orleans born and the scion of a long-ensconced French-speaking line belonging to what, in the Nineteenth Century, were called les gens de couleur libres. Bertonneau, trained in the Latin curriculum of the city’s Catholic schools, went to work in the family business—"A. Bertonneau & Sons," a haberdashery on Dryades Street—just after the turn of the century, and he saw the migration of many of his uncles, aunts, and cousins to California during the decade before World War One. He would eventually follow them, in 1916, only to die in the influenza epidemic two years later. Gaston’s cousin Jeanne Bertonneau had gone west with her parents and siblings in 1912. In January, 1915, she had written to Gaston of her plan to attend the State Normal School in Los Angeles (the forerunner of my own alma mater, UCLA) to become a teacher. Gaston took the opportunity to reply to his young relative in a letter dated 8 February, 1915, beginning with the etiquette, "My Dear Jeanne". "It is needless to tell you," he says, "how we enjoyed your long and interesting letter announcing your entry into Normal and outlining your future plans. Your letter sizzles with so much enthusiasm that I often reread it to rekindle that same spirit within myself." Chance only has preserved this epistle—but how fortuitously for my purpose: it combines the themes of education and reading and infuses both with a passion, a warmth, that cannot be feigned. The idea that Gaston often rereads Jeanne’s words to rekindle in himself her obvious enthusiasm is a bit of natural Platonic philosophy: one soul speaks to another by means of the written word and there results from the exchange an enkindling of enthusiasm.

The openness of Gaston’s words moves me. He writes to Jeanne: "On behalf of the family and myself I congratulate you on your achievement. If you continue to display the same industry and perseverance in Normal that you characterized your High School studies, you are bound to attain the goal that you have so persistently worked for." Education "is one of life’s most treasured prizes." It lifts one "above the crowd" and arms one "better to fight the battles of life." Finally, education constitutes "a source of much pleasure" that fully justifies itself. Gaston writes that if he had his own schooldays to live over, he would study harder and follow Jeanne’s example. Business, he says, is rather "dull". They have just spent a good deal of money in rat-proofing the premises. In learning lies redemption from such dullness.

Implicit in Gaston’s remarks to his cousin about learning is a pedagogical observation made prototypically by Saint Augustine in his late-Fourth Century Confessions about schoolboy animosity to the abecedary and to the primer. In quoting Augustine, I ask readers to think of the citation from Petronius’ Satyricon about the corruption of Roman education in the First Century—about the unwillingness of Agamemnon’s pupils to do any scholarly work. Augustine admits to having liked Latin literature when he was a pupil in the Late Antique North African equivalent of secondary school, but he reports candidly that he disliked Greek—to him a foreign language, with a difficult grammar—and never forgot his own recalcitrance in the face of initial instruction. "The first lessons in Latin were reading, writing, and counting, and they were as much of an irksome imposition as any studies in Greek" (Pine-Coffin’s translation 33). Yet, as Augustine adds, "these elementary lessons were far more valuable than those which followed, because… they gave me the power, which I still have, of reading whatever is set before me and of writing whatever I wish to write" (33). The earliest movement in transition from the oral person to the novice in letters inspires a profound reaction yet qualifies as the most important of all the stages in education. I saw this in my son, Joseph Augustine Felix, who balked for a time at further abecedary instruction when he was four-and-a-half, but who now at age eight years reads well above the school expectation.

If, like the Bishop of Hippo, either Gaston or Ham in his school days had kicked against learning his ABCs or rebelled against the elementary reading lessons (doubtless but we all do), such childhood recalcitrance had, for both, long since yielded to a normative civilized adult comfort with the world of letters. The sign that one has reconciled himself to the difficult early lessons is the competency of his reading and writing. Augustine’s own prose provides a perennial example—vivid, detailed, incisive. Gaston and Ham, in their humble way, write competently and without noticeable difficulty.

Contrast their modest achievement with the forced expression of the representative undergraduate of today, the one that Reeves and Birkerts describe and whose prose I have examined in my earlier Praesidium articles. My students—and I can hardly imagine that they differ from anyone else’s—now no longer read their assignments except under the sustained coercion of weekly examinations. At the end of the semester, they invariably complain, in their course-evaluations, about the onus of the requirement. "I would give Professor Bertonneau’s class a higher recommendation," one wrote, "but I don’t like reading books." A year ago (Spring 2003), I asked my "Western Heritage" students to write an examination essay about four titles out of the nine that the syllabus had charged them with studying during the fifteen-week semester: Plato’s Symposium, Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and Augustine’s Confessions (Books I through IX). I wanted to know whether the respondents could see a large, meaningful sequence embracing all four texts. We had talked, throughout the semester from the first week up until the last, about the theme of order in ancient letters and about the philosopher’s vision of the orderly society. A student whom I will call "Hathaway" produced the following paragraph, typical of the batch:

Plato’s "Symposium", Petronius "Satyricon", Apuleius "The Golden Ass" and Austine’s "Confessions" are all a unique story written in different times, however a few common themes can be found. The most obvious of these themes is the theme of power. Al three stories have to do with power, although different authers wrote them, they were all playing with the concept of society and its controlling ways, such as the way it justifies "right" and "wrong." Austine’s vision is a bit different then this because it also reflects the concept of god, which although is present in both, is a larger part in this particular tale.

The hypothesis is hard to accept. It assumes the existence of a competency that can be upset. Literacy, like bicycle-riding, simply does not work that way. When the student has not done the reading, then he knows that he has not done it. He has time before sitting down to write the essay in class to think about how to fake his way through. If he knew grammar, syntax, and so forth, he would marshal them to his cause—and I might even admire him for it slightly. There is something to be said for well-executed fakery.

As on previous occasions, I feel obliged to add that neither Hathaway nor any of his peers can be held entirely responsible for his prose peccadilloes. Each emerges as the product of his education. Our institutions of education have failed. Hathaway’s writing problems reflect his reading problems. Yet I insist less eagerly than I have in prior instances that one ought to shield students from all blame. There is the matter of not reading, of being averse to the act, as students increasingly are.

We find ourselves back in the realm of resentment: against learning, against subtlety, against literacy, as remarked by Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies, but we are now in a position to understand this resentment more fully than does Birkerts himself.

Gaston Bertonneau and Augustine "Ham" Hamilton were poor by contemporary standards. I remember well the dirt cellar in Ham’s Lincoln Avenue house in Highland Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. Either man might have been a living font of complaint against life’s adversity—if he bought into the modern ideology—but neither was. Contemporary undergraduates who complain about the odium of reading are, by any historical measure, affluent. Their environment constitutes what Keyserling calls the "cult of ease". What should one make of their plaintive disposition? Should one sympathize with their plight? That deprivation neither excuses ire over, nor makes impossible the acquisition of, literacy is witnessed by Frederick Douglass in his Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (1845). I have previously cited the examples of my step-grandfather and my grandfather in order to show that earlier generations of Americans than the current one might become impressively literate, thoroughly competent and fluent in their articulation, without the expensive folderol of the contemporary high school and college experience—which, in any case, seems to not produce a genuinely adult literacy. Douglass’ autobiographical instance illustrates the same case but more dramatically and poignantly.

At age seven or eight years, Douglass’ owner, Colonel Lloyd, sold him to his cousin Hugh Auld, of Baltimore, a transaction that entailed the boy’s removal from a rural plantation—where even the white folk, in Douglass’ account, seem to have been illiterate—to the city. Auld’s wife Sophia, not yet fully acculturated to slave-owning, at first treated Douglass decently, to the extent of giving him preliminary lessons in reading and writing. What seemed a catastrophe then befell, for

Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." (78)

Auld’s words struck Douglass with the adamancy of a revelation: the ban on instruction—on literacy—lay at the basis of slavery. Nothing else could explain the vehemence of the new master’s injunction against Sophia’s gentle plan: "The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering" (79). From this moment Douglass determined to complete the suspended course. He says, with a measure of irony, "in learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress" (79). He acknowledges both.

But how might an indentured lad, always under supervision, connive his further practicum in bookishness against the legal ban? "If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself" (82). Of foremost importance is the desire to connive it. Mistress Auld having granted Douglass the intellectual first inch, he would now take the scholarly whole ell, come judgment or high water. As Douglass says, he cadged his lessons by making other boys and girls his teachers. Sent on an errand, he would finish it swiftly and then ask what he needed to know from older children whom he met in the street. He had lifted a primer, and the other, older children led him through it: "With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read" (82). Douglass learned to write in the same way, copying the letters made by other children and finally, after he had gotten hold of it, those in Webster’s Spelling Book. The exercise drew itself out and it required sustained deliberate stealth. The details show, not coincidentally, that Douglass learned by the phonetic method and none other.

All the while, Douglass remained focused on the fact that gaining his letters meant an increase in the power of his own consciousness—a widening of his intellectual horizon and a deepening of his ability to fathom his own condition. Soon after becoming a competent reader, he came into possession of that remarkable early Nineteenth Century volume The Columbian Orator, edited by Caleb Bingham. A minim’s glance at the Orator’s contents reveals a remarkable and varied curriculum. Among much else Bingham’s anthology includes Perkins’ Oration on Elegance, Blair’s Exhortation on Temperance in Pleasure, Mansfield’s Speech in the British Parliament of 1770, Milton’s Christ Triumphant over the Apostate Angels, Cicero’s Oration against Catiline—even an anonymous Speech of an Indian Chief. "Every opportunity I got," writes Douglass, "I used to read this book" (83). A dialogue between a slave-holder and one of his chattels especially appealed to him, for "the slave was made to say some very smart things in reply to his master" (83), resulting in "the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of his master" (83). Douglass tells how he read and reread this and the other Orator pieces whenever he could steal the time to do so. Reading never lowers on him as a burden but always drives him as a passion. It is as though he had heard and heeded that same voice that once spoke to Augustine—in a child’s high pitched sing-song—saying, pick it up and read it, pick it up and read it. In the twentieth century, this voice has yielded to that other one that says, turn it on and watch, turn it on and watch.

Later, under the ownership of Mr. Freeland, Douglass once again labored as a field hand far from the city, but not so wretchedly as before. Freeland, perhaps the kindest master in Douglass’ memory (so he avers), kept but three slaves, hiring the rest of his hands. The other two chattels were Henry and John Harris, both "quite intelligent" (119) although illiterate. Douglass egged them on about letters until they expressed "a strong desire to learn how to read" (119). Douglass then began a Sabbath School for this purpose, the activity of which soon began to exert its allure on slaves from neighboring farms. "I had at one time over forty scholars, and those of the right sort, ardently desiring to learn. They were of all ages, though mostly men and women… The work of instructing my dear fellow-slaves was the sweetest engagement with which I was ever blessed" (120). Douglass extols the character of his scholars:

These dear souls came not to Sabbath School because it was popular to do so, nor did I teach them because it was reputable to be so engaged. Every moment they spent in that school, they were liable to be taken up, and given thirty-nine lashes. They came because they wished to learn. Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness. (121)

The scholars inhabit a milieu distinctly unlike Keyserling’s "cult of ease". As soon as the slave opens a book, he runs the terrible risk of "thirty-nine lashes". His passion to become lettered must compete with his knowledge, no doubt sorely earned, of the possible consequence. The slave is not, like Ortega’s mass man, "satisfied with himself". He glimpses the external standard, grasps his deficit by comparison, and wants to conform himself to the criterion. The slave resents, not learning, but the starvation of his mind. He resents the standing bill-of-attainder against the free exercise of his capacity to learn. In opposition to the ardent desire of the slaves to throw off their "mental darkness" stands the hatred of the bigots. We have already reviewed Auld’s rebuke of his wife when she taught a few letters to the new servant. It could be much uglier than that. Douglass tells how, on one occasion, angry interlopers bloodily smashed the meeting-room and sent the scholars running: "Wright Fairbanks and Garrison West, both class-leaders [in a white Sunday School], rushed in upon us with sticks and stones" (120).

The vandal quality of the assault outrages any educated sensibility. What would I not give to have forty eager learners in my classroom? We should remember, however, that resentment and barbarism, when aimed at literacy, need not take the form of direct action. Where a lingering embarrassment to be seen violating good manners restrains a brutal iconoclasm, such ire will appear in its rhetorical guise as a complaint against the minimum of civilizing rigor. The students in Agamemnon’s school in Satyricon hate rigor and would take their business elsewhere did the corrupt master not pander to their intellectual recalcitrance. Blixen, with courageous acuity, refers to the spelling reform movement in Denmark in the 1930s as "barbarian": she accuses those who want to reduce the instruction of children to that which is merely instrumentally useful—what a slave might need to know—of violating "the whole human being". She even invokes the old institution of the castrato to emphasize her animus. The common luster of the otherwise heterogeneous articles appearing, in the last three decades, in the quarterly journals College English and College Composition and Communication, the major venues of literacy pedagogy in American higher education, is that of a profound antipathy to the norms of written language, to the structures of argument, and to the archive of meritorious books to which Douglass and his brethren so passionately and spontaneously responded.

College English and College Composition and Communication represent the consensus among those on the university faculties most immediately charged with coaxing freshmen to respond to letters. Publication in either forum counts towards tenure and promotion in English departments and writing programs. Yet the hallucinatory nature of College English- or Three C’s-prose, its detachment from literate reality, challenges adequate description. The majority of contributors in recent years are women, which is to say, feminists of one sort or another, often adding the trope of ethnic difference to the all-too-familiar argument. While one detects a retreat from the worst excesses of Derrida- and Foucault-inspired anti-prose of the 1980s, the abandonment of a completely hermetic jargon only emphasizes the nullity of the content. Notes to articles still cite Paolo Freire, Rigoberta Menchu, Michael Bérubé, Bell Hooks, Cornell West, abermasHaand other icons of the 1980s Academic Left; the same writers also promiscuously cite one another until the reader grows dizzy at the self-consuming Charybdis of cross-reference. One gets the feeling, paging through these journals, of being stuck in an eddy of cultural time. But in an eddy is where resentment inevitably sticks him who diverts his psyche, his eros, into an antinomian tantrum.

Surprise need not overtake us, then, when Min-Zhan Lu, writing in Three C’s, declares blithely—and with extreme prejudice—how "scholars now recognize that literacy is a topic, the meaning of which is up for grabs," so that "defining literacy is thus a site of political struggle" (Lu 178). The prejudice lies, of course, in the verb, to recognize, which seals its object under a spurious patent of incontrovertibility. The College English and Three C’s writers consistently abuse Aristotelian terms, like topos, to render the world unreal and to toy with meaning. What Lu calls "the ideal literate self", in her words, "uses writing for the following social goals [inter alia]: to end oppression rather than to empower a particular form of self, group, or culture [and] to grapple with one’s privileges as well as one’s experience of exclusion" (178). Lu lists altogether four such "goals". I shall not ask in what way the tenured radical has been excluded—not from the faculty, that supposed bastion of the old-boy network. I can hardly imagine the same tenured radical grappling, as Lu says, with her privileges. She is more likely to grapple with her carry-on luggage on her subsidized way to the Composition Conference, mistaking the happy privilege for a natural condition. And so it goes.

My readers will share my relief in the knowledge that mountains, rivers, oceans, and the like really exist. My step-grandfather, "Ham" Hamilton, understood this directly: with blistered feet and a parched throat—somatic indices quite external to any discourse—he exerted his way through the kaleidoscopic canyons and dry-as-bones salt-basins of Death Valley in the war-tossed Spring of 1944. He saw what he saw, keenly, with a kind of physiognomic tact, and without the benefit of feminism or ecofeminism or any other polysyllabic barbarity. In his word-portrait of Panamint City abandoned, he gives us a test-case in the limits of ecological adaptability, imbued with unforced elegy. I imagine that, in his school days, his reading comprised the equivalent of The Columbian Orator. My consanguineous great-grandfather, who met and corresponded with Frederick Douglass in the decade just after the Civil War, published and edited La tribune de New Orleans, the bilingual daily newspaper for les gens de couleur libres in the metropolis of Louisiana from 1858 to 1865. He delivered to Abraham Lincoln in 1865 a petition (unheeded) to proclaim immediate universal suffrage in the former Confederate states and, in 1877, sued the New Orleans School Board to allow his children to attend class across the street rather than across town in the "colored" school. Bertonneau v. School Board is one of the citations in Plessy v. Ferguson. Arnold Bertonneau (1838-1912), like Gaston, wrote in elegantly orotund English, as well as in classically balanced French. He never thought of those tongues as the languages of the oppressor, but as the indispensable medium of the claim on rights. He identified himself as a civilized man—a Mason, an ex-officer of both the Louisiana Native Guards and the Corps d’Afrique, and a noted wine-merchant—purely and simply. His interest in education, not only for himself, but for his children, finds expression in his prototypical litigant status in the matter of a child’s right to attend lessons at the nearest publicly subsidized school.

What Douglass, in his desperate circumstance, wanted and what my great-grandfather, in his less desperate but by no means easy circumstance, also wanted, the contemporary composition faculty—the teachers in charge of the reading and writing curriculum for undergraduates—despises and rejects. These academicians despise and reject the archive of belles lettres, substituting a degraded journalism (often, apparently, articles from College English) for the edification of their students; they despise and reject a clear prose that reflects the external reality, whose objectivity they deny by a sophomoric Nominalism. Their preferences reach down to elementary and secondary school because they have long since hijacked the colleges of education. They have enforced a reign of ideological illiteracy on American education.

It can be no wonder that cohort after cohort of college freshmen, when ministered to by such people, has taken bad counsel to heart and likewise, all too often, despises and rejects what is good because of the demand that the good makes on a native self-satisfaction. We would do well to remember another historical moment pregnant with implication for our own, the Christian triumph of the Late Fourth Century, when fundamentalists of the victorious creed began to turn their resentment indiscriminately against the whole Greco-Roman tradition. The puritanical Donatist faction of the Church was ready, particularly in the aftermath of the Emperor Julian’s petulant attempt to quash those whom he styled as Galileans, to liquidate the classical canon from Homer down to Plotinus. To the benefit of all succeeding centuries, the influential Bishop of Caesarea, Saint Basil (323-379), took a stand. In his Address to Young Men, Basil urged in opposition to sectarian ire that Christians might nevertheless—as his subtitle puts it—Derive Profit from Pagan Literature. Christians must heed their own Scriptures, but alongside them, "the pagan teaching is not without usefulness for the soul that has been sufficiently affirmed" (Deferarri’s translation 387). The followers of Christ have no monopoly on virtue, Basil argues: "and since it is through virtue that we must enter upon this life of ours, and since much has been uttered in praise of virtue by poets, much by historians, and much more still by philosophers, we ought especially to apply ourselves to such literature" (393).

What will the post-literate world left to us by the marauders of literacy and the vandals of taste and tradition be like? What ethos will the new puritans make? The question is not entirely a speculative one, as we have been living in a post-literate world for at least two decades. It can get worse, of course, and it certainly will. Let us begin with a description of the present, after which we can avail ourselves of the science-fiction writers for their glimpses of the future, near and far.

Decades ago observers such as Keyserling, Ortega, Oswald Spengler and Eric Voegelin began noting certain disintegrative trends. Given their precedent, later-celebrated books like Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1974) and Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1986) seem less ground-breaking than journalistic excitement made them appear at the time. Keyserling’s "cult of ease" I have already treated in some detail. We might well turn, then, to Ortega’s "dissection" (his term) of "mass man" in The Revolt of the Masses, as a meditation on cultural decline both prescient and rewarding. Ortega remarks that the mass humanity that has arisen since the beginning of the Twentieth Century bears some resemblance to the type of the aristocratic fils de famille. The hard work of establishing the familial commonwealth has been undertaken by the father and the grandfathers. The son merely inherits. The mothers and grandmothers and sisters and aunts, in their turn, dote on him, protect him, seek excuses for his lack of enterprise, for his self-satisfaction. "He is a man who has entered upon life to do ‘what he jolly well likes’" (102). Because, in the family, "even the greatest faults are in the long run left unpunished," the son "thinks that he can behave outside just as he does at home" (102). In his imagination, "nothing is fatal, irremediable, irrevocable" (102). As Ortega writes:

None other could be the conduct of this type of man born into a too well-organised world, of which he perceives only the advantages and not the dangers. His surroundings spoil him, because they are "civilisation," that is, a home, and the fils de famille feels nothing that impels him to abandon his mood of caprice, nothing which urges him to listen to outside counsels from those superior to himself. Still less anything which obliges him to make contact with the inexorable depths of his own destiny. (106)

Elsewhere Ortega remarks on the "intellectual hermetism" of the new, historically deracinated man, who "regards himself as perfect" and who, feeling "nothing outside himself", happily embraces what amounts to his "self-obliteration" (69). The blitheness of the contemporary mediocre person, says Ortega, is, "like Adam’s, paradisiacal" (69). It is not only the son, either, for, as the refrain of a top-forty hit of some years ago put it, girls too "just want to have fun." Everyone nowadays wants to have fun. But an appetite directed solely at fun is infantile. We might recall Augustine’s analysis of infancy in Confessions as uncivilized and tyrannical, demanding imperiously of others and flying into a tantrum when those whom it addresses fail to respond. Ortega’s point, however, is that mass man has long since become dominant and has, since the end of World War One, been arranging the social condition to suit his own nature. What, after all, is the so-called service economy—with its global emporium, functioning through the Internet, and its myriad of fast-food shops and cinemas—except the material resource of a supreme technology brought into the beck-and-call of infantile appetite? This reorganization of life naturally influences education, now dominated by the pedagogy of self-esteem, with students increasingly referred to as consumers of a product. Many features added to education since the 1960s anticipate the consumption-model, none more so than student evaluations of courses and professors, which swiftly became crucial in the tenure and promotion of personnel. Note that Petronius’ Satyricon prefigures this state of affairs exactly in its depiction of the schools in Nero’s time. As Agamemnon, the professor of rhetoric, says to Encolpius, if I did not give the students what they want—flattery—I would be the only one in my drama.

The reigning theory of the postmodernists and multiculturalists—that all institutions are a priori oppressive, that the animus of society is to plunder so-called subaltern people of their dignity—is none other than the reigning theory (to call it that) of Ortega’s mass man. The teacher pronounces the student, especially the female or black or Hispanic or homosexual student, ontologically sufficient and declares that all traditional wisdom merely conspires to conceal from the student this selfsame ontological sufficiency. Education will consist in revealing the conspiracy and shaming the conspirators. The same teacher tells the white male student that he is ontologically a predator-oppressor, but that by admitting his sins in a simulacrum of Christian confession and by adopting the language of the radicals—the language of sensitivity to the Other—he too can receive grace and, as Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche both put it a generation before Ortega, be licensed do what he will. The students, whatever their individual pre-dispositions, respond to the lesson because popular culture, saturated with resentment against the adult order, has inculcated in them the same liberation from custom and truth ever since any of them began watching television or listening to the radio or playing video games. As the lesson, despite its repugnance, is much easier than applying oneself seriously to a raft of serious books, even the doubting students incline to play along.

When the stages of this catechism extend from Kindergarten through the senior undergraduate year, the result is inevitably a personal stubbornness about submitting to any objective criterion, including the standard paradigm of written language. Another word for the condition is barbarism. Ortega says: "when all [standards] are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism" (72). The notion of a "vertical invasion of the barbarians" comes from Ortega, and describes the triumph of mass values over the ultima ratio of tradition. But what is the character, assuming it to be subject to description, of the barbaric consciousness? For Ortega, the barbarian is the one who cannot distinguish between nature and civilization, who assumes the latter to be the former, and who has no historical sense of the centuries-long struggle that gave rise to the achievements on which he depends but which he fails completely to understand. As "advanced civilisation is one and the same thing as arduous problems," argues Ortega, "historical knowledge is a technique of the first order to preserve and continue a civilisation already advanced" (91). From this stems the paradox, in Ortega’s words, that while "the world is a civilized one, its inhabitant is not" (82), for, as I would argue, he has rejected the written word, the only possible medium of a history and the only possible forum for solving arduous problems. Instead of the canon, the post-literate world will have "news", in the form of ever more simplified print-journalism and television. The "news" will blend increasingly with gossip and "entertainment reporting". Finally, as in the surfeit of stories about Michael Jackson or Paris Hilton, it will morph into pornography. The progeny of the bookless curriculum will also be oral rather than literate in its mental habits, with all the implications that I have surveyed in earlier essays.

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) comes from a later generation than Ortega. Voegelin lived longer than Ortega and made a special study of the United States beginning on the late 1920s; he lived and taught for many years at Louisiana State University, before and after World War Two. Voegelin, like Ortega, sees the Twentieth Century as a time of civilizational collapse characterized by mass political movements, which he describes as quasi-religions, each intent on making universal its restrictive dogmas. "On the level of pragmatic history," writes Voegelin in Anamnesis (1978), "the deformation of existence has produced ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’; it has revealed itself as a febrile impotence that cancels out in bloody dreams of greatness and has brought the majority of mankind into subjection under mentally diseased ruling cliques" (6). Voegelin insists that he uses the term mentally diseased in a rigorous way, "in the Ciceronian sense of the morbus animi, caused by the aspernatio rationis, the contempt of reason" (6). He does not mean by this only the masses subjugated under the ideological regimes of the Communist world, but those in the putatively free nations as well. Voegelin notes how the scholarship of the humanities has succumbed to the intellectual onslaught of the ’isms, stemming from Marx, Freud, and others. He sees the simplified—but distorted—view of existence offered by the ideologies as perfectly suited to "the populist expansion of the universities" undertaken in North America after 1945; he refers to "the inevitable inrush of functional illiterates into academic positions in the 1950s and 60s" (7). The phenomenon has continued apace, as my brief sampling of Three C’s and College English will have shown.

Addressing the professoriate of letters, history, and the related subjects, Voegelin says that "it has become increasingly difficult to describe this sector of the academic world, with its peculiar mixture of libido dominandi, philosophical illiteracy, and adamant refusal to enter into rational discourse, because the adequate form would have to be satire and, as Karl Kraus noted already in the 1920s, it is next to impossible to write satire when a situation has become so grotesque that reality surpasses the flight of a satirist’s imagination" (7).

The post-literate world is, or it will be, history-less; this is because it is, or it will be, bookless. But the post-literate world also is, or it will be, orgiastic: a great and continuous spasm of resentment against arduous questions, as Ortega calls them, and against the demands of an existentially challenging inherited order. Voegelin’s analysis helps to explain the pornographic strain in contemporary existence. When a people loses its traditional bearings and becomes "lost", he writes, its constituent individuals can no longer "productively contribute to the creation of an order of symbols through which the transfinite processes [of the world] can be made comprehensible in the transparency of myth" (26). Where Voegelin writes "myth" we might easily write literature. Voegelin also writes of the narrowing of the transcendental horizon, which occurs when a people forgets the ideas and arguments on which its coherent existence is founded. So it is, then, that

In the social dynamics of our time, the most important symptoms are the "movements" which in part have an obvious orgiastic character, and the "great wars." The wars are symptomatic not only insofar as they possibly reveal a positive will to orgiastic discharge but also insofar as they must be endorsed because actions that might prevent them have become impossible through the paralysis of the will to order, which can be active only where its meaning is secured by the community myth. (26)

But those who set the mental tone now complain that myths are toxic and that we must, for our own good, spurn them. They routinely denounce virtues—literacy, for example—as myths. Any external principle becomes a myth in the pejorative sense. What is important to the "lost" individual is, as Voegelin says, "discharge". This explains the weird infusion of passionless sex, not only into the market, but more specifically into education where, despite the fact that the feminists denounce intercourse as a patriarchal plot, they also urge students to copulate serially, as long as the ritual includes prophylaxis by condom. At formerly Calvinist Oberlin University, nowadays an exemplary New Age institution, students recently received credit for making their own pornographic videos. At the Potsdam campus of the State University of New York, the administration sponsored a three-day exhibition of whips, sexual prosthesis, and pornographic display, underwritten by the state’s taxpayers.

Petronius made an observation similar to Voegelin’s two thousand years ago: the background against which his picaroons wander in Satyricon is universally pornographic, consisting of brothels of all kinds, mandatory promiscuity with sado-masochism, and, for religion, a pervasive Priapic cult. We now have the Internet, heavily pornography-driven, which extends via the telephone-line into every college dorm-room; the dorm-room, meanwhile, is distant from parental supervision, near to intervention by the radical teacher-overseers. (They refer to themselves as facilitators.) Voegelin also tells us that, even while a great spiritual downfall occurs, the technological civilization will continue to produce gadgets that give an impression of progress, as long as we think of progress, as barbarians do, in purely material terms: the latest sports utility vehicle or computer-game. In saying so, Voegelin responds to Ortega, who believed in the 1920s that the new barbarism implied a near-term collapse of the industrial-technical infrastructure. We do nowadays, in North America, import a large segment of our technicians from foreign countries, such as India, a nation that also supplies many of our medical specialists. The Northeastern power-outage of 2003 did rattle confidence in the utilities. It is a mistake, however, to chart these trends in any short term.

Their insight into the long term is what makes the science fiction writers valuable. The passing decades have only strengthened the plausibility, for example, of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Huxley represents the destruction of history in the new calendar, beginning with "Ford" (Henry Ford, innovator of the assembly line), that has supervened on the Gregorian calendar. Book-learning is obsolete, having yielded to "Hypno-paedia", a kind of electronic oral-instruction-while-you-sleep. You only learn what you need to know, however, in your role as specialist. The drug "soma" and the full-sensory cinema known as the "Feelies" function as the panem et circenses of the regime. In constant discharge, the masses have no need of thinking. Literacy of a kind still exists in George Orwell’s 1984, but the program mandates the reduction of English into Newspeak and the destruction of all literature prior to Big Brother. Orwell seems to have gleaned the idea for Newspeak from a Swedish novel of the early 1940s, Kallocain, by Karin Boye. The "Kallocain" of Boye’s title is a drug, mandatory and universal for the citizenry, that shuts down the mental processes and, like Huxley’s soma, synthesizes ecstasy; but there is also an artificial speech, restricted in its vocabulary, whose purpose is to make the old tongues incomprehensible to a rising generation. In both 1984 and Kallocain, the protagonist is a person who has a vague awareness of his plight, but who lacks the resources to understand it completely. The state is hostile to understanding. Like Douglass’ master, the state wants obedience.

I wish not, however, to claim that the current condition resembles that of Orwell’s or Boye’s imagination. Nor are we so dehumanized yet, as in the milieu described by Huxley. The most presciently accurate portrait of our surrender to a post-literate existence comes from a book written half a century ago by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953). While still a public figure in the early 1990s, Bradbury espoused the cause of literacy and he complained about the failure of the public schools to foster it. He is worth more than all the post-modern professors put together.

The world of Fahrenheit looks like the familiar one of today: it is clean, with lovely shops; people have access to all sorts of entertainments, many of them broadcast over the air waves and listened to by ear phones. I think of the students filing into my classroom wearing their Walkman headgear, listening to adolescent wailing in the form of MP3 files. Bradbury pictures Mildred, wife of his fireman-protagonist Guy Montag, as reclining on the bed, as though in ecstasy, while she listens to a surging music consisting of drummed-out rhythms and to saccharine melodramas. "She was listening to far people in far places, her eyes wide and staring at the fathoms of blackness above her in the ceiling" (42). When Montag himself experiments with the ear-phones, he hears "a great thunderstorm of sound… Music bombard[ing] him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons" until he feels himself "a victim of concussion" (45). Mildred watches her "parlor screens" obsessively. There are three in her salon, each covering an entire wall of the room, and she pesters her husband to buy her the fourth. The screens carry programs, in swirling color and in deafening sound, jejune in character, including a soap-opera in which the viewer can participate by reading lines from a script. Mildred refers to the televised serial as her family, but she can give her husband only a tiny inkling of what the story-line is, when he inquires.

Bradbury’s triumph in Fahrenheit consists in his invention of Beatty, the Fire Chief. Montag’s boss is the man in charge of the official book-burners employed by the post-literate, anti-literate, state. He is the perfect thought-hating ideologue, rancorous about the past, resentful of all spiritual differences, anxious, intolerant—a maliciously soft-spoken fanatic. Donald Pleasance, that master of quiet malice, did not, but ought to have, played him in Truffaut’s otherwise excellent film. In a 1979 commentary on the novel, Bradbury identifies Beatty with those who have attempted to rewrite or censor his own literary work: "Wouldn’t it be a good idea," a "Vassar lady" wrote him, "to rewrite [The Martian Chronicles] inserting more women’s characters and roles" (175); editors of a high-school anthology who included Bradbury’s dinosaur-story The Fog Horn eliminated a metaphor that invoked notions of "God" and "presence" (176). Another high-school anthology revoked "every word of more than three syllables" and "every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention" (176).

Bradbury comments: "there is more than one way to burn a book" (176). In Fahrenheit, Beatty tells Montag that the professional book-burners owe their origin to the advent of two modern insurgencies. The first of these is the emergence of "motion pictures… radio… television," under whose influence a new mental attitude "began to have mass" (54). People acculturated to these influences could not come to terms with books, so the purveyors of print began to ply them with "digests" and "tabloids" and Hamlet as a one-page summary: "Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery… the intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more" (55). The second of the two insurgencies is the one concerned with the growing allergy of the mass to criticism perceived as slight. The principle is: "The bigger your market… the less you handle controversy" (57). Beatty refers to "all the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean" and rhetorically warns those "authors, full of evil thoughts," that they should "lock up [their] typewriters" (57). "Our civilization is so vast," he says, "that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred" (59). Since everyone is individually a minority, including the slow and the stubborn and the uneducable, the censors must expunge all potential offences of any kind. The mass of paltry, spiritually thin-skinned individuals amounts, however, only to a conforming, thoughtless mob. The state wants them to be thus. The state’s policy is to pander to the mob’s essential inanition. The result, which Beatty defends, is

School… shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually… neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts. (55-56)

[Then] more sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. (57)

Bradbury helps us to grasp literacy anew as the codification of anxiety and anxiety—doubt, openness to criticism—as the mark of the civilized person. When Montag rescues a Bible from a mound of doomed books, his friend Faber tells him that only a few copies of that tome still exist. The Scriptures of the scriptural religions turn out to be the non plus ultra of anxiety-producing books. Secretly reading the books that the state employs him to burn finally awakens Montag from sleepy complacency and transforms him into the anxious rebel who plots with others to preserve knowledge against monolithic state-inspired idiocy. From the printed page, Montag draws the knowledge that he is alive, mentally alive, in a way that his environment has always rigorously suppressed. So much of our present condition appears in Fahrenheit 451 that one feels pressed in accounting for it all: the theoretically justified restriction of literacy by ideologues in charge of education, the dumbing-down of the curriculum, the triumph of broadcast culture, the cult of sensitivity and the denunciation of the Great Books—all of these things have come to pass and can be charted into the future. That future will look like the world of Fahrenheit. It is the logical extension of empirical trends.

Note how Beatty’s argument for happiness over anxiety resembles, not only the ego-boosting pedagogy of the self-esteem mongers, but also the wicked injunction of Douglass’ master, Hugh Auld, against teaching the slave-boy his letters. Why learn anything, as Beatty says, save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts, when these things are what will land one a salary and so permit one access to sports for everyone, group spirit, fun? To read is to confront, in Ortega’s phrase, arduous problems. The damnable thing about arduous problems is that not everyone can rise to them, and those who cannot are bound to feel inferior to those who can. So by all means, let us discourage reading or shrink it down to comic books or to digital pornography on the Internet. Like the College English and Threer C’s writers, let us redefine literacy so that illiterates might receive the fulsome praise that their accomplishment ranks with that of those who, like Augustine, can read or write anything that they wish, and who have the wisdom, gleaned from books, of wishing with discipline.

It might seem that I have divagated indulgently from where I began, not just in the present essay, but two or three essays ago in the sequence, when I described Powell’s theory of the origin of the alphabet and Havelock’s theory of the influence of alphabetic writing on Greek thought. When we put together Powell, Havelock, Ong, Luria, Plato, Plutarch, Petronius, Saints Augustine and Basil, Keyserling, Blixen, and all the others on whom I have drawn in making a long argument: when we do this, I say, the pattern becomes clear. The ballistic arc of Western Civilization is also the ballistic arc of literate thinking, of books, and of our anxious confrontation with them. It is by no means far-fetched for Blixen to urge that the reform of Danish spelling will spell cretinism for Danish thought, for the alphabet, which has its own precise inner logic, gives ground to the kind of thinking that structures the orderly world that we foolishly take for granted. My students never recommend books to me (they do no reading outside of school and precious little in it), but some of them do from time to time offer me their graphic novels, fancy cartoon-books on glossy paper, always violent, often with a pornographic tinge. These items are still, one might say, for the eye, as is print, but they are not primarily print; they are primarily image. Nor do pictures encourage abstraction, which, as Havelock and Ong argue, print on its own does, in fact, encourage. Those who cannot make the transition from the immediacy of the sensorium to the theoretical schemes of abstraction mediated by literacy also cannot make the crucial transition from theoretical schemes of abstraction back to the immediacy of the sensorium grasped now at a higher level. Those who lack all history cannot see the present for the culmination of millennial struggles that it really, metaphysically, is. I think of "Ham" Hamilton’s appreciation of the actual Death Valley on the basis of his prior study of it and of the way in which the actuality then informs the study with a renewed vitality. I think of the way an ornate dialogue in The Columbian Orator transforms Douglass’ sense of his condition—and of his possible future outside the choking horizon of that condition.

NOTES