The modern order has been critiqued as an attack on marriage and the family, invading the domestic sphere, the table and the bedroom, the home. It has obliterated–still somewhere in the common memory–the great lordly house that promised a reconciliation of private and public goods, of generosity and inwardness, sharing the joys of its hidden life with neighbors and dependents, and lifting them above themselves. A promise perhaps ultimately symbolic rather than literal, but nevertheless it was without a doubt literally real.

But I’m already ahead of myself, because I was going to say that the modern order is equally an attack on the inner life of those collective symbols and institutions which form the sphere of public life: the polity, the school, the university, the church, (should I add, the battlefield?).

Little enclaves of culture and devotion cannot survive, let alone flower, without clergy, teachers, administrators, and statesmen who dedicate themselves to a truly public ministry and, in doing so, create and cultivate a sphere for common works and projects, for noble alliances and friendships, for shared understanding, feeling, and devotion.

“The unmistakable sign of greatness in a city is the presence in it of people who are courageous and hardy enough to play public roles, to be public figures.

For when one is a public person, one sacrifices time and leisure, comfort and pleasure, but, even more, one relinquishes that secret dream in which we all share, the dream of being irreproachable and flawless, superior without being tested. The public person is visible. He stands in the light; and, more, he stands for something. He receives blame and ridicule; and whatever praise and admiration come his way are given long after such tributes have ceased to matter.

The public man is a leader and a worker. He does not work merely to keep busy, but to accomplish. True work transforms a portion of the world: it is not mere routine or mechanical drudgery. Work is the encounter between the human and the nonhuman; between man and things. Work is man’s great joy. The public man knows this secret; he works on projects, with others; he is a team worker. His entire life is given over to his work: if he entertains, it is to foster the spirit of community and perhaps induce others to work for the general welfare; if he retreats to his vacation home, it is to store up energy for another task.”

Imagining Dallas, Louise Cowan

Ad Jo Albulam. Virtutis Genius.                        To Johannes Albula. The Genius of Virtue.

Virtus aetheri conscia sanguinis,                       Virtue aware of her celestial blood

Astrorumque soror non amat, Albula,               and sister of the stars does not love, Johann

Inter serpere fungos                                                           to creep between the mushrooms

Et declivia vallium.                                                            and declivities of valleys;

Semper summa petit; quo neque nubium        But flies forever to where not even feathers

Nautum Romulei flammigerum Iovis               excited by deep wind bear the flame-bearing

Pleno concita vento                                                              proud sailor of the clouds,

Transfert penna satellitem.                                             the Eagle of Jupiter.

Illius labor est nobile pabulum,                          Her noble food is labor, and her rest

Acclinis clipeo porrigitur quies                         To stretch out, head propped against a shield,

Accenditque soporem                                                           until sweet danger of war

Belli dulce periculum.                                                        enkindles sleep in her.

Iam cum sidereis otia fratribus,                         There she shares Leisure with her starry Brothers,

Iam cum fulminibus proelia dividit                then battles, with her brother Lightning flashes,

Lustralique tonantis                                                              and loves being sprinkled well

Gestit sulphure spargier.                                                   with the thunderer’s lustral sulphur.

Supra Fata rapax tollere se domat                    Hungry to rise above the Fates, she tames

Formosis humilem sub pedibus Metum.        ignoble fear beneath her shapely feet,

Si Fortuna lacessit                                                                   and if Fortuna mocks her

Constans adicitur sibi.                                                          she steadfastly gathers strength.

At cum pulvereo fumat ab aequore,                But when smoke rises from a dusty field

Corpus non gelida fluminis abluit,                 She does not wash with chilly river water

Sed sudore lavatur                                                                   But bathes in sweat, a Goddess

Neglectu Dea pulchrior.                                                     more beautiful for neglect.

Auri nulla fames, nulla sitis lucri;                   No hunger of gold she has, no thirst for profit;

Dedignatur humum figere spiculis:                 she scorns to fasten arrows to the earth.

Arcus tota cupido                                                                     The bow’s whole longing flies

Metam fertur in arduam.                                                     to a much steeper goal.

Promittente necem vulnere gloriae               As a wound promises death, a death in glory,

Migrat cum Domino fida comes suo                 the faithful comrade migrates with her Lord,

Heredique superbit                                                               proud to be left like plunder

Linqui, ceu spolium, pigro.                                                to her unwilling heir.

From Ramify’s ”Biography” of Balde:

Jacob Balde (1604-1688) was a German poet and Jesuit Priest  and perhaps the greatest of the Neo-Latin poets. … He taught Classics and Rhetoric in Munich and Innsbruck, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1633. Balde served as professor of eloquence at the University of Ingolstadt before being called to Munich to educate the sons of Duke Albert. He also served as court preacher to the elector Maximilian I. In 1654 he was sent to Neuberg, on the Danube, on account of his failing health, becoming an intimate friend and advisor to the Count Palatine Philiipp Wilhelm. Balde died 1668.

Balde was a prodigiously prolific, prodigiously various poet; his biographer Georg Westermayer calculated that he published over 80,000 verses; they include four book of “Lyrica” (i.e. lyric odes in classical meters), a book of “Epodes,” nine books of Statian “Silvae,” many books of Elegy, Satire, Pastoral, and Epic, and even a brilliant tragedy (Jepthe, later renamed Jepthias). Although not all of equal weight, within this variety is a kind of unity; as Westermayer says, “Overall one can discern four distinct poetic times of day in Balde’s life: an Epic morning (1626-1637), a lyrical midday (1637-1649), a Satirical evening (1637-1649), and an Elegiac twilight (1662-1668).”

Among the “Lyrica” alone the variety is huge; they include acerbic epigrams, haunting pure lyrics, admonitions to every kind of person, elegies, prayers, and dozens of hymns to the Virgin for which he was especially famous.

During his lifetime, all over Europe Balde was hungrily read, imitated, and envied. Within just a few generations of his death, Latin verse largely ceased to be written, or much read, with the result that few could even understand his too compressed, too subtly allusive Latin. He was later discovered by Herder, and prized by Schlegel and Goethe, but then again largely forgotten; and he remains so today, except among specialists in Germany.

But that is our loss. Unlike many of the Neo-Latin poets, whose poetry is filled with prefabricated parts plundered from the ancients, Balde’s Latin, in the words of Karl Maurer, “is often so fresh and strange, so dense with simultaneous, fully imagined images, that is as if, like Catullus or Vergil, he were stretching Latin beyond its proper bounds.”

“Of course,” writes Maurer, “translations of Latin verse of this quality can only be coarse simulacra. But they might perhaps cause a few readers to notice the denseness and power of the Latin, and the fact that some of these poems are masterpieces.”

More Balde here: http://udallasclassics.org/maurer_files/Balde.pdf

Ramify here (do feel free to subscribe!): http://www.ramify.org/issues.php

“Being here with you, I am reminded of my own first steps as a professor at the University of Bonn. At the time, the wounds of war were still deeply felt and we had many material needs; these were compensated by our passion for an exciting activity, our interaction with colleagues of different disciplines and our desire to respond to the deepest and most basic concerns of our students. This experience of a ‘Universitas’ of professors and students who together seek the truth in all fields of knowledge, or as Alfonso X the Wise put it, this “counsel of masters and students with the will and understanding needed to master the various disciplines” (Siete Partidas, partida II, tit. XXXI), helps us to see more clearly the importance, and even the definition, of the University.

…

At times one has the idea that the mission of a university professor nowadays is exclusively that of forming competent and efficient professionals capable of satisfying the demand for labor at any given time. One also hears it said that the only thing that matters at the present moment is pure technical ability. This sort of utilitarian approach to education is in fact becoming more widespread, even at the university level, promoted especially by sectors outside the University. All the same, you who, like myself, have had an experience of the University, and now are members of the teaching staff, surely are looking for something more lofty and capable of embracing the full measure of what it is to be human. We know that when mere utility and pure pragmatism become the principal criteria, much is lost and the results can be tragic: from the abuses associated with a science which acknowledges no limits beyond itself, to the political totalitarianism which easily arises when one eliminates any higher reference than the mere calculus of power. The authentic idea of the University, on the other hand, is precisely what saves us from this reductionist and curtailed vision of humanity.

In truth, the University has always been, and is always called to be, the “house” where one seeks the truth proper to the human person. Consequently it was not by accident that the Church promoted the universities, for Christian faith speaks to us of Christ as the Word through whom all things were made (cf. Jn 1:3) and of men and women as made in the image and likeness of God. The Gospel message perceives a rationality inherent in creation and considers man as a creature participating in, and capable of attaining to, an understanding of this rationality. The University thus embodies an ideal which must not be attenuated or compromised, whether by ideologies closed to reasoned dialogue or by truckling to a purely utilitarian and economic conception which would view man solely as a consumer.

Here we see the vital importance of your own mission. You yourselves have the honour and responsibility of transmitting the ideal of the University: an ideal which you have received from your predecessors, many of whom were humble followers of the Gospel and, as such, became spiritual giants. We should feel ourselves their successors, in a time quite different from their own, yet one in which the essential human questions continue to challenge and stimulate us. With them, we realize that we are a link in that chain of men and women committed to teaching the faith and making it credible to human reason. And we do this not simply by our teaching, but by the way we live our faith and embody it, just as the Word took flesh and dwelt among us. Young people need authentic teachers: persons open to the fullness of truth in the various branches of knowledge, persons who listen to and experience in their own hearts that interdisciplinary dialogue; persons who, above all, are convinced of our human capacity to advance along the path of truth. Youth is a privileged time for seeking and encountering truth. As Plato said: ‘Seek truth while you are young, for if you do not, it will later escape your grasp’ (Parmenides, 135d). This lofty aspiration is the most precious gift which you can give to your students, personally and by example.”

http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Pope-to-academics-at-WYD:-Young-people-need-real-teachers-22410.html

For instance:

…We wonder, “How do we name?”

There are three possibilities: first, we give names completely arbitrarily—there is no recognizable connection between a thing and its name. Achilles means nothing to us, whether or not it meant anything to his namer. Second, we name by isolating a remarkable characteristic. I think of Ray’s first fictional hero, Swivelhips, or of mine, the lanky, long-legged pitcher with a kick like Warren Spahn’s who released the ball out of a bewildering windmill of limbs. His teammates looked up at him on the mound and called him Highpockets. Third, we do so by transference, by the paradoxical habit of calling something what it is not, that is, by metaphor. Now I think of that figure who roamed through centerfield long ago in Fenway Park, Tris Speaker, so elusive conceptually that he needed two names to describe him, the Grey Eagle and the Spook. When he ran under the ball, he became a poltergeist and a bird of prey, spectral and swift. Or what about the fellow who played later in left? They called him the Splendid Splinter, so total a hitter that he seemed to be a piece of his own bat, Ted Williams.

You can see then that this practice of naming tells us something about the difference between language as qualitative and number as quantitative. Numerical precision applied to speech would require that one word denote only one thing, which would make language impossible. We could never learn it, because the simplest statements would be unutterably complex. The solution of speech is to make use of ambiguity, which gives us the strange result that clarity is the product of the lack of clarity. A man is a hungry, swooping ghost. Naming, therefore, through its deliberate confusions, by bringing unlike things together as if they were alike, instructs us in the nature of the same and the different.

I won’t quote the last passage–”the foreign has this power”–but it’s wonderful.

Dr. Louise Cowan: Address to the Faculty

Apart from the Church, the university is the most powerful institution in our society today. It controls the health of all the professions, of industry, of government, and the very texture of daily life. But, as an institution, it is currently in trouble. This particular university that you and I share was designed to meet that trouble head-on and somehow to change the direction of American education. So it is not really our university that is the problem: it is the whole system, for which we might be said to be the solution. This is our moment.

So let me make clear that I consider the University of Dallas the most important underground organization in our society today. It is already determining the spirit of education in hundreds of classical high schools; its graduates have themselves founded institutions of higher learning; it educates teachers, influences the curricula of other colleges, staffs their faculties, sets the pace for liberal arts and humanities organizations, as well as produces business, professional, and political leaders. Despite its lack of public notice, UD is well known among those truly interested in higher education. It has taken seriously its revolutionary task of being what a university is meant to be and has forfeited much in order to keep that integrity. What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose his soul? So this university, guarded by its faculty, has kept its soul. But on its fiftieth anniversary it faces not only the opportunity for which it was intended, but the crisis that could divert it from its true path. For, as Donald Cowan used to say, this university belongs to itself—not to the diocese, or the state, or the board; not the administration, the students, or even the faculty. And so we need always to consider what it wants to be. We cannot afford at this juncture to do nothing. So, much as I may seem to be reminiscing in the remarks that follow, I mean to be speaking to you of what this University truly is and of what it is meant to be—its character, that soul it has not lost.

But some moments contain within them an entire future. And such a moment it was forty-seven years ago, when this University was completing its third year, and Gene Constantin, Ed Maher, Bishop Gorman, and Msgr. Maher took Don and me to dinner, confiding in us their hopes for this new institution that they, along with the Sisters of Mary of Namur, had founded. They wanted it to make a difference in America and the world. We saw that we shared with them a piety toward the ideals of our nation (a cast of mind already becoming rare) and a conviction that we were witnessing the end of a long cultural era. We all agreed that the hope for our national ideals and indeed the world lay in American education. Further, like them, we held the conviction that not a college, but only a very fine university, even if small, could make any difference in the nation’s educational scheme. As Christopher Dawson had written in The Crisis of Western Education, “A Leviathan is huge; but he has a small brain.”

We conceived of a Catholic university as an opportunity for generosity on the part of the Church—the great texts from the past having been preserved in a Christian culture and now in danger again of being lost, a treasure trove as definite as the collection of art in the Vatican museum. And this meant, of course, that we conceived of a Catholic university’s chief task as educational, not specifically religious. We all agreed—the Bishop too, who had earned a doctoral degree at Louvain—that the kind of liberal learning that had developed ex corde ecclesia was something the Church could offer a world much in need of it. In fact, as we discovered, the founding motto of UD was “A Catholic university for students of all faiths.” As Mr. Constantin described it, it was to be a real university, not just another little college intended to protect the faith of young Catholics while they prepared for employment. The dreams of these founders were generous and bold; indeed, they may seem now a bit too bold in the audacity of their aspiration. But we listened. We heard them say that this institution had a unique mission. And, as we discovered, it already had variety. Founded by the unlikely combination of a group of dedicated, extremely conservative businessmen and an order of spirited, liberal nuns, it offered a home to a dislocated group of learned (left-leaning) Hungarian monks, attracted a community of charming (and right-leaning) Dominican friars. It had a talented non-political novelist as Dean. It was a strange and stimulating place to be in the pre-Vatican years, with a sense of purpose, a spirit of self-irony, a lot of bourbon—and an attitude. But it had to be directed away from the typewriters and the cooking ranges, the public speaking courses, the accounting ledgers, the textbooks.

Assured that we would have freedom to plan a curriculum if we came here, Don and I imagined what could be done with Catholic higher education. If we did cast our lot in with this new school, we made clear, it would have to be a real university–one dedicated to liberal learning for all its students. The world did not need another moderately good college. We were eager to develop innovative programs that would give an entire school a genuine education, for we felt sure that such a curriculum would ignite sparks, spread into a kind of firestorm, and eventually illumine an entire nation. We had converted to Catholicism in 1956 and had both taught at Vanderbilt before coming to TCU. Our ideas of education had been shaped by our friendship with the Southern Agrarians, along with study of Newman, Dawson, Maritain, Gilson, and intense reading in the brilliant theology of the forties and fifties—de Lubac, Guardini, Sertillanges, Rahner, John Courtney Murray—as well as C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot. All these writers were concerned with the relation of truth to culture. And all recognized that the culture we took for granted was in decline.

When Don and I came here, then, in the fall of 1959, as the heads of Physics and English, respectively, our imaginations were given over to the immense possibilities of this new school. Lyle and Sybil Novinski had arrived on the scene a year after us; and, with their talent and dedication, we managed to get things going toward the innovation and depth, the liveliness and style that we knew we needed to have, along with the seriousness of a rigorous curriculum. At my urging, the English department decided to use complete texts, rather than textbooks. We worked at developing what we considered a literature program rather than an English department, a program that, avoiding the over-specialization afflicting most English departments, would include translated texts and—most important of all—develop a philosophic approach to literature, considering it a genuine mode of knowledge. We started the Literary Tradition sequence, a literary discussion group, the Junior Poet project, a quite creditable literary journal, Kerygma. Then, when Don was made president, three years after we joined the faculty, the explosion became widespread, and a number of beneficent forces came together to make this a new start.

Don had a remarkably original mind and a varied background; he had had business and engineering experience; had taught radar to the Army Air Forces, and had taken the lead in developing the use of this new technology. After the war, he had gone on for his doctorate in physics and served for a while as head of a group studying the peacetime uses of atomic energy. Then, teaching at Vanderbilt and later at TCU, he had developed a passionate commitment to educational principles. He had a prophetic sense that a new “post-technological epoch” would follow on the collapse that he felt was nearly upon us, a collapse that would mark the end of what he called “the myth of fact.” For him, all the disciplines, in particular physics and poetry, sought truth through the imagination as well as the intellect. As president of this new university, he was fearless and selfless, and, was loved and trusted by Mr. Constantin, who had lost his only son in the Pacific War. So there was a providential time, it seemed, when whatever appeared right to do could be done; and everything was collegial. Don engaged a number of brilliant if sometimes a bit eccentric professors—chief among them Willmoore Kendall from Yale and Fritz Wilhelmsen from Spain. I wish there were time to name all the fine additions—Leo de Alvarez, for instance, and Scott Dupree and such leaders as Frank Doe, Bob Wood, Bob Lynch, Tom and Grace West, Josef Seifert, Bob Sardello. The novelist Caroline Gordon was with us for seven years. Eric Voegelin, in the six months that he lectured on our campus, finished a crucial part of the final volume of his series Order in History. Jeff Wallen (the founder and director of AALE) was a young faculty member during this time and remembers it as a golden age.

This was the period when our basic curriculum was born, our graduate programs developed, the Rome and MBA programs begun; Braniff, Gorman, the mall, the tower, the library, the Margaret Jonsson theater were built, the McDermott lectureship and the O’Hara program established. The university was honored by the Neiman Marcus Irish Fortnight; the famous culinary expert Helen Corbitt became our friend and sponsor. Lyle Novinski and Heri Bartscht were changing the concept of art in the diocese; Judy and Pat Kelly were developing a drama department that would set new standards for academic performances, Cherie Clodfelter was adapting a solid education program to the liberal arts. All the disciplines were galvanized. We designed a Masters in Art, in English, and in Humanities, and, a few years later, a Ph. D. Program in Politics and Literature, which was highly praised by the Southern Association, though we were urged to incorporate in it more programs. It became the Institute of Philosophic Studies, with the four concentrations of Literature, Politics, Philosophy, and Psychology (the last mentioned under the distinguished chairmanship of James Hillman). In the city, Don and I were appointed to the mayor’s 60-member Goals for Dallas team. UD was accepted as one of the important Dallas institutions. It could boast of having on its board the former mayor, Erik Jonsson, Margaret McDermott, and Ruth Carter Johnson, the daughter of Fort Worth’s great leader Amon Carter. It had a woman’s advisory board numbering more than a hundred and fifty of Dallas’ most active social leaders, who met for literary study on campus once a week. The University was on its way to recognition by and support of the wider community. It was on its way to thriving as a really fine university.

Don and I felt intuitively that a tremendous cultural change was coming about; and hence were certain that this new university should not model itself on the current pattern. Our work, we thought, was turning out leaders, by retrieving and furthering the Christian and Classical tradition, considered as not merely the Great Books, but a living, vital continuum. We considered the works we taught as making up an organic body that we called “the tradition,” influenced by T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot declared tradition to be something not inherited but struggled for, speaking of the literary tradition in particular as a body of works that together make an organic whole—so that when a new work appears, the entire organism rearranges itself to include it, forming a new order. What this figure implies is the constant reinterpretation of the past as it responds to the unfolding of history; and we considered this process to be ongoing in all the disciplines.

But the galvanizing issue for us was Christopher Dawson’s interpretation of the rarity and value of Western Civilization. In Religion and the Rise of Western Culture he asks:

How did it come about that a small group of peoples in Western Europe should in a relatively short space of time acquire the power to transform the world and to emancipate themselves from man’s age long dependence on the forces of nature?

And he answers his question:

…, because its religious ideal has not been the worship of timeless and changeless perfection but a spirit that strives to incorporate itself in humanity and to change the world. In the west the spiritual power has not been immobilized in a sacred social order . . . It has acquired social freedom and autonomy and consequently its activity has not been confined to the religious sphere but has had far reaching effects on every aspect of social and intellectual life.

And then:

The activity of the Western mind, which manifested itself alike in scientific and technical invention as well as in geographical discovery, was not the natural inheritance of a particular biological type; it was the result of a long process of education which gradually changed the orientation of human thought and enlarged the possibilities of social action. In this process the vital factor was not the aggressive power of conquerors and capitalists but the widening of the capacity of human intelligence and the development of new types of creative genius and ability.

What inspired Don and me in Dawson’s thought was his conviction that it was not conquest and finance but education that gave the West its idea of progress. This was a recognition of the ability of education to change people, not just to conquer them, not even just to govern them, but to transform them; and in transforming them, to alter the destiny of the world. Implied in Dawson’s statement is the objective good of the Western focus on education, which he conceived not as a trait of one particular people, but as a universal truth needing constantly to be reinterpreted. The Western tradition could be seen, then, not as aggression and ruthless cupidity or mindless evolution, but as paideia, the leading out of new possibilities of the soul—not just a series of conquests. Within the panorama of violence that constitutes Western history (for all human history seems tragic in retrospect) could be discerned heroic attempts to educate: to move toward the good, not pointed toward one race, but universal in its intent.

The major influence on our thinking, of course, was Cardinal Newman’s insistence in his magisterial Idea of a University that the liberal quality of education is determined by the spirit in which learning is approached, not by specific courses. Further, Newman’s conviction was that in education one needs to be taken to the top of a mountain to see the vista below. Having once seen the whole of things, the learner’s viewpoint is forever changed. “If we would improve the intellect, first of all, we must ascend; we cannot gain real knowledge on a level; we must generalize,” he writes, and “That only is true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole.” It is this mountaintop experience that illumines UD education. The disciplines are viewed in a quite different light than if approached merely from the plains below. They have extension and perspective; they point to a whole, a beyond that imparts to them a dimension not otherwise discernible. The disciplines inform each other; and what is now called the “core curriculum” accomplishes this mountain peak experience for students at UD. This vision of the whole is something that happens to students nearly always in the second semester of their sophomore year. It all comes together, they say; and they have a hard time describing the experience. But it is recognizable as a kind of vision, an enlargement of soul that changes the way they look at things.

All this is a brief and hasty summary of the mission we had for this school in its first stage. The University of Dallas is not like other Catholic universities; and this difference accounts for the difficulty one faces in attempting to change it. But it nevertheless must change and grow. It has a stubborn identity, the value of which it conveys to anyone who seriously regards it. But it was at least partially changed in its second stage, an epoch from which it is just now emerging. During this period, it structured its course offerings, solidified what it calls its core, clarified its management, fortified its departments, built a solid faculty, strengthened the Rome program, developed a more conscious Catholic sense, came to regard academic specialization more kindly and curricula as firm and unchanging. It has grown up. But, now, on our fiftieth anniversary, facing of necessity a third stage in the unfolding of this university’s calling—with a genuinely learned and gracious president, an extraordinary faculty, a remarkable student body, and a concerned Board, we are asked to look again at our curriculum.

What I myself would suggest is that, just to make sure of our direction, we return in our imaginations for a while to that first vision of liberal education as a spirit illuminating study rather than as specific courses. For, if we need to find room for some innovations, not just any innovation will do; nor will other universities’ practices automatically merge with the flow of things in the deep underground stream that is the life of this institution. As Mark Twain said, about steering a boat up the Mississippi: “You have to know the shape of the river.” So changes and additions have to be made carefully, cautiously, from time to time—in line with the invisible flow that is the shape of this river, for the University has an indiscernible inner movement of its own.

At this juncture, however, what is primarily needed is a reformulation of our public role. We can no longer remain in hiding. The world needs us. This is no time for us to back down from our belief, with Mortimer Adler, that “the best education for the best is the best education for all.” We must move on into a third stage in our University’s history where we take the lead in an even more intense advocacy of liberal education at a time when the institutions that have shaped and supported society are already crumbling. As many authorities now tell us, we may be facing a new Dark Ages, when the light of Greece and Rome, the codes and courtesies of Europe, and the openness and freedom of the American way disappear from the human community. Civilization as we have thought of it already seems a thing of the past.

Of course, the elephant in the room, the object that it is difficult to speak about, is our conviction of the uniqueness of this university. Secretly, we know we are meant to be the flagship university for the Catholic Church in this new era, and our task has to be the investigation and expansion of true learning. We have to find among our collective selves the genius to know the true from the false—for our institution without doubt will grow and we need to know what choices to make. We have to be able to impart the liberal spirit to new programs. And this discernment will require meetings and colloquia, letters, discussions, arguments, insults, apologies. To change the old saw, battles are so bitter here not because the stakes are low, but because they are immeasurably high.

But the greatest key to our kind of education is something that we are already doing, something very simple and yet energizing: something indicated by one of my students after he had failed his M. A. comps and I encouraged him to try again. He called it “the alchemy of praise.” And something did indeed transmute him almost alchemically when we worked together in preparation. Perhaps this is the most distinctive aspect of the University of Dallas: you admire and love the University, each other, your disciplines, and your students. And that changes things. Willmoore Kendall once asked me, “Louise, why do you want people to love each other?” “Because it’s more fun that way,” I responded. But that was not the right answer. I should have said, as Pope Benedict’s recent encyclical puts it, “Because God lavishes on us a love which we must in turn share with others . . . in a heart that sees.”

In this light, the limits of what is to be praised in humanity have not yet been determined, though Greece in the 5th century BC and Europe in the 13th century AD attempted the task. It is in fact the exploration of these limits that constitutes the kind of liberal study the University of Dallas is meant to offer to a world in need.

Dr. Eugene Curtsinger : “Moby Dick on Campus”

There’s not much I can say that this faculty doesn’t already know. So I’ve decided to tell you two or three little stories, all of them true. A few years ago, one evening toward dusk, a carload of nuns–Sisters of Saint Mary of Namur–drove along the dirt road that is now transformed into Braniff Drive. They stopped to admire the farmland that might become the home of the University of Dallas. They could see a horse–Billy Colwell’s old nag–on a rise a hundred yards away, staring at them. In their fluttering black habits and white rims, they stood beside the fence and prayed for the deal to go through. I’ve never seen a flock of nuns trying to get through a barbed-wire fence, and it didn’t happen then. Sister Mary Margaret told me that they checked the miscellany of their pockets–pliers, rosaries, scissors, crackers, cigarettes?–but couldn’t find a statue of Saint Joseph to plant in the field. Sister Stanislaus came up with a small carving of the Infant Jesus of Prague. She threw Him over the fence into the plowed field, along with their prayers. On the way back to Fort Worth, the other sisters teased her. “The horse will eat it!”

A few years later, Professor Louise Cowan, with a little help from the English department, brought Moby Dick on campus, along with Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, and Light in August–each of these involving an approach to the cross–and other marvelous writings. I was busy writing novels, but I was soon caught up, again, in the wonders of Melville’s classic. You remember how Ishmael makes a double journey–out there, across the water, and in here, into the self. Sea-scape and soul-scape mirror each other. You recall Aristotle’s comment that “the human soul is, in a way, all things.” Parmenides pointed out that “thought and being are one.” Whatever Ishmael meets out there he discovers in the immensity of his spirit. Ishmael enters a spell of half-sleep, and a strange being, Queequeg, enters the room, bringing a light into Ishmael’s inner and gloomy November. The pagan harpooner comes from an island, Melville says, “far away and to the west and south, not down in any map. True places never are.”

Einstein is rumored to have said that “the imagination is more powerful than knowledge.” The alert reader soon realizes that our tattooed Queequeg comes not only from some cannibal island but also, by Melville’s magic, from the depths of Ishmael, and from the unmappable true place known as heaven. Is Queequeg a divine messenger–angel, archangel–bringing the light of Christ? Is he the Holy Spirit? Is he the place where our hero is hooked on to immortality? Along with their allegorical or symbolic roles, the characters in the novel have their own intense and literal reality. They’re real sailors, on a real ship, in a real and wet Atlantic.

They are also mysteries going on in the soul of our Ishmael. We do them some mis-service by translating them narrowly, but we might recognize Starbuck as the re-vivified conscience of our sinful Ishmael. A student wrote that “Starbuck even sounds like the conscience speaking in his low and steady voice.” Another sophomore wrote that “Captain Ahab’s leg was decapitated by a whale.” My brother said “he must have had his foot in his mouth.” Ahab, opposed by Starbuck, is the embodiment of Ishmael’s sin. As Ishmael grows to represent mankind, Ahab may be seen as all the sins we’ve ever enjoyed all the way from Adam down to now.

Classical Greeks liked to insist that knowledge and wisdom come only with work and suffering. But we’re built for learning, and we love to do it. Jolly Stubb is a celebration on two legs, always ready for a pipe, a drink, a song. He is the embodiment of Ishmael’s–and our–joy in our difficult journey toward ultimate truth. Other parts of Ishmael are running around loose on board the Pequod, but the cabin boy, black little Pip–in that mystery of person–is the irreducible core of Ishmael’s deep self. Pip, abandoned in the water, is”carried down alive to wondrous depths,” Melville says. “Strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes….He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it,” in that nautical term. The weavings of the classical Fates are being replaced, in Ishmael’s growing belief, and the loom is powered now by Providence.

The secrets of heaven are not sayable by the human tongue. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath the heart of man imagined” those delights. Music, poetry, the imagination, might touch on them, but they are cloaked securely. Pip, the core of Ishmael, has had a glimpse of ultimate truth. What wild knowledge-what soul-entrancing visions of divinity he gains in his encounter with God’s eternal foot–are not sayable in the language of time or man. But Pip tries.

Hearing Pip’s jabberings after his rescue, his shipmates call him mad. Biology majors say that Pip’s brain was deprived too long of oxygen. Melville says, “Man’s insanity is heaven’s sense.” Some of the Christian mystics seem to prove the point. Pip’s vision marks a profound overhaul going on in Ishmael, readying him for the encounter with ultimate truth, the big white whale: God. Or, if it makes any difference, God’s grandest agent. “It will be seen,” says Ishmael of Pip, “what like abandonment befell myself.”

By this time in the story, the reader recognizes that the soul of the novel is classical tragic form, baptized now with the beginnings of Christianity. In the first moments of the Oedipus Rex, Oedipus is regal, potent, sinful, stuffed with hubris, lost as a man. A classical scholar at a nearby university agrees with his students that, to use his published phrase, “Oedipus was screwed by the gods.” The novelist in me attacks that notion as a total misreading. I picture the old gods sitting around and conspiring Oedipus’ chance for moral rescue. “I know what,” one says. “Let’s set things up so that, out of his own will and in his rage and pride, he kills his father and marries his mother, then finds out later what he’s done. If that don’t cure him, we’ll have to give him up.” God might give you a crown of thorns, but there’s no halo unless you reach for it. Oedipus never ceases reaching for the truth. When he returns to the stage at the end of the play–blinded, on his knees, catsup on his tee-shirt–he is beautiful, saved as a man, saved by his unyielding search for truth and the responding grace of the gods.

Tragic form not only reassures us of the goodness of ultimate truth. It rehearses us, establishes, in the sinews of the spirit, the salvific path to heaven laid out for all us sinners. Well, we always have saints among us–in the classroom, perhaps two or three of you at the moment–but most of us need to sail the oceans of the spirit and find a Queequeg and a Moby Dick. “Something gets born at the end of tragedy,” Arthur Miller says. It is us. Having had a look at the big whale, we rise up with Ishmael off of Queequeg’s coffin, reborn, renewed, faith quickened, hope soaring, virtue rampant.

Some years ago, President Donald Cowan talked about “the spirit who walks these hills.” He mentioned it so often that we began to make fun of it. But we recognized, in terms of our own disciplines, what he meant. The old Greeks, out of a sense of the spiritual and of the mystery of being, honored the goddesses of grove and fountain, the gods of river and hill and sky. With a similar sense, one of my Rome sophomores, visiting Assisi and falling for the place, wrote that she walked down a cobbled path, and turned a corner, and saw St. Francis crossing the street. Melville calls Moby Dick “the gliding great demon”–the word had a sinless connotation back then–”the gliding great demon of the seas of life.” If we really enter into this place called UD–pour ourselves into it, work with it, struggle with it, love it–we catch a glimpse, now and then, of the spirit who walks our hills.

Our visions arise out of our disciplines, our character, our negotiations with the world, with each other, with the students. A couple of decades ago, Tom Jodziewicz looked out his office window at the students walking along the mall as students do–book-laden, tired, exuberant, noisy, solemn. He also saw each student carrying a cross, bent a little with the weight. He shared with us this beautiful, this true and moving vision.

As you’ve learned from history and math and languages and things moving around in test-tubes, I’ve gained from characters in my novels images and phrasings I didn’t know. A Spanish character says “it’s on the cross that the unthinkable violence–the killing of a god–comes together with the unimaginable love.” A batty old Roman cleric taught me a new sign of the cross. In his younger days, he had worked at bringing together the eastern and western churches, and he signed this way: head, and tummy, and, crossing his arms, both shoulders at the same time. I read recently a thirty-page essay on what mankind was for. I didn’t find out. But in the novel I was writing, five ducks line up, alphabetically, and follow each other in single file: Arturo, Balthasar, Chretien, Danielle, and what’s his name. They object when the donkey points out they’re going to be eaten. “What do you think ducks are for?,” he says. Arturo, the leader, responds. “We’re for the glory of God,” he says.

I admired Jodziewicz’ vision of students with crosses. Not to be outdone by a history teacher, I discovered, back in the eighties, that an invisible crucifix a thousand feet tall stands in the center of our campus. The department of English and the other departments are always in its shadow and its light. Perhaps the gold doubloon Ahab nails to the tall center mast of the Pequod has something to do with it. The Christian imagination, illumined and encouraged by Melville’s poetry, sees the doubloon as Christ. “Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous hills.” It is “untouchable and immaculate to any foulness.” It is “set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end.” “The mariners revered it as the white whale’s talisman.” Ahab, Mr. Sin, does the nailing out of an ancient truth: no sin, no crucified Christ.

“I and the Father are One,” Christ says. I had enough calculus years ago-the Army decided we couldn’t win World War II if I didn’t become an engineer, so they sent me to Carnegie Tech–I had enough calculus to be impressed by the beauty of mathematics, the power of calculus over swirling forms–enough math to appreciate the poet’s line “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.” It seemed to me Christ should have said “I and the Father are two-thirds.” I need a course in Divine Mathematics. I guess the Spirit who walks these hills can’t do it by Himself: Christ and the Father are strolling too. Some holy-rollers in one of my novels, needing a meeting-room, look for a place “easily accessible by the Holy Spirit.”

Walks these hills? Invades the buildings! Wanders the halls, the classrooms, the labs, perhaps even peeks into the administrative offices. You teachers have noticed those occasional moments in class when the students become suddenly very quiet, very still, not even taking notes, scarcely breathing. Their eyes become beautiful, motionless, fixed on something beyond all sight. For an immeasurable moment, the Spirit sings through the voice of the teacher, and every student knows that he is loved. I don’t know if Billy Colwell’s horse went to communion on the little statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague. We still have him, this Child, even as He has grown up and is hanging, now, on our crosses, and even as the Divine Trio after the resurrection–perhaps hand in hand–enjoys our hills, our buildings, our mall, and signs up, now and then, for one of your courses.

I’m reminded of a young couple in one of my novels who pray together a prayer for a chaste courtship. They look ahead with fear, and a sort of anticipatory joy, to their wedding night when, the bride says–referring to the fulfillment of the joyous sacrament, the sacred moment of their lovemaking–“when God in me holds hands with God in you.”

The philosopher-poet Emerson wrote that “men go through the world each musing on a great fable.” I’ve given you a corner of mine. The Spirit Who walks these hills attends all our dealings with each other–discussions, arguments, jibes, committees, even this talk I’m finishing now, while Moby Dick in me holds hands with Moby Dick in you.

Donald Davidson’s essay “Poetry as Tradition” asserts for poetic form—distinguishing it from that of prose fiction, for instance—a special independence from the medium of the printed page. Poetic form carries the promise of a certain permanence, providing a radiant locus of human meaning capable of surviving the collapse or decay of other cultural forms. But this independence comes with a corollary dependence. If the poem “can always reduce the book to its true function as an instrument of convenience” (258), dispelling with the appearance of its livelier, more palpable reality the illusion of its reliance on paper and ink, this is because it depends on a far more deeply and strangely impressionable medium: “the lips of men, … their voices, … their memories, … their hearts” (258). The poem (somewhat like the blessed of Dante’s Paradise, who yearn for their resurrected flesh), Davidson implies, exists in and for the moment of its embodiment. The poem only speaks to and in the being of a person; its form is the figure drawn on human ground, marking it as precious and the only vehicle of what is precious. This is why the genuine utterance of a poem can be a unique and unrepeatable event, and why committing a poem to memory, more than merely the transfer of information, can often be transformative—realizing or revealing new potentialities both in the person reading and the poem itself. Indeed, one is tempted to say that in paradoxical proportion to how undeceivedly a poem acknowledges as its proper medium the most mortal of things—the concentered mind and shaping memory, the voice’s accent, and ultimately the incommunicablility of another person—will its chance at a genuine immortality increase. This immortality will not be that of the voiceless ciphers of impersonal record, but that of a quiet mirror possessed of sufficient purity and amplitude of angle to capture and embrace both the motes of the passing hour and underlying cares of a life. Behind the idea of the poem’s independence from the page, then, rests Davidson’s more central concern of the poem as an instance of tradition—as a living form for what can be passed from generation to generation, or (first of all) from person to person. Poetry’s “metre, rhyme, and other formal elements” writes Davidson “ally poetry with memory; they are the marks of poetry that not only derives from tradition but is tradition” (258), which is to say: by their availability to the memory such formal elements mark a poetry that exists in and for the moment of handing itself over to another. Beyond what we typically classify as formal elements, though, this paper will look at two of Davidson’s lyrics to show how this gesture of tradition, of handing itself over, shapes the inner form of the poem as well.

Many of Davidson’s poems take such a moment of tradition, whether realized, attempted, or desired, as their dramatic situation: “Aunt Maria and the Gourds,” “Randall, My Son” (41), “Sanctuary” (42), “Lee in the Mountains” (34), for instance, in which spiritual parents weigh their own inheritance and address their heirs. There are parallel poems by Ransom and Tate: “Antique Harvesters” (26), the profoundly frustrated “Aeneas at Washington” (65) and “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” (67) All of these poems are haunted by a reality that resists direct communication: an “all” that “cannot be said,” a “word” that “cannot be told,” a “knowledge carried to the heart,” a thought “stuck in the mire” of Washington DC of what “we built [Troy] for;” an understanding hidden in secrets that are told “not often” and “only from a father to a son,” or in “old tales [that] are like prayers,” hidden in mysterious figures—“the proud lady of the heart of fire, the look of snow,” the “green altars” of war-drenched mountains, “an old horn’s husky music,” “the last enchanted white deer”—and in rituals that to the “scornful beholder” are “nothing”: “The hound, the horns, the lank mares streaming by / … / And the fox, lovely ritualist, in flight / Offering his unearthly ghost to quarry; / And the fields, themselves to harry.” One way or another, the insistence on a central reality that cannot be spelled out casts a weight of trust and hope, or frustrated longing, upon the receptivity of the reader. The burden of Davidson’s “Sanctuary” is “You must remember this. … /… / Remember this. … / … // You must remember this, and mark it well.” “Remember this,” okay, but what is this?

In “Utterance,” Davidson suggests a likeness between entertaining the frustrating yet tantalizing inadequacy of speech to what it wants to say and the wager involved in getting to know another person. The speaker or “I” of this poem is a personified “utterance” who is rather self-conscious of “his” own inadequacy: “I am not what my lips explain, / And more devotedly inclined / Than these dry sentences reveal / That break like crude shards from my mind.” This utterance wants us to draw our attention away from what we might take to be its characteristic, definitive features—“what my lips explain,” what “these dry sentences reveal”—and attempt to surmise its underlying posture, the more devoted inclination of its mute “mind.” With brilliant and humorous self-reference to its futile gestures of hyperbole, the utterance complains: “What way is there of gesturing / The cruelly impounded thought? / It comes, it pierces me like steel, / It flames and I can utter naught.” The gestures of speech will be misleading unless they are recognized as in themselves beside the point, and taken as the epiphenomena of an essentially wordless and informing disposition.

Ultimately, the utterance’s is a shy and twinkling irony that retreats from trying to communicate an identity can only be encountered, and draws back from explaining what must be embodied in order to truly appear: its “soul,” “Its changeful self, the wistful me.” The poem ends with a coy and winning appeal that makes its whimsy glimmer with possibility and promise: “And am I worth the guess you make? / Oh fact so digged in circumstance! / It surely is not known to me, / And you must take my Self on chance.” The implication of the utterance’s appeal to “you” to “take my Self on chance” is that speech ultimately shares itself, not by means of measurable communication, but by creating the occasion for some common inference by two or more individuals of a shared reality—by making, through something like its whole posture or tone, an implicit center of experience and understanding palpable and present.

A poem like “Utterance” may seem to have more in common with the lively irony and wit of Marvell’s “Dialogue of Body and Soul” or Frost’s “Iota Subscript” than the sonorous, meditative, and earnest voice of Davidson’s more memorable lyrics. But it can be taken as a cipher for the paradoxical moment of tradition, the figurative act which hands something over to another (as opposed to directly communicating it), with which all Davidson’s poems are concerned. We can see this figurative action fully realized in the lyric “Randall, My Son,” whose title and refrain evoke a musical ballad-tradition, and whose rich vocality hovers between the formal fluidity of song and the intense personal address which is made within its dramatic situation.

In this poem a mother of fateful stature addresses a son who is returning late from the cold “glitter of the world that draws [his] eyes” and “beckons [him] from [her.]” And while the poem’s world is realized with a texture that is rich and fine—“the vine fingering the latch, / … through the rain … the poplar bough / Thresh[ing] at the blinds … // … the lamp burning low”—we are aware from the beginning that every detail carries symbolic implication. The speaker herself, bereft and comfortless guardian of a collapsing house, but unbowed, capable of maternal care and rebuke, and commanding awe with an authority not to be ignored, is surely herself the figure of the undeniable yet riddling claims of a beloved traditional order in an alien world at odds with it.

The poem begins with the mother’s call that brings her son across the threshold into her domain. His late coming has startled her from a lonely revery in which the encroached-upon, crumbling boundaries of her household bring home to her her undeceived bereavement. While capable of making understated details of her realm evoke this abandonment with the dignity and control, she also lets her call to Randall echo in the depth of her aloneness: “old and troubled overmuch, / [I] called in the deep night, but there was none / To comfort me or answer, Randall, my son.” This lonely call in the “deep night” should be set beside her careful preparation of a room of welcome within the space that she still quietly guards and disposes: “But mount the stair and lay you down till morn, / The bed is made—the lamp is burning low / Within the changeless room where you where born.” There is a calm intensity of aloneness that makes possible the preparation a place where another can truly rest and dwell, if only temporarily. This is an ordered, formed space in contrast to the barren and cold glittering world of “the mistress that beckons you from me,” as well as to the wilderness to which the garden-plants threaten to revert.

The care and welcome indicated by such a space gives special weight to the deliberate perplexity of the mother’s reproach and to her resistance to the future: “I am unreconciled to what I know, / And I am old with questions never done.” Faced with the insurmountable, inevitable collapse of a literal and sacred order of life—a defeat with which to be reconciled is to be a betrayer—one must find a way to somehow retain and persist in this order, if not literally, then analogically: as a figurative order that holds the promise of some future redemption, of a grace “brooding within the certitude of time” whose specific literal, historical terms cannot be foreseen. To transmit such a promise is the purpose of the poem, and it is this that makes it, at least in hope, an instance of tradition.

This painful but essentially hopeful necessity of transforming of a literal into a symbolic order shapes the riddle of the final lines, in which the poem enacts the fundamental gesture of handing itself over to another:

Take, what I leave, your own land unforgotten;

Hear, what I hear in a far chase new begun

An old horn’s husky music, Randall, my son.

Finally, then, we should recognize in the poem’s symbolic speaker a dual reality. She is Rachel “weeping for her children, for they are no more,” inconsolable, for her loss is irrevocably real. She is also Hestia, Vesta, the household-goddess entrusting the hearth-coals of a fallen city to an heir who will venture to carry the promise of a renewed future under the aspect of a riddle and a prayer. She is, finally, the poem itself, addressing, welcoming, rebuking, and commissioning a community of future readers whose flaws and infidelities and virtues (however unforeseen in their particulars) will need such a voice to guide and uplift them.

The irreducibly figurative speech that is poetry asks us to “remember this”: it hands over to us its promising but non-self-explicating weight to carry in our musing memory. In a fuller sense of “remember,” it asks to undertake the adventure which allows the figures of poetry to begin to find literal and embodied reality in the transformation of our lives. And (if we may be permitted to take it in this way) in the word’s fullest sense, the figures of poetry instill in us a sense of the strange promised grace bound up in what I know no other name for than “the resurrection of the body.”

Davidson, Donald. “Poetry as Tradition.” The Southern Critics: an Anthology. Ed. Glenn C. Arbery. Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2010. 241-59.

Ransom, John Crowe, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate. The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective. Ed. William Pratt. Nashville: J.S. Sanders, 1991.

It occurs to me that Latin has wonderful words for winds, each of which carries a distinct image, character, associations, and not merely reference to their compass-point of origin. Eurus is characterized by a favorite teacher of mine as “most often cold, rainy, wintry, and the most disliked of the winds,” and Aquilo is “associated especially with clear cold weather”–I remember this teacher professing that Aquilo and Boreas (alternate names for the North Wind) summon up entirely distinct images and feeling for Vergil.

Boreas is a great booming stormer, Aquilo cold and serene: et claro silvas cernes Aquilone moveri. “And if, at the hour the sun restores the day, and when he hides it again, / His circle is distinct, your fear of storm clouds will be vain: / You will see the forest moving in a bright Aquilo.” (As a side note, since the last mention of the sun–who is actually supposed to be the “hero” of this passage, though Vergil is always letting the focus of his attention get usurped by whatever offers itself as the most beautiful or gripping image–is of him hiding the day, I think that last image must be of a radiant night!)

Of course their winds are also gods. But the Romans’ mythology had this lovely and bright naivety that allowed Vergil to talk, for instance, about a farmer’s wife “boiling down the moisture of sweet must on Vulcan” (he simply means a cook-fire!). It was still possible to see, without affectation, the quite literal fire in one and the same glance as the god. Likewise, though Eurus is a divinity, for the Romans there is no more contradiction in speaking of “Euri” than for us of “Sirrocos,” Easterlies or Nor’easters. Anyhow, their being gods is not different from their being winds: their names are certainly not, for the Romans, porcelain personifications–but usable and decent words to capture the essence of the weather.

All of that to ask if anyone knows of any other wind names that they like or love: especially in English, but any other languages welcome as well. I thought we might start a little catalogue.

(Also, as a full disclosure, this post got usurped by “Georgics-nostalgia”: both missing the poem, perhaps the most beautiful and magical ever written–and also the class, certainly the most delightful of my grad-school days so far, even rivalling in happiness the best of my whole studenthood, which is saying a lot. Also, and relatedly, there are few thoughts above that do not really originate in, or are not at least deeply colored by the sparkling teaching of Dr. Maurer. Though I’m sure there may be inaccuracies that have sneaked in entirely on my account.)

That’s why I started this blog way back when. I was looking to do some writing that had rain and wind and walking in it.

I think there’s a little stone church somewhere in the Spanish countryside where I could pray properly–unshapely stone church which belongs to wind and weather. You can only get there walking.

When you walk–say you have a destination, even a meaningful one–you still will have to release the thought of arrival, let the walking take over expectation. Otherwise, the thought of the indefinitely long and folding road more than your weight defeats you. But the walking can, and your thoughts after a while begin to walk too. Somewhere on their windy path is a chapel of rain-wet stone–like some uncut, Abraham’s altar.

The film is in itself beautifully conceived and composed; but it is still more beautiful for the vision and activity of the institution that it portrays. That institution deserves to be remembered and looked to by all people of good will as an exemplar of what liberal education can be. By right, that institution ought to be remembered by those both at Thomas More and the Erasmus Institute who are committed to the present work of education and to envisioning its future.

Liberal education represents a genuine service and a genuine need because only through actively recalling the memories of our spiritual and cultural history can we hope to be true stewards of our destiny, free from the unexamined reign of contemporary sentiment and opinion (or opinionlessness, as the case may be). This more recent history of ours, that of a particular educational institution in crisis, though it is certainly more contemporary, is not on that account less weighty, nor its memories less deeply compelling. Indeed, by their very nearness to our own contingency, the memories of this history have a fragility that calls in particular way for our care. We are to hold such memories in a way that combines protection with offering, in a way that says they are not only ours.

The Beautiful Changes
Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water, it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it,
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

The film was recently posted on YouTube:

“and being unable to resist but not having everything to give you promise it the future.”

Now it is conventional to call the god of love irresistible. Lyricists, Troubadors, Petrarchan poets, and the popular song writers of our day have so named him again and again. But surely, even his irresistibility granted, something so deliberate as “a promise” cannot be extracted merely by a god’s irresistible power. Doesn’t “a promise” imply some kind of free human response and therefore and only therefore the promiser’s assumption of responsibility to that power?

Assuming, then, that this promise is a free act, I would like to propose a possible solution of the dilemma KTL poses.

It seems likely that some powers are essentially respond-able-to, and some are not. Certainly I may try in good faith to speak (or promise, or keep a promise) to a being who cannot hear or understand my words (though only if I suppose that he can). But trying is not doing, even if there is something noble in the effort. (Isn’t the very intention of a speech such as a promise premised on some essential respond-able-to-ness of the the one to whom the promise is made?)

Furthermore, if I try to promise a promise (and try to keep that promise) which premises not just any respond-able-to-ness, but a divine respond-able-to-ness in the power to which I am trying to promise, and if in fact there is no such respond-able-to god as my promise premises, then I am in an analogous dilemma. I may try to promise and try to keep my promise, but I will not succeed, though there may be something noble in the effort.

Nevertheless, if such a promise has been “made” to a god who is not such a god as to listen to or respond to or otherwise hold one to a promise, what then? (This, I imagine, is what KTL is asking.) Was not the promise made in “good faith”? Can it simply dissolve into nothing?

Well, a promise is also made with secondary listeners in mind (and is in a real sense a promise to them as well as to the primary listener): the witnesses. Even if his promise was made in secret, the promiser himself is such a witness. A witness might hold one to one’s promise even though the one-to-whom-the-promise-was-made is absent or otherwise engaged. Such a witness might act as a fitting proxy to whom one’s promise might be kept; as one might fittingly pay a debt owed to a dead man not to his corpse but his heir. But when a man promises to a god, can a human witness hope to supply, as a fitting proxy, the special respond-able-to-ness of a divine being? Or hope, with authority, to assert the inherited demands of a god who, for whatever reason, does not assert them? clearly not—not even if the promiser himself, whether out of a sense of loyalty or even to maintain his own integrity, try and assert the rights of the absent god. (Though we may admire him for trying.)

However, if another god (a truly respond-able-to and responsible one) should happen to overhear the promiser’s speech and recognize the “good faith” of his intention, this overhearing god might effectually take up the promise which was made in ignorance and confusion, and offer it back the promiser as renewable in spirit and truth.

Paul at the Areopagus: "He is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17)