Water Views

At the beginning of The Bostonians, Henry James shows Basil Ransom visiting a cousin in Boston, looking out from a window from which

there was a view of the water; Miss Chancellor having the good fortune to dwell on that side of Charles Street toward which, in the rear, the afternoon sun slants redly, from an horizon indented at empty intervals with wooden spires, the masts of lonely boats, the chimneys of  dirty 'works,' over an expanse of anomalous character, which is too big for a river and too small for a a bay. This view seemed to him very picturesque, though in the gathered dusk little was left of it save a cold yellow streak in the west, a gleam of brown water, and the reflection of the lights that had begun to show themselves in a row of houses, impressive to Ransom in their extreme modernness, which overlooked the same lagoon from a long embankment on the left, constructed of stones roughly piled.

Later, at dinner,

he had another view, through a window where the curtain remained undrawn by her direction (she called his attention to this--it was for his benefit), of the dusky, empty river, spotted with points of light... 

A matter glossed by the hostess's sister:

'That's what they call in Boston being very "thoughtful," Mrs. Luna said, 'giving you the Back Bay (don't you hate that name?) to look at and then taking credit for it.'

 One infers that this takes place in the early 1870s.

In 1872, George Santayana arrived at his mother's house in Boston, where

 They took us into the dining room to show us the "beautiful view" from the back of the house--a great expanse of water, with a low line of nondescript brick and wooden houses marking the opposite bank. It was Bostonian to show us the view first; ...

He gave that view qualified praise:

This view of a vast expanse of water reflecting the sky was unmistakably impressive, especially when the summer sunset lit up the scene, and darkness added to distance made the shabby bank opposite appear inoffensive. Gorgeous these sunsets often were, more gorgeous, good Bostonians believed, than any sunsets anywhere else in the world, and my limited experience does not belie them. The illumination often had a kaleidoscopic quality, with fiery reds and yellows, but at other hours the seasons and aerial effects of the Charles River Basin were not remarkable.

 (Persons and Places)

From the description, Mrs. Santayana's house may have been one of those extremely modern houses to the left of Charles Street; certainly there was an embankment between her house and the river.

Photocopying and Conferences

 In David Lodge's novel Small World, the American professor Morris Zapp, remarking on the view of Rummidge University, says

"Look at the Library--built like a huge warehouse. The whole place says, 'We have learning stored here; if you want it, you've got to come inside and get it.' Well, that doesn't apply any more."
 "Why not?", Persse set off again at a gentle trot.
 "Because," said Morris Zapp, reluctantly following, 'information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people. Ergo, it's no longer necessary to hoard your information in one building or keep your top scholars corralled in one campus. There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have taken in the fact: jet-travel, direct-dialling telephones and the Xerox machine. Scholars don't need to work in the same institution to interact, nowadays: they call each other up, or they meet at international conferences. And they don't have to grub about in the library for data: any book or article that sounds interesting they have Xeroxed and read it at home. Or on the plane going to the next conference. I work mostly at home or on planes these days. I seldom go into the university except to teach my courses."

I thought of this in reading Peter Brown's memoir Roads of the World, which particularly mentioned the revolution that photo-copying created. Brown discussed phone calls mostly in connection with this family. But he seems to have spent a good deal of time on airplanes and at conferences.

Brown mentions not only the use of photocopying in scholarly work, but in teaching, in the course packets one could arrange for students to get at Kinko's. The latter use ended, or at least was restricted, in 1991, when a number of textbook publishers won a lawsuit against Kinko's. I believe that I remember picking up a course packet or two from the Kinko's on Route 1 before they got out of that business. No doubt the packet or packets were for computing courses, but I don't remember which. 

 

Journeys of the Mind

Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History runs to 698 pages, not counting introduction and index. Occasionally in the course of reading it, I wondered whether all those pages were needed. Yet I can't say where Brown would have cut.

I knew of Brown because of his first book, Augustine of Hippo. I finished Journeys of the Mind with the notion that I should find the revised edition of Augustine, which includes insights drawn from recently discovered letters of St. Augustine's, and should probably read two or three more of Brown's books. At least I should read The World of Late Antiquity, and Body and Society. And probably I should read the works of some of the other authors mentioned: the footnotes make for an intriguing bibliography, and a program of further reading, if only one had the tongues and the time.

As an autobiography, it is curious. One reads early and late of Brown's family, mother, father, aunts, and cousins. On the other hand, "my wife Pat" appears first on page 591 and thereafter only on page 631. We learn she wrote her dissertation on "the art and social setting of that most Venetian of Venetian painters, Vittorio Carpaccio", we learn the name of the book that resulted, and we learn that she received a tenure-track position in the Art History Department at Princeton. Comparable memoirs, it seems to me, have given spouses a bit more room.

Princeton University Press will bring out a paperback edition in late October for $28, about two-thirds the price of the hardback. (The date and price are for the US.) The book is not for everyone, but those with an interest in the history of late antiquity will likely find it of  interest. I might buy a copy or two as Christmas presents.

Webs

 There was mist, maybe a light drizzle, last night, and this morning the spider webs on shrubs showed it:

out front,

and a few blocks away.

Gluten Free and Vegan

A reminder from the dermatologist sent me to the store for some sunblock. I came away with a tube of SPF 70 sunscreen lotion. This morning, in going to put it on, I noticed that the tube states that the product is Gluten Free and Vegan, answering  a question I'd not have asked.

I can understand someone objecting to animal products for ethical reasons, or the products of some animals for religious reasons. The interest in a gluten free sun block I suppose derives from the notions some have that gluten can affect one through even brief contact of bread with the skin. I think this most improbable, but evidently you needn't travel far to find someone who holds the notion.

 

More MacIntyre

 This week I finished a first reading of Alasdair MacIntyre's Three Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Encyclopedia is the late 19th Century liberal consensus, as embodied in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Genealogy is Nietzche's and the Nietzcheans' project of subverting that consensus, unmasking its claims as expressions of the will to power, in The Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere. Tradition is preeminently Aquinas's synthesis of the Augustinian and Aristotelian/Averroist traditions in the 13th Century.

 The sub-subtitle of the book is "being Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1988." I found the book slow going: the sentences are long, and often punctuated more lightly than I am used to. I  wonder whether those who heard them, with the lecturer's spoken emphases and rhythms, would have followed them more readily. The prose is very clear, but to careful reading.

(I believe that the only other set of Gifford Lectures I have read are those that make up Whitehead's Process and Reality. Those made slow reading for very different reasons.)

 MacIntyre's prescription for the university is to make it a place of encouraged and lightly controlled confrontations, so that radically different understandings can confront each other rather than talking past each other as they now do. He does address the improbability of this:

.... The charge of utopianism, so it must appear, cannot be evaded.

This I am not disposed to deny but only if it is understood that the charge of utopianism, sometimes at least, has a very different import from that which is conventionally ascribed to it. Those most prone to accuse others of utopianism are generally those men and women of affairs who pride themselves upon their pragmatic realism, who look for immediate results, who want the relationship between present input and future output to be predictable and measurable,  and that is to say, a matter of the shorter, indeed the shortest run. They are the enemies of the incalculable, the skeptics of all expectations which outrun what they take to be hard evidence, the deliberately shortsighted who congratulate themselves upon the limits of their vision.

Who were their predecessors? They included the fourth-century magistrates of the disordered city which Plato described in Book VIII of the Republic, ....

Projects of academic reform have come and gone since 1988. None that I remember has had much effect, and none that I remember was in the direction that MacIntyre had in mind.

I will read the book again, but probably will re-read his Whose Justice? Which Rationality first.

MacIntyre died this May. The New York Times published an obituary. 

  

Reading Midgley, Again

 The Little Free Library at Midgley Corner yielded Man and Beast: The Roots of Human Nature some weeks back. I have by now read through it, and am grateful to have done so. Some of the book I had previously read in The Essential Mary Midgley, selections from various of her works. Most was new to me.

Broadly, the themes of Man and Beast are those of The Essential Mary Midgley. There is a great deal more about animal behavior: the mental abilities of primates, the family bonds of such as wolves and wild dogs. She quotes Kant, but also Konrad Lorenz and Jane Goodall, and others working in ethology, and also, with respect but with considerable reservations, Edward O. Wilson.

I have always liked books that suggest or compel more reading. I can tell from Man and Beast that I really should read Wilson, Lorenz, Goodall, and Bishop Butler. But I think that the others will have to wait on Butler, though for his sermons I will probably have to go to Alibris. They may also have to wait on Anthony Powell, since Midgley quotes from novels of his I haven't read.