Black Eyes

 Near the end of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics there appears the passage

Further, if a man prospers or fails to prosper because he is the kind of man he his, just as a man sees poorly because he is blue-eyed, then not luck but nature is the cause.

(Translated by Anthony Kenny.)  Earlier in Chapter 2 of Book VIII, there is a reference to the superior eyesight of the black-eyed. This is not something I have heard of elsewhere. It is tempting to suspect that Aristotle had dark eyes. People used to suspect and perhaps still do that he had a snub nose, for more than once in his works he asserts that a snub nose is not a defect.

In Naples '44, Norman Lewis writes that in WW II the career of one who had finished a preliminary course in military intelligence was determined before the placement interview had officially begun: the blue-eyed got the demanding, interesting, and--to be fair--more dangerous assignments. The dark-eyed were sent off to be sergeants in Field Security. My stepmother (herself blue-eyed) once remarked that the heroes and heroines in Helen MacInnes's novels of suspense always had blue eyes; though I suppose that some of their opponents must have had blue eyes, given that they tended to be Germans or Russians.

I don't know where Aristotle would have placed my eye color on the range from black to blue. My driver's license calls them brown, the mirror suggests that hazel or green might suit better. (Be their color what it may, I don't see well without glasses.) The word Kenny renders as "blue" is "glaukos".  Liddell and Scott say that as applied to eyes this means blue or light blue--otherwise it seems to shade toward green.

 

Complaining Because They Won't

 Last month, the Sunday New York Times Book Review carried a piece by David Brooks on Tom Wolfe. This was part or all of an introduction Brooks wrote to a volume comprising Wolfe's pieces "Radical Chic" and "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers". Two weeks later, there were two letters about the piece, one praising Wolfe, and one putting in a good word for the Bernsteins. Nobody addressed what I thought the strangest few paragraphs.

It appears that the old WASP world of Manhattan could trace its ancestry to Debrett's Peerage or the Almanach de Gotha:

The old aristocrats had it so easy, those stately bankers in the J.P. Morgan mold. They may have been frequently bewildered about why the masses didn’t like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. It was right there in their bloodlines — the generations of grandees stretching back centuries. The status rules were simple.

But the names offered do not convince:

 the old blue-blood Protestant elite — the Astors, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers

John Jacob Astor, founder of the family, was the son of a butcher. John D. Rockefeller's father was not especially reputable. The Whitneys went a good way back in the northeastern US, yet I suspect that the reflective among them would have agreed with Mrs. Archer in The Age of Innocence:

 "Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the Newlands or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. One of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and another was a general on Washington's staff, and received General Burgoyne's sword after the battle of Saratoga. These are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has always been a commercial community, and there are not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word."

 Whatever the case, the new families did not have it so easy:

The members of the new cultural elite could never be so secure. Their status — their very reason for being — was based on their own superior sensibility. They lived by their wits and their public attitudes.

That sixty years ago in the Midwest I heard of Leonard Bernstein had nothing to do with his superior sensibility, except so far as it was reflected in his composing and directing music. I knew no more of his public attitudes than of George Szell's. (Of Szell's I knew only that he thought very poorly of persons arriving late at concerts.)

Then a few weeks later, the print edition carried a review by Jennifer Szalai of Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich. There I was interested to read of

the easy lie of a noxious conspiracy theory in place of the hard truth, that Germany was incapable of defeating the Anglo-American coalition.

The French losses in World War I were about 15% greater than those of the British Empire; the American losses were not a tenth of the French. And Russia may have suffered more casualties than France. If any crank wrote to complain about the salience of the Anglo-American coalition, the letter did not make it into the Book Review.

T. Collin Jones, Esquire

 If you watched American television sixty years ago, almost certainly you heard Kodak commercials using the song "Try to Remember [that time in September]". That song came from the musical "The Fantasticks". The lyricist, Tom Jones, died last month.

I remember very little of the song, but I read with interest the obituary of Mr. Jones in The New York Times. In particular there was his account of his high school, and early college years in Texas:

 “Sometime during my sophomore year at Coleman High School, I became a ‘character’” — wearing bow ties and a straw hat to school, smoking a pipe, signing his articles for the school newspaper “T. Collins Jones, Esquire.”

“Even now, nearly 70 years later, I can’t help but stop and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing,” he wrote. “Even more, I wonder at the fact that the other kids — farmers mostly, and ranchers and 4-H girls — took it all in their stride."

But then he got to the drama department of the University of Texas, where

"for the first time, there were other people actually like me," he wrote. "Here, marvel of marvels, everybody was T. Collins Jones, Esquire."

It is well that he found his tribe.

One understands the wish for distinction. An American can grow up in a homogeneous world, one of so many so much alike, and feel an urge to stand out from the crowd. In "My Military Campaign", Mark Twain mentioned a young neighbor, who

 had some pathetic little nickel-plated aristocratic instincts, and detested his name, which was Dunlap; detested it, partly because it was nearly as common in that region as Smith, but mainly because it had a plebeian sound to his ear. So he tried to ennoble it by writing it in this way: d’Unlap. That contented his eye, but left his ear unsatisfied, for people gave the new name the same old pronunciation—emphasis on the front end of it. He then did the bravest thing that can be imagined—a thing to make one shiver when one remembers how the world is given to resenting shams and affectations; he began to write his name so: d’Un Lap. And he waited patiently through the long storm of mud that was flung at this work of art, and he had his reward at last; for he lived to see that name accepted, and the emphasis put where he wanted it, by people who had known him all his life, and to whom the tribe of Dunlaps had been as familiar as the rain and the sunshine for forty years. So sure of victory at last is the courage that can wait.