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Carrying literacy's banner forward into e-space continues to be a mildly contradictory adventure whose tensions can sometimes drive its footsoldiers to despair.

Professor Bertonneau, a veteran of many classroom campaigns, laments that the coed undergraduate, far from being the English teacher’s joy to instruct that she once was, has become frequently downright adversarial thanks to feminism’s having applied rough edges liberally.

In a rather routine presentation of a literary survey class, this professor was struck by the prominent—but largely unremarked—presence of the sublime in English literature since the Renaissance. Why did English theorists like Edmund Burke themselves appear to disparage the sublime experience?

Words and notions are brutally abused in today’s raging political disputes: some essential definitions and elementary distinctions would go far toward making such exchanges more responsible.

A previous issue had some fun with Ivory Tower culture and “liberal chic”. It seems only fair now to report on what neo-conservatives are up to—or would be, if they were given free reign to create their own campus.

In addition to regular classroom duties and committee work, the college professor will occasionally be called upon to perform such incidental pedagogical chores as… judging an essay contest saturated with miserable entries.

To make a donation, address your check or money order to The Center for Literate Values or to John Harris (NOT to Praesidium) and post to:

I wrote several of you toward the end of June that The Center’s last days may have come. Our Web site had inexplicably vanished from cyberspace, replaced by a pretty young blonde carrying a backpack but otherwise not even implicitly affiliated with matters academic, intellectual, or cultural. A few phrases had randomly been snatched and posted on the “home page”, rather as the entrails of a huge Cretaceous raptor’s victim might be sprinkled upon a lawn… a fingertip here, a shorn spleen there. Most of the phrases did not coalesce into any sense from any angle. All too abundant and comprehensible, however, were two menus of invitations to engage in financial activity—buy a plane ticket, sign up for online dating—which would involve the release of delicate personal information.

I panicked, quite honestly—not only because I hadn’t the slightest idea what had happened, but because the dozen of dignitaries I had lately invited to visit the site would never take me seriously again if their eyes should light upon such rubbish. I assumed that we had been “hijacked”, and proceeded to notify my Web hosting service (which answered none of my Priority One messages until after the weekend) and the FBI (which has yet to send me so much as a standardized auto-response). It turns out that the exotic port of Shanghai should not have stirred in my imagination: the heist was entirely home-grown. My Web host, having divided technical assistance and billing into two distinct departments, could not seem to pass the word from one to the other that I had properly renewed my domain name (“literatevalues.org”). I learned that a certain species of vulture swoops down upon these names the instant they become available, purchases them for pennies, and then offers them at a re-sell price of thousands of dollars in the event that some hapless outfit like The Center is facing a massive loss of clientele. Of course, just in case the domain name’s quondam owner really does not care to keep it, these dusky operators set several snares for any visitor so foolish as to divulge credit card information.

The Web host did right by me on the Monday morning in question (though only two weeks later was my card finally charged for the domain name’s renewal). I did not walk away from this adventure chirping, “All’s well that ends well,” however. Though our site was actually much improved by the thorough scrub-down and manicure I gave it in consequence of the scare (see for yourself sometime), I nevertheless remain deeply impressed by the multiplied opportunities for fraud, waste, and ruin in our Internet “culture”. I am disturbed that so many sleazy businesses can operate so openly, that virtually no legal oversight is effective, and—most of all—that casual errors on the part of well-meaning parties can create tidal waves rather than mere ripples. Of course, I really have no way of ever finding out if The Center failed to receive a grant or endorsement because an important person visited its site during those sixty-something hours. I have no way of knowing, really, if our PayPal button is working as it should. Links on the site cease functioning without warning. On this particular morning as I write, I plan to see a man about a camera that was supposed to create DVDs capable of being viewed on a TV screen… and it doesn’t. My home computer (and the one at my workplace) will not even burn simple text files onto a disc after receiving all the right commands until I eject my disc and am told in effect (like a patient beau saddled with an airy flirt), “Wait! Put that back! I haven’t finished with it!”

I wrote some of you during my panic attack that the latent contradiction between The Center’s work and the Internet’s importance to that work had at last reached the snapping point—that readers and other thoughtful people simply don’t waste time clicking around on a flashy box, and that the hit-or-miss, all-or-nothing links upon which every stage of such communication depends cannot long be tolerated by responsible adults. The failure rate is unacceptable. The risk, the margin of error, are too great. The impenetrability of the failure’s causes and the inaccessibility of a competent technician are infuriating. To those of us who are dedicated professionals rather than bored adolescents with an attention deficit, our culture does not seem to be advancing… quite the contrary.

In various ways, I think our contributors are constantly noticing this inadequacy of “progressive existence”. Tom Bertonneau writes in this issue of the gross incivility observable in the undergraduate coed who swaggers down college corridors with a New Woman chip on her shoulder. I wonder how much this situation is worsened by the absence of young men who are not trapped in adolescence by a panoply of electronic games? My own essay about the sublime in English literature argues that applied science has a built-in contempt for the incomprehensible (or even the “unprocessable” as the technician understands it in his narrow terms: try finding a young “geek” at Radio Shack who sympathizes with your computer anxiety). Ivor Davies has given us a short story which all too well illustrates the squalor of prose-writing in this epoch of lunging at “icons” (a word whose transformed meaning packs a walloping irony which will never graze Bill Gates, let alone his cultural progeny).

The Vanishing Cultivated Girl and her Replacement: From Reading Novels to Talking Trash on Campus

I begin with three vignettes, the veracity of which my patient readers will accept on faith…

First Vignette. It is the end of the semester in my “Western Heritage I” course, an undergraduate “general education requirement” that I teach as a large-enrollment enterprise, with over a hundred students in the auditorium. Even with the help of a graduate-student teaching assistant, keeping order in the classroom has required a massive and annoying investment of the teacher’s energy. Students come late, complain about lost points due to missed quizzes, shuffle in their seats, and—most distracting of all—talk during the lecture. It is women, far more than men, who offend in this manner, although men are not free from the vice. To allay student fears about the final examination, I have agreed to spend the last two days of the semester summing up the major points of the syllabus and offering reminders about what we have read during the semester. (Some, who have not done the reading, mistakenly think that by taking notes during these concluding sessions, they can fake their way through the examination.) I am carefully making my way through an outline, tying Homer to the tragedians, the tragedians to the philosophers, Greek literature to Latin literature, and pagan civilization to the early Christian discourse that it at last produced. I find that I cannot keep the thread intact. Something is addling my concentration. I cock an ear and discover the source. From the moment I began, two young women sitting halfway back in the auditorium and close to the right aisle (from the lecturer’s perspective) have been chattering to one another in loud stage whispers. I shoot them a disapproving look. The chattering continues, as if no one else were present. I shoot them another look and clear my throat. No result. Finally, I must stop my lecture and address the two of them directly, with a mandate to cease gossiping or take their palaver out of the classroom. Both girls make it clear by their expressions that they feel put upon and abused.

Second Vignette. It is a more recent semester. Again I am teaching “Western Heritage I,” but in this little story the actual course plays only a small part. The public schools have a hiatus, so my twelve-year-old, a seventh-grader, is with me on campus. He sits through a lecture on Virgil while reading a book about UFOs. When the class-time has elapsed, he helps me pack up my chattels and we begin to walk to my next class, on the other side of campus. In the crush of students we find ourselves walking next to a female undergraduate engaged, like eighty percent of other students, in a peripatetic cell phone conversation. The young lady is well dressed—in the female equivalent of “junior executive.” She walks briskly, oblivious of anyone’s co-presence in the public space. Her dialogue grows excited. She is complaining to a sympathetic listener about one of her instructors, who has apparently assigned what she believes to be too much reading and who grades, as she sees it, harshly. “He f---ing thinks nobody’s got other things to do,” she says loudly. “Well, I’m f---ing not going to let him push me around. I’m f---ing going to report this f---er to the dean.” In three sentences, she has inserted sailor-talk into her speech four times. At the second usage of the Anglo-Saxonism, I give her a disapproving glance. At the fourth I say loudly, “Thank you for sharing that with my twelve-year-old.” She drops back, looking more irritated than ashamed, avoiding my eyes.

Third Vignette. Often it is in the freshman composition course that I have closest contact with students. Here, still a bit intimidated by the college experience and not yet cynically inured to education, students tend to show themselves most naïvely and candidly. Insisting that students share with me for consultation two drafts of each of their four formal essays gives me the opportunity actually to talk to them individually many times during the semester. Undergraduates come to college today with less literacy than ever. As a rule, functional illiteracy little bothers the men—they imagine other spheres than the intellectual in which they might demonstrate some kind of prowess; women generally show themselves more amenable to constructive discipline in the domain of their written expression and generally make better progress than the men. “Better,” however, means in comparison to a paltry norm. This semester (Fall 2007), the best writer, and the most mature eighteen-year-old in the class, is a young woman whom I shall call, by a chain of protective associations, “Veronica.” No opportunity presents itself that would let me discern much about Veronica’s background. She distinguishes herself from others, however, by doing the reading that I assign (most skip it) and by always turning in her required draft-versions of the paper; again, many fewer basic-language deformities mar her prose than is the case with other students. She has a mien of some awareness, a careful way of speaking, and a measure of poise, as previous generations would have named it. Veronica can make, rudimentarily, a logical and evidentiary argument, something few of her peers can. Her range of references shows much restriction; she has read a little—more than other freshmen, but nothing challenging or brave. I think to myself: Veronica might be much more intellectually and culturally developed than a jejune education has made her—and she is unaware of the possibility.

More than one commentator in recent years has bemoaned, and rightly, the decline of masculinity in college students. In place of the aspiring young man who seeks to add lettered cultivation to his purely physical development, the male undergraduate has become, for the most part, an infantilized, marginally overweight, video-game-obsessed consumer of rap music. In his sartorial habit and demeanor, he resembles the slaphappy imbecile played to perfection by Huntz Hall in the old Bowery Boys comedies, right down to the invariable baseball cap worn at any angle except brim-forward, as the haberdasher sensibly designed it. He might be de-sexed or not yet sexually determined (this will be in parallel with his infantilism), or he might be crudely and pornographically sex-obsessed. What he avoids is balance. In class he tends to the surly, but a noticeable admixture of effeminacy often emasculates even his surliness. A male student once told me, when I asked him in accordance with my rules for classroom decorum to remove his hat, that he couldn’t do so because he was, as he said, “having a bad hair day.” He intended this as a meaningful remark. Asked why he has come to college, the typical male student cannot say, unless he recites the empty formula about “earning a big salary” when—or rather if—he graduates. Another characteristic of contemporary college males is that their numbers have steadily decreased over the last decade. Fewer men come to college than ever before; more men than women drop out before completing a degree.

The blame for this etiolating of masculinity lies not solely on the men themselves, although they contribute to it by making choices that they could make otherwise. Rather, for twenty-five years or more the American nation, in its public schools and through its commercial mass-culture, has been deliberately censuring real masculine behavior and deliberately feminizing males. I wish to explore, however, not the emasculation of young men, as catastrophic as that is, but instead its corollary: the equally enormous de-feminizing of females.

Do comparisons run to unfairness? So be it. In my graduating class at Santa Monica High School (1972), I knew many already formidably cultivated young women. They were, for one thing, readers. They read books on the bus traveling to and from school –the usual girl’s fare of Jane Austen, but also surprising things like the Tolkien trilogy, just then issued in paperback. By the tenth grade, Diane S—— had finished the last installment. They read Demian, Siddhartha, and The Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. They read The Stranger by Albert Camus and Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. They read Love Story by Eric Segal, too, but this had its context in their other literary involvements; it never defined them. Then they read John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which no boy did. In Mr. Johnston’s Senior Honors English course, they sustained their part in the discussion and often left the boys looking like they had little to say. One really had to compete with Regine W—— or Janet M—— or Ruth K—— in the endeavor of interpretation. Those girls sang in the chorus or in the smaller Madrigal Society, or they played an instrument in the school orchestra. They had their favorite Top Forty hits, I’m sure, but they could appreciate a symphony concert or a song recital. When an exhibition of Impressionist paintings came to the Los Angeles County Art Museum on a weekend, Regine and Janet and Ruth would come to school on Monday eager to talk about it. I once spent a memorable afternoon with Regine in the Huntington Gardens , whose grassy and flowery beauty she grasped much more vividly than I. Again in college, at UCLA, despite the pull still exerted on adolescent habits by the descent into Hippiedom of the previous few years, one yet encountered straight-backed girls, well dressed, well read, and serious in their spiritual pursuits.

The privilege fell to me of dating such a girl, stately in her possession of Episcopalian form, during my sophomore year. Elizabeth (“Liz”) A——, who later earned a law degree, played piano (Bach and Mozart), spoke French, and did not find an Ingmar Bergman film foreign to her experience although she could equally well laugh her heart out at a Woody Allen movie. Among their accomplishments Regine and Elizabeth knew how to dine. Their interest in cuisines embraced the adventurous, and both knew to stand to let the lad seat them. I can imagine neither of them eating a fast-food chimichanga, the very name of which suggests barbaric engrossment. In the incipient wisdom of my early thirties, right in the shrillest Harridan days of academic feminism, I had the luck to marry a genuine lady of the same species as Regine and Elizabeth.

Maleness impels me to the usual sex-related interest in women, including frankly the coeds in my classes. I don’t say that I fancy them, as a predatory humanities professor of my UCLA days was known to do serially. (As he grew older, the girls grew younger and younger.) Indeed, most of these nymphae exert moderate repulsion by virtue of their personal qualities or, as it might well be, their amorphous lack of definite personality and their culturally bereft condition. Nevertheless, at an organic level, the presence of young ladies solicits a mixture of curiosity and protectiveness that informs my sense of them despite reason. Plato says that Eros is intrinsic to education, so perhaps that ubiquitous Platonic Eros acts to make my innards kick in. I expect the males to avoid humane discipline like a plague; I expect them to behave and speak crudely and to mumble their lame I dunno’s when addressed in the interrogative. Emotionally unmoved by them, I have learned to shrug my shoulders at their “slacker” imperviousness to edification. For the coeds, although facts militate against it, I stubbornly await a freshening of the wind, a calm sea, and a prosperous voyage. In respect of them, the thought whispers to me: There is a physiological beauty in this girl that ought to be matched by intellectual formation; a bit of genuine knowledge might refine her expression or positively alter her posture somehow. Elizabeth, my sophomore-year girlfriend, and my wife Susan, in their common upright and clear-eyed self-presentation, furnish the ideal. Perhaps a prospect of discovery will loom. The ship of this hope usually breaks its keel on the Siren-Rocks of classroom reality, as in the first of my three vignettes. Men in their grimacing apathy sleep during class or stare at the ceiling. Whispering to one another lies outside their repertory of offenses. No longer a rare intrusion, the chattering girls turn up ubiquitously, holding forth in private parliament during the lecture, while registering alarming non-susceptibility to rebuke.

Chatterers constitute a describable sub-category within the larger realm of the de-feminized. As befits their particular annoying quality, they usually correspond to raw girlishness. They are more likely than not to be the youngish-appearing puellile girls clad in dresses rather than jeans and with curls or “done up” hair rather than the straight shoulder-length tresses that define the default of current coed coiffure. They come in pairs, naturally, and must typically be sorority sisters or dorm-room co-dwellers or off-campus apartment sharers. Their chattering is at once narcissistic and aggressive. It is narcissistic for being utterly selfish and anti-social. The mindlessly prattling pair shows obliviousness to the distinction between the outdoor space of the quadrangle and the indoor space of the lecture hall; or worse yet, it is not obliviousness but willful contemptuousness towards the indoor space of the lecture hall, which they claim as theirs by treating it in what manner they will. They also show obliviousness or contempt towards the presumptive presence of other students—although in actuality these might be few—who seat themselves with the intention of listening to and following the lesson. Their girlishness or even little girlishness belongs to the calculation of the behavior: it functions as camouflage, as if to say, “my innocent appearance preempts chastisement and shame on him who thinks me guilty.” The guise puts me in mind that a year or two ago, MTV ran a series of hour-long programs called Sweet Sixteen, which featured pathologically spoiled adolescent girls who extort their wealthy and indulgent parents for lavish birthday parties. The birthday girls all exhibited that same Barbie-Doll-like false femininity.

Chatterers are that kind of girl. Their irremediable self-absorption freezes them, in their moral and intellectual (non-) development, at the seventh-grade level. Chatterers are aggressive for being relentless in their rude behavior and directly challenging in their appropriation of time and attention. I like occasionally to show films connected the readings that I assign. Nowadays, however, turning down the houselights inevitably operates as a sign for the gossipers to commence their obnoxious volubility. More than once I have suspended the screening to say, “Girls, you need to stop your private conversation now and pay attention the movie.” Who ever became a college teacher expecting to monitor habits as disruptive as these? The frequent visible gut-response of the miscreants is volcanic indignation that can barely contain itself from Krakatoa-like eruption.

Chatterers disqualify themselves as feminine by a deliberate choice to sustain infantile behavior into what should be the beginning of their adulthood and, considering that they have accepted the invitation to attend college, their Bildung. I only once had to rebuke male chatterers. This happened when I taught extra courses one semester at a so-called community college. The two offenders were effeminate “Goth” males in Marilyn Manson makeup and garb, which inclines me to classify them as belonging to a distinctly female phenomenon. Chatterers contribute maliciously to the larger breakdown now happening in society between the exterior forum and the interior sanctuary. Stand-up comedians have long since made the loud cell phone user a staple of their routines. It’s barely funny any more. Movie theaters routinely run announcements at the beginning of the program begging people not to talk during the performance and asking them to turn off their cell phones. An old phrase, “chattering like fishwives,” whether fair or not, ascribes audible insouciant prattling to the lowest, most unformed constituents of womanhood. Fishwives presumably read few books. Incessant talk militates against absorption in letters, a task requiring the discipline of silent concentration. Incessant talk militates against paying attention to road traffic, too. When driving on or near campus, one must keep an eye peeled for students, mostly women, who think that they can chatter inanities and negotiate left turns at the same time. Chattering signifies a recursion in contemporary society of pre-literate oral behavior unrestrained, however, by the village decorum that provided every European language with the justifiable equivalent of the succinct French phrase, taisez-vous, Mesdames!

People who chatter in class in violation of good taste and derail a formal procedure probably abuse cell phone technology too and annoy others by that abuse. The trespasses run together in a syndrome along with much else. It is not only loud private conversations out of place in public areas—it is also text-messaging. I have scolded ten times more women than men for text-messaging during class, another dissolution of courtesy and social order that has reached epidemic proportions and yet another deformation of the female character. Text-messaging no more signifies literacy than does chattering, reducing grammar and syntax to a pidgin and restricting topics to those within a domain of insipidity. Inveterate text-messaging probably stunts the mind just as fully does inveterate video-game-playing or television-watching. One form of linguistic, and therefore also of mental, stultification is the lapse from polite into vulgar language. I would point to the new crassness of female speech as another outstanding element in the low-class behavioral koine characteristic of the de-feminized coed: on the one hand, mindless yadayada even during lecture, and on the other, le patois des mâtelots and the yob-talk of soccer hooligans.

My physio-chemistry makes me liable to crises of low blood sugar. Fortifying myself with a meal before pitching into two or three straight class-periods of lecturing is a habit I carefully observe. A creature of the campus, I take a sandwich or a bowl of hot soup in the dining commons where students and faculty members sit at table where they will. This makes the luncheoner privy, without intentional eavesdropping, to many simultaneous conversations during a forty-five minute leisurely repast, and it opens access to a fair sampling of student locutions. I exclude the male bull sessions that one might overhear. Again, one expects these to occur at a low cultural level with many sexual and scatological references. It is the women, among whom I used to think that hope might lie, who interest and disappoint me. The cell-phone talker in the second vignette has innumerable clones as far as her speech habits are concerned. While it no longer surprises me to hear the s-word or the f-word distort the tongue of a cosmetically noticeable twenty-year-old, the contradiction in it has not yet ceased to shock me. I estimate that seventy per cent of coeds casually employ excretory and fornicating vocabulary in their conversation. They use the s-word and f-word not merely now and then, by way of Jack Tar emphasis, but constantly, at least once or maybe even many times in every single sentence. No verbal gesture being devoid of some indexical function, even if semantically it were empty, constant female trash-talking must point to something.

It points to some obvious things. The feculence of commercially mediated so-called popular culture grows more immune to overestimation with the passing seconds. Sixteen years ago, MTV, the long-time mass-instructor of our wretched youth-culture, ceased devoting itself to music videos (the genre it had pioneered) and began devoting itself to the mendaciously named enterprise of reality programming, so-called. As pandering virtuosity, the template of all such entertainment, The Real World, showed cynical genius. Producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray recruited groups of kids in their early twenties to live together in a house while cameras filmed every aspect of their lives. The casting directors knew what they were looking for: a combination of libidinousness and resentment that would lead to tension and hostility among the cohabitants of the dwelling. They valued a capacity for resentment at least as much as they valued willingness to copulate on camera. The introductory voice-over put it this way: “This is the true story of seven strangers, picked to live in a house, work together, and have their lives taped—to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real… The Real World.” One element of mendacity is that no one who has never started being polite can stop being polite. The sound-track bleep, which covers up a normatively impolite utterance, but only barely, belonged as staple to the reality-programming formula from the beginning. The sound editors cleverly gestured in the direction of discretion while leaving the matter of vocabulary-related limitation entirely clear. The expletives signified to the audience (high school students), by a moronic but powerful code, that the college-age students on display in the half-hour episode had liberated themselves into an adult existence bravely beyond parental supervision. No one stood in danger of having his mouth washed out with soap.

The Real World never caused the vulgarization of coeds, although, of course, it has regularly reinforced a pervasive hard-meretricious comportment in young women. The importance of The Real World lies in its having so blatantly revealed a connection between the free usages of four-letter profanity, debased sexuality, and perfervid resentment. The producers clearly aim the show at high school girls and freshman coeds, who take behavioral hints from it. The Real World and its spin-offs merely crystallized a trend that already existed. Coarsened language proliferated in movies almost immediately after Hollywood’s abandonment of the vestigial production code in the mid-1960s. Faye Dunaway’s eponymous gun moll in Bonnie and Clyde (1968) swore only a little (some timid hell’s and damn’s) although she behaved like a whore; whereas the same actress’s “Diane Christensen” in Network (1976), an aggressive female TV news producer, had a ceaselessly peppery mouth, including the f-word. All the girls in The Real World, whether they have ever seen Network or not, take their model in Dunaway’s Christensen, played as a seething mass of executive resentment and inchoate ambition. The archetype has seeped into the culture, not as an apotropaic fright, but rather as a profitably imitable set of cues. The theme of resentment plays a role in Sweet Sixteen, too. One of the birthday girls blithely tells the camera, “I want my party to be bigger than anybody else’s so that all the kids will know how rich I am.” Fear of inferiority drives the display. Resentment enters the pattern by definition: if they so much as think their status is higher than mine, then my status is effectively diminished and theirs is increased. The girl resents the presumed self-evaluating higher status of others.

The girl inserting profanity into every sentence on her side of a peripatetic cell phone conversation—if “conversation” were the word—in my second vignette has descended as deeply into resentment as she has into profanity. She dresses in the severe “Lady Executive” style and thus imitates the Dunaway-Christensen archetype, whether she knows it or not. I recall to the reader the occasion of her ire: one of her instructors had evaluated her below her own estimation. The reactive antics of a female student enrolled in my “Western Heritage I” course in a recent semester equally well demonstrate the depth of resentment with which the feminism-inspired, MTV-vulgarized coed readily responds to the smallest perception of under-evaluation or “unfairness.” The course carries a high enrollment-cap of 140 students. During the semester under discussion, 135 students had enrolled in the course and even at the end of the semester, after some attrition, 117 students sat at the final examination. The campus logistics people assign the course to a big auditorium with so much seating capacity that, even with 140 students, there are scores of seats remaining. This creates a pedagogical problem that I have learned to address immediately when the semester begins. Many students try to be present in the lecture minimally by finding a place in the back and off to one side. I require students to shift their seats to create a compact audience up front. I use a mixture of mild coercion and non-corrupting bribery to draw students to the front rows, especially, pointing out that an empirical correlation exists between sitting up front and receiving a higher evaluation than the norm.

On one occasion, as class began, several seats remained open in the front row. I urged students to fill in these seats and a few complied. I had scheduled a quiz, which I then administered. I usually let the students score their own quizzes, but before collecting them, I said, “The students sitting in the front row may give themselves two additional points.” The justification was twofold: to reward those who had been willing to come forward and to create future competition for proximity to the lecturer.

At the next class-meeting a girl came down front while I was setting out my notes and otherwise preparing for the lecture to say that she wanted to talk to me about her quiz. In fact, she wanted to talk about the two extra points that I had given to the students seated up front. This lagniappe for the bold had obviously obsessed her since the last class meeting; she characterized it as “punishing all other students.” I explained to her that rewarding some after inviting people, as it turned out, to be rewarded, was not at all the same as punishing others; I reminded her that every time I took roll in class, once or twice a week, I gave a point to those present and none to those absent, and that this meant that by the middle of the semester she, who at least attended class consistently, had received far more than two “free points.” She would have none of it. She demanded that I add the two points to her score. I answered that I hadn’t the slightest inclination to do so, but that if she wanted to she should feel free to take her complaint to my department chair. My poor chair! She first sent him a 1,500-word email message filling in the details of her outrage, and then harangued him in his office for ninety minutes. As he is as sane as she was not, her ferocious self-advocacy made no more impression on him than it did on me—or rather it made the identical impression of a little ego-monster whose college career was likely to be one hyper-emotional crisis after another. He did get her to assent weakly to his characterization of my ploy as a “brilliant pedagogical maneuver.”

After that, she remained a morose presence four or five rows back from the front, never saying anything, and acquitting herself on quizzes with a C+ average. She took no more interest in the course material, in other words, than any other detached participant in the class. Neither to me nor to the chair did this girl use bad language, but I remain relatively certain that she used it about me to her friends, supposing she had any.

Many men in the class must have regretted, as acutely as the girl did, not coming down front at my behest. I know that a large number of men enrolled in the course resented having to fulfill the “general education requirement” in the humanities that “Western Heritage I” satisfies, and felt no particular fondness for me. It strikes me as a sign of the times that a coed rather than a male student took the initiative to act on her baseless feelings of humiliating punishment and deprivation. I cannot remember when last a truculent male student tried intimidating me over a justly deserved low grade or for any other reason. The same girl also complained that my reading-list for the course “didn’t have enough women writers on it,” adding a distinctly ideological cast to her dissatisfaction. I pointed out to her that in Classical letters there isn’t an abundance of female authors, but that my reading-list included Sappho of Mytilene and my syllabus indicated lectures on Diotima, the teacher of Socrates, and Lady Julia, the cultured wife of the emperor Septimus Severus. Indeed, my first day’s lecture devoted lengthy discussion to an image, recovered from a house at Pompeii, of a young Roman woman either reading a letter just received or writing one to a friend. This image has long enamored me. It represents an ideal of literacy for men and for women, mute though it is. I urge my students, all of them, to aspire to the condition of that long-dead girl. I ask them to read The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius, a Second Century Latin novel that roundly, if comically, condemns licentious behavior and makes a roundabout case for prudence in matters erotic and for purity of mind, as far as this is attainable for mere mortals. In my decade of teaching this novel, no female student has ever had the wits to draw a link between the pornographic milieu described by Apuleius and the engrossed sexual life that plays out on campus, signified in part by scores of young women who worry not at all about being overheard talking like an Apuleian puta.

A coed enrolled in my “Twentieth Century American Novel” class a few semesters ago exemplifies the indiscreet and shameless way that college females nowadays talk and what carelessly they say to people of mere casual acquaintance. I taught in a classroom next door to my office. Students usually congregated in the common area outside the classroom in the twenty minutes or so before class. One day I saw this particular coed, in conference with a friend, outside my office. She and her friend, also female, kept glancing at me. Finally they both came to my office and the student said to me, “I’ve been on the pill since I was sixteen and for the last six months I haven’t had my period.” I must have visibly flinched. I rallied myself sufficiently to inquire, “Why do I need to know this?” I should have said, “I don’t want to know this, so please reserve any further details.” The student then said, because I had inadvertently given her the opening: “My period just started. It’s really, really heavy.” The friend nodded. “It’s really heavy,” she amiably testified. The student said: “I hope you won’t mind if I skip class today. I think I need medical help.” I agreed, and hoped fervently that I would never see her again. Her unsolicited divulgences resembled the careless f--- you’s of the strolling cell-phone talker in that they indicated complete obliviousness of any distinction between personal and professional or private and public. If she had simply said to me, without explanation, that she felt ill and preferred not to come to class, I could not have taken exception.

She had told me in so many words, apparently imagining that I wanted to know, that she had been sexually active since high school, had been medicating herself with hormonal prophylaxis just as long, and had recently experienced an organic dysfunction of the most intimate sort. Later in the semester, she argued with me about a question of extra points on a quiz that would not even have altered her final grade had I yielded them to her. It fit the pattern.

Is the set of resentful, trash-talking or casually divulging coeds the same as the set of rutting girls, the ones who, far from criticizing male sexual grossness, have agreed to go along with it on the feminist-abetted assumption that whatever boys do girls can do just as well or even better? The two sets overlap, and the overlapping represents more than an accidental statistical convergence. The bad language, the cynical and aggressive attitudes, and the lack of spiritual interest: these things betoken the dominance of bodily function over intellectual aspiration within the realm of campus life. As the Greek mystics said, “Soma—sema,” “The body is our grave.” In an essay of some currency called “Dorm Brothel,” Vigen Guroian argues that the sexualization of youth-culture and the increasing coarseness of academic life have combined with an abandonment of the old in loco parentis principle to create a campus atmosphere especially inimical to young women. Guroian writes: “The lure and availability of sexual adventure that our colleges afford is teaching young women… to pursue sexual pleasures aggressively. Yet, based on my own conversations and observations, there is no doubt that young women today are far more vulnerable to sexual abuse and mistreatment by young men than when I was a college student, simply because the institutional arrangements that protected young women are gone and the new climate says everything goes.” Guroian follows up with this: “In the new culture that our colleges incubate and maintain, everyone is a ‘guy.’ Everyone is ‘familiar.’ Young men and women who have never seen anyone of the opposite sex naked or in underwear, other than family members, now must get used to being seen by and seeing others—perfect strangers—in just such a state. Everyone is available to everyone else. It would be antisocial not to be.” A USA Today story from December, 2007, seems to confirm Guroian’s assessment: “College students, including young women, are far more accepting of pornography than their parents, a shift that might be related to easy access to porn on the Internet, a study reports today.”

Guroian has described the morass of campus life accurately. Pursuing sex aggressively the girls certainly are, maybe more obsessively than the boys—now feminized and de-sexed—used to do. I doubt, however, based on the tone of female trash talk, that the phrase “pursuing sexual pleasures” quite adequately defines late adolescent women, for the emphasis in it falls on “pleasures.” Most of these girls are merely hustling and grubbing, for the status that they think “hooking up” endows on them and for grades better than the ones that they objectively deserve because here, too, they glimpse the dim Grail of badly defined status. Pace Guroian, a Christian gentleman of the old school and a friendly if casual acquaintance, women must acknowledge just as much responsibility for the moral-sexual collapse as do men. Where I teach, the administration is almost entirely female, from the president through the provost down to the dean. The student “Health Center” has not ceased handing out condoms or prescribing hormonal prophylaxis. The practice is this: the pharmacist gives the condoms to the girls so that they can give them to the boys. If the girls were truly victims, they would be massively complicit in their own victimization. Colleges abet and excuse the trollop-life, but the wider culture teaches it before young women arrive at college. They learn the lesson eagerly. They appear to me to be participating in the contemporary rush of the masses to the lowest levels of mentality and mien, seeing in orgasm one more entitlement.

Nevertheless Guroian does hit the nail squarely on the head when he observes—and it constitutes a genuine linguistic observation—that “everyone is a ‘guy.’” In restaurants, invariably the college-girl waitresses greet mixed parties not with “Ladies and Gentlemen” but rather with “Guys.” “Hi, my name is Tiffany. What will you guys be having for your beverage?” The word guy comes from the Italian Guido, used as a proper noun. Its provenance is theatrical. It designates a low-class male character in a farce. His antics trespass on decorum and so provoke the risible outrage of haughty supercilious self-over-inflating co-characters in the play. So they also produce audience-laughter at the haughty co-characters. A guy is a Bowery Boy, set loose from the proscenium; he is Huntz Hall, but he is Huntz Hall as a porno-film player, and nowadays a Guidezza goes with him, even dominating him in the action.

Around the year 100 A.D., Claudia Severa was probably thirty years old, living in the fortress town of Vindolanda near the northern march of Rome’s Britannic province. Claudia’s husband, Aelius Brocchus Severus, officered the watch over the Pictish lands beyond the frontier. The gentle-lady’s letter to her friend, Sulpicia Lepidina, is, as Chris Scarre writes in his Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Rome, “the earliest known writing in Latin by a woman.” “Claudia Severa to her Lepidina,” reads the letter, “greetings: I send you warm invitation to come to us of September 11^th, for my birthday celebrations, to make the day more enjoyable by your presence. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius greets you and your sons. I will expect you, sister. Farewell sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and greetings.” The manuscript, a mere torn fragment of a page, reveals a lovely, readable cursive hand. In the word “dearest,” which she addresses to Lepidina, Claudia uses the Greek kappa, making the spelling karissima. Perhaps as a girl she had a Greek tutor. Everything about this precious remnant, recovered from ruins adjacent to Hadrian’s Wall, suggests the possession both of grace and of a determination to uphold canons of civilized life in what must have amounted to harsh and trying conditions. September on the border likely brings clement weather, but the true autumn of October and November would see rain, cold winds, and perhaps even snow. London and Bath, the Britannic centers of Imperial life and therefore of civilization, lay distantly to the south; Rome, mentioned occasionally by letter-writers from the town, lay even more remotely. Aelius had served previously in Pannonia; it is unknown whether Claudia was with him then.

Not too long before Claudia Severa wrote the lovely missive inviting Lepidina to her birthday celebration, the parents of a young girl of Pompeii commissioned a portrait of their daughter to grace one of the many frescoed interior walls of their splendid house. Frescoes deteriorated rapidly in the humid climate and once every few years, householders needed to arrange the repainting of the interior décor. This implies that the artist painted the image not too long before the famous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., to the otherwise catastrophic results of which we owe the fortuitous preservation of the artifact. This is the image about which I lecture in “Western Heritage I” on the first day of class. My comments will gain meaning through acquaintance with the picture. Here it is…

This young Roman woman, whom I guess to be in her late teens, embodies the Platonic form of the cultivated girl. In the 1970s, the same portrait used to grace the cover of the black-spine Penguin edition of The Nature of Things by the Roman Epicurean poet Titus Carus Lucretius, no doubt because the young lady strikes even the casual viewer as modeling the “Love of Wisdom.” I bought the book when still in high school largely because of the image. The young woman gazes, as she contemplates words in her tablet, into the true “Nature of Things” in its substrate. Perhaps the moment catches her quietly considering a letter from a friend, or perhaps she is writing such a letter to one of her “sisters” in correspondence. Whatever the case, she might profitably have patented her femininity; she might even more profitably have patented her humanity, for these attributes imbue the graphic record of her with a benign and hopeful aura. The tip of the stylus pressed against the lower lip sets the tone and provides one of the central symbols of the Gestalt. The young woman is profoundly literate and she is, as her eyes tell us, a thinker. The link with Epicureanism, fostered by the old paperback, is not necessarily spurious. The Epicureans, who had a strong following in Pompeii and Naples, set great store on learning, as on the exercise of the mind; they also acknowledged the intellectual and spiritual equality of women with men. The young woman’s purple robe signifies the nobility of intellectual endeavor, for purple is the royal color par excellence in the ancient world.

Order and measure sign themselves forth from the image. Again, Epicureanism valued the careful arrangement of life and moderation in it, holding these desiderata in common with Platonism and Stoicism. The lower tip of the stylus, the ring on the young woman’s left hand, and the apex of her upper lip thus form an isosceles right triangle, symbol of geometry and of rationality as measure. The notion of measure reminds us also of Plato’s metretike ethike, or “calculus of morals.” For here is an individual who can begin to gauge her own mind and gauge the consequences of actions and omissions. The soul is deep, said Heraclitus; it is of subtle matter, said Epicurus. The young woman’s eyes, indices of her soul, give wide entry to the visible world. The fine brows emphasize the intelligent, almond-like shape of the eyes. The earrings avoid ostentation; they set off the straight-nosed face without calling attention to themselves. The coiffure shows the art of the hairdresser, but it betokens nothing vain; cut short, rather than Venus-like in long tresses, the dense curls suggest a chaste demeanor. The net of golden filigree appropriately crowns the head, in harmony with the purple vestment. A Victorian novelist might have invented a Bildungsroman around this image, interpreting its subject as a Stoic, a Platonist, an Epicurean, or even an early convert from one of these doctrines to Christianity, and plotting out a life for her with marriage, children, crises both of the family and the civitas, and finally of old age and death. Echoes of the young woman of Pompeii indeed turn up everywhere in Nineteenth Century fiction.

In William Dean Howells’ Rise of Silas Lapham, for example, the Laphams have named their daughters in a Classical spirit: Penelope, the older, and Irene, the younger. Howells contrasts the two considerably, endowing Penelope with wit and a largely self-acquired education, and making her, among other things, an inveterate reader. Irene has borrowed Middlemarch from the Athenaeum library but only Penelope has read it. Irene does not lack in virtue, but intellectual disposition plays no role in her personality: she misinterprets a meaningless act of young Tom Corey’s when he visits the site of father Silas’s new house, disastrously building up on her error a full romance concluding in nuptials. When the Nemesis of disillusionment comes for Irene, it comes hard. Tom, as it turns out, fancies Penelope, precisely for her intellectual qualities. Among contemporary actual college girls one meets only a few, a shrinking number, of Penelopes; of Irenes contrarily a full selection remains in offing. Many, lacking the context of a traditional Protestant (or any other) home life, have succumbed to the malaise of the ambient cultural toxicity. Parents no longer name their daughters after Greek wives or empresses or saints; they name them Tiffany and Brittany, often spelled Brittny, or some other analphabetic cuteness.

I sometimes ask the Brittanys whether they know the origin of their common name. It is the same origin as in the surname Bertonneau and it designates the Imperial province where Claudia Severa lived. A Penelope knows this, or is at least capable of appreciating it; an Irene knows it not and cares not about appreciating it. The “Veronica” of my third vignette hovers somewhere between Irene and Penelope, closer to the former than to the latter, but nearer the latter than most.

Veronica stands for herself but she also subsumes a few other coeds who have passed through my classroom over the last decade and a half. They share the trait of coming from religious backgrounds, in some cases merely vestigial and in others intact and robust. One, whom I knew while teaching in Michigan, came from a branch of the same movement that yielded Seventh Day Adventism, although this chapter of that phenomenon seemed to have shaken off the some of the fervent quirkiness of its self-isolating cousin and to have cleaved more closely to civilized life. But it did disdain television and it did insist that children behave in an orderly manner and show respect to elders. The absence of television found its healthy compensation in an abundance of thoroughly random books. In sum, this girl had avoided the taint of popular culture long enough to acquire some real culture. She exhibited the propensity, on hearing about something that promised interest, to go to the source and, when puzzled (as she once admitted being with respect to Charles Baudelaire) to seek tuition. At one point, she read a reference to Mozart’s Requiem, acquired a recording of it, and listened to it obsessively. As I earlier wrote, I had the chance to glean only a little of Veronica’s background. But because she has an Italian surname—Upstate New York boasts a large Italian presence—I assume some exposure, grandparental at least, to Catholicism. That she catches a few religious references in one or two of the essays that I have assigned for freshman composition bolsters me in the supposition.

I don’t care, really. That’s the pattern, for what it’s worth. Veronica fits the pattern in this way, too: that she convincingly claims not to be a watcher of television and does not join with the other students in the class in gushing forth with reminiscences when invited to respond to some television-reference. On the other hand, she carries the burden when I quiz students orally on the required reading, so much so that I must ask her to shift the onus to others because they have leaned on her too heavily.

Where the other students can produce only one and a half or two typed pages when the assignment calls for four, Veronica turns in five or six. Veronica has meaningfully researched a fourth and final essay, exploring the difference between cults and honest religion; it runs to seven or eight pages. Compared to what other students write—never mind confining it to the other coeds—Veronica’s essay stands out as rising toward the mature in its handling of adequately defined concepts. Other students turn in cliché-ridden prose on novel, startling theses such as smoking is bad, drinking and driving is a bad combination, and professional athletes shouldn’t use steroids. The language corresponds neither to grammar or syntax and exhibits misspellings galore; one sees in it no evidence of any interest on the part of the writers in the educational opportunity of gaining mastery over their prose. The writers have downloaded most of the “research” from un-vetted websites and have cut and pasted it onto the page, often in different font from the rest of the typescript. In better circumstances than those provided by the contemporary college campus, Veronica might catch a glimpse of her intellectual star and begin her struggle through discipline to reach it. It could still happen against the odds, but the mainsail of my faith flags rather than billows before the wind. To wend her way to her metaphysical goal of spiritual homecoming, the lady-Odysseus must navigate the contemporary campus-equivalent of Sirens, Cyclopes, Circes, and Scyllas. What are these?

There is the insipidity—or worse, the nihilism—of the fragmented curriculum now in place in our state colleges and universities. The potentially cultivated girl who arrives on campus at eighteen years of age fronts something less than a well delineated educational prospect. The freshman composition course, once an entré into humane studies, is entirely unreliable. The girl might luck her way into a section of the course captained by a genuinely literate and mature instructor, or she might find herself in one of the sections supervised by a graduate student tenuously in possession of a Master’s Degree who is not much more literate than she is. Worse yet, she might find herself in the Cyclops Cave of the Marxoid-multiculturalist or feminist composition instructor who proposes, not at all pedagogically, to reduce the conceptual range of vision of students to a hysterical binarism of devils and angels. It will have nothing to do with reading and writing, nothing to do with the human spirit, and everything to do with the inculcation of “right attitudes.” Once beyond freshman composition, the student is ten-fold more likely to be stuck under the semester-long supervision of the Manichaean specialist in this or that field of doctrinaire resentment. What used to be called breadth requirements in actual humanities and sciences nowadays consist largely in a shotgun blast of indoctrination by the usual liberators and consciousness-raisers with chips on their shoulders. No college student, male or female, nowadays escapes The Vagina Monologues.

There is also the spiritual bane of Guroian’s “Dorm Brothel,” and beyond it the even deadlier bane of the Culture Brothel of manipulative mass-entertainments and perverse behavioral (non-) expectations. Quite apart from the pornography of contemporary cinematic diversions, consider the proliferating sado-masochism of the movies. A notably successful series of films carries the general name of Saw. The original Saw appeared in 2004, and the producers have already sent Saw IV into the cineplexes. Here is the Amazon.com product-description of this movie in its DVD incarnation: “Saw dives right into the depths of the madness… opening with our killer’s current victims, two men chained on opposite ends of a filthy restroom, a body in the center clutching a cassette player and a handgun. Each man is given a tape to play, which provides him with a nice dilemma to ponder during his captivity. The background of the killer and the events leading up to the men’s current situation unfolds nicely during narrated recollections and well-placed flashbacks, while the actual motive stays hidden underneath the obvious delight the killer derives from the simple pleasures of torture.”

Ah, filthy restrooms and the simple pleasures of torture… I know about Saw because a coed once enthused to me about it. It would hardly have surprised me to hear fulsome praise of what amounts to a snuff film from one of my culturally deprived male students. When I ask students what films they have seen in the past semester, Saw or its equivalent usually figures in the response, with female students praising items like Hostel or Turistas, which feature the kidnapping and torture of college students on vacation. What else? The college town where I live and teach supports a thriving tattoo industry. The local yellow pages list seven tattoo parlors within walking distance of campus. In the same town, the number of public houses per capita is a long-standing cause of civic shame. Two years ago a popular mayor lost his job and went to jail for arranging an assignation with two underage girls. But why go on? The familiarity of our vices obviates any need for repetition.

Critics will accuse me of being a middle-aged gray-haired English professor suffering from acute reminiscences of lost love and a Pygmalion complex. I deny the accusation: that is to say, while I am 53, gray-haired, and an English professor (for whatever that’s worth), I am not suffering from a bout of misplaced sentimentality. I see in no coed any Eliza Doolittle. The destruction of femininity—an immense cultural achievement—and the functional illiteracy of the female college graduate are the final nails in the coffin of social decency because women, as mothers and wives, have traditionally fulfilled the central civilizing function in the community.

Maybe the thong-wearing, trash-talking, tattooed, unlettered, resentful, bed-hopping, cell-phone-addicted twenty-year-old will miraculously transform herself into a paragon of nurturing graciousness, but I have always felt skeptical about miracles. She will more likely become one of millions of embittered divorcees propelled to middle-level management by affirmative action wondering in a fog of confusion why her life now seems empty. Seems? “Madam, I know not seems.” The life will truly be empty, for nothing substantial will ever have nourished its inner formation. The men in the singles bars that she frequents will exist at an even lower level of refinement and awareness than she does; they will revolt her, but she will be unable to articulate the reason for it. She will content herself with half-remembered formulas of resentment from her “Women’s Studies” course, but those will never assuage her suspicion of total vanity. Resentment and vanity are one and the same. For what it is worth, my wife gives expression to an even deeper pessimism than my own. She would probably, had she written this essay, have used stronger terms than mine in many cases. Have I really reserved my pen? Yes. I suffer from an ingrained reluctance to say diminishing things about women, but on the principle of candor I have nevertheless striven to say what I see.

Dr. Thomas Bertonneau is Secretary of The Center for Literate Values and a steady contributor to Praesidium. He teaches English at SUNY-Oswego.

Literacy’s Mystic Moon: The Flow and Ebb of the Sublime Through the English Classics

John R. Harris

I had not taught the undergraduate Survey of English Literature (From Beginnings to the Romantics) for several years when asked to do so in the spring of 2008—an unexpected request which left me little time for planning. Insofar as one may still call any syllabus “standard” in these post-canonical times, I drew up the standard plan of attack. Yet I have never favored the presentation of survey material as a series of stops on a whirlwind historical tour. A comparatist by temperament (I almost wrote “by training”—but a doctrinal program in Comparative Literature trained me only in insipid, reductive methods of politicizing), I prefer to seek themes and styles that knit together large chunks of time. The specifics of an author’s devotion to this duke or that pretender should be passed along to the historian’s plate. (Not the least irony of our pedagogical “revolution” in literary studies—the same one that dissolved the classical canon—is that avant-garde professors now lean upon minute historical cross-indexing of texts and events at least as heavily as their counterparts did in the “dark years” of the New Criticism. Is this because our generation of radicals wishes to keep close tabs on the rise of Woman, or because the once-oppressed, now capped-and-gowned refugee from Middle Class tedium savors her superiority most when juggling obscure names and dates?)

At any rate, I confess to having been rather “blindsided” by a phenomenon in English literature whose presence I had not recalled as so early and influential, and at which nothing in all the capsulated introductions of our anthology ever hinted: the sublime. Here I must tread carefully, for this word has been much strained during its irregular periods of popularity in literary discussion, as only befits a designation for an indefinable effect. The shadowy Greek scribbler Longinus (third century AD) is supposed to have written a treatise titled Peri Hypsous, most of which is dedicated to praising Homer. No Aristotle by any stretch, Longinus—or whoever the piece’s real author may be—tenders few benchmarks or limits for identifying hypsos (from hyper, “over, above”). Thereafter, we find little sustained and useful analysis of the term until the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when virtually every philosopher worthy of the name authors a tract on the subject. Burke, Kant, and Schiller appear with distinction on this list.

Though the declared occasion for this study is English literature, I recommend Kant’s Critique of Judgment as a means of clarifying the sublime’s misty, hazy matter. (In any case, Coleridge would eventually import many of Kant’s ideas to the land of the Britons.) We must distinguish at once between the sublime and the beautiful. Beauty, in this tradition (and it is really nothing less than the Aristotelian tradition), elicits pleasure in the mind by presenting an object easily apprehensible in its extent—its objective wholeness—but complexly constructed, and so requiring minute exploration to appreciate. The objet d’art is not exactly an abstract arabesque, for its internal complexity must give a sense of destination rather than of idle meandering (“purposiveness without a purpose,” in that elegant Kantian phrase which also absolves the object from practical usefulness). The sublime, on the other hand, exceeds all attempts to capture it within a frame. It is immeasurable; or, at any rate, it leaves the mind, struggling after apprehension, in no doubt that any emerging sense of wholeness is an imaginary product rather than a completed empirical assessment. The mind is not put through its paces (so to speak) in a leisurely dressage, as with the beautiful, but rather made powerfully aware that it can divine a reality inaccessible to the body—that a possible realm of the soul exists.[1]

We need not linger over Kant’s distinction between the “mathematical” and the “dynamic” sublime. The former involves the merely dizzying effort (frustratingly futile as a material calculation) to measure huge phenomena such as great mountain ranges. The later energizes such immensity with the presence of vast mobile forces—say, a cataract spilling down from a high peak or a crackling thunderhead scraping through a craggy pass. The key in both cases is the inadequacy of any mentally conceived limit. The sublime shatters all confinement, forcing the neck to crane and allowing minutes or hours to tick away unnoticed. Yet as awe-inspiring as the objective phenomenon clearly is in such instances, Kant stresses the constructive role played by the sweeping gaze and the ignored pocket chronometer: the feeling called forth by the scene does not, after all, belong to rugged terrain or to high seas, but to the human perceiver.

One can see… that the true source of sublimity is to be sought only in the observer’s frame of mind, not in the natural object whose evaluation stimulates this feeling toward it. Otherwise, who would label as sublime even an immense mass of mountains towering above each other in a wild disorder of ice caps, or a darkly raging sea, and so forth? For the mind senses itself uplifted into its own contemplation when, in treating such objects without reference to their form, it employs the imagination to pursue a subjective idea with no definite end, whose ever-widening rational base exceeds the power of every image.[2]

What attracts me most to Kant’s treatment of the sublime is how well he explains the sentiment involved without waxing sentimental. To the sublime phenomenon’s enormity, he links both the perceiver’s initial bouleversement and a subsequent swelling of the breast; and of this second state, he remarks both the exhilarating emotional content and the grandly speculative intellectual turn. As a metaphysician, he seems particularly interested in the latter state’s climactic trumping of the former; for the momentous shift of perspective scores a triumph of the perceiver’s internal being, caught up in dizzying calculation and inspiring metaphor, over his external being, quailing under a giant’s shadow.

Kant’s disciple Friedrich Schiller, being more dramatist than philosopher, did indeed write of the sublime experience with greater poignancy but without careless effusion. The playwright emphasizes the moral victory of a properly educated free will over the somewhat constrictive and artificial circumstances of human society. The court, the market, and the boulevard are indeed not scenes of the slightest interest in Schiller’s essay. His model for the sublimely inspired observer is the hiker who gazes upon “

Scotland

’s wild cataracts and cloud-covered summits” rather than the pampered idler admiring “the soulless order of a French garden”. In his view, a developing mind deprived of natural vistas would most likely remain a “mere slave to physical necessity”, since “neither in our concepts nor in our sensations would we go beyond” the world of the clearly perceptible. Abstractions such as the all-good origin and terminus of moral law—such as, let us even concede, the benign spirit infusing those beautiful objects so abundant in civilized urban settings—would scarcely occur to us if we were always city-bound; for sublimity imports taste to beauty, inasmuch as “what the imagination cannot represent would have no reality for us.” Beauty needs idealism: nature, paradoxically, liberates us from the tyranny of the senses. “The prospect of unlimited distances and invisible heights, of the wide ocean spread at one’s feet and the broader ocean beyond it,” speaks to the soul by surpassing the perceptible.[3] Noble hearts, the crown jewels of human culture, are nurtured by enlightened moral teaching but not inspired by studied artifice.

It may be said that Schiller supplements Kant’s greatest weakness: a dryness of style. Yet the former’s celebration of sublime nature (already implicit in Kant’s usually clinical prose) is perhaps both too little and too much. Schiller certainly shares with other Romantics the conviction that nature may be more civilizing than culture, and his embrace of wild wastes is common to his time; but I find that it also shoulders away many similar experiences available to the reflective urbanite, such as the vastness of time, the incalculable ripple-effects of human action, and the irresistible decline of great cultures into moral ruin. Such imaginative landscapes, to be sure, do not suggest the word “exhilarating”. Nevertheless, they possess the power to wrench the contemplative mind from its tiny niche in time and space and to transport it like Scipio’s dream to the highest balconies of the empyrean.

Edmund Burke’s On the Sublime and the Beautiful preceded both German treatises, and was very likely the source (through Lessing’s translation) of the Kantian definition’s stress on the proximity of physical danger in the sublime. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite ideas of pain,” Burke writes in beginning Section 7 (Part 1) of his essay, “that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.” Beyond this point, however, Burke’s theory take a turn away from what will become the Kantian view to embrace ideas that, if not vile in themselves, require an estimate of human nature as such. For the perceiver’s safety from immediate danger is in itself the source of the sublime feeling to Burke, as when one witnesses a public execution without oneself kneeling before the block. Like La Rochefoucauld, Burke believes that there is something in the pain even of our best friends that doesn’t entirely displease us. We sense a relaxation of tension, he argues, once we apprehend that the axe is falling upon another’s neck—a response which he characterizes as the natural reflex of self-preservation rather than as envy’s sordid product.

The passions which belong to self-preservation turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful [delight being Burke’s term for a relaxation of distress] when we have an idea of pain and danger, without actually being in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime.

Obviously, few experiences could be farther from that moral victory of the will over carnal timidity which Kant and Schiller saw in the sublime. One may be tempted to glimpse misanthropy, if not irony, in this extremely low estimate of a thrilling sentiment. The essay’s second part, indeed, is a catalogue of stimuli—terror, sensory deprivation, encumbered intellect—tending to elicit ignorant, foolish, or brutish responses, “the mind… [being] so entirely filled with its [sublime] object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it” (Part 2, Section 1). Not surprisingly, Burke often adduces exemplary experiences from rudimentary cultures, childhood, and the illiterate classes. Yet his comments bear no trace of a sneer: they appear quite in earnest.

Such deprecation of the sentiment, let us admit, logically jibes with the Lockean tradition of referring all categories of human thought and feeling to the senses. The sublime, in the hands of an empiricist, looks very like the relief of a natural coward when he realizes that a falling rock will strike his neighbor’s head rather than his own, or like the mute awe of a safely concealed savage when a strange light flickers in the night. The definition is deeply disappointing; but its very poverty as a definition, I will argue, is an additional clue about what was taking place in English intellectual life that caused an explosion of interest in the sublime.

Let the foregoing, then, suffice as a definition of the mind’s exhilarating failure to define: let us call this experience sublime. I wish to proceed from here by advancing two significant observations. One is that phenomena, both literary and natural, capable of stirring sublime sentiments are all around us—and the natural variety, at least, has always been so. Yet we human observers have not always been capable of registering a state of mind which qualifies as the sublime sentiment: that is my second proposition (in patent disagreement with Mr. Burke’s theory). The two generate a certain amount of friction, for we are surely not used to aesthetic responses which do not move stride-for-stride with the creative techniques and general tastes necessary to support them. Sonnets are best appreciated by the musical, psychological novels by the reclusive. A shepherd who has never heard anything but reed pipes will not understand a symphony. The abstract art of the twentieth century may have motivated a “reappraisal” of Neolithic cave paintings, Polynesian totems, and other such primitive artifacts as cannot objectively justify the praise of our progressive culture—whose intent was not primarily (or even, perhaps, secondarily) aesthetic, and whose form was determined by limitations in tool and medium rather than the artist’s judgment. The sublime partakes of a similar ambiguity. Much oral-traditional narrative seems to us awe-filled, numinous, mystical, and otherwise beyond the measure of the clear and distinct. Yet to conclude that a live performer working from memory deliberately aimed at the effect—even if he was Homer, whose sophistication far exceeds the strictly oral performer’s—is presumptuous.[4] Traditional narrative is typically starved for words and forced to generalize the specific: a galley of forty oars working against an offshore tide becomes a dark ship on the whispering sea. In the same way, Nature did not intend to make the Grand Canyon an incomparable image of all that cannot be circumscribed—a crystallization of the soul’s indefinite horizons and shifting mists. To a greater or lesser extent, the perceiver creates the aesthetic effect in these pre-print cases of sublimity.

And that perceiver, to vex the issue yet further, necessarily possesses a literate mind, if not de rigueur one molded by the printing press. Students may hear such an assertion with dismay, divining an odor of “cultural imperialism” within it. If they can marvel at the dismal swamplands of Beowulf (runs the protest), then why not suppose both that the text’s first raconteurs intended to evoke a sublime mystery and that the original audience was captivated by that mystery? Further hair-splitting is needed. To begin with, I will not insist flatly that our anthology’s translator rendered Beowulf’s text with a tantalizing articulateness not in the original: my competence as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon is too shaky for that. Yet I am fairly confident that such is the case, as it seems to be invariably with English versions of Homer: translators refine descriptions and avoid artless repetitions when they work with traditional tales. The temptation to do so is all but irresistible. Now, this doesn’t mean that the tale in pristine form was not a sublime document. On the contrary, precision spells death to sublimity. The sublime phenomenon has the plasticity of a great cloud, suggesting at once stone castles and snowy mountains and sandy beaches to the imaginative beholder. Too high a power of resolution in showing the stone, the snow, or the sand, while no doubt creating something more on the order of a beautiful landscape, would stifle the border-disdaining restlessness of the experience. The oral style of representation, of course, is nothing if not vague. Nevertheless, the most literal translation I have ever seen of Beowulf does not abstain from tweaking mysterious elements of description to produce a faintly more enticing mystery. When the words, “Dâ côm of môre under mist-hleoΦum / Grendel gongan…” become, “Then up from the marsh, under misty cliffs, Grendel came walking,” the tampering seems infinitesimal—almost. But not quite. The emphasis of motion de profundis which “up from” bestows upon of is not negligible, and “came walking” implies a more sinister plop-plop-plop of heavy feet more than does gongan.[5]

To argue that, in any case, the oral-style composer (meaning the proto-literate that we find in Homer) could not not narrate in these grandiose terms, even if he wanted to, and that therefore he cannot take credit for a sublime composition, would be overly fine. Let us concede, rather, that the oral world was saturated in the numinous—that the unlettered tribesman was surrounded by rocks and streams and trees the least of which could emit a spiritual glow in an instant. This is the obvious truth of such cultures: the familiarity of repeated encounters, rather than rendering things bland and dull, turns them holy. “Reality,” writes Mircea Eliade of the “primitive” mind, “is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is ‘meaningless’.”[6] Herein we glimpse the vital importance of the past to oral thinking. That which is to form a part of culture—of worship, of tribal government, of eating and dressing habits, of behavioral codes—must be repeated and memorized (even reenacted, when possible), for otherwise it will surely be lost. For this reason, and specifically this reason, the tribesman cannot experience the true sublime. His encounters with the numinous, far from drawing him away from customs, limits, and preconceptions, point him back into the niche which the gods have made for him. If a cloud were to catch fire and an angel to descend from it—a Homeric Hermes, say, with winged sandals—our bard would fall to his knees, drop his eyes, grasp some apotropaic talisman, and flee to his chieftain with the “news” once released by the golden beams. He would retain nothing particularly personal about the incident; for to the extent that he had done so—that he had kept quiet about this or that detail—he would have denied its occurrence. To refuse it admittance into the collective memory would be to expunge it from his own memory, which is precisely an imprint of his tribe’s.

The element of individualism is missing, in short. Beowulf’s audience would have been awed and thrilled before the storyteller’s images of the primal swamp, yes—and similarly would the Iliad’s first audiences have marveled at Poseidon’s magnificent transit from a Thracian mountaintop to the ocean bottom as Book 13 begins (a favorite passage of Longinus’s). The Ionian Greeks, it appears, had already rejected the gloom of their continental cousins’ otherworldly encounters (even the Odyssey insists on identifying the entrance to Hades with all those frightful, barbaric things far north[7]); but any narrative written in the oral style has a certain orderliness at that very interface between tribal stricture and the unspeakable where we literates would expect to see mystical effusion. Beowulf thinks of his honor—i.e., the reputation he will enjoy before others—and the celebration of his remembered glory as he confronts the chaos beyond culture’s pale. Poseidon’s katabasis into the sea is referenced to sacred spots throughout Ionia—and Odysseus’s visit to Hades is rigidly enclosed in ritual formalities. Even as that most daring of adventurers clings to a fig tree above Charybdis, so does any product of tribal culture cling to his customs more tightly than ever when the familiar world’s surface caves in.

The original audience of Beowulf, then (and nothing is harder than this for undergraduates to understand), would not have shuddered delightfully before the murky abyss where Grendel’s mother dwells while recalling a private dream or a unique vacationing spot or tailoring, perhaps, a metaphor for virtuous struggle or a symbol for lubricious depravity. Members of that audience, rather, would have thanked their gods for their stable customs. Longinus himself, I suspect, could not define the sublime experience with anything approaching the power we find in eighteenth-century philosophers because he yet lacked those lonely inner depths—that acute literate sense of the gap between self and other, between personal longing and community expectation—which is necessary to inspire a very intimate meditation. I do not believe, by the way, that such a sense was underdeveloped in all the ancients. The lines penned by Virgil, for instance, to describe the African harbor where the battered Trojan fleets finds refuge echo both in imagery and in sound from end to end, grandly refusing to pinpoint or delineate:

The most obvious phonetic effect is the studied interplay of dactyls and spondees, the former stitched together in fluid strings to indicate waves in motion (e.g., 161, where spondees intervene only in mid-line with a splash of sibilants), the latter stacked side by side to suggest majestically rising cliffs (e.g., 162, where the almost mandatory fifth-foot dactyl is the only one to be found). The images are equally restless, pulling the eye into a cavernous recess, wrenching it up to the zenith, casting it from a craggy pinnacle back into the watery depths, then confusing it in dense forest shadows. One can scarcely believe that the author of these lines did not know the very modern sensation of standing rapt before a sweeping natural panorama for long minutes as the soul’s most cryptic spaces open. For that matter, the anguishing theme of Virgil’s great poem is precisely the continuous corruption of inner peace suffered by a devoted servant of the community.

So when would English culture have been capable of such a response, either to natural majesty or to a literary representation thereof? When would the tribal mentality of the oral or oral-with-scrawled-notes storyteller have yielded to a more literate sense of independence from the group, with its accompanying loneliness and uncertainty?

I began this ramble by springing from the convenient board of a sophomore survey, so I shall (with apologies to more rigorous minds) return thereto for my bearings. We considered in my class the possibility that the scene of utter devastation near the end of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur partakes of the sublime. Certainly it hints at a vista of immeasurable ruin:

“Now go thou, Sir Lucan,” said the king, “and do me to wit what betokens that noise.”

So Sir Lucan departed, for he was grievously wounded in many places. And so as he yede, he saw and hearkened by the moonlight, how that pillers and robbers were comen into the field, to pill and to rob many a full noble knight of brooches, and beads, and of many a good ring, and of many a rich jewel; and who that were not dead all out, there they slew them for their harness and their riches. When Sir Lucan understood this work, he came to the king as soon as he might, and told him all what he had heard and seen.

Our verdict was that this passage cannot strictly fulfill the terms of sublimity—yet it extends the working definition proposed above in two directions: the historical and the moral. What we perceive through Sir Lucan’s eyes is the palpable end of the heroic age; so it is human history here, and not an ice floe or a windswept steppe, which provides the prospect of a stunning immensity. So much providential nurturing, so much painful cultivation, so much arduous self-sacrifice went into giving the world the cream of chivalry… and now the last drop has been spilt irrecoverably. As if the distance separating modernity from Eden were not incalculable enough (for the Heroic Age’s loss is indeed a second Fall), the rupture is emphasized in a most ghastly manner by degenerate bipedal vultures scavenging the battleground. Time’s precious bequest dropped and shattered, the humans of tomorrow busy themselves gorging on pieces of glistering rubbish, smothering the last embers of nobler beings wherever they yet glow feebly. The physical panorama of the killing field itself is only implied, and for this reason I say that Malory has not quite succeeded in creating a sublime landscape. He is unquestionably aware, however, that civilizations can incur loss beyond reckon, both in terms of the number of ascendant generations nullified and the amount of new depravity unleashed. The prospect is scarcely exhilarating in a Kantian fashion, yet it calls forth the soul no less, I think, to measure an abyss.

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus may be labeled sublime, and also judged marginally so, for the same reasons. The good doctor has squandered an inestimable wealth of talent and learning by the end of his misspent life. Instead of doing his accounts, though, as his final minutes tick away, he loses his soul (quite literally, as it turns out) in the great gulf of history. Surely the playwright’s single most famous line, “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” poses a reflection wherein Helen’s glories are very nearly upstaged by Homeric silhouettes and echoes that whirl around the lady like the heroic shades who come to drink of Odysseus’s sacrifice. So vast is history—and so legion the ripples set into motion by a rare individual’s impact—that the intelligence reels in trying to sustain the meditation. Like Malory, Marlowe has not quite presented us with a sublime scene, a pretext for the sublime experience. Where the former’s landscape remains too implicit, the latter’s exquisite ghost remains too much an object of Faustus’s eye rather than the audience’s. What we seem to have here, instead, are two figures (Sir Lucan and Faustus) whom we observe registering the sublime rather than the ineffable, magnificent presence itself in crudely objective form. Yet in both cases, the state of being awestruck by an immense truth is plainly presented (more plainly in Doctor Faustus, to be sure) as lifting the individual from a sense of urgency, of temporal participation. Such elevation, in Faustus’s case, might even have proved salutary if accompanied by a Boethian overview of the flux of human affairs, the vanity of human passions, etc. That is, the Doctor’s interlude with Helen’s image is really less lustful indulgence than transcendent fascination, his evasion of impending judgment less denial of the soul’s eternity than deprecation of the body’s anxieties. Goethe would plumb these redemptive ironies to their heart.

In King Lear, sublimity at last finds form in magnificent words. The second scene of Act III is surely among the earliest examples of the “objective sublime” in English literature, though Edmund Burke chose to ignore it in his treatise. Burke emphasized that the sublime experience must involve circumstances physically menacing to someone, but from whose reach the perceiver recognizes himself safely removed. Lear does not appear to satisfy this primary criterion. The storm which rages over his head might hurl a thunderbolt upon him at any instant.

One could argue that the old man, though fully aware of his danger (indeed, he asks to be struck down), does not perceive it as a danger, and thus is free to contemplate the vastness of human history and the depths of the human heart in a meditative (if highly indignant) fashion. Hence his apparent lunacy: in ecstatically calling down retribution from the heavens, he sets his personal share of the punishment at naught. Far from disqualifying the scene as sublime, I would contend, Lear’s “madness” elevates it to a unique height; for the perceiver is not, in fact, remotely frightened though the circumstances elicit fear—his thrilled spirit has so disdained his corporal limits that he can contemplate his own bodily annihilation in what must be the calmest words of the speech! The fury stirred in him by the sweeping panorama of human fraud and hypocrisy so electrifies his moral longing for justice that instinctive self-preservation, essential to Burke’s theory, has been silenced with a contemptuous dismissal. That the vista of mankind’s sin should suddenly open so broadly before the old man is perhaps as sure a sign of his “imbalance” as the careless strutting beneath the thunderbolts, for the ingratitude of Goneril and Regan seems narrow ground for condemning the whole species. Again, however, the only fact relevant to the experience’s sublimity is that Lear has truly awakened to the dark side of mankind. Though his journey to this precipice appears to have been made in lunges and lurches, the view at his feet is now enormous.

In another outburst that follows shortly after, the uncrowned old king’s words indicate that, despite the naiveté responsible for his present plight, he has taken the full measure of human depravity at some point during his long life. The real mystery, then, may be that so jaundiced an observer could have trusted his conniving daughters so gullibly.

Shakespeare may not endorse this virulent misanthropy: it appears somewhat excessive within the context of the play’s own instances of redemption where one would least have ventured a hope. Yet neither is Lear’s string of prophetic denunciations mad. It lacks mercy, it passes over rare exceptions, it perhaps underestimates the speaker’s own folly in allowing evil to prosper… but as a vast insight, it resonates with all the wretchedness of the human condition. Good people merely fight off hypocrisy—and merely for the moment: they do not slay it. The best of them are not always good. It is perhaps the very imminence of violent death which permits Lear to look upon this appalling truth. Anything short of casting his own life aside scornfully would have left him in the compromising state of one who still has a stake in things, who still plots, who still hopes.

Such serenity on the scaffold is not only the antithesis of Burke’s sublime moment; it implies a kind of ecstasy very nearly the opposite of Burke’s “delight” in realizing oneself just beyond the reach of a grave danger. Lear denies that he has sinned greatly, but not that he has sinned. He therefore resigns himself—cheerfully, one might almost say—to the same wrath as he calls down upon his fellows. Likewise, whatever sublimity we may read into Sir Lucan’s awed study of the dismal battlefield must argue for his own awareness of being caught up in an epochal shift which renders his person infinitesimal. He is certainly not exulting that he yet lives when so many have died. (In fact, he will soon perish of his wounds.) His mind, rather, is preoccupied by an immensity which dwarfs his personal concerns. So for Faustus: like Lear, he is in mortal danger—or in immortal danger, unlike Lear—but escapes fear through a vision. The escape is not morally fertile in the way that Lear’s turns out to be; for the old king awakens to a new level of social consciousness soon after his “quarrel” with the lightening forks, when he enters the peasant’s hovel, while Faustus is distracted from a still more sublime vision than that of the human past and the determinism within human events. All the same, a case may be made—a perverse case, to be sure—for the spirit’s triumph over the body when contemplation of history can temporarily dull the tortures of Hell.

Shakespeare’s Lear confronts the sublime in a natural setting, as Kant (who was no littérateur) seemed to think only reasonable and as Schiller (a brilliant playwright) determined to be mandatory. As we approach an era of more neoclassical taste, I believe we find a steady rise in the association of the natural with the sublime which will continue for two centuries—this despite the fabled rift between classicists and romantics insistently promoted by hard-headed theorists. My survey class did not include Romanticism, as I have said. Yet I recalled that Shelley employs the technique of mixing metaphors in order to evoke a kind of sensory overload which he associates with sublime bedazzlement, as here:

This is dense going. The rainbow merges smoothly enough into a veil—which, however, is rather improbably hiding an unsculpted “image” (as in “idol”) like a robe… and then sleep “wraps” with still another veil, this of eternity… after which the cataract’s roar wanders between animism (“no other sound can tame”) and a highly abstract “path”. Scrambling imagery, it seems to me, must be done with the utmost care. Whether or not I am being fair to Shelley, however, I will do him the justice of observing that Crashaw gives precedent for the risky strategy. The nightingale’s song portrayed in the mid-seventeenth-century Delights of the Muses is just such a jumble of alternative images:

I shall not even attempt to tease out every hint of a comparison, from staggering to hovering to wavering to slipping to thundering… sobbing, panting, bubbling… no doubt, there is much of such undisciplined, groping admiration in the likenesses which one fancifully offers up to a magnificent blue-gray cloudbank. Again, that the reader may not be attracted to this “overloading” technique is presently irrelevant. The point is simply that the experience of sensory confusion had come to hold much interest for poets well before the romantics, and that such triumph of the irrational was tied early on to nature.[8] Even neoclassicism conceded that the Dionysian might rival the Apollonian (though the poor nightingale in Crashaw’s piece is bested by an artful human lutist). Creators seemed more and more to be both aware that their artistry could not describe a part of what they were living and convinced that this indescribable part had an urgent importance.

Milton, too, had an eye both for nature and for the sublime. What is curious about his blending of the two (and this is the real difference between neoclassicism and romanticism on the subject) is that nature herself is beautiful: natural aberration is sublime. The Eden of Paradise Lost poses limits, though not through human artifice. Out of God’s hand, nature has observed pattern and speciation; creatures live in and understand hierarchy; vegetation grows in harmonious alternation and collaboration, not in a survival-of-the-fittest rivalry for sunlight. Adam is part of this well-framed, well-plotted landscape—the central part—as long as he obeys natural authority. The lonely hiker surveying endless wastes turns out to be Satan, and the sublime panorama at his feet is Hell.

Burke lauds the descriptions of Book 1 for how little they in fact describe—for their grand obscurity, their provocative hints at immense extension. (He evinces a fine taste in literary effects, whatever the shortcomings of his theory.) I might add that, in this passage and elsewhere, Milton also displays a Virgilian gift for inflating images with sonorous redundancy (and of the Aeneid, too, Burke demonstrates a keen awareness of grand effect). The fuming steppes of Hell are unquestionably a scintillant example of literary sublimity. Satan, furthermore, inhales from his dire surroundings the sort of volitional energy which allows him to triumph over his humiliating corporal defeat, though his body is a giant’s. He draws the sort of inspiration which Schiller would have anticipated:

Brave words… but damned words—words sprung from a will invigorated to rebel, to assert itself above the natural order of things. To Milton, sublimity is anti-Edenic, a disruptive force stirred by misperception and inadequate reflection (recall Burke’s treatise) which pathologically magnifies the blundering fool’s assessment of his inner resources. For that matter, Crashaw’s nightingale committed a naïve miscalculation (if we may imagine the creature capable of any calculation at all) in challenging the lutist, who had polished his art with long apprenticeship—i.e., a subordination of personal will. (I should note that the human performance is not described with such a mixing of metaphors!) So for Milton’s “Allegro” and “Penseroso”: the former may seem less deep and intriguing to us today, but the latter indexes his ghost-like restlessness to experiences like Catholic monasticism which were certainly anathema to the poem’s author. Wandering about in the dark alone is unwholesome. It is sublime and unwholesome. Neoclassicists were not by any means impervious to its attractions, but they regarded these attractions as dangerous seductions. Marlowe, by the way, would apparently have agreed.

Throughout most of the eighteenth century, nature is paradoxically the artist’s model rather than a heap of imperfections in need of his refinements. The view prevailed that poetic craft consisted of astute adjustments producing subtle correspondences and contrasts, just as nature when functioning healthily would integrate incredible finesse into her seemingly ungoverned profusion. The artifice both of art and of nature was heavily emphasized. That incomparably level head, Dr. Johnson, has his poet-guide Imlac portray the artist’s calling as one of close observation and instructive generalization. The poet “is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features as recall the original to every mind, and must neglect the minuter discriminations” (Rasselas, Chapter 10). The undertaking sounds very like empirical science; for “nature”, as Imlac invokes it, is essentially “laws and rules”, and her study yields efficient, predictive types strained from masses of chaotic-seeming data. Whether animal or vegetable, nature is susceptible to and revealed by measurement, classification, and analysis. Her fiber and sinew are the Creator’s artifice, and raw sense impressions unmediated by reflection simply obscure them.

Hence poets do not—or should not—write about thunderstorms and shadowy abysms. Naïfs like Imlac’s protégé Rasselas only end up ruining their lives by longing beyond the clear-and-distinct. In this observation, of course, we draw very close to the romantic point of departure. Goethe’s Werther would not have denied that his excessively broad moral vistas (constructed of ruined antiquities and social inequities as well as Ossianic landscapes) imposed a paralysis upon his life; neither would his literary first-cousins, Chateaubriand’s René or Foscolo’s Iacopo Ortis. Yet the creators of these romantic protagonists have clearly initiated a shift of blame from the dreamer to society. Why does one invite Horatio’s warning to Hamlet, “’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so,” when one peers far into life’s meaning? Why is individual choice to be discouraged when it strays from conventional paths? Why must we shut down our minds when they threaten beauty’s pleasures by finding accepted limits to be obtuse or fraudulent?

Expressed this way, the sublime response is the more intellectual one—not Burke’s vulgar, half-seeing, misconstruing superstition, but Kant’s and Schiller’s groping journey into abstraction where external reality achieves its highest truth as a set of metaphors.[9] The final two works in my survey course partook of the sublime’s emerging spirituality: Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” and Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village”. Of these two, I would call the former the more sublime. Gray has assessed the ordeal of a human lifespan from the precipice overlooking its innocent beginnings rather than from a vantage like Sir Lucan’s which reveals a moribund epoch and a fearfully plunging degeneracy. If anything, the immediate presence of so much youthful enthusiasm, honesty, and vulnerability magnifies Gray’s poignant sense of impending loss, for no one traverses life unscathed (Seneca’s nulli licet impune nasci). What renders the meditation distinctly sublime, however (for the merely poignant would be pathetic, in Schiller’s terms: the beholder would be immersed in pain rather than elevated above it) is the poet’s recognizing at last the futility of his concern. The great wheel will turn. All that he has prophesied—the poverty, the disgrace, the jealousy, the ambition—will warp the piping voices before him into grotesque groans or shrieks or oaths as boys age into men. As preemption, his foreknowledge would be useless—would indeed be folly. Why risk marring a rare happiness by raising an arcane alarm where joy runs highest? The sublime observer, one might say, once again torments himself… except that such torment is also inevitable in a mature, thoughtful person, and brings a satisfaction not verbalized here in so many words: that of no longer being history’s dupe. Where wisdom is futile, ‘tis yet grand not to be surprised by folly.

Goldsmith’s poem, in comparison, lacks elevation. The poet has swept the panorama of time—of small, fine joys once cultivated like country gardens, now eradicated and pulverized by the forced exodus of Enclosure—even as he broods over the empty village’s unhinged doors and weed-grown streets. Yet Goldsmith deprives us of the sense of inevitability. His indignation rejects fortune’s wheel, prosperity’s far slope. He is ever less resigned to these, in fact, as he nears the poem’s end (though its very last lines, said to have been composed by Johnson, do indeed court the proverbial—and with what dissonance!). In a manner which draws us, all unwitting of its motion, both forward to Shelley’s radical politics and back to the unholy rebellions of Faustus and Satan, the poem’s sour irony verges on the revolutionary. Let us admit that social upheaval lies just beyond one horizon of the sublime experience’s dynamic ecstasy. To be able to do nothing at all can motivate a manic, end-to-end repudiation of how things get done. Even Lear is not far from this.

From the sublime to the grotesque: Francisco Goya completed The Colossus or Panic (as it is variously titled) early in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and Saturn Devouring One of His Sons about ten years later. The contrast might be called that between a vision and a nightmare. Both works draw upon myth or fantasy, with the legend behind Colossus being much the more obscure and probably local. As the giant plods sleepily over hill and vale, he seems not even to notice the petty human settlement beneath him. A truly sublime sense of recoil from earthly affairs is captured on canvas. Saturn is another matter. The myth, of course, is recorded in Hesiod’s Theogony and elsewhere. Yet though the subject is twice taboo (cannibalism and filicide), it does not challenge the imagination in a liberating manner. The disturbing canvas may indeed serve to remind us that antiquity had an irrational side only redeemable to modern tastes at the cost of distortion (a cost Goya does not seem willing to pay here).

My intent has not been to inventory various English classics possessing some tincture of the sublime, but to pose two questions: why does English literature seem to offer comparatively many examples of sublimity, and what cultural shift might account for the phenomenon’s rise and fall? I may now advance to attempting a conclusion on both counts.

That the sublime indeed creates more of a stir in English literature than in other traditions appears very plausible. Longinus notwithstanding, the much-advertised Greek fear of the void seems to have shrunk from unlimited (or at least immeasurable) prospects. Herodotus records the Pythian Apollo as declaring, “I know the number of the sands and the measure of the sea, / And I hear the voice of a mute and listen to one who speaks not” (1.47.3). Yet besides prophecies and a smattering of pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus, this dazzling irrationalism has few Hellenic exponents. Homer himself, as we have seen, probably comes across as grander in style than he (or they) had intended thanks to the relative inflexibility of oral narrative technique.

The Romans, for their part, produced the lofty Virgil—but also Lucretius, whose De Rerum Natura might fairly be called a forerunner of Burke’s essay in its equation of reverent awe with vulgar superstition. (Many admire Lucretius’s copious style: I find it tedious precisely because it drums away at his own materialist theorems rather than paying homage to the ineffable.) The circumstances surrounding Virgil may well have been unique—and here I do not even refer to his artistic genius. It may be that the educated Romans of his day were so highly literate and so divorced, at last, from a tribal mentality (civil war not being conducive to cultural solidarity) that they were thrust more rudely into the discovery of individual will than any Greek ever was. The Greek Stoic, at least, could withdraw from public life: the educated Roman was forced to occupy himself with public affairs while admitting, more and more, their duplicitous squalor. Plato’s Socrates need only consent to his execution: Cicero’s Scipio must consent to the active service of a fickle state awash in conspiracies.[10] Virgil’s Aeneas may well be a Scipio who cannot afford to admit that his ancestral gods are morally schizophrenic, but who suspects as much deep down.

Yet once born, however arduously, in antiquity, why would the power of the individual will not have prospered steadily in the cultural centers of continental Europe, or at least have continued its growth after an oral-traditional relapse in the Middle Ages? Why is the knight-errant, that compelling figure of personal resolve, truly more a model of self-abnegation than of lonely courage, more apt to sacrifice himself in his lord’s bad cause than in his own conscientious crusade? Ariosto’s raging Orlando and Cervantes’s pipedreaming Quixote disdain bodily risk with the giddiest abandon to assert their will—and their mad exploits fall somewhere between the ludicrous and the pitiable. Mainland Europe, it seems to me, was never fully sold on sublimity. Even in the Romantic Period, excitement about the individual soul’s dynamism failed to migrate very far toward the Mediterranean. Young Werther, like those eloquent advocates of the sublime’s spiritualizing qualities, Kant and Schiller, hailed from north of the Alps; and when Chateaubriand sought to copy Goethe by creating René, the result (despite the rugged landscape of Brittany) was anemic. As for Ugo Foscolo’s Ortis, another successful Werther “spin-off” mentioned earlier, he is more a hunted political exile than a perplexed mystic. Continentals simply do not sigh at clouds or gaze into craters with the longing of Englishmen.

Catholicism must surely play some part in this. If we apply our review to a map, we will note a correspondence between the literary sublime’s ascendancy and the inroads made by the Protestant Reformation.[11] One may come at the relationship from almost opposite directions. First, it may be said that Protestantism condones and even encourages individualism—especially the personal encounter with the divine—in a way that Catholicism does not. The Catholic follows a conventional conduit to God’s will: the Protestant dare not merely “go through the motions” if he wishes his salvation to be genuine. Secondly, the Catholic liturgy and setting for worship might be styled more compatible with a sublime experience than their Protestant counterparts; for in seeking his personal encounter with God, the Protestant is apt to mistrust elements of that encounter “commandeered” by ecclesiastical formality. Shadowy vaults, stained glass, mementos of past saints, and sonorous chants are “manipulative”, in his view, because they elicit the sublime sentiment “on cue”. The Catholic, contrarily, may find sufficient elevation in his communal order of worship that he may not feel driven to seek it in wide, lonely spaces. As a result, perhaps his faith is more tightly bonded to communal habit and less alienating—less a torment driving the believer into individualism. The Protestant may assess this stable situation pejoratively, of course, by charging it with reviving the tribal impulse. It is a historical fact that Catholic societies tend to be more hierarchical, their social classes more rigidly fixed, and their rate of literacy consequently lower than what we would find in Europe’s more Protestant nations (though to advance Catholicism as a prime cause of this condition truly begs a great many assumptions). Where literacy flourishes less, a residual oral-traditional adherence to group norms binds tighter.

I discern one great snag in arguing that the sublime is a distinctly Protestant burst of enthusiasm for free will: most of its representations in the works surveyed above are highly critical of such fireworks. Marlowe’s Faustus distracts himself from attending to his salvation by contemplating the infinite; Milton’s Satan is most vigorously evil at those very moments when he gives his will free rein; Johnson’s Rasselas achieves only misery by yearning to see the next horizon. While Shakespeare’s Lear is morally energized by one kind of ecstasy and Gray’s poetic contemplative spiritually pacified by another, the English tradition certainly offers no unanimous celebration of the individual will. If anything, one could more correctly characterize Protestant theology of Milton’s era as deeply suspicious of individualism—at least as much as mainstream Catholicism. The Reformation was (among other things) supposed to purge worship of intrusive frivolities that dulled the heaven-seeking mind’s edge, not free the worshiper to seek heaven in his own way. Denominations proliferated precisely because each group insisted that devotional energies were best channeled just so: there was no intent to multiply options in a kind of liturgical bazaar.

And here, I believe, lies the basis for understanding the dissonantly vile motivation ascribed by Edmund Burke to the sublime experience. Empiricism came to typify English thought after Bacon and Hobbes to such an extent that one can find virtually nothing else in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among either philosophers or churchmen.[12] As the fruits of science’s harvest grew ever more numerous and succulent, the validity of assessing reality by tinkering with its component parts appeared ever less open to suspicion. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, England was making out quite well. No doubt, her less stratified, more mobile, more entrepreneurial, and more literate society (along with whatever correspondence to Protestantism all this implies) evinced a special talent for “progress”. As for theorists of the strictly human realm, like Burke, it would scarcely have occurred to them to supply any mechanism except a physiological one to an uplifting contemplation of the stars (or to whatever emotion might come under scrutiny).

Let me pose the question, then, in these somewhat reductive terms: how could the same nation’s denizens be uniquely inclined both to admire the Milky Way and to comprehend reality only as particles and nerves? Literacy, I believe, is the answer. Both of these contradictory movements of the mind greatly accelerate under the influence of the printed word. The literate intelligence at once magnifies the human being’s inner life (through separating serious reflection from communal chatter) and promotes an objective analysis of perceptions (through separating subject from object). Literates are more aware of themselves as individuals, more apt to ascribe their acts to personal decisions, less apt to attribute a misdeed to tribal or other environmental mediation. To that extent, they are more spiritual: they have a more evolved concept of the human creature’s unique soul. At the same time, however, they are more prone to see themselves as object; for while the immortal soul catalyzed by sublime meditation extends forever, the puny body left behind is also a datum in calculating external reality. The same analysis that frees literate man from being an environmental appendage turns out to reintegrate him—on the backstroke, as it were—into family, tribe, nation, species.

A shrewd examiner like Burke can indeed discover more ways of subordinating men and women to their circumstances than the Homeric clansman could ever have imagined. Hence the paradox: the elevated perceiver of the sublime revels in his internal vastness, his spiritual infinity… yet this wondrous subject is in the next moment of reflection objectified in so many ways that his every twitch is involuntary, determined, predestined. From a Kantian resonating chamber for the divine, he becomes a Calvinist prisoner, manacled from birth to a fate forever behind his back.

Here, then, is a probable answer to why the English so denigrated the sublime experience despite showing a sensitivity to it beyond any other European nation’s. One may indeed extend the hypothesis (though this lies beyond my undertaking) to say that later English romantics were acutely aware of the sublime because empiricism and technology, with their contemptuous dismissal of the soul’s resources, had scored such “triumphs” all over the English landscape; and that impatience with melancholy and “bloody-mindedness”, conversely (going back to Burton’s psycho-physical diagnosis), ran high in England because admiration of the sublime so often flew in the teeth of “productive endeavor”.

As Sean Trainor lately remarked in these pages, the Protestant evangelicals of John Wesley’s time “were more concerned with the Church’s day-to-day life than with the Church invisible.”[13] This practical focus did indeed offer one outlet to the ecstatically meditative—the so-called social gospel, whose interest was the problems of the poor and oppressed. The social crusade is a logical alternative destination, after all, for a sublime inspiration interrupted by an empirical fidget. Castles in clouds thatch not a single hovel… but a mission to save humanity accommodates both idealism and pragmatism. Now the inspiration is “doing something”—and I would remind the reader not only that Goldsmith’s poem veers in this direction, but that even mad old Lear mumbles in the peasant’s hut, “O, I have ta’en too little care of this.” Good works, to be sure, are the footprints of a good will—but they can also be a placatory offering to the empiricist’s ethic of usefulness when a sincere idealism has suffered too much derision to show its face. Is talk of eternity embarrassing—does the mystic’s happy poverty verge on lunacy? Does Epictetus look too like a vagrant? Then preach the inspired soul’s social consciousness. Indeed, this would be the undistinguished future of the sublime experience in northwestern Europe: a crusade to feed everyone, house everyone, and cure everyone.[14]

When Western culture became incapable of discerning in such an agenda a debasement of the sublime, it may be said to have begun its gradual descent into nullity. For self-sacrifice, though always noble, cannot healthily aim at the sacrifice of the “higher self”—the divine spark in oneself which has communicated the nobility of sacrifice, to begin with. Moral duty is not served when we “help” the weak to evade it: such “charity” is self-annihilating. If the only practical consequence of the soul’s discovering its vast range is a rush to provision those bodily needs in whose ample supply any soul must languish, then the servant earns his sainthood by murdering those he serves. There is no uplifting vision in the modern social utopia, no space for the individual to sicken on surfeit and dream of eternity. Rasselas’s Sehnsucht is not allowed by our gurus (any more than by Johnson) to lead to heaven, but is diagnosed as a hormonal disorder and treated with appropriate drugs.

All of this, I contend without any intended facétie, was foreseeable in the uneven reception given to the sublime as England began to reign supreme. Today the trail has petered out. Literature offers no more grand rages, no more serene brooding. If escapist, it is allowed to court lurid effects of the sort perfectly suited to Burke’s terms: titillating, vicarious brushes with the ghastly and the ghoulish. If “serious”, it must espouse a political ideology of service to the oppressed as if these latter were but dumb beasts with carnal requirements. The adventurous among us will seek a “high” by skydiving or bungee-jumping, mining therefrom (as they often report) the confidence to argue and intimidate more confidently in the workplace. Now that reading for insight into character or refinement of sentiment is itself dead and cold, we need hardly be surprised that “tornado-chasers” howl like fraternity boys after a sighting and compare the “sensation” to an orgasm.

In a sense whose profundity I cannot overstate, I should say that civilized people must learn what to do with a sunrise or an seascape if they wish to survive. They must learn to do what the empiricist would call “nothing”: that is, they must allow their soul to take its own measure from time to time.

NOTES

[1] See especially the opening section (No. 23) to the “Analytic of the Sublime” in the Critique of Judgment.

[2] Kritik der Urtheilskraft, vol. 5 of Kants Werke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 256—a concluding remark to section 26, for those who prefer to follow standard translations.

[3] All of the passages cited in this paragraph are drawn from p. 92 of Schiller’s Über das Erhabene in Vom Pathetischen und Erhabenen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970), 81-100. The translations are mine.

[4] In The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MS: Harvard UP, 1960), Albert Lord had early on supported the thesis of his short-lived colleague, the legendary Milman Parry, that Homeric verse, being orally composed, cannot be credited with great subtlety of characterization, of foreshadowing, of innuendo, etc. Yet Lord would eventually revise his theories (e.g., by collaborating in founding the journal Oral Tradition) to accommodate the now-dominant view that literacy had sufficiently intruded into Homer’s process to make various kinds of intended finesse plausible.

[5] From the translation of Howell D. Chickering, Jr., in his helpful dual-language edition, Beowulf (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1977), 88-89.

[6] Cosmos and History, trans. William Trask (New York: Princeton UP, 1959), 34.

[7] Cf. Odyssey 11.14 ff.: here Homer describes the land of the Kimmerioi, where Odysseus beaches on his way to Hades, as so far north that neither the rising nor the setting sun ever illumines it. Despite the head-shaking of commentators, this juxtaposition of the solar cycle, the Arctic Circle , and the Underworld is quite logical. (One also finds it in the epic of Gilgamesh where the hero begins his katabasis.) Placing the “tunnel” of the sun’s nightly passage from west to east at the northern extreme of its transit along the zodiac applies Ockham’s Razor, as one might say, to the problem; for now only the shortest possible tunnel is needed.

[8] Burke credibly argues that Milton mixed metaphors with sublime effect in Paradise Lost, of which I shall shortly speak: “the mind is hurried out of itself, by a crowd of great and confused images; which affect because they are crowded and confused” (Part 2, Section 4).

[9] Kant, it should be said, was at best an uneasy romantic. His early admiration for Rousseau waned with time; and he once condemned romances for giving their reader “the appearance of a dreamer and… [making] him inept in company, since he blindly follows the free flight of an imagination unordered by any use of reason” (my translation from p. 208 of Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht, vol. 7 of Kants Werke [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968], 117-333).

[10] In the “Scipio’s Dream” section of Cicero ’s De Re Publica, Scipio is warned by his grandfather’s image to be especially wary of his kinsmen (12).

[11] Of the English authors I have named after Malory, only Marlowe may have been Catholic: his true convictions remain in doubt. Kant was a Protestant of Pietist provenance, while Goethe and Schiller held deistic beliefs without any clear denominational affiliation. Foscolo had preserved only minimal ties with the Catholicism of his childhood (and was destined, furthermore, to finish his days in England ). The highly aestheticized Catholicism of Chateaubriand may well confirm the argument (made subsequently in this paragraph) that the Church itself satisfied a longing for the sublime, diverting it thereby from literary expression. Milton implies as much in “Il Penseroso”.

[12] A two-part essay by Sean Trainor, “A Kinship Forgotten, A Rebellion Overlooked: Evangelical Influences on English Romanticism,” Praesidium 8.1 and 8.2 (Winter and Spring, 2008), 45-66 and 1-26, explores the oddly (and unwittingly) empirical tenor of English evangelicalism during these years. Indeed, Mr. Trainor’s work greatly assisted me in developing the ideas I offer here.

[13] From Part I of the essay cited in the previous note, 54.

[14] Such social crusading is much older than Marxism. At the end of Jules Romains’ fascinating novel, Recherche d’une Église, Jerphanion is very nearly recruited to Masonry by the sage who confides that its ultimate objective is the “total unification of humanity”. Of course, the Catholic Church is also the traditional adversary in this case.

Dr. John Harris is the founder and president of The Center for Literate Values, and currently serves as Visiting Professor of English at The University of Texas at Tyler.

This essay will endeavor to offer a short yet cogent definition of Western traditionalism (or conservatism). Surely, persons who are conservative-leaning should try to delineate and define what separates them from Communism, from Nazism and fascism, and from liberalism and left-liberalism in all their myriad forms. A positive step would be to call all those persons who are traditionally-minded back to their first principles.

Left-liberalism, liberalism, Communism, and Nazism can all be seen as materialist, secular ideologies, whereas real conservatism could be construed to be a perennial philosophy at whose core is an assertion of spirit over matter, and, in particular, the recognition of the difficult position of “persons of spirit” versus everyone else throughout human history, but especially in current late modernity. It can be seen that spirit, mind, intellect, and soul are related but not identical phenomena, in constant opposition to matter, the body, and the general tendency to entropy. As far as reason and will are concerned, one must recognize the existence of both "”conscious-volition” and the subconscious parts of the mind, from both of which evil and good can originate. At the same time, a traditionalist outlook should not rely too much on the overly reductionist reason of the physical sciences, but rather on “the higher reason” of the philosophers.

Traditionalist (or conservative) philosophy asserts the belief in a traditional social absolute. Traditional means that it is hallowed by long-time usage. Social means that it is based and rooted in a social context, in relation to society. Different societies can have different absolutes, but the core notion of the absolute (or “bounded horizon of meaning”) must, generally speaking, be upheld in that particular society, when it is a traditional one.

Traditionalist philosophy asserts that these traditional social absolutes can be discerned (at least indirectly) through the human mind, whereas the secular ideologies of modernity are, generally speaking, hypocritical in relation to absolutes. On the one hand, one of the apparent “principles” of liberalism is “that there are no principles”—your “values” are as good as mine. On the other hand, there is a highly ideologically charged form of prevalent “political correctness” which functions as a kind of absolute, although it can be seen as an anti-traditional and (a traditionalist would argue) an anti-social one in the context of the societies in which it operates.

There is also the question of whether or not there is some kind of “absolute beyond absolutes”, or THE Absolute. Traditionalist philosophy would generally argue that the true “traditional social absolute” participates to some extent in THE Absolute (which could be called “God”, or “Human Nature”, or “The Sum-Total of Humankind’s World-Historical Experience”).

The issue of Natural Law or Natural Right is not as straightforward for traditionalism as it might appear. On the one hand, there is a school of thought which sees the so-called “first wave of modernity” (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Hume), as preserving some elements of the medieval scholastic Natural Law, which is therefore to be preferred over later waves of modernity (e.g. Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche) which totally overturned it. On the other hand, the notion of Natural Law can be seen to have become virtually coeval with Lockean philosophy and the kernel of all later ideas of so-called “universal human rights” (as self-servingly interpreted by liberals) or “abstract universals” (disembodied from living societies), which are rather disliked by traditionalist philosophy.

According to traditionalist philosophy, a human being’s natural, uncontrived expression of his or her relation to the Absolute is religion. A straightforward embrace of tradition means standing fast by one’s own religious tradition. A straightforward Western traditionalist would believe that the revival of Christian faith in the West is a prerequisite for the survival of Western civilization, although, from a strictly Christian viewpoint, Christianity will endure whether or not the West collapses. A straightforward Western traditionalist would argue for Christianity as the truest and firmest form of religious expression for Western societies, and quite possibly for all humanity. A believing Christian could not really claim otherwise, but would hasten to add that this worldwide conversion obviously could NOT be forced or hurried. He or she would assert this need for tolerance not because of some abstract liberal “right of dissent”, but because Jesus Himself made clear that involuntary conversions were a grievous violation of the notion of human dignity recognized by Him. There is also an enormous difference between a society or a state very mildly promoting a Christian tendency versus situations of non-Christians (or those considered schismatics or heretics or idolaters within Christianity itself) being summarily kept out of or expelled from a Christian society, being persecuted or killed, or being forced to convert on pain of death or torture. It is clear that all these evils done in the name of Christianity were gross violations of the most central Christian teachings—and now are almost totally unthinkable actions for nearly every professing Christian today.

However, it can also be seen that the state structure of contemporary American, and especially Canadian society, effectively banishes Christianity from the public sphere, and in many ways promotes the most extreme and excessive forms of liberalism and left-liberalism. So current-day society may in its own way be as persecutory of Christianity as it itself has accused Christianity of being in the past. A return to Christian intolerance is today extremely unlikely, and should not be a source of anxiety in politics. Today, one should not look at what religion once was, but what it can be in the far different context of late modernity, when most of the problems confronting society may be termed as being “of a new type”.

If the old persecutions by Christians are to be read into the indictment against today’s Christianity and traditionalism in Western democracies, then it must also be considered how thoroughgoing and vicious the programmatic policies of (to name the most prominent figures) Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (resulting in tens of millions of deaths) were. All these policies were closely tied to radical left-wing projects of irreligion. Yet left-liberals are rarely called to task for often tacitly supporting the crimes of these left-wing, atheist despots.

It should also be remembered that the Nazis were, philosophically, neither Christians nor conservatives, and in fact combined a vicious mixture of bloody-minded occultism and scientism. There were in fact curious convergences between the anti-clericalism of the Nazis, Soviets, and left-liberals of the day. Some liberals such as former British Prime Minister Lloyd George initially supported the “modern, progressive” Nazis, but opposed Franco’s regime, or even Poland, because they considered the latter “priest-ridden reactionaries”. It should be remembered that committed Christians constituted among the few serious centers of resistance to the Nazi regime in

Germany

itself. In German-occupied

Poland

, particularly savage persecutions were directed against the Polish Roman Catholic and other Polish Christian clergy. The theorists of Nazi Germany—far from claiming support from what they considered a “Semitic-inspired” Christianity –understood Christianity as a massive barrier to the full implementation of their horrific agenda.

The straightforward traditionalist would argue that the spiritual side of the human person is best fulfilled in religion. If a person lacks the anchor of traditional religion, he or she will typically try to find the fulfillment of religion in ersatz, surrogate, pseudo-religions, precisely the secular ideologies. Thus, the straightforward Western traditionalist will say, instead of worshipping the God of Light and Love, such a person will worship the Savage God of ideology, the dark idols that demand human sacrifices and sexual debasement. At the same time, such a person might deny the existence of these idols (and their hold on him or her) in an act of self-delusion. Modern psychology (with its dozens, if not hundreds, of rival therapies) and modern science have also moved in the direction of substitute religions. Or someone who loses faith will find satisfaction in such things as cults, rock music, illicit drugs, promiscuity, or generally aimless “rebellion”.

However, straightforward traditionalism offers little to persons who could be called ethical nonreligious individuals, or those who have had religious roots, but fallen away from them. Here is where traditionalist philosophy (and the appreciation of “the persons of spirit”) may be called on to buttress religion. Indeed, philosophy and religion may be seen as two different modes of drawing closer to the Absolute.

Does the strictly religious viewpoint preclude philosophy or cultivation of the arts? There have been many philosophers who embraced the central idea of the megapsychlos, “the great-souled man”. These would include Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hegel—to name but a few. If we look at those philosophers who insist on the existence of absolutes, we find many of the first-rank thinkers—including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel. The non-absolutist philosophers exist mainly as a counterpoint to the absolutists. However, it may be argued that a more critical question is the philosophers’ attitude to “the great-souled man”, as well as what practical effect a philosopher’s thought has on the flourishing or undermining of such a person. For example, the practical effects of much of Kant’s thought, working itself out in the world, have been to subvert the possibilities for the emergence of “great-souled men” in late modernity. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s radical perspectivism could be interpreted as an attempt to redeem and re-nourish a transformed idea of the megapsychlos—transmogrified in response to, and in order to confront, the extraordinarily harsh terrain (for the nurturing and flourishing of the megapsychlos) of late modernity.

In any case, philosophy does not necessarily progress historically, i.e., the later philosophers are not necessarily the better philosophers, nor is the thought of earlier philosophers necessarily outdated by new developments. One can, for example, still read Plato for incisive criticisms of phenomena similar to current-day democracy and liberalism.

It may be argued that virtually all the truly great works of literature, art, and music are conservative in the sense that they assert the triumph of Spirit (the Idea) over Matter, and that in these works we find some intimation of transcendent truths. Thus, in the Bible, in the great books of philosophy, and in the great works of art, music, and literature, we find portions of the overwhelming Truth of the realm of the Spirit. Even modern science, which, according to diehard traditionalist thinkers, only holds a candle to the sun in terms of explaining reality relative to religion and philosophy, is tentatively edging towards the recognition of the importance of the spirit-centered viewpoint (as in the works of C. G. Jung, or in Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, 1975).

However, one of the advantages of sensible religion over pure philosophy is that religion is accessible to everyone, regardless of native intelligence and other accidental characteristics. It is that part of traditionalism, at least in the Christian worldview, that proclaims the equality of the souls of all men and women before God. In the Christian belief, God does not allow for any special categories of persons exempt from his moral laws. This does not mean, however, that He estimates all persons’ moral worth as the same, regardless of their lifelong moral qualities and behavior. He is quite willing to “divide the sheep from the goats”. And it may be seen as one of the aims of organized human societies to reflect, however dimly and imperfectly, that kind of so-called “judgmental” outlook.

The main terrain of action of “the persons of spirit”—especially the more “politico-philosophical” rather than “religious”-minded ones –is, of course, the nation, patria, or res publica. (It need hardly be added that a sense of genuine nationhood, civic-mindedness, community, and patriotism can just as easily occur under the formal aegis of a monarchy as of a republic). The various nations of the Earth could ultimately be seen as spiritual-corporate, organic, living entities, many of them sharing in an unbroken historical continuity of hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

The twin principles of traditionalism are both culture and virtue. Human beings must recognize and try to nurture the striving towards culture and virtue within themselves. Society must be permeated by an atmosphere where culture and virtue will be maximized and intensified. Culture includes the great art, philosophy, and literature of all humankind, as well as the shared historical experience of the spiritual-corporate national entities. The so-called Canon of great works may be increased, but likely only at a very slow rate. Thus, fifty years of human history may produce only one truly profound work, which brings us in touch with the sublime and the spiritual. As for the shared historical experience of a national entity, it may exist at many levels. There are the unconscious, partly conscious, and fully conscious aspects of the national “consciousness”. The boundaries of the national consciousness should not be drawn either too narrowly or too widely. Thus, in some senses, the consciousness of ancient

Greece

and Rome is present even among us. The goal of the preservation of the national consciousness is transcended only by the moral lessons to be drawn from the Canon of great works (the Country of the Mind), by the practically possible dictates of religion, and by virtue. Ideally speaking, the preservation of national consciousness and virtue is mutually reinforcing.

Virtue is the moral code which almost all premodern and “spirit-centred” philosophies, and all major religions, promote to a greater or lesser extent—but which, a believing Christian must argue, is most authentically expressed in Christianity. Because virtue exists in the realm of Spirit, it must, in general, take precedence over the spiritual-corporate national entities, even though these may also in some senses exist in the mindworld. Gross evil and immorality should not, theoretically speaking, be permitted, even if doing so is highly instrumental for the preservation and advancement of one’s nation. Of course, evil and immoral actions have always occurred in relations between nations; however, one should be sternly warned against abandoning all human and moral reservations in the name of the advancement of one’s nation, after the notorious fashion of Nazi Germany. The traditionalist holds that believing in ideals (e.g., in norms of behavior or manners), despite occasional failure to live up to them, is preferable to abandoning ideals and embracing some feral exaltation of the removal of all self-restraint. This could equally be a criticism of the vicious racially-driven nationalism of Nazi Germany, of the unrestrained countercultural rebellion of the 1960s (and subsequent decades), and of the unrestricted selfishness and greed of consumptionist capitalism.

As was pointed out before, the strength of virtue is that it is theoretically accessible to every human being, regardless of native intelligence and other accidental characteristics. Thus the simple washerwoman with her deep faith may be closer to truth than a deconstructionist professor with his doctorate. Nevertheless, traditionalist thinkers are necessary to give form and substance to an instinctual vision of truth.

Culture and virtue will be maximized in a society which is permeated with harmony. Harmony, not tyranny or chaos, is the principle of the traditionalist social absolute. Harmony is when society’s functioning tends towards an organic, integral whole, in consistency with the ideals of culture and virtue. Yet, it might be asked, has a society like this ever existed? (Some would argue that the ancient Greek polis, medieval Europe , and some periods of Chinese history were in some senses closest to this ideal.) For Christians, the reason for this perennial failure is found in the symbolic Garden of Eden narrative, where we learn that human nature is “fallen”—that is, susceptible to the worst impulses and desires. This story (as well as that of Cain and Abel) reminds us that human nature has a bestial and very dark side. Furthermore, we are warned of the existence of dark powers, which may be the personifications of darkness within us but, to a Christian, must be seen as actually existing in some sense beyond us, for Satan is no atheist.

The Darkness, whatever its cause, is almost irrepressible in fallen human nature. Thus all elements in a human society should be directed towards keeping these impulses in check. In the Christian conception, the highest freedom is freedom from sin. Laws, the sense of authority, decorum, custom, and tradition are most often the elements of society which keep these darker impulses in check. Yet, organized religion is perhaps the strongest buttress against outbreaks of individual and mass anarchy. That is why religion must be supported strongly without discounting that the Darkness may re-appear in the most unlikely places. One must “fight the darkness without yielding to the darkness”. Even though Pope Alexander VI (Roderigo Borgia) was utterly corrupt, there were persons of virtue and culture who maintained the vision of first principles in the Renaissance and knew that what he was doing was utterly wrong. There is no question of justifying such behaviour in terms of “alternative lifestyles”, “differing value-systems”, or “situational ethics”, as in modern liberalism.

The number of persons of culture and virtue will generally be small in almost every society, the question being how far the first principles can be accepted by society as a whole. Thinkers, intellectuals, philosophers (or whatever one calls them)—as well as the poets—are the ultimate determiners and legislators of whatever form the entire society takes. The Catholic Church, by its near-total intellectual monopoly, presided over the West for close to a thousand years. Only when its intellectual monopoly was finally broken did modernity erupt, with a dizzying succession of ever more serious and intensive dislocations—along with the unquestionable triumphs as well as unmitigated disasters of modern science and technology.

It could be argued that most people in any society will be passive, both intellectually and politically, no matter what their economic standard of living is. The majority of the so-called “poor” in North America, who from some standpoints practically have the economic living standard of medieval knights or barons, most likely do not use their ample spare time (if on welfare, for example) to improve themselves, to study, to think. They usually follow their basest desires and impulses. Many, if not most, people in the middle and upper classes act in a similar fashion, the main difference being in the extravagance of their base pursuits. Thus in any society, the number of people who are intellectually or politically active is limited. Unfortunately, in current-day society, the traditionalist would argue that a huge proportion of these people are proponents of poorly based ideas which are misguided or sometimes even outrightly evil, certainly in terms of their social and cultural consequences, if not usually in their stated intent. Thus no matter how high the standard of living is able to go, the problems of a disordered and disharmonious society will be with us.

Because of the egalitarianism of virtue, the traditionalist thinker can formulate the concept of what could be called the Vital Center . (This term, which is borrowed from American liberal thought, takes on a much different meaning for the traditionalist.) The “vital center” would consist of all basically decent people of any class, ethnic background, or religious affiliation who essentially keep a nation or society together. The stronger a nation’s “vital center”, the stronger its commitment to culture and virtue, and the closer it draws to the realm of the Spirit. At the same time, a strong “vital center” usually, but not necessarily, gives a nation great power in this world, because a spiritually based and therefore genuine consensus exists between most of its members.

The “vital center” appears to be under severe attack in our society today. One could easily list a dozen or more “isms” that assault the remnants of traditionalist thinking and traditionalist society. In the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the vital center was practically exterminated and displaced. In North America and most of Europe today, the process is carried out through the mass-media and mass-education systems. In all such cases, there is the attempt to construct society entirely on the basis of various strictly secular ideologies. The Soviet Union was based philosophically on Marx as interpreted by Lenin and Stalin, two mediocre thinkers but ruthless politicians. Nazi Germany was based, at least in part, on the ideas of Nietzsche, although these probably appeared in even more disfigured form than those of Marx in the Soviet Union . (There is in fact a huge debate on whether Nietzsche was the most consistently anti-modern thinker or the capstone of modernity.)

In the Soviet Union , entire classes of culture-bearing individuals were liquidated: the aristocracy, the nationalist intelligentsia, and the more industrious peasants. While the Nazis seemed to use traditionalist slogans when it suited them, their attachment to traditionalist principles was about as deep as the Soviet attachment to democracy. Real traditionalism understands that one cannot promote an apparently integral and holistic view of the lifeworld while at the same time encouraging people to give free reign to their darkest impulses. Every national entity must try to recognize the existence in the world of other national entities by entering into a spirit of reflection about the nature of nationalism. The popularity of the Nazis also shows just how susceptible the German masses were to what was essentially a nihilistic secular ideology, combining occultism and scientism, for which the ground had been partially prepared by the anarchy and depravity of the Weimar period. Hitler, it should also be remembered, came to power by using the most “modern”, “popular”, and “democratic” means.

In terms of “practical” results (as well as professed first-principles), liberalism seems very far from the horrors of Nazism or Bolshevism. The first principles of liberalism, in liberals’ self-understanding, consist of nothing but “compassion”—goodness, sweetness, and light. But is liberalism so much better in “practical” terms? As society loses its grasp of first principles and the barriers of law and custom are dismantled, there will be more and more of the various horrors which are taken as commonplace in late-modern society. It is time to think seriously about what present-day Left-liberalism, pushed to what is probably its logical and necessary conclusion, might mean: the complete atomization of society; the destruction of family, morality, and religion; the denigration of patriotism, virtue, and authentic cultural achievement. Indeed—in so far as it could exist—a wholly liberal “society” would probably dissolve in a matter of years, to be replaced by a dictatorship, the alternative which the “politically correct” would undoubtedly offer. Or perhaps there would be an evolution to a liberal/left-liberal consensus (which is practically in existence today), where there would be freedom for dissent “in a leftward direction”, but traditionalist conservative ideas and notions would either be completely ignored or cruelly ridiculed by the mass-media and the institutionalized leftism of government bureaucracy, the academic world, the mass-education system, and the wholly co-opted business world. Even supposedly “moderate” liberalism could become distinctly “totalitarian” when dealing with sharp traditionalist or conservative dissent, which would be seen as such a brazen challenge to its philosophical basis.

From the traditionalist standpoint, the spectrum of practical political discourse in Western societies is extremely narrow, consisting mostly of varieties of liberalism and left-liberalism. Various types of radical left ideas are often seen as legitimate “alternatives”, but conservatism is not. Liberalism, with its horror of traditionalist absolutes, or even of too clearly defined ideas, admires the supposed “idealism” and the “principled stand” of the current-day “politically correct”. Liberalism does not seem to have the philosophical depth and moral strength to resist the totalitarian temptation which is always at hand. Interestingly enough, liberal and Leninist societies are in many aspects far more similar to each other than to any premodern society.

At the same time as the spectrum of political (and philosophical) discourse is narrowed, it is also pushed leftward, thus doubly weakening traditionalism. As technological and social change overwhelms a given society, only a residuum of true traditionalist or conservative ideas and notions remains. Positions and attitudes which were once diametrically opposed become virtually indistinguishable from each other in terms of the generally liberal mass-society. The massive historical struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, or between Christianity and Islam, is subsumed into the conflict between what could be seen as the spiritual and the material. The struggle between Romanticism and Classicism (and, later, Modernism) is subsumed into the struggle of cultured persons against the deadening mass-culture. The perennial premodern conflict between the aristocracy and the priesthood, and of these two estates against the bourgeoisie in early modernity, is completely forgotten. Shallow media pundits call libertarianism “extreme conservatism”. It is difficult to conceive of the libertarian cult of egoism, and of its hostility to religion, as symptomatic of traditionalist ideas. Furthermore, any exclusively economic approach to life, whether philistine pursuit of wealth or doctrinaire Marxism, is not traditionalism. Following your basest passions is not traditionalism. Unabashed greed and selfishness are not traditionalist impulses. Mindless hatred is not traditionalist, but righteous anger is.

In the Christian view, history does not unfold without a higher purpose. From the Christian perspective, it may be suggested that the role of this period in history is to test the Universal Church. The more revolting society becomes, with outright blasphemy and violence and perversions, the greater the chance there is of a total overturn of this so-called “freedom”, this anarchy, which characterizes liberal society. The “vital center” may be able to re-assert itself.

A quasi-Hegelian view of history also allows for such dramatic, “dialectical” turns. In a moment of acute crisis, genuine traditionalism could unexpectedly resurface. On the other hand, what may happen is a partial renewal of certain traditionalist ideals without a decisive impact on society.

Whatever happens, authentic critics of the present-day system (regardless of what they choose to call themselves) must continue to speak out.

Mark Wegierski is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Toronto. He has published frequent pieces in this and other journals about popular culture, science fiction, and political philosophy.

Internal Bickering Nixes Establishment of Private Neo-Conservative Liberal Arts College

Five hundred asphalt-paved acres in the shadow of Teapot Dome, Wyoming, bisected by the raw ditch of what would have been a main conduit for steam pipes and electrical cables, stand as mute testimony to the failure of a consortium of GOP politicos and right-leaning corporate money-givers to agree on the constitution of a proposed “Neo-Conservative” liberal arts college that planners hoped would become the “Harvard and Yale of free-market based, Neo-Conservative humane higher education in the United States.” Logistical planners intended the blacktopped allotment to serve as the “pad” for a series of pre-fabricated, transportable, interlocking and re-combinable building-modules to house the classrooms and administrative offices of the proposed institution. “It would have worked like a giant Lego set,” one architect said, “but that’s appropriate since when we look at Lego blocks, we see the future of American higher education—liberal, illiberal, or whatever.” Organizers had contemplated naming the new school either after Viribus Postum Mallhardt III , Chief Executive Officer of family-owned Mallhardt Agglutinated Ventures and the project’s main financial backer, or Senator Trent Lott (Republican, Mississippi), its most prominent political sponsor. Squabbles over the institutional christening figured centrally in derailing the enterprise. What might have been called Mallhardt College or U-Postum is now known derisively by one splinter-faction as “Trent’s Lot”. The unfinished utilities ditch, filled with stagnant water, carries the derisive moniker “Lott’s Trench”.

Before falling out with his collaborators and suspending his cooperation, the senator had hoped to lend his name to what his aides affectionately dubbed Big Lott’s, with the possibility, after retirement from the Senate, of being named chair of the Graduate Program for Comparative Male Cheerleading Studies. Other issues acting to dampen the ardency of erstwhile lobbyists for “Neo-Conservative humane higher education” concerned the administrative structure, the content of the curriculum, and the extent to which maintenance and other non-academic services might be outsourced to external contractors.

Many curious parties are asking the question: Just what is “Neo-Conservative humane higher education”? Mallhardt Agglutinative Ventures spokesman Dewey Eggbert Pinwhistle, who interned with then House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, agreed to explain the basic concepts. Reaching into his briefcase, Pinwhistle revealed two arcane-looking electronic devices, of different vintages, which he offered to the interviewer’s examination. “Let’s take inventory. What you have in one hand is a large, clumsy, easily breakable RCA vacuum tube of the kind used in the early, room-sized UNIVAC computers. What you have in the other hand, so small that it could be implanted in one of your molars, is a state-of-the-art Whazzmacker Industries twelve-point-eight gigahertz, quadruple-threaded, fifty-system Armageddon Series-6000 microprocessor with the lowest minimal memory and highest neutrino-moderated throughput of any crypto-accelerated low-impedance mother-chip currently on the market.”

How would this approach affect the logistics of higher education delivery? “Let’s view it from the literacy angle—Gutenberg and all that. Do you grasp that Gutenberg invented the printed book over five hundred years ago? What would our economy look like today if we were still yoking oxen to ploughs in our agricultural sector or lacing women into whalebone corsets in our luxury underwear sector? But that’s the way boards of regents tend to look at higher education. Now I’d like you to think of the typical university research library as resembling the old UNIVAC computer,” Pinwhistle said, “and a book sitting somewhere on a shelf as resembling the RCA vacuum tube. It took hundreds of thousands of those books to make a library, and scores of librarians in whalebone corsets to keep it all in order. That’s not even considering the fact that finding any given book involved the tremendously inefficient labor first of discerning the call number in the card catalogue and then of physically retrieving the volume from the shelf. Students, most of whom also resemble vacuum tubes, then had to spend ungodly hours committing to rote obsolete context-specific judgments that had been bequeathed to the Twentieth—or even to the Twenty-First—Century by past centuries that had never even heard of Whazzmacker Industries or crypto-acceleration. Now let’s think of the Whazzmacker Armageddon Series-6000 microchip as representing Neo-Conservative humane higher education. Why carry around a backpack full of five-hundred-year-old books when you can stick a microchip into the rigging of a polyester sports bra and forget about it? The key principles of Neo-Conservative higher education are minimal memory and the highest possible throughput. Instead of squinting at books in a carrel, the educator treats the brain of each student as a processing-core and treats instruction as the crypto-accelerated routing of data.”

Pinwhistle offered another analogy: “Let’s imagine that the cultural heritage of Fifth-Century B.C. Athens, with its brilliant philosophers and politicians, is a large dust bunny clinging to the parquetry in the corner of your grandmother’s Victorian living room. Only it’s a vicious, quasi-sentient dust bunny with really sharp teeth and a nasty, weasel-like disposition, full of rancor, just like all intellectuals. Now let’s imagine that your grandmother is a Nineteenth-Century-type old-fashioned manual carpet sweeper, with pig-bristle mounted gear-driven rotary spools for its action and the whole works housed inside a decorative tin carapace; and let’s imagine further that your grandmother wants to interface with the dust bunny. I mean, who wouldn’t? Okay, you grab ‘grandma’ by her long wooden handle and you keep ramming her jut-jaw-first into the corner—back and forth, back and forth—but the pig-bristle rotary brushes underneath the wheeled sweeper head never get quite far enough into the wall-angle to snag the dust bunny, which mocks you from its asylum, just like the liberal elites always do.”

Pinwhistle warms up to his subject: “Wouldn’t it be better if your grandmother were a sleek 1990s-type Bissell Upright with touch-controlled auto-motion, plenty of amperage, lots of high-powered suction, and a detachable hose with a variety of tools? Now let’s go further than that. Let’s imagine that Socrates, the Father of Philosophers, is a 1920s-type pneumatic transport system in a large metropolitan department store, with almost no back-streaming or out-gassing and with concomitantly high throughput. Next let’s imagine that you are a modern gigabit flash drive of the kind whose price has dramatically decreased in just the last two years thanks to cheap coolie labor in China and the extinction of the mom-and-pop store in small-town America. Hey, that’s what globalization is all about! In one final twist of our thought experiment, let’s imagine that Socrates wants to marry your grandmother. Stranger things have happened. How do you get these two incompatible information networks to interface? The obsolete way is to have a bearded old goat in a dirty chiton start asking your grandmother all sorts of accusatory questions—like what is the good, what is the beautiful, and what is the ratio of your amperage to your suction?”

Pinwhistle continues: “That’s the old model of education. Notice that it never grabs the dust bunny and that it offers no USB port for your flash drive. Neo-Conservative humane higher education operates with a lot more amperage and a lot more suction than the existing federally subsidized type of carpet-sweeper higher education. In it, the education supplier—very much on the model of successful entrepreneurial service industries—brings the incentivization to the student, the way the pizza delivery service brings the pie to your door or the way Deborah Jeane Palfrey brings the svelte cocktail party escort to the congressman. Think of old-fashioned education as the 1890 Sears Catalogue and Neo-Conservative humane higher education as the Victoria’s Secret online search engine. Then think of yourself in student-mode as the congressman and the range of required courses as the svelte cocktail party escort who not only brings her own pizza, but has her own USB port as well, and whose services you can order from a Mallhardt Mega Warehouse—at a steep discount because of high-volume sales—instead of from some pricey ‘secretarial agency’ in the District. In this analogy, the lady provost of a typical state college would be an Eighteenth-Century reciprocating steam pump and the chair of Women’s Studies would be the chassis of a Lima Works oil-fired freight-hauling locomotive. Try putting a push-up bra or a cheerleader’s outfit on one of those! Never mind about a whalebone corset. In an incentivized situation, the problem of the mismatched interface presents much less of a hindrance to the final coupling of the flash drive and the USB port, or the vacuum-cleaner attachment and the dust bunny, than in the old way of doing things. In a phrase, Neo-Conservative humane higher education is about amperage and suction; it’s about Wankel pumps and high positive displacement, especially if your grandmother is Deborah Jeane Palfrey.”

Senator Lott’s faction has its own ideas. Senatorial aide Larch Speke-Wrightly echoes his boss’s own words when he remarks that “Neo-Conservative humane higher education has to be more than just sitting in a lecture hall carving your girlfriend’s name into the desktop with an Exacto-Knife while the English professor drones on about how Truman Whaleville sailed around in a big peapod—or maybe it was some kind of pipsqueak—and how he continuously avoided the Spanish Frittata by searching for a Great Slight Male in some specific ocean or another. That was in The Scamperfairy Tales, right, or was it The Harlot’s Letter? I always get those two confused because they’re basically the same story. They were both later rewritten as Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, which made a lot more sense to me than the other two, particularly in the movie version. Anyway, apart from himself, Senator Lott has known many Great Slight Males, like his late colleague Strom Thurmond or his not-so-late one Orrin Hatch, and as far as large bodies of water go, anyone who’s been to the Pascagoula shore can tell you that one ocean looks pretty much like another when your kids bury you up to your neck in the sand and leave you there with the hermit crabs tickling your honker. So why get bollixed up about specifics? What I’m trying to say on behalf of the senator is, education needs to be practical, as well as ineffectual—or worse than that, pseudo-ineffectual. Man, I hate those guys! Most of them are… you know… a little bit limp in the handshake, like they pranced right out of Whaleville’s Homeo and Juliet—which I’m told can actually be found in junior high school libraries here in Mississippi—or maybe art school. The senator is looking into that. Our idea for Big Lott’s was that kids from a certifiable Country Club Republican background would be able to browse at leisure for four or five years, sampling a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but without the obligation of buying or remembering anything. They could have a slushy in the food court and maybe some extreme fajitas. Then they could go on to become lawyers.”

How, our interviewer wondered, does humane or liberal knowledge specifically contribute to the intellectual development of a Young Republican or other GOP-oriented congressional-aide hopeful? Speke-Wrightly said: “Oh you’re back to that ineffectual stuff, huh? Well, have it your way. As the senator sees it, everybody, even a lawyer, should possess a little bit of fancy knowledge apart from remembering Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s cell phone number without ever writing it down—and the littler the better. Every educated person should create a mental asylum or a sort of bird-sanctuary, so to speak, deep down in his brain with a few good books, like maybe The Dialogues of Pluto and Don Peyote, displayed prominently on the shelves and a few more, like Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Deborah Jeane Palfrey in Kindergarten, on a coffee table. And plenty of high-class booze in the liquor cabinet. In times of job-stress or big political decisions that you don’t really understand, you can sort of go on junket down there, kick back, and maybe pour a drop or two of Seagram’s into your Postum. Or Sanka, if that’s what you prefer. We Republicans call this place our ‘Inner Rick Santorum’. That guy’s so smart he’s almost ineffectual.”

Exactly what does Speke-Wrightly mean by practical? “Power-dressing falls right in the middle of the practical category, especially for women. We think coeds should take at least one semester to study hot wardrobe tips from Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter, with some historical fashion-references from Phyllis Schlafly, who owns the world’s largest collection of naughty whalebone corsets. If you’ve ever attended a meeting of the College Republicans, you’ve witnessed the results of this. For those who see themselves as future House members, senators, or presidential cabinet officers, learning the right cheers is probably the most important thing. ‘Bloomers’ is a good one, but all the congressmen need to be wearing the same color underwear for it to work right. Senator Lott is good at ‘Buckets’, where you extend your arms straight out from your shoulders like you were holding a bucket in each hand. If you’ve lobbied effectively, the special interests fill up those buckets with shekels really fast. Sometimes ‘Buckets’ is also called ‘The Milk Maid’ and sometimes ‘The Bissell Upright’. It depends on the overall amperage, and on what type of push-up bra the congressman is wearing, but since the Palfrey Scandal we try not to talk about that. Once Senator Lott organized Senators Warner, Lugar, Hatch, Hagel, and Specter into an ad hoc ‘Cradle Catch’. They snagged Senator Clinton by surprise in the Senate Cloak Room and tossed her straight up. She did a full twisting double with a pirouette and then pulled off a Yurchenko before they caught her on her way down. Fortunately, all seven senators were wearing the same color underwear. If Monica Lewinsky had been able to do that, she might be Senator from New York today instead of Hillary. Then there’s ‘The Cradle Snatch’. That has to do with middle-aged congressmen, with or without flash drives, and House or Senate interns, usually with USB ports—it also requires buying and gift-wrapping the Victoria’s Secret lingerie beforehand and it’s by no means confined to ineffectuals. ”

The Catalogue of Courses and Student Handbook, now a mere false prophecy of shattered dreams, offers some clues to what four years of undergraduate studies would have entailed at Mallhardt College or Big Lott’s. The Catalogue lists among elective English courses, “Modern Literature 250”, a sophomore-level offering with the following booklist: Capitalism the Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand, Embrace the Serpent by Marilyn Quayle, Therese and Isabelle by Violet Le Duc, Sisters by Lynne Cheney, Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, Monica Speaks by Monica Lewinsky, A Reference Guide to Media Bias by L. Brent Bozell III , You Can’t Be Too Careful by ex-Congressman Mark Foley, and How the Borg Gave Us Barack Obama or Sleeping with Seven of Nine by former U. S. Senate hopeful Jack Ryan, all in their audio compact disc editions, except for Therese and Isabelle and Starship Troopers, which the Catalogue lists as DVDs. According to the course description, “Neo-Conservative Semiotics tends to concentrate—not to say linger over—gratuitous erotic titillation, especially unmotivated sex-scenes involving one-time-only drunken dorm-room lesbianism between two really hot heterosexual chicks who are ‘merely experimenting in a healthy way while in college,’ just like in Girls Gone Wild! Students might visualize Marilyn Quayle with Ayn Rand or Lynne Cheney with Monica Lewinsky. It is strongly advised not to try to visualize Ayn Rand with Monica Lewinsky, as astrophysicists think this might result in something catastrophic on a psycho-galactic scale that could only be depicted effectively in literature by H. P. Lovecraft or Michel Houellebecq. Guest lecturers during the semester will include Hollywood actress Dina Meyers, who will discuss the Neo-Conservative significance of the coed shower-scene in Starship Troopers, Lynne Cheney, who will supervise two or three visualization exercises, and Jack Ryan, who will demonstrate how divorce can make you cry like Meryl Streep.”

Intellectual History is represented in a course called “Bipartisanship in the Caucus of Ideas”. According to the Catalogue, “While Neo-Conservative thinking is a step or two down from Platonic and Hegelian thinking, or even a step or two down from Abbott and Costello or the Smothers Brothers, it remains dialectic. Thus Neo-Conservatives define ‘sovereignty’ and ‘citizen’ in terms of their opposites; in doing so Neo-Conservatives thereby enable themselves to vote with their honorable Democrat Party colleagues to leave the southern border completely unsupervised, except when an illegal entry is detected and stopped by the migrant’s chance encounter with one of the scarce border patrol agents. Neo-Conservatives regard illegal residents as equivalent to citizens because ‘they do the work that Americans don’t want to do.’ Neo-Conservative congressmen, by distinction, do the work that Americans don’t want them to do; they do it anyway, relentlessly, and they blame Rush Limbaugh when public opinion reacts against them. The Neo-Conservative dialectic operates in this fashion: suppose the right thing Constitutionally is A but Ted Kennedy wants B; Neo-Conservative congressmen divide the issue into two phases, giving Kennedy half of what he wants in one session, while holding the other half back, and then giving him half of what he wants in the next session, while congratulating themselves on having gotten away with the third half. ‘We felt we could vote for this measure because our colleagues across the aisle have given us most of what we want.’ They then retreat to their ‘Inner Rick Santorum’ and screen the coed shower scene from Starship Troopers. Normally, people think of compromise as bad when it concerns fundamental, especially constitutional, issues. Neo-Conservatives solve this problem by training themselves not to think.” The books for this course cover the history of ideas from the Pre-Socratics, for which the text is Sean Hannity’s Favorite Country-Music Lyrics, to Eric Voegelin, for which the text is Arnold, by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

According to impartial commentary, Mallhardt College or Big Lott’s failed not because of squabbling but because of an obsession with “outsourcing”. The entrepreneurs of Neo-Conservative humane higher education in the United States discovered that almost all services, from dining to budgeting, could be done more cheaply over the Internet by people in China and India. “In fact,” says an accountant who consulted on the project, “they found that Chinese, Indian, and Eastern European students, especially from the ex-communist countries, are already doing the disciplined studying that American students no longer want to do.” In a moment of reconciliation, Dewey Pinwhistle and Larch Speke-Wrightly shook hands and agreed that bygones should be bygones. “After all,” said Pinwhistle nostalgically, ‘we’ll always have Pepperdine.”

Latham cleared his throat as he nestled more deeply into the cushioned armchair beside his office’s one great window, reaching for his best lecture voice. Its highly practiced modulations were able even to indicate, in some inexplicable but infallible way, the casual misspellings of the print-out that he held as gingerly as holy writ or, perhaps, an item of fingerprint evidence:

I think that the Anead by Virgil features a more sympathy by far to the female heroin. Dido did not deserve to have what happen to her happen. She was a graceful lady and did everything to treat Aneas right when he showed up at her door needing everything and having nothing not even so to speak the cloths on his back. She helped him and he jilted her, leaving her far behind so he could go pursue fame and fortune in far-off

Italy

where he said the gods needed him. But if they were the gods why did they need him? They could have used anyone for their purposes, they being gods and all. He knew that but deserted Dido anyway. I feel he felt she was damaged goods so to speak—but he was the one damaged her and now she’s not of interest because she laid down her virginity and all she had for him, so he will be the “love ’em and leave ’em” type because now he is bored. The gods should never have made Dido fall in love with Aneas, it wasn’t her fault. But once they made it happen, he didn’t have to play along without him just wanting it that way all along.

Cutting a glance at his distressed auditor, Latham exhorted, “Wait, don’t die yet. There’s more. Indeed, the crux of the contrast is imminent, if I am not mistaken.”

Now Medea, there was no sympathy for her that one could have. Killing her own children just to get back at the man that wronged her! Jason was no-good, don’t get me wrong, just like Aneas. But at least Dido didn’t kill any children, and she wouldn’t have if she had any. She suicided herself in her grief, but she would never have killed her babies. Medea is one of these bitches who kill their kids just to date some guy who doesn’t want their kids around. She was a really wicked lady, and she thought it all over and did what would seem like it would really get to Jason, and for no other reason. She only thought of herself and her ego. So for that reason I feel that Medea sucks as a female heroin. You can’t have any sympathy for her at all. And if Eurypedes was like saying that this is what he thinks all women are like, then I don’t think we should even be reading him because it is just one more slam by a man on women he doesn’t even understand or want to understand, but just trash talk about.

“There, now… now you can heave that terminal sigh. I’ll even join you. We will… Jessup, let us suicide ourselves jointly.”

“Not until I’ve made you suffer, in return. Wait, now… where’s my gem about medieval romance?” Jessup flipped open a manila folder and mined his jewel from the papery depths with very little effort. At the same moment, he paddled the swivel chair (which Latham had pressed upon him in artificial politeness, the armchair being infinitely more comfortable) toward the window’s light. Yet he could not tune his voice, less rich and less mature, to transmit spelling errors through thin air. In what he began to read, one could only suppose that orthographical mayhem was of the “drive-by” sort, senseless and ubiquitous.

Women in the Middle Ages were either saints or sluts. There wasn’t any space between the two. You were either a white plaster saint on a pedestal with your hands clasped together looking up at heaven. The saints didn’t do anything but be saintly and wait for heaven, obstaining [“Yes, I said ‘obstaining’,” interpolated Jessup, mistrusting his tonal emphasis] from all sex with men and waiting around to get married and have children. Or else go into a convent. Or else they were complete sluts, tempting men into bed like prostitutes without brains, just bodies for men to stuff.

Well, the worst of these or a typical example of them, really, was the lady if you can call her that in Gawain and the Green Knight. She came on to Gawain every single morning that he stayed in their castle. She would slip through his door wearing a Victoria ’s Secret-type nightie, lock the door behind her (it didn’t say where she put the key) [“’Where’ is spelled ‘w-e-a-r’,” censured Jessup], and plop herself down on his bed. Then she had her cones in his face the whole time telling him how great his reputation was for the ladies and what a sorry disappointment he was for not jumping her bones right then and there. You do have to wonder about Gawain. He says at one point that he didn’t even have a girlfriend, so maybe he just didn’t like girls. And then there’s all that hugging and kissing of Bar-cilak the husband later on, in which Gawain seems kind of attracted to him.

Latham burst out laughing—seemed, indeed, to explode after a long-sustained partial suppression of laughter. “What? No comment about ‘gay was this goodly man in guise all of green’?”

“But this really isn’t bad, Jessup… that is, it’s an original, refreshing kind of bad. In fact, the image of the plaster saint, though proverbial, has long vanished to this generation, and so might be considered a genuine heuristic triumph. Did this person—is it a ‘he’ or a ‘she’?—did they, as the students say, really write, ‘It didn’t say where she put the key’? But that’s… that’s choice! That’s brilliant! Read no more! Give the man the prize! Or is it a coed?”

“Have you forgotten? All names and other possible references to the author’s identity or gender…”

“Yes, yes, yes. I had forgotten. But… wouldn’t you say it’s a lad? What lassie would ever think about where the lovely seductress might deposit the key? And then, ‘stuff’ as a metaphor for coition—not to mention ‘cones’—doesn’t sound very feminine to my conventional ear.”

“We’re not really supposed to discuss these matters, Comrade,” retorted Jessup in a mediocre bid for a Russian accent. “Continue this talk, and I shall have to report you to Komissar Silverstein.”

“Well, if it’s not, I’d like to know what side of the brain ‘green nightie’ emerged from.”

“Sir Gawain and the green nightie! Oh, this is exquisite! We have a winner! Sir Gawain and the Green Nightie!”

And Latham laughed and snorted until his rather too plush cushion sagged deeply beneath his rather too plush bottom.

“We must give this man—this scholar—his rightful award! Winner of the 2008 Erma Luftspiegel Award for Best Undergraduate Comparative Essay About Woman’s Historical Struggle! Applaud, gay knights! Now let’s fill out the form and go home.”

Jessup smiled, but appeared sincerely perplexed. “Um… there are a couple of problems. One minor, the other more formidable.”

“Oh. Jessup! I trust you’re not going to get hung up on some nugatory concern such as the incoherent argument, the factual blunders about the poem’s content, or the hideous lurching of the writing from one clause to another without regard for finishing an idea. These are but trifles beside such virtues as a disappearing key and a green nightie!”

“Away with Objection One, I say! Why, my piece on Dido and Medea had all of said foibles in spades. The essay is supposed to identify, not a strong hallucinogen, but a heroine who demonstrates initiative in the face of patriarchal oppression. My piece presents Dido purely as a victim; and while it does promote the view of Medea as a bitch, the word seems to carry none of those positive connotations prized by the contemporary female professional. The writer seems actually to hate Medea. Erroneous assertions, such as Dido’s virginity before the arrival of Aeneas, are legion; incoherent ones, such as that the childless Dido wouldn’t have killed her children even though she had none, keep pace. Grammar is conspicuous by its absence. So I put it to you that, merely as a display of miserable writing, Green Nightie has nothing whatever on Bad-Ass Ho.”

“Ah!” Latham waved with contempt and stared out the window, where the aging day gilded the archaic mansards of Fennimore Hall and the poplars lining the boulevard beyond. “I think you’re just being difficult, Carlton . This arbitration business is going to your head.”

The swivel-chair squawked as Jessup leaned back deliberately, eying his colleague like a poker-player about to double the stake on his remaining adversary. “I don’t intend to put my foot in it, if that’s what you mean. I’m not exactly as secure as you.”

“No, probably not. But somebody does care about getting something on me, and I don’t intend to make it easier. The contest in itself means nothing, as you say. But handled wrongly, it could have one very big loser.”

“Which brings us to Objection Number Two. If the author of Green Nightie truly turns out to be a male, then…”

“And particularly since the essay has so many transparent weaknesses, questions will be raised—and you could hardly blame anyone for raising them—about the motive behind our choice. Our making a mockery of the whole thing isn’t a case we’d want to expose publicly… but if worse came to worst, it might even be said that we weren’t clowning around at all—that we were just looking for a male to give the nod.”

“No, you’re wrong there,” interrupted Latham keenly, frowning at the semi-rural, now traffic-less boulevard. “No, the accusation would read that, as involuntary but incorrigible sexists, we had nosed our way to one of the more repulsive male entries—and there are probably few enough male entries, which makes it worse—because the scent of keg parties and porn flicks overcame our intelligence. The inadvertence of it would make us ten times more despicable.”

Latham wrinkled his mouth in a response often elicited by lemon juice. “What, then, is the alternative? Choose the entry with the best grammar, or with the least miserable grammar? That would leave us—and especially you, my young bull’s-eye-bearing straw man—in the middle of yet another mine field. The moderns would identify you with the ancients; and as the last surviving ancient, I can tell you that such an alliance will not work to your advantage.”

“Do you really have nothing… nothing, you know, a little more respectable in your pile? This one’s not bad, exactly. Just… insipid.”

“Yes, we could always go with insipid. Perhaps even a candidate for graduate study…”

“The grammar and spelling, at least, are… well, not bad.” Jessup lay the manila folder flat in his lap and cleared his throat:

Women have been recognized as higher beings as our history has advanced from the ancient times. Before, women were almost like senseless animals. In the ancient world, they had no rights and were not expected to show any judgment. Allowed to become rulers [“I’m afraid she wrote ‘a-l-o-u-d’,” whispered Jessup], they ended up falling for the first handsome stranger, like Dido. As gods, they were childish and always seeking to have their way, like Juno in the Aeneid [“Spelled correctly!” marveled Jessup]. Calypso and Circe were both goddesses and seductive females who couldn’t control themselves. They fell for the handsome Od… Od-ee-sus [“Hmm…”] thinking only of their lust and not of his wife and child.

Then in the Middle Ages, the Christian Era came. More was expected of women. The woman in Marie de France’s Laustic doesn’t even have a sexual act of any kind with the man who lives next door and speaks to her every night at their respective windows. [“Some rough riding there, I’m afraid.”] Yet she has committed adultery with him in her heart. She must go through a painful pinnace [“Uh-oh… chose the wrong option from Spell Check”] because she has broken her marriage vows in her heart for the next door neighbor. It is as if Marie is telling us that women can now be expected so much of [“Ouch!”] that even a sinful act only imagined is cause for just punishment…

“You know damn well we can’t. Besides the fact that her torment at the hands of her monstrous husband is not ‘just punishment’—and I admit, such a misunderstanding of the story is at least not on the level of imputing virginity to Dido—the whole tenor of the thing makes the author sound like a refugee—a reluctant refugee—from the walled-and-armed compound of some polygamous Texas sect of millenarians. Poor girl—for she is too obviously a girl! Only imagine how adrift she will feel in her pink pinnace if she ever steers into one of Professor Silverstein’s classes! I’m shocked to find that we have any such students here.”

“Well, apparently. But they cannot be allowed—not loudly nor even tacitly allowed—to come close to the Luftspiegel Award. I’m within a few short years of retirement.”

“You think anti-Christian bias here is that strong? What about Lodovico’s new book…”

“Oh, Carlton! Lodovico does the missionary thing in Africa. That is always above reproach. What you have just read, in contrast, makes it sound not only as though having sex with a man of her choice may sometimes be a sin for a woman, but as though the mere thought of it may be so. I’m telling you, this would… how can you…”

“Okay, okay. I had shuffled it to the back of the folder, as you may have noticed before I started reading. But we were talking about good grammar—or less-than-terrible grammar—and…”

“A secondary criterion. Even tertiary. Forget about it. Make it a tie-breaker, if we can find a tie.”

Jessup seemed distinctly disappointed in the response. His blondly innocent expression wandered neither out into the gathering evening nor in upon the seamlessly bookshelved walls, but inward, crinkling behind a clenched fist. At last he murmured, as if to himself, “I knew this was a trap.”

“A trap? This stupid contest? God, no, it’s not a trap! Why would it be that? It’s just something nobody else wanted to do. I was too old and slow-moving to get out of the way, and you… you were not in a position to say ‘no’ to any request of your chair, especially a tedious one with no promise of glory. For those are the chores reserved for you poor sods who dangle from thin threads.”

“Yes, I know. But that’s always true. You might say something wrong to the Vice President at a reception. That doesn’t make the reception a trap… not really. Only if you want to go through life being perfectly miserable.”

“But… but I think Dana really doesn’t like me. I think that’s why she sets me up at times like these—she really is waiting for me to stumble over my own feet.”

“Which you will not do—you’ve already stopped me from dragging us both down on a whim. And Dana… I can’t tell that she’s ever liked anyone. For her, the world is made up of superiors to be fawned upon, adversaries to be cleverly assassinated, and underlings to be treated with the utmost contempt. You and I qualify for the last, you because you haven’t been around long enough to fit the second category, I because my silver years have demoted me from any competitive ranking. Contempt is not hatred, however. It may well be the emotion with whose recipients she is most comfortable.”

Latham had perked up in his armchair, flapping his hands and working his mellifluous voice for effect. He stopped short now in mid-breath, observing that his colleague had scarcely lifted his eyes.

“Damn old lady Luftspiegel, anyway! An obscenely wealthy widow with time on her hands… so she takes night classes at the local liberal arts college, where she is introduced by Rhoda Witzinger—long before your time—to the mysteries and wonders of feminist revisionism and has a kind of epiphany about her own life. Oh, she saw other mysteries and wonders, too… but this one resulted in that damned award, which—to be fair—was really a logical-seeming next step to the guru’s teachings. Why not open up the entirety of history to close examination for signs of women throwing off the yoke? Trouble was… we had jettisoned all our ancient and medieval courses by then! Nothing left but the sophomore survey that even mentioned Dante’s name. Did any of your Ciceros mention Dante, by the way?”

“Um…” Engrossed in Latham’s words, Jessup was somewhat ambushed by the question. “Yes. Um… Green Nightie did, as a matter of fact. That was his example of a plaster saint. Beatrice… Dante’s wife! His dead wife.... But this is all fascinating about the award. I never knew any of it. So this Luftspiegel had been a student…”

“A very wealthy student. She first wanted to endow an entire new Department of Gender Studies, but cooler heads prevailed, and the Luftspiegel Library was born. The award was kind of a consolation prize for her literary designs gone awry. Only, as I was saying, there were now no students capable of writing intelligently upon the very historical periods she wished to have illumined in all their villainy, because the courses addressing such periods had been airbrushed from the catalogue as punishment for their evil deeds…”

“But now it was just a prize for someone taking the sophomore world lit survey…”

“Not even that, for a while. Right after the old lady’s death, during the competition’s first cycles, it was an award for the best senior essay on Madame Bovary or Sister Carrie or Sister Souljah or… or Françoise Sagan, how the hell do I know? Of course, the writing was far better… but the period, the modern focus, was all wrong. Frau Luftspiegel had specified that ancient and medieval literature should be the targets on the firing range. And her son and heir, to whom the gene for being a pain in the ass was passed along, had noticed this in one of his rare encounters with the written word.”

“Particularly idiotic? Oh, four or five years. Just before you came, I should say. So, you see, you could view yourself as stepping into a trap… but there are others in this department who probably view you as their savior, if not their lord.”

Jessup’s weak witticism clearly signaled that a cloud remained low over his head, and now the two of them fell to brooding in tandem. After all, fascinating though the contest’s history might be, its present cycle still possessed certain qualities of an unexploded land mine.

After a moment, Latham emitted a sort of laughing sniff, without even opening his mouth, and started thumbing through his stack of papers with apparent purpose.. Soon he announced, “Here, now! This is one that almost would do… or I suppose might do in response to the proverbial loaded gun pressed to my head. When your last paper was discussing goddesses—whom it very diplomatically, if tastelessly, referred to as gods—it set me to thinking of this one. Goddesses, you will notice, are but so many girls facing The Great Struggle with the rest of the sisterhood. Their divinity amounts to an aristocratic social class… not that social class is recognized as a lifestyle determinant of equal value to gender in any of these screeds. Marx, thy body lies a-moldering.”

And fishing out a slender mass of stapled pages, he cleared his throat once more. “Well… let me find yet another purple passage. Black-and-blue, more like…”

I liked Athena the best. She would be my nominee for a lady who really showed advancement and self-independence. [A pause for a sigh….] She wanted her man Odysseus back home, and she even went up against the great Zeus to demand her wishes. She was there for him when he got back home, too. She guided him in the fight and made sure that he was not hurt. She was crafty and smart, even disguising herself on many occasions. Other female goddesses were not this way at all. They were like spoiled children. Hera tried to ruin all of Zeus’s plans because she hated the Trojans because of the Judgment of Paris, and she continued to destroy everything he tried to do when she became Juno and he became Jove later in history. She seemed not to have a brain, just her passionate fury. She did trick Jove once by sleeping with him so that the Trojans could be killed, but this was not being smart. It reminded me of the prostitute in Gilgamesh who just slept with people to get them to loose their power. Athena would never have done that, because she didn’t sleep with anyone. It wasn’t clear to me if she just didn’t like men or was waiting for someone special. She obviously was not completely ruled by sex though and could hold out for something better. I wouldn’t want to live completely without sex, but I like it that she was not dominated by men. She was going to choose the man she wanted. I felt like she really wanted to choose Odysseus, but she also liked Penelope and didn’t want to break up their relationship. She was just a good person as well as a strong one. I would love to have someone like her as a friend. When I read the book, I just keep saying, “You go, girl!” everytime [“One word…”] she pops into a scene….

“But you’re right, Latham. It has possibilities. At least she’s smart enough—my God, there’s not any pretense of this one concealing her gender identity, is there? But at least she’s smart enough to keep her sentences short and avoid major grammatical gaffes. I know you don’t want to valorize grammar particularly… but there seem to be few other mistakes, either. Perhaps looking only at the Odyssey’s Athena and ignoring her conduct in the Iliad is tendentious, but I see such things as that in scholarly journals.”

The paper cracked so loudly in Latham’s impatiently waved hand that Jessup gave a mild start. His older colleague, having turned toward the window again—very abruptly—didn’t notice the effect. “Bah! I… I can’t do it!”

“That’s exactly what I mean! I tell them and tell them when I teach the survey that they must not evaluate the gods as if they projected human standards. Yet they do it anyway! Athena is, as you say, a new pledge attending rush—or a cool lady, a good person, a chummy companion. ‘You go, girl!’ My God, I hate that expression! I think I hate it almost as much as that incomparably repellent popular ditty—repellent in every way, from mawkish lyrics and swaggering tempo to witless, stomach-churning, narcissistic optimism—the one that began… oh, you know the thing. Even your generation must know it. What was it? ‘I am woman, see me go, watch me grow… nyah-nyah-nyah… I am invincible.’ Invincible, for Christ’s sake! If there is any lesson at all in the classics, Jessup—if there is one most basic lesson to which all others distill—it is the admonition against hubris. No one is invincible! I could slip on the stairs on my way out tonight… oh, but if a woman slips, then the college must be sued for negligence—or else it is the wicked programming of a sexist society which victimized her by placing high heels on her feet! I could have blood in my urine tomorrow—I could be dead of cancer in a month. But if a woman dies of cancer, it’s because not enough pink ribbons have been affixed to enough minivans—because society continues to evince a callous sexist indifference to lumps in breasts! Why, the natural state for any woman is immortality! That goes without saying! She is invincible! Anything short of that is a plot, an evil plot! Well, I’m sick of it, do you hear?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong.” Now Latham struggled to lower his voice, which had surged to a low shout with stunning speed and with no show of irony. He gazed into the violet sky with near-mesmeric intensity, perhaps afraid to look at his companion before he had shored up several tottering bridges between honesty and respectability. “I have two daughters, you know. God forbid that they should have lived before feminism. I can’t imagine them wasting their lives answering phones or… or producing baby cretins for some prematurely balding philistine stockbroker. But this invincibility folderol… who would want his own child, or anybody else’s, released into life’s jaws picturing herself as invincible? Why, it’s criminal! I suppose that’s why these girls simply cannot be brought to understand that the representation of goddesses in ancient texts is no window into the lives of human women—because it seems natural to them that women should be gods! What is invincible, but a god?”

Jessup raised his brows affably and nodded without looking Latham’s way, as if wanting to appear sympathetic but not trusting his eyes to show a proper depth of sympathy. His hands had slipped from the manila folder to grip the frail leathered arms of the swivel chair—to secure them, perhaps, against any attempt at squealing.

“I… oh my God, how I must have shocked you just now! That was quite an outburst! I don’t quite know where it came from…”

“No, no, no! It’s very interesting, really. I mean, I had never thought of it that way.” Jessup pondered his next words for another instant, then chanced a peak at his colleague. “I suppose the feminist argument would be… that we cannot allow ourselves to be locked into immutable truths, because then progress would become impossible. I mean, the existing power structure could always deny freedoms to its minions on the reasoning that freedom had already been pushed to its limits.”

“I’m not saying that I agree with that position. I’m just saying that I can understand why… why the progressive argument would be reluctant to admit the classical argument. There could be abuse…”

“Well, I suppose that’s the nutshell case for why the classics were thrown overboard. No more immutable truths. Not because they don’t exist, but because it would be impossible to distinguish between them and an abuse of power…”

“No… no, of course not. But you state it very well. And… and it has merit. Yes.” Latham’s stare had imperceptibly worked its way to the worn pine flooring which separated his laced shoes from his partner’s loafers. What he found there seemed to be far more sobering than anything he had read in the sunset. “So you would like to give the laurel to this essay, then?”

“Oh, no! Not at all! That wasn’t my intent… I mean, I think the tone is too… too ‘ OMG ’. You know—like a text-message from one coed to another. I agree with you about that. I really do. But… but we’re going to have to pick something.”

“Very late… yes. We have to have something by tomorrow. I should have agreed to meet earlier this week, but… but I had a stack of essays to return on Wednesday.”

“Ah….” Latham’s characteristic gesture of dismissal turned his vision back out the great window. He seemed to do a double-take, shifting from moody abstraction to specific interest. The outermost, western-most mansard of Fennimore Hall had caught fire in a late, low streak of sunlight, its old panes as hotly silver-white as a new star. When would those panes have been forged in a real flame? Almost two hundred years ago… unless someone had clambered up three stories on a scaffold to replace them while the sashes were being painted. And why would they ever need replacing, those panes, in two hundred years? Hail damage? But they would be small and thick, hard to crack. Their inequities probably bent outside images in strange ways to the insider’s eye, cast prismatic rainbows in strange spots across an old throw-rug or hardwood floor. And who would be sitting in that room day after day to enjoy the quaint distortions wrought by past’s crude hammer? What lowly bureaucrat would be relegated to such a high office? Perhaps it was a broom closet….

“I’m willing to go along with whatever you choose,” uttered Jessup’s voice very softly.

“B. Subterfuge. Create a prize essay. The students do it all the time—download a paper from the Internet. Why in the ever-loving hell couldn’t one of them do it this time?”

“Jesus, there’s a truly frightening thought! I wonder how much they had to pay?”

“But probably not. If the contest had been for a grade instead of a thousand-dollar prize, then they would have plagiarized. A grand doesn’t mean much to them, even though all of them are always broke.”

“Doesn’t mean a thing. The terminals in the lab were all taken off-line for the occasion, but … but cell phones are always smuggled into any exam, in my experience. The kids can access the Internet on a screen smaller than your palm and copy whatever they find.”

“Can they, now? Damn them for resourceful little bastards! I never knew that. Still… the monitoring presents a problem.”

“Let me get this straight: you’re going to download an essay from the Internet…”

“No, no, no, no. No, Jessup. I’m going to write an essay. To be precise, I’m going to re-write a very good essay I received early in the term… something about Marguerite de Navarre. The girl who wrote it… Haley Ngyuyen, do you know her? No? Well… very bright. Sharp as the proverbial tack. But lazy. At least… I couldn’t get her to sacrifice one afternoon and go rewrite the thing, essentially, for the Luftspiegel competition. I think she said she had to be at work! Imagine thinking of filthy lucre at such a time, when the door of eternal glory cracks open to admit you… with a thousand bucks sitting on the other side. Surely that represents a lot of tips, even today! But… but since the session was monitored, there will be a record of attendees… and that complicates matters. Do you happen to know who did the monitoring?”

“You mean that thankless, menial chore for no extra pay and carrying no recognition for services rendered?”

“Jessup! You sly dog! Very well, then, we’re in. I’ll rewrite Haley’s essay tonight, being certain to introduce a solecism here and there in homage to the occasion’s haste, but not anything of the sort that would indict the girl’s native intelligence. In fact, I intend to spruce up the content, just a bit. Haley is a worthy cause. The money will be welcome, she will do credit to the institution… and her demographic profile, as you might say, is a public relations officer’s dream. I suspect she is probably even Buddhist.”

“But… but how will you explain it to Haley? She wasn’t there, and… and if she sees the rewritten essay…”

“Trifles, Jessup, trifles. I shall tell her that several entries were culled from classroom essays because too few students appeared at the designated time. I’ll also say that it’s entirely conventional for the winning essay to undergo a tiny bit of rewriting for publication in the student literary journal and elsewhere. How’s she ever going to know otherwise?”

The swivel chair squawked like a badly wounded partridge as Jessup fell back with full impact, dazed. “It’s brilliant!”

“But you,” pursued Latham, heaving himself from his plush chair with miraculous new life (and stumbling forward almost upon Jessup’s loafers), “you will have to obtain another entry form and fill it out properly, including—especially including—the correct date.”

The older don’s papers had spilled all over the floor in his remarkable leap. He now stepped over them and gave a cat-like stretch, his back and balding head to the window. The younger man, still smiling, leaned from the swivel chair to reach tentatively for one of the fallen essays.

“Oh, leave it! The cleaning lady will retrieve them all. ‘Lady’, indeed! Athena demoted to a lady, the charwoman promoted to one… no comrade workers, all of us lords and ladies. What a brave new world for us, Jessup! And you see, don’t you, that with a little subterfuge… you are invincible!”

“In fact,” murmured Latham around a wagging finger, swaying back toward his colleague as the two hovered over their briefcases, “it occurs to me that you have a chance at a real coup here. Not simply a dodge of the proverbial bullet… but a real coup.”

“This exercise has made me realize how damaging is the survival of the classics even in our watered-down sophomore survey. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. To see these young imbeciles bandying about Homer, Virgil, Dante, as if they were so many… ah, what’s the phrase? Those insipid comic-book dildos that they paste all over websites… clip-art! The classics are nothing but clip-art to this generation. They’re a strategy for low-level rhetorical points. ‘Give me my promotion, you loathsome white male! Do you take me for Dante’s Beatrice, to be thus walked over? Do you expect me to do your dirty-work forever, like Enkidu’s prostitute? I have a lawyer who, like Circe, can change you into a pig!’ It is my opinion—my considered opinion—that we should stop doing this. It advances no one and nothing. It desecrates the memory of great texts, and… and it impedes our young charges from… from credibly making the kind of sales pitch that they do so well among those of their kind and in their own lingo. The classics are dead. They have no relevance to this generation… or probably to future generations. Let them rest in peace. Erase the sophomore survey from the books—at least its first half. History begins with the eighteenth century. That’s what you need to tell them, the whole department, the next time a curricular discussion arises. You’ll have them all on board—particularly Dana. Give that little spiel of yours about the contradiction between immutable truth and progress. Make them see that we are actually standing in the way of progress as long as we keep burdening impressionable young minds with ancient ideas. Make them see that it is their moral duty to declare that nothing happened before the eighteenth century.”

Jessup had turned a shade paler—or perhaps the sun had finally started to dip behind the distant poplars. His upper teeth might have glinted in a smile… or they might have been shaping a word which refused to take wing.

“Well, I… but I rather like some of those old texts. And my Chaucer class…”

“Your Chaucer class is upper-division, and would of course remain untouched. I’m just pointing out to you how we could… how we could spare texts we both admire this obscene kind of death agony, how we could spare our underclassmen the misery of suffering through authors they can’t understand and will only grow to hate—and, oh, by the way, how you could both remove some of Silverstein’s suspicion of you and ensure that we would never again pass an afternoon like this one. For the rules of the Luftspiegel competition would have to be completely overhauled. Luftspiegel fils, the son and heir, would have no choice but to comply. We could return to our piles of essays about Madame Bovine-Ovary, a hallowed ground we never should have left.”

“Think about it. No need to make up your mind soon. But there is a need—a pressing need—for you to construct an entry form for Haley Ngyugen. ‘N-g-y’… Vietnamese origin, you know.”

“Yes. And do it tonight. You do the form and I’ll do the essay. You’ll be making a first-generation hard-working legal American very happy.”

This time, Jessup was laughing less obstructedly, in the vicinity of merrily, as Latham escorted him out his office’s door with a mild push on the shoulder. Then the older man—the no-longer-young Full Professor—shuffled very slowly back to his desk, where he allowed his briefcase to collapse upon the blotter. After some hesitation and heaving a very deep sigh, he grunted uncertainly, laboriously, to his knees, balancing his descent against the desk, and began to collect the scattered papers.

Ivor Davies has been a frequent contributor of humorous stories about academe to this journal for many years. He resides in the southeastern United States, but prefers for his institutional connections to remain undivulged.

The Vanishing Cultivated Girl and her Replacement: From Reading Novels to Talking Trash on Campus

Literacy’s Mystic Moon: The Flow and Ebb of the Sublime Through the English Classics

John R. Harris