Final Fridays (22 page)

“Excuse us, Sir,” the physicist and philosopher then respectfully inquired: “We can't help wondering what in the world those folks asked that even You couldn't answer.” To which God sighed and replied, “They asked me,
When will our kids ever get their shit together?”

 

END OF JOKE (which anyhow I suspect applies less to graduates of this institution than to those of many others) and beginning of the Tragic View of Liberal Education. For me to natter on here about the importance of “Great Books” curricula like St. John's would obviously be preaching to the choir—but I'll do at least a paragraph-sworth of that anyhow, for reasons to be set forth presently. Having been born, raised, and schooled in the state of Maryland, and having subsequently lived and worked there for more of my life than not, I became acquainted early on with the program at your original campus in Annapolis. If I ended up matriculating at Johns Hopkins instead, that was because from high school I had gone up to Juilliard's summer program to test against reality my then ambition to be a professional jazz drummer and orchestrator; I aced my courses but failed my reality-test with flying colors, came home to think what to do next, and found I had won a state scholarship to Hopkins that I'd more or less forgotten I'd applied for. So with a shrug of the shoulders I went there,
faute de mieux
—a most happy
faute
, as I
came to realize later. In my undergraduate and graduate-school years there half a century ago, the St. John's curriculum was spoken of and its pros and cons debated, or anyhow discussed now and then, in class and out; we compared and contrasted it with our own quite admirable two-year lecture courses in Literary Classics and Classics in the History of Thought—mandatory in those bygone days for all Hopkins Arts & Sciences undergrads.

What were those pros? What were the cons, as we saw them from the perspective of Baltimore back at mid-century?
¹

The pros, as I've said already, go without saying in this venue—or would so go except that 1) some of them are even more evident now than they were 50 years ago, and 2) saying over and over what goes without saying (at least vis-à-vis the craft of fiction-writing) was for decades my pedagogical specialty. So what's to be said (once more, with feeling) for a curriculum devoted to the study of a more-or-less-agreed-upon roster of “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold's famous formulation—or at least as representatively much of that Best as the ever-evolving consensus of a good college faculty believes can be fruitfully addressed between undergraduate matriculation and the baccalaureate?

Well: What's to be said for it, needless to say, is that it not only edifies and instructs—any old good curriculum does that—but permits
discourse
within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than this season's pop music, films, and TV shows, which a colleague of mine used to lament were the only points of cultural reference that he could assume to be shared by his undergraduate students: not Homer and Sophocles and the Bible, not Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare, but
The Sopranos
and
Friends
and Britney Spears and N'Sync, all of which in just a few years will seem as quaintly
dated and otherwise limited as
Leave It to Beaver
and Boy George and Tiny Tim (I don't mean Charles Dickens's Tiny Tim). It is this urge for a richer shared frame of reference that has prompted those “One City, One Book” programs that you may have heard about, in Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo, Rochester, and elsewhere: the urging by city officials that every adolescent and adult in town read, say, Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird
or Ernest J. Gaines's
A Lesson Before Dying
, their reading to be accompanied by discussions and other events in the city's libraries, bookstores, and community centers as a low-cost way to nurture civic pride and community spirit while propagandizing benignly against racism (in the case of the two novels just cited) and offering teenagers a healthy alternative to television and video games. Who could possibly object?

No show of hands necessary: One may fidget at the choice of Harper Lee and Ernest Gaines (serious and competent writers both) instead of, say, Flannery O'Connor and Ralph Ellison, finer literary artists with no less moral passion in the matter of racism. And one fidgets at the idea of
any
single book—instead of, say, Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of 418 Harvard Classics, or the 88 distinguished names (who can resist saying “88
key
names”?) on the St. John's College Reading List last time I looked—as a shared frame of reference for dialogue on racism or anything else, including the topic of Shared Frames of Reference. But one has to start
somewhere
, no? It's just a question of where—and in raising that question we find ourselves confronting possible reservations about Great Books curricula, which doubtless also go without saying in this venue, especially on this happy occasion, so let's review a couple of them anyhow:

NEVER MIND, FOR starters, the half-serious objection of my undergraduate mentor at Johns Hopkins, the late aesthetician and historian of ideas George Boas, who liked to tell us that the problem with the Annapolis curriculum was that it left out not only all the
bad
books—which, like bad art, may be indispensable to defining and appreciating the good—but also all the arguably great books that happen to disagree with the ones in the canon. We can dispense with these teasing objections because (in the first instance) mediocre-to-bad books and art are sufficiently inescapable that we needn't include them in our curriculum, although it's certainly useful to point them out from time to time and to argue with them. As for the second instance, any respectable clutch of Great Books will contain sufficient contradiction or at least disagreement on, e.g., the nature of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty to escape the curricular sins of pasteurization and homogenization. The real problem, it goes without saying (and this is what Professor Boas was good-humoredly pointing out to us sophomores), is that there are so
many
great or at least important books that no four-year undergraduate survey—much less his own
two
-year survey—can be more than a radically selective, though not arbitrary, sampling. And this, mind you, was the 1940s and '50s, before multiculturalism and political correctness hit the fan. Dr. Eliot's aforementioned shelf (which I myself read, or at least thumbed right through in numerical sequence, while working as a night-shift timekeeper in Baltimore's Chevrolet assembly plant one undergraduate summer) had come to look quaint indeed by the century's latter decades: all those Protestant sermons, instead of the
Mahabharata
and
Gargantua and Pantagruel
! Alessandro Manzoni's novel
I Promessi Sposi
instead of Murasaki Shikibu's
Tale of Genji
and James Joyce's
Ulysses
! For all its merits, by the 1960s it was as obviously dated a cultural artifact as its most judiciously updated and multiculturally sophisticated present-day counterpart would doubtless be seen to be half a century from now.

The difficulty, of course—as you probably knew before you enrolled at St John's but were no doubt reminded of during your freshman orientation here and every semester thereafter—is succinctly put in the title of Isaac Babel's earliest known work of fiction:
You Must Know Everything
. What a title:
You Must Know Everything
! That imperative implies, among much else, that you must
read
everything; must indeed
have read
everything, which of course you cannot; which you could not even if history refrained from growing both longer (as recorded time accumulates) and wider (as cultures evolve and intercultural connections multiply), thus ever enlarging the mass of what Umberto Eco calls “the already said.” You cannot read everything; could not even if you were a certain fellow Hopkins graduate student who seemed to me and his other seminar-mates to have read nearly everything already; whom we suspected of staying up all night reading the corpus's few remaining unread volumes (in their original languages) while we lesser beings slept; and who I later learned
was
, in fact, doing just that, more or less, he being not only a polymath but a tireless insomniac: a charming and generous fellow of such cripplingly vast erudition that to this day he is scarcely able to complete a sentence or publish an essay, because every word he utters sets off so many synaptic hot-links in his mind that he has difficulty getting from subject to verb to object, astray in the hypertextuality of his splendid erudition.

Yet even he, as he'd be the first to insist, is far indeed from having read all the books worth reading, much less from having
re
-read them
(we recall Vladimir Nabokov's insistence that “all great reading is rereading”—a dismaying idea when one has finally reached the end of Dr. Eliot's shelf or of the ten folio volumes of Somadeva's
Katha Sarit Sagara
, or
The Ocean of the Streams of Story
). No: We cannot read all the books, not to mention spectating all the important stage-plays, films, and graphic and plastic arts; auditing all the music; acquiring a working knowledge of all the languages and arts and sciences (a fascinating section of our Hopkins commencement program is the pages and pages of doctoral-dissertation titles in the several sciences: titles of which, more often than not, I cannot understand a single word; can only shake my head in awe at the staggering
multifariousness
of human intellectual curiosity).... We “must know everything,” but we cannot, and inasmuch as we cannot, our pursuit of Higher Education both during and after our college years involves us in an exemplary paradox: Since time, attention, energy, and opportunity are all finite, we must radically exclude and delimit if we are to learn anything at all well; yet in so doing we may very possibly leave out things that, had we discovered them or they us, might have been keys to the treasure that we were scarcely aware we were seeking; or if not the keys, at least elements of the combination.

The Tragic View of life, and/or of history, is that there are no ultimate victories, just different ways to lose, the only “victory” being to go down heroically, or anyhow as nobly as we can. The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, as at St. John's, it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying—which
we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study. Our Hopkins mini-version of your Great Books curriculum was commendable; but how fortunate for me that to make ends meet I worked as a book-filer in the university library, where I lost myself back in the stacks sampling what I was supposed to be reshelving, and thus discovered such extracurricular storytellers as Petronius and Boccaccio and Scheherazade, important to my eventual vocation. But who knows what-all I
didn't
happen to discover, or do or meet, that might have made me into a very different, not impossibly a quite better, writer, not to mention a better human being?

 

BUT THAT WAY lies fruitless discontent, and I do not at all intend the Tragic View of Liberal Education as a despairing or even a pessimistic view, only an unblinkered one. I remember wishing, as a green undergraduate and apprentice writer, that I could at least know the
names
of everything, if not the things themselves: “all trades,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, “their gear, tackle, and trim”: every rock, bug, plant, star, body-bone, lingo, culture. I remember feeling like a newcomer to a party that had been going on for millennia, and worrying that maybe all the best jokes and stories had been told already. 25 centuriesworth of poets getting off good metaphors for the ocean and the sunrise, for example, since Homer's “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn”: Could I or anybody hope to come up with yet another? And how would I know that I had, unless I reconnoitered the entire existing inventory? Which of course I could not; only comfort myself with the speculation that my tens of thousands of predecessors, so far from exhausting the stock of good dawn- and sea-images, might for all we know have scarcely made a
dent in it. No doubt the number of possible zingers is finite, but then so is the number of stars in the galaxy, not to mention in the universe: finite, but astronomically large.

Therefore take heart
, adviseth the Tragic View: One's education is at best fragmentary, and will never be anything like complete; but at least it can know itself to be so, and can achieve
some
compass and coherence. It has to start somewhere, and inasmuch as we happen to dwell in
this
historical/cultural latitude and longitude rather than some other, it seems not unreasonable to begin (although we will not end) with some judiciously chosen reading-list therefrom—recognizing it to be neither more nor less than our point of departure (or 88 or 418 points of departure), not our journey's end.

Will there be objections to the list? Of course there'll be, and welcome to the Great Conversation! Are there arguable alternatives to the Tragic View of Liberal Education? No doubt there are—including the Tragic View of the Tragic View. But that's a sermon for some other occasion than this: For now, my warm congratulations indeed on your Education Thus Far. Welcome to the party!
Gaudeamus igitur!
On with your stories!

This article—commissioned by the State Department in 2002 for inclusion in a book of essays to be distributed in U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the world “to illustrate American values through having various authors consider what makes them an American writer,” but subsequently rejected for its “explicit commentary on the events of September 11”—first appeared in Italian translation
¹
in the anthology
Undici settembre
(Torino: Einaudi, 2003).