August 3, 2014

Without having intended to, doubled the size of the front garden yesterday. I woke from a nap in the mood for digging, I guess, but the impetus was that I have ordered four important roses, and the roses in the backyard–where I meant to put them–are not doing well. Some fungus might be in the soil. Brother mockingbird came to gobble up the grubs as I tossed them from the edge of my spade.

I was feeling great this morning. But an email from Will that his mother-in-law has broken her leg and “thrown family plans into question” chills the future of 62. I feared that things were going too smoothly. The one request I had–in a field hazed and thronged by his requests– that we sign the agreement in a timely manner, would have cut the panic of this moment. I am trying to keep despair to one side.

As I dug the garden I was, curiously, thinking hard about the university, and my current disappointment with its course, at least the course of the Humanities program. As we fought dumbing-down at our level, we forget that it was being casually enforced everywhere beneath us, so we are now hiring a crop of academics who were never taught the difference between taste and judgment, who were allowed to think that the fragment was equal to the whole if we loved it enough. To say to some of my younger colleagues “X or Y is necessary for a responsible education” is to be met by a blank stare or an insolent smirk. The idea that one thing is more important or prior or more useful than another is a sort heresy. Thus, time is lavished on confetti and ornament (or the minuscule issue we wrote our dissertation on) while the structure is ignored– the idea of structure or priority being, of course, patriarchal. But what I was mostly thinking about was why this makes me angry. What is my anger about? If it’s about the insolence of certain popinjays in the program, I’d best let it go now. If it’s about the truth of the academic enterprise– well, is that served by anger? I do fear for the fate of the young people put in our charge, that we are reinforcing rather than parrying the deficiencies of our time. We are serving self-indulgence rather than correcting it, serving narrow and inward vision rather than correcting it, serving solipsism rather than correcting it, serving abbreviated attention span rather than enlarging it, honoring the obsession with the small, personal, and immediate rather than opening doors into a wider world. We lie and misrepresent in order to sound up-to-date. We mouth the shibboleths and the truisms of the moment without turning on them the critical thought we pretend to espouse. Like our students, we would rather take the easy way than the right way. They have no one to show them a higher path, and to obscure our indolence, we insist that “higher” does not exist.

There, I am angry again. I will listen to the catbird crying in my bamboo thicket.