Gotham Diary:
The Dragon School
11 December 2014
Kathleen is now in San Francisco. She flew there from Phoenix yesterday morning. Last night, she took a taxi out to Sunset and saw Megan, Ryan, and Will, and also Ryan’s parents, who have been paying a visit from their new home in Riverside County. She had a very good time. I stayed up late, in order to chat with her afterward. What a difference an hour makes! The two-hour jump between the Eastern and Mountain Time Zones is psychologically manageable — it doesn’t seem to amount to very much. The third hour, between Eastern and Pacific, makes it much more difficult to reconcile schedules. I call it a phase change, although I don’t know what that means.
I slept neither well nor poorly. I got up earlier than I thought I would. Although I read several stories in the Times, I can’t remember a single one, except for Charles Isherwood’s review of the revival of Electra in London, with Kristin Scott Thomas, whose outbursts of rage struck the critic as “monotonous.”
Then I called Kathleen, who doesn’t have anything to do today but draft documents and, this evening, attend a dinner. She gladly accepted my offer to call her back in an hour.
In the middle of the afternoon, I’ve got a Remicade infusion at the Hospital for Special Surgery. I was going to try to do a few other things while I was out, such as getting a haircut, but I’ve abandoned those ambitions. Getting myself to the hospital and back will be plenty beaucoup for this cold, grey day. At some point, I have to install a new answering machine. Now that JM has normalized our land-line situation, I’ve taken calls from friends who didn’t have my cell phone number. One of them said, “Ah, your phone is working again.” What he meant by that was that I had picked up the phone before his call could be shunted to the voicemail box to which, not knowing the password and not being able to set a new one, we don’t have access.
Between washing the dishes, after dinner with Ms NOLA and Mr ED, and Kathleen’s phone call two hours later, I read Jan Morris’s Oxford. But is it? Oxford came out in 1965, when Jan was still very much James, and the book betrays, on almost every page, an insider’s familiarity with the place that, in those days, only a man would possess. (A woman, no matter how much of an insider herself, would certainly have complained about the male entitlement that was still the great sea of privilege on which the University floated.) But authorial metamorphosis is not the twistiest thing about Oxford. Fifty years on, how accurate is it? In the chapter on “College Spirit,” Morris predicts that the autonomy (and peculiarity) of the thirty-odd colleges can’t last, that, if nothing else, state funding, new at that time, will eventually transform the fabric. (In fact, however, there are three more colleges today than there were in 1965, a move, it would seem, away from homogenization.) Can the High Steward still oversee trials for treason?
It doesn’t much matter, really; I’m reading the book for its impressions, as well-written as Morris’s always are, and for a sense of the once and future university, which rises from countless statutory provisions and traditional routines to caper like a dragon in one’s moist imagination, impossible to capture.
Do I wish I’d gone to Oxford, instead of to Notre Dame? Do you have to ask? But I’m too old for regrets of such highly speculative nature. Notre Dame was good enough for me, and I have heard of only two or three other American schools where I fancy I might have done as well for myself. That’s to say: where I shouldn’t have come to grief. I needed a demanding curriculum but easygoing professors. Arguing in seminars was instructive, but writing papers was more important. I was convinced that nobody really knew anything, that the older professors who actually did know something had stopped learning, as a response to the apparently huge changes in everything. My totem, a figure too invested with dread and dismay to serve as an idol or a patron saint, was Cassiodorus, the sixth-century patrician who institutionalized the preservation of a written culture that had already sustained severe losses. I regarded my contemporaries as Ostrogothic barbarians looting the libraries. And I still do.
My intellectual community is a world of silent exchange, of writings passing back and forth and onward. The division is not between the living and the dead but between the distant and the near, and my intellectual companions are all distant; they are at any rate never in this apartment. My life is not at all monastic — I’m unabashedly hungry for dozens of small pleasures — but the pace of my thinking is set by the demands of reading and writing, not those of debate, which rather horrifies me. The meaningful discussion of almost anything is too complex for conversation; talk just complicates. Silence can indeed be golden.
This is not to say that conversation is unimportant. Far from it; without the stimulation of smarty-pants badinage, I should go on thinking the same old things indefinitely. But the thinking, when it happens, takes place in my fingers, not on my tongue.
I often think of that pensée of Pascal’s that I can never quite locate in satisfactory form, in which he attributes all the unhappiness in the world to the inability of men to sit quietly in a room. I substitute confusion for unhappiness, and I also argue that no one can be expected to sit quietly in a room without sooner or later reading or writing, both forms of engagement with the world.
I don’t know how much of this I should have learned earlier in life had I sojourned in an Oxford college. I doubt that it would have made much of a difference. Oxford is, after all, a society in which young people compete whether they’re asked to or not, and I have never understood the value of intellectual competition. I want to get closer to the truth, yes, but this doesn’t mean that I want to get closer to the truth than anyone else. What’s the good of that? I’m left alone with the truth. I’d rather work toward it in peaceful and quiet collaboration with other readers and writers. I’m not above showing off, but I’m aware that showing off is, or can easily become, ridiculous and pathetic. Not to mention distracting.
For the next couple of days, you’ll find me in Jan Morris’s Oxford.