Helping Fishtown (part two)

Yesterday I introduced Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart, which argues that Fishtown (that is, people without college degrees) is culturally handicapped from keeping up with Belmont (that is, people with college degrees).  But I criticized Murray’s policy proposals for fixing the problem – arguing that he probably doesn’t think those policies are any good either. 

I agree with him that culture runs deeper than policy.  But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of society.  The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”  Both are probably true.  Politics can be used to help the cultural problem.

So here are a few policy proposals of my own:

First of all, accept the Fishtown/Belmont divide.  Instead of trying to get Fishtown kids into Belmont, try to help Fishtown kids themselves.  Yes, there will always be working-class kids who turn out to be better at school than all the kids from the educated classes; colleges and intellectual businesses should keep their eyes open for those kids.  But part of what Murray’s showing is that the class problem is intractable.  Murray sometimes seems insistent that working-class people can only be happy if we turn them into information-class people.  Boloney.

In fact – well, this shows I should read his books, instead of just reviews, since I’m probably missing his point; but since you probably haven’t read Murray's books either, my summaries can help us think even if they get Murray wrong.  In any case, Murray’s last book, Real Education (2008),  has been my greatest touchstone for this. 

He says (and backs it up with lots of sociological evidence), imagine a kid getting C’s in high school; the only thing he’s good at is Shop.  Somehow he gets dragged to the guidance counselor who tells him, (of course!) “you can do it!  You can make something of yourself!  You should go to college!”  So he spends four years taking enormous debt doing something he doesn’t enjoy and isn’t good at.  At the end, he gets a job in middle-management, sitting in a cubicle making very modest pay for doing something so soul-crushing that they make black comedies (the movie Office Space, the sitcome The Office) to make fun of it.  Whereas if his stupid guidance counselor had let him be a carpenter, he would have saved himself the four years accumulating debt, and gone right into something that pays better and has higher job satisfaction – and that he’s particulary good at and enjoys.  Shunting Fishtown kids to Belmont is bad for kids.  (And – a topic for another time – probably bad for our society, as it means we’re shifting resources from artisan products that make life more beautiful to an ever-increasing bureaucracy that makes life more stupid.)

So we should start by letting Fishtown be Fishtown.  Every subsidy means taking money from one group and giving it to others.  Even if the money ultimately comes from Belmont people, tax money sent to subsidize college educations is money they can’t spend paying carpenters (etc.) to build beautiful things. 

Yes, we should scold people who don’t work.  But also, we should recognize that building things – Fishtown work – is nothing to spit at.

Rick Santorum’s ideas for promoting factories are full of loopholes (they don’t help carpenters and plumbers, for example – and, see above, the carpenters and plumbers ultimately join all other non-factory people to pay for them), but Santorum’s on the right track: let’s find ways to encourage factories, and all other blue-collar work. 

Mayors and governors could stop insisting that every city be a replica of Silicon Valley.  Factories, everyone will tell you, made Newark stink.  But poverty, joblessness, and hopelessness make Newark stink worse.  Stop regulating out non-Belmont jobs, and start building public transformation (not trains, which are a boondoggle, but better buses) that help poor people get to work.  Cut it out with all the stupid money spent on ever-expanding freeways – essentially wealth-transfer from people who don’t drive SUVs in the exurbs to people who do.  Etc.  Realize (a) that when we subsidize Belmont, it is ultimately everyone outside – Fishtown people – who pay the bill; and (b) that Fishtown, if we could clean up its social problems, is a perfectly noble place to live.

Second: social conservatism.  A post for another day.  But realize that nothing is more destructive than the destruction of families.  Especially for the lower classes.  Pornography is not free speech, it is war on the family; “free speech” originally referred to political speech, the one kind of speech liberals want to hyper-regulate.  “Consenting adults” is fine – except that sex, of its very biological nature, constantly ends up involving non-consenting children.  As does marriage.  Sex and marriage are not about individual freedom, they are about the rights of the next generation.  Their nobility should be defended.  Who suffers most when they aren't?  The fatherless children of Fishtown.

So too the churches.  The rich -- perhaps! -- can lock themselves up in enclaves where the decline of public religion doesn't matter.  (In fact, rich suburban drive-through churches are a pretty poor substitute for the public reality that religion ought to be.)  But for those in Fishtown, who cannot so fully privatize their lives, the decline of public religion is also the decline of private religion.  (To the extent that there is such a thing.)  The attack on public expressions of religion is an attack, among other things on the people of Fishtown. 

Third: okay, fine, open some options for kids to get from Fishtown to Belmont, with education reform.  But realize, first, that children are always above all products of their parents.  Don’t try to trump the parents – but give them options.  Promote homeschooling – and recognize that homeschoolers are double-taxed, paying all the other costs every other parent pays; paying the same taxes to fund the rotten public schools; and paying the costs of materials to school their own children – including the salary of the stay-at-home mom “teacher.”  So at least let parents who school their own children opt out of paying for everyone else.  Give them (us!) the freedom to do it, and give them some of the money they are saving the state.  Education choice should not be limited to the rich.

If parents want to send their children to schools, give them the option to send their kids to good schools.  If parents want to ship their kids to the Belmont Public Schools, and their kids aren’t causing trouble, let them do it.  If parents want to send their kids to church-subsidized schools, don’t make them pay double to do it.  And, by all means, don’t let the teachers’ unions hold other people’s children hostage.  Parents should have the right to educate their children, whether it’s to ennoble their lives in Fishtown or to give them a shot at Belmont.

And finally, yes, as Murray says, find a way to subsidize those who are desperately trying to make ends meet -- but do away with the negative incentives.  Right now, if you want welfare, you have to quit work.  If you want the Earned Income Trap – I mean, the Earned Income Credit – you have to make sure not to make too much money, since they will take your credit away if you work too many extra hours to get your family ahead.  These are stupid, perverse, negative incentives.  Send every family with children a check, regardless.  Help them out.  Send every disabled person a check, regardless, help them out.  Don’t tell them that if they work they will lose their benefits.  The poor do need help, because it can be very hard to get started when you have no money at all.  But they need the checks not to be phased out, because phase-out is a trap to keep you stuck at lower income.

Imagine the single mother – the “welfare queen” of Newt’s welfare reform.  According to pseudo-conservative orthodoxy, she had children just to get rich off the welfare system.  Except, of course, that no one got rich off of welfare.  And children cost a lot of money.  And children are an enormous lot of work.  No, she wasn’t having children to get money.  She was having children to have a family.  (That she couldn’t keep a husband is a social problem that needs to be dealt with – but the problem is the lack of husband, not the children.)  Yes, welfare – or the hidden welfare trap that is the Earned Income Credit – lets her afford to raise a family.  But that’s a good thing.  The bad thing is that if she gets a job, she loses the money.  And the even worse thing is that the 1990’s politicians – including, I’m very sorry to say, Rick Santorum – decided that there’s nothing worse than a stay-at-home mom -- unless she's rich -- and they decided that instead of helping her to get out of poverty or to get and keep a husband, they would penalize her for being with her children.  Wrong solution.  Focus on the right problems.  Give her the money to help her out, and focus your reform energies on making sure she can rise out of poverty, take care of her children, and find a husband.  Giving her money -- guaranteed money, with no phase outs -- to help with her children is the simplest way to start.

Fishtown needs help.  It needs ways to escape poverty.  It needs a morale booster, after a couple generations of being told that its work is demeaning.  It needs economic help, after a couple generations of subsidies from Fishtown to Belmont (always ultimately paid by whoever isn’t getting the subsidy, even if the middle-man is rich people who can’t spend because they’re being taxed), based on a false American dream based not on family, community, and honest work but on silly ideas about how great it is to have a piece of paper claiming you got a college education and work at a cubicle in middle management.  It needs social help, including a deligitimization, in law and in culture, of sexual irresonsibility.  

But Fishtown probably doesn’t need a lawsuit against private companies that stupidly rely on an ever stupider bastardization of college education.

Helping Fishtown (part one)

Charles Murray, one of my favorite public thinkers, has been all over the opinion pages (as author and subject) for his new book, Coming Apart.  He argues, in short, that there’s a growing cultural divide between the educated and the uneducated.  His sociological data shows (or apparently shows: I haven’t actually read the book), contrary to popular belief, that the upper classes, who live in the kind of enclave he calls “Belmont,” are not only harder workers, but also more likely to stay married and go to church, while the denizens of “Fishtown,” along with a failing work ethic (evidenced, above all, by vastly increased numbers of working-age men who claim to be unable to work and in need of government assistance) also don’t get married or go to church. 

Murray’s been criticized for his lack of solutions.  He urges a kind of welfare reform that I’ve been promoting for years, whereby one doesn’t have to quit working in order to get government assistance.  But otherwise, his solution is entirely cultural.  He says there’s nothing much we can do other than for the people of Belmont to start “preaching what they practice.”  Here’s how he put it in a piece in the Wall Street Journal this weekend:

To bring about this cultural change, we must change the language that we use whenever the topic of feckless men comes up.  Don’t call them “demoralized.”  Call them whatever derogatory word you prefer.  Equally important: Start treating the men who aren’t feckless with respect.  Reckognize that the guy who works on your lawn every week is morally superior in this regard to your neighbor’s college-educated son who won’t take a “demeaning” job.  Be willing to say so.
...The cultural shift that I advocate doesn’t demand that we change our minds about anything; we just need to drop our nonjudgmentalism.

That’s good rhetoric.

I wonder if Murray’s lack of solutions is also, in part, rhetorical.  I’d bet he has some ideas about policies that would help.  But he wants to keep the conversation focused on the bigger point.

In fact, in another recent piece, in the New York Times, Murray gave in and actually made some proposals:

1.      Demand that unpaid internships pay the minimum wage.  Unpaid internships are a huge educational advantage available only for those whose parents can subsidize them.

2.      Get rid of the SAT, which, contrary to its supposed purpose, does not measure pure intellectual potential, but also whether your parents could pay to put you through a test-prep class.  Another unfair obstacle to education for the lower classes.

(In a sign of mercurialness, Murray offers this as one of his four policy proposals, then claims that he thinks the SAT is actually working fine.  He’s playing with us.)

3.      Replace ethnic affirmative action with socio-economic affirmative action: instead of lowering entrance standards for black kids, lower entrance standards for poor kids.

4.      Some public-interest law firm should argue in court that requiring a BA for a job amounts to a form of discrimination, since the lowering standards of BA’s tend more to tell where you come from than whether you actually have any skills.

I see the advantages of all these proposals.  But I don’t think they end up being much good, and I suspect Murray doesn’t either.  He’s too smart for this – and, again, I think he’s more interested in getting us talking than in pushing any of these reforms.

I agree, for example, that the BA has become a stupid entrance requirement.  (I am an undergraduate professor.)  And I agree, more than Murray does, that SAT’s are not working.  But what would replace these things?  The problem is always unintended consequences.  If we get rid of the SAT, what will we use instead?  At least the SAT pretends to be measuring “aptitude,” or academic potential.  I don’t know any simpler way to let smart kids from the wrong side of the tracks prove they are college-ready.  And, again, at least the BA pretends to be a real credential.  If a kid can’t prove he’s Belmont-worthy through four years of college, how else will he prove it?  Murray is worried that kids from Fishtown can’t get a leg up on kids from Belmont.  Remove the SAT and the BA and, stupid as those two things have become, you only make it more likely that Belmont people will hire Belmont people.  How else can they tell who from Fishtown is going to be worth the investment?

I’m all for employers and colleges experimenting with better measurements than SAT’s and BA’s.  But when policy makers demand that you get rid of something, you tend to get something worse.  I suspect Murray knows that.

Tomorrow I’ll make some alternative proposals for helping Fishtown.

George Will on James Q. Wilson

The most accomplished social scientist of the last half-century would occasionally visit his friend and Harvard colleague Pat Moynihan at the White House when Moynihan was President Richard M. Nixon’s domestic policy adviser. Once Moynihan took him to Nixon and said: “Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say.” Moynihan was right on both counts. 

James Q. Wilson recently died.  George Will's encomium is fantastic.  

He also understood that although social science cannot tell us what to do, it can tell us what is not working, which has included a lot since the radical expansion of what is considered political. 

That's brilliant.

America, Wilson said, increasingly faces “problems that do not seem to respond, or to respond enough, to changes in incentives.” This is because culture is often determinative, is harder to change than incentives and impedes individuals’ abilities to respond to incentives.  

This is a great middle ground between the conservative rationalism I sometimes espouse and a good friend's liberal anti-rationalist responses.  One of my running ideas is that cultural shifts take decades.  You reap the New Deal and World War II in the 1960s; Woodstock really hit in the 1990s; we're only barely beginning to feel Reagan, etc.  Which makes history are darned difficult discipline: cause and effect are so distantly separated, and by the time effects are felt, several other causes are getting involved.  

Society tends to reward useful aptitudes. This produces hierarchies of pay and power that are resistant to rearrangement by government, including government attempts to redistribute income. Such attempts often ignore how income differences are necessary to reward activities and ignore history, which suggests that economic growth, which redistribution often inhibits, does more than redistributionist measures to narrow inequalities. 

This is a key part of the response to Charles Murray's project, which keeps highlighting the stubborn problems of the lower classes.  There's more to be said, but one key part of the answer is to say it's better to just make life better all around than to try to fight the kind of differences that we'll never do away with.

And the highest purpose of politics is to encourage the flourishing of a culture that nurtures rather than weakens the promptings of the moral sense. 

Brilliant.

The Managerial Revolution

 My wife says I try to say too much in one blog post.  This will not be an exception. 

Nelson Rockefeller

I’ve been thinking about this post for awhile, and was originally going to call it “The New Rockefeller Republicans.”  After serving as Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller ran for every presidential election in the 1960s, and was eventually Gerald Ford’s vice president.  He had crazy amounts of money, and a kind of WASP-y (see my post four years ago on John McCain) noblesse oblige.  He supported the arts, achieved real progress in environmental conservation, greatly increased transportation and public housing, was tough on crime, especially drugs, but also fought valiantly against racial discrimination, while taking a decidedly moderate approach on abortion.  He was an enemy of ideology, ignoring the growing concerns in the 1960s and ‘70s that would become social conservatism, taking a friendly, accomodationist stance on foreign policy, and having a tin ear for questions of limited government.  He worked (at least in his mind) pragmatically for a better society.

But he was only at the center of a major mid-century movement.  Thomas Dewey, also governor of New York, ran for the presidency all through the 1940s, battling against the conservative wing of the Republican party, led by Robert Taft.  Put simply, Taft articulated a philosophy in opposition to FDR, Dewey did not.  Responsibility, pragmatism.

Dewey helped Eisenhower defeat Taft for control of the party in the 1950s.  Eisenhower was a pretty decent president – but thoroughly middle-of-the-road.  Central to Eisenhower’s presidency was the rising civil rights movement, in which Eisenhower fought hard for tolerance (not a bad goal) by sending federal troops into the states, while conservatives worried whether this goal was being achieved through destructively un-Constitutional means and an ever creeping federal State.

And Rockefeller passed the baton to George H.W. Bush, who condemned conservative philosophy as “voodoo economics,” ignored social concerns, and, for example with the Americans with Disabilities Act, continued to fight for a more pleasant easy-going world while ignoring concerns about the limits of government and the danger of perverse incentives.  (As the father of a wheelchair-bound child, I can tell you all about the glories and follies of the ADA – another time.)

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is surely in this class, with his truly ridiculous crusades for public health, his general fight to make New York more pleasant – like a luxury hotel, he says – mixed with his general insouciance about economics and the limits of govenrment

Mitt Romney, with his maneuvering on abortion, unwillingness to take a strong stand on economics, and defense of a health care policy that ignored the dangers of creeping government – not to mention his apparent support from a class of “responsible,” non-ideological, “establishment” types, and even his Northeastern pedigree – has been labeled as the inheritor of the Rockefeller tradition.  But perhaps this new generation of Rockefeller Republicans has an important difference.

Please be clear: what follows is not intended as an endorsement (or rejection) of Romney, or of the movement of which he may be part.  It is simply an observation.  We must understand before making judgments.

Consider some of Romney’s peers.  Example One: Chris Christie, the fabulous governor of our great state of New Jersey.  Christie ran as a moderate; he was frankly dishonest with the people of New Jersey.  Once in office he led a charge to get the books in order, cutting spending especially by standing ferociously against the spend-thriftiness of the unions.  He has refused to raise taxes, but unlike the Reagan generation, who made tax cutting the prime concern and didn’t really worry about spending, Christie and his peers have refused tax hikes as an illegitimate excuse for runaway spending, but have kept their eyes on the bottom line, not on the philosophical goods of tax cuts.  Christie appears to be a Catholic in good standing and a pro-life social conservative, and he is one of America's most exciting politicians when it comes to dealing with urban problems – but that is not his focus.  He is just doing the responsible thing.  New Jersey has been living beyond its means for way too long, and it has to be stopped.  If Christie had to lie (or at least not tell the truth) to the voters in order to get elected, and if he has to ignore other good causes while fighting for these goals, so be it.

Rep. Paul Ryan

The same is true at the federal level.  Consider Paul Ryan, the great congressman from my home state of Wisconsin, and the de facto leader of the Republicans in Congress.  Ryan is a budget geek.  Again, he seems to be a pro-life Catholic, and I think he is in favor of lower taxes, but that isn’t his focus.  Ryan is worried about entitlement spending and how to get our books in order.

One of Christie’s closest friends is the governor of Indiana (and still my dearest desire from a contested convention), Mitch Daniels.  Daniels is a Presbyterian, but also apparently very pro-life and otherwise generally a social conservative.  But when contemplating a run for president last Spring (he decided not to run for personal reasons) he infamously called for a “truce” on social issues while we focus on the budget.  Many conservatives have responded that there can be no truce – witness the last week’s events, with Planned Parenthood whipping a breast cancer research organization into line, the Obama administration demanding that people with moral qualms about contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs must pay for other people to get them, and the West Coast’s Ninth Circuit court ruling that there is a Constitutional right to define marriage however feels comfortable to social liberals.  But obviously Daniels had a point: we can focus more or less on these issues, and use more or less firey rhetoric even when taking a firm stand on actual policies.  Meanwhile, Daniels says, we face a new “red menace” – not Communism, but debt.  As governor of Indiana, Daniels is famous for cutting spending, finding new ways to finance freeways, battling the ever-voracious unions, and (everyone’s favorite!) making the DMV more efficient. 

The list goes on.  Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, is a pro-life Evangelical focused on fighting the irresponsibility of the unions (both the educational policies of the teachers and the general spend-thriftiness of all the public unions).  So is John Kasich, the governor of Ohio.

Mitt Romney can be read as part of this crowd.  Of course (perhaps) he is pro-life, pro-marriage, socially conservative, etc.  He has, after all, an exemplary family life, and is a leader in one of America’s most conservative churches.  But like Chris Christie, his biggest political booster, he has set everything else aside to fight the Red Menace.  Perhaps – I don’t know, but perhaps – he decided in Massachusetts that he would ignore all else, even lying about his position on abortion, in order to get the budget in order.  He was not great (though not bad) on taxes, not great on jobs (though he helped), and his decision on health care reform was not the best (though, I have to say, it is defensible, was the majority-conservative position before Obamacare – note that this was a non-issue when Romney ran in 2008 – and may have been the best that could be done in uber-liberal Massachusetts).  But he did balance the budget, taking Massachusetts from deep in red ink to a big rainy day fund. 

Romney explains his position on abortion

Perhaps Romney is actually the Chris Christie running for President.  Not running like Chris Christie was after the election, but running like Chris Christie was before the election.  Keep the focus on the other guy (Christie was also up against an unpopular mis-managing liberal), just tell people you’re responsible, don’t tell them just how radical you want to be, get what mandate you can, and then kick butt once you’re in office, hoping that you can accomplish enough in your first term to help the country, and maybe even win people’s affection (as Christie has in super-liberal New Jersey) when they can support what you’ve accomplished, and not what you’re threatening to accomplish.  Christie’s show-downs with the unions look a lot better in hindsight than in foresight.

Gov. Chris Christie

I’m not saying Romney has Christie’s skills – surely he does not have his pugnacity, for example.  But perhaps these new Rockefellers are of a different type.  Whereas Dewey, Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and Bush-41 just vaguely fought for a better, more welcoming world, without any sense of social or political philosophy, the new Rockefellers – Romney, Christie, Daniels, Ryan, Walker, Kasich, etc. – have a very strong social and political philosophy, but believe that this Red Menace is so dangerous that all else needs to be made secondary while we battle it. 

One interesting corollary of this belief is the way they relate to politics.  The old Rockefellers jumped on FDR’s bandwagon in thinking the way to get elected was to please everyone.  The new Rockefellers – hardly fair to even call them by his name, given their important differences – agree that you need the support of the masses: How else to get elected in the states with the biggest problems, like Massachusetts and New Jersey, or, as Daniels has said, to get a big enough mandate to do the enormous heavy lifting required for entitlement reform at the federal level?  But profoundly unlike the Rockefellers, these guys are not handing out goodies.  In fact, the only thing they are handing out is the bitter medicine of fiscal discipline.  The Rockefellers were popular for popularity’s sake.  The Christie-Daniels Republicans are trying to appease enough people that they can whip us into order.

To close – and lest my wife relinquish her claim that I try to say too much in one post – I would like to make a wild prediction about the twenty-first century.  I have previously argued a cockamamie theory that each century has its peculiar revolution and character – typically with foreshocks at the end of the previous century and the real avalanche in the second decade of the century.  The eighteenth century had its somewhat unreasonable hopes for reason.  The nineteenth century (focusing here on America) began with the Constitution, but settled in with the Virginia dynasty, and then especially General Jackson’s election in 1828.  It was a century of “republicanism”: a belief that, rightly ordered, the common man could be defended by a proper constitution.

I recently attended a political science conference in which nineteenth-century-Americanists pointed out that the idea of democracy was anathema to the nineteenth century.  Democracy is mob-rule.  Everything in the Constitution – read the Federalist Papers! – is organized to prevent democracy, to make sure that the 51% cannot inflict their prejudices and self-interest on minorities of various sorts.

The twentieth century, with tremors in the late-nineteenth-century populism of William Jennings Bryan and real victory in the Constitutional Amendments of the 1910s, turned that consensus upside down.  Now (yes, still now, for the twenty-first has hardly begun) most Americans cannot even conceive of someone being opposed to majority rule and direct votes.  But we are beginning to wake up to the damage done by this way of thinking.  The ravages of consumerism, to be sure -- of, for example, supposing that if everyone's enjoying the Super Bowl halftime show, it must be okay.  But even more, the ravages of government give-aways, where pandering politicians sell the good of the nation short in exchange for a few more votes.  Populism has had its day, and its successes and failures.  (A post for another day: how rich are we really – when the bill comes due?) 

And so, perhaps, the twenty-first century will be the age of the managers.  Men like Chris Christie and Mitt Romney, Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan, who set aside populist rhetoric, set aside even a true portrayal of themselves to the voters, in order to better manage the country.  Romney is portrayed by his opponents as wanting to “manage the decline.”  But the belief of these new managers is that management is the only way to avoid decline. 

The same kind of people have taken over my university – this is anecdotal, but perhaps significant.  Our new president and provost have very little to say about education, but lots to say about management, including, above all, getting our books in order.  (Even in the university, "books" now means finances.)  As I recall, even when I was a grad student at the Catholic University of America – which was undergoing a profound rediscovery of its religious and intellectual mission – we got a new Provost interested not so much in education as in management.  Consider the irony of schools changing this job’s title to “Chief Educational Officer”: on one level, it claims to be about education, but in fact, it’s a title out of management theory.

Good or bad?  Well, a bit of both.  It’s not my point to endorse it or condemn it, but to say, watch it come.  These guys are right.  The twentieth-century’s obsession with democracy left a major deficit of serious management.  Perhaps the next century will see us give up on cult-of-personality populists trading handouts for votes, in favor of boring technocrats who let us ignore the grime of politics while they fix the problems.  I think there are ways of defending this way of life – far from Big Brother, most of these technocrats seem also to realize, for example, the importance of the family, the local community, and personal responsibility, and might be expected to overrule the ever-expanding if-it-feels-good-do-it-ism of the twentieth-century.  Super-manager Mitch Daniels insists that the goal is not more power for him, but less; his book is subtitled, "Saving America by Trusting Americans."  There are abundant economic and social corollaries to a shift from mob-rule to management.  But for now, I’ll leave it here.

Mitch Daniels

Bartleby

I have just finished Herman Melville’s short novel Bartleby the Scrivener. My reasons for reading it were two: I know nothing about Melville, nothing even about his period, except that he is supposed to be very good.  And the book was free and short on Libra Vox, so I could listen to it in the car.

Bartleby is written in the first person, describing the consternation of a Wall St. lawyer who hires a very strange secretary, for whom the book is named.  Bartleby is passionless—he is contrasted with other, colorful characters, the secretaries Turkey and Nippers and the office boy Ginger Nut, precisely to show how colorless he is. 

He falls into ever deeper depondency.  Increasingly, when asked to do various parts of his job, he responds with the book’s refrain, “I prefer not to.”  The narrator discovers that Bartleby is living in the office, apparently without friends, without anywhere to go, and without much food. 

A scrivener who “prefers not to”—not even to talk about himself—is pretty annoying, and upon pressure from other business people who pass through, the narrator decides to get rid of him.  The book reaches a peak of absurdity when the narrator, who cannot bring himself to call the police, moves offices so as to escape from a Bartleby who prefers not to leave—only to have his former landlord hunt him down and demand that he find a way to get Bartleby out of the building.

The narrator can never quite bring himself to do Bartleby harm.  In fact, he repeatedly offers him money, one time putting it in his hand, only to watch it fall to the floor.  But when Bartleby prefers not to engage any other opportunities, even an offer to come home with the narrator(!), the landlord finally has him taken to jail.  Despite the narrator’s arrangements with the prison grub man, Mr. Cutlets, to provide Bartleby with the best of food, Bartleby prefers not to eat.  The narrator finds him dead, as if asleep, in the prison yard.

I know nothing of this period in American literature, which perhaps strengthened the effect of the book on me.  Even as Bartleby died, it was still unclear to me whether this was a work of black irony or of Christian compassion.  The story is certainly absurd.  But it closes with the narrator hearing a rumor that Bartleby used to work in Washington at the “dead letter office,” processing undeliverable mail. 

His job was to remove valuables—rings or money, perhaps—from letters that never reached their intended recipients: a long meditation on futility and unbreachable distances between those who would profess their love.  The narrator surmises it is this meditation that led Bartleby to despondency.  And so, on the last page of the book (or last minute of the recording), we are overwhelmed with the sadness of a man who has so deeply felt the pain of this world that he is finally judged by others to be unworthy to live in it.

I happened to listen to the last section of Bartleby while running errands with my seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter.  They of course couldn’t follow all of the story—I had listened to the whole thing, and understood the language, and still wasn’t sure what was going on until the very end—but my daughter, especially, thought the refrain “I prefer not to” pretty humorous.  And I think they, too, were caught up, as I and the narrator himself were, in the riddle of Bartleby. 

Perhaps ten minutes before the end of the book, we were driving through an especially rough part of Newark.  On a desolate corner stood a black man in ragged clothing, with an odd assortment of bags around him.  It wasn’t clear what he was up to, but my daughter proposed, after we’d gone past, “Daddy, I think I just saw one of those men who is too poor to have any home to go to.” 

This, I think, is not the least of the virtues of city living.  My children know about, and recognize homelessness.  It is familiar enough to them that they do not cringe—I was recently in a better part of Newark with a suburban friend, who professes to hate cities, and who was shocked when my wife failed to notice a somewhat derelict looking crowd of black men as she was proclaiming the safety of our neighborhood. 

To be a Christian, to be even human, I think, is above all to have compassion for the riddle of Bartleby.  

Land of Sorrows

New Jersey.  We've lived here for a little over two years now, in Newark, which has long been the biggest city, in a neighborhood that was, not all that long ago -- 150 years? -- a swamp, but has been filled with poor immigrants ever since, and is the one part of the city spared from the destruction that has come upon so many of America's cities.

What do you think when you think New Jersey?  Brash.  Fast driving.  Nasty lawyers. (Yes, they're here!)  Guido's and Guidette's on the beach.  Unpleasant people.

But let's go a little deeper.

Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin famously called New Jersey a "beer keg, tapped at both ends."  That may seem to sum up New Jersey as a place of swill and hangovers, smelling like an "arm pit" (one of the more pleasant evocations of our state - there is actually a campaign that feels the need to cry out "New Jersey doesn't stink!").  But Benjamin Franklin was also the one who said, "beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Early reports of New Jersey are of a paradise, a garden state, a place of rich farms and, yes, great breweries.  I don't know much about the Channel Islands, between England and France, but when I think of old Jersey, I think of a farming paradise -- and that's what this state was like.  It was a keg you wanted to get into.

But it was also a keg tapped at both ends.  New Jersey has always been the land between Philadelphia and New York.  Today we have no media markets of our own -- part of the reason our politics are so screwed up -- because most of the state is part of metropolitan areas centered in other states.  On the one hand, that means money has always flowed in from Philadelphia and New York.  On the other hands, it means we have always been serving someone else.

Today, the state is divided according to which city you commute to, and traversed by I-95, which literally runs across the state from Philadelphia to New York City; the New Jersey Turnpike, which extends from 95 to bypass Philadelphia on the way to Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington, DC; and the Garden State Parkway, which reaches down the Shore, bringing tourists in and out.  Originally, the primary road was the the old Post Road, authorized by the Constitution, and formerly the King's Highway, running from Philadelphia to New York.  We are a state rich in natural resources, but fundamentally In Between.

New Jersey was born of compromise and division.  The Swedes were actually the first to settle, in the southern part of the state.  Then we were part of New Netherlands, along with what is now New York and the western half of Connecticut.  Even then, the Dutch milked this land for resources, without really investing.  New Jersey proper was born of protest.  England's King Charles II -- himself the victor of a Civil War -- purchased the country from Holland, and gave it over to his brother, the Duke of York and the future King James II.  James, of course, was the one deposed by (ironically, the Dutch) William of Orange and Mary.  He was deposed because he was Catholic.  New York was named for this man who might have returned England to the faith of her fathers.  New Jersey split off in protest.  Thus Princeton, the original College of New Jersey, has always been a center of Calvinist Presbyterianism precisely because New Jersey was the land to which all the pious Dutch fled when it appeared that New York might go papist.  I teach in a town called Orange; it is not named after fruit.

New Jersey was the crossroads of the Revolutionary War.  Our city of Newark was founded in 1666.  By 1776 -- not that much later -- George Washington was stopping here as he fled from the massacres that were the British capture of New York City, on his way down to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, from which he would run various raids back into New Jersey.  Trenton eventually got to be our capital in large part because of the glorious battle fought there -- after Washington's famous Christmas crossing of the Delaware, from Pennyslvania into New Jersey, to slaughter the Hessians.  Washington's earlier stop at Newark is famous in large part because it was apparently here that Thomas Paine wrote those famous words (I will quote beyond the famous part, to give the flavor):

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Consoling words, I suppose--but consolation only in the face of desolation.  For seven-odd years, the armies tramped back and forth over New Jersey, burning farms, raping civilians (the Hessians were especially known for that, though the British were pretty proud of themselves too), devastating towns -- anyone who could, sure got out of Trenton.  If New Jersey was a place of victory, it was only because it was a land of continual slaughter.

The army battles of the Civil War did not hit New Jersey.  But the civil battle certainly did.  Southern Jersey extends south of the Mason-Dixon line, and even up here in Newark, there were very strong business connections to the South.  New Jersey was torn apart.

In the later nineteenth century, New Jersey was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.  Thomas Edison was here, Paterson was the home of the silk industry and the original manufacturers of Colt rifles, and a huge proportion of America's leather products were made in Newark.  Newark also produced the first plastics, had and produced the first electric lights, and, because it was so ahead on these manufacturing things, hosted the birth of the insurance industry in the late nineteenth century.  A rich and prosperous state.

But you cannot understand New Jersey -- or New York City, or probably any of the Northeast -- without understanding immigration.  Wave after wave of Europe's poorest people poured into our cities.  They came here to work, and they did work, and rose from poverty.  But it wasn't easy, and it wasn't comfortable.  More on that, perhaps, in another post.

Eventually the blacks came, too, in the two Great Migrations (first from 1910-1930, then from 1941-1970).  They came here, like all the other immigrants, because New Jersey was a land of opportunity.  But they were not always respected, and the political classes did not treat them well.  The destruction of the cities is a topic I have covered elsewhere; suffice it to say that it was devastating to the millions of blacks who had come to work in New Jersey.  It was somewhat less devastating to the European immigrants, but their communities, too, were destroyed.  Newark's old First Ward, once a truly vibrant, and truly Italian community, was razed to the ground, replaced by government housing projects full of blacks, many of them without much hope of advancement.  Weequahic, the southern most part of the city, went from having at least as much claim to be a true homeland for the Jews as Israel itself, to a place where this past summer a police officer was accidentally killed after two girls -- black, and hopeless -- got in a fight, and one of them sent her boyfriends to gun down the other one's boyfriends in a pizza place.  Newark, and New Jersey, is a place of scars.

The riots were both cause and effect.  To live in Newark is to hear constantly of those July days in 1967 -- and to see the physical scars that remain across the city, the blocks piled with rubble, the boarded up houses and buildings, the ancient billboards advertising a glamourous city that it strains one's imagination to believe could ever have been Newark.  The Italians who stayed, and those who left, remain in shock and terror at what happened to their home, their city.  But the riots were not the beginning - they hardly could have been.

New Jersey, this garden state, this industrial masterwork, this place of opportunity and beauty, has always been bleeding.  It is a true crossroads of America, and like Belgium, that means it has been crossed by every kind of army in every kind of war. For a hundred and fifty years now wave after wave of impoverished immigrant has come, bringing with them the pathologies and desperations of their home countries, the clash of cultures that have never met before, the desperate effort to get ahead.  New Jersey, I sometimes feel, is like we're still on the boat, with everyone gasping for air, stepping on one another to try to survive, and to get to where the land of riches must surely be.  In New Jersey, the rich themselves came from the poverty of the docks of Naples, and continue to act like it.  And meanwhile, every generation looks down on, and does their best to take from, the generation after it: the WASPs have always tried to hold their power, and to get rich off of the immigrants, and each generation of immigrants follows that pattern.  It is a frightful place, because it is a bleeding place.

Please don't misunderstand me.  I love the immigrants, including those black immigrants from America's South -- I choose to live in an immigrant neighborhood, in a black city. I write not to condemn, but to compassionate.  I feel the terror, the frustration, the scars.  And I believe this is America, at its deepest, and richest, and most difficult.

Today is the feast of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, "Padre Pio," a Franciscan friar in Italy in the early- to mid-twentieth century.  He was a man of compassion and of suffering, and for his compassion he was made to suffer, cast out of his community, silenced, abused.  I heard a priest say Mass today who in many ways embodies my understanding of New Jersey.  He talks like a man born and raised here -- but he also says the Italian Mass at our parish, reminding us that he is the son of immigrants, who grew up in a home where they didn't speak English.  He grew up in Newark -- and not our part of Newark, which was spared.  His parish has been bulldozed, his community is gone; the center of the riots was walking distance from his home.  When he comes to say the Italian Mass, we know it is with a suffering nostalgia.  After the riots, his parents moved out to the very borders of Newark, to a kind of hiding place, but still within this beloved, bleeding city.

I don't know the rest of his story.  I know that he had a mental breakdown after his mother died, that he is a man whose holiness -- if I am right in thinking it is holiness -- is precisely in his utter forsakenness, his complete loss of interest in amounting to anything.  Recently we were chatting, somehow, about Monsigniori.  He said, "not for me.  'Monsignor' is for mothers.  My mother is dead."  His preaching, like the way he says Mass and hears confessions, always carries the resignation of a shrug: he does things right, but makes no effort to do them particularly well.

But today he spoke with unaccustomed eloquence about St. Pio.  A man he said he identifies with -- I have NEVER heard this priest say he identifies with anything related to sanctity! -- though he then tried to cover it up, saying we all probably feel some kinship with Padre Pio.  And then he talked about how Padre Pio got nothing but suffering, nothing but rejection, for all the good he did.

A land of sorrows.  New Jersey.

Nature and Aesthetics in Brideshead

I am teaching Evelyn Waugh's wonderful novel Brideshead Revisited right now. I'd like to share some thoughts about aesthetics.

Early on at Oxford, Charles, the future landscape painter, learns something critical:

It was not until Sebastian, idly turning the pages of Clive Bell's Art, read: "'Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?' Yes. I do," that my eyes were opened.

Modernity claims a radical divide between nature and man. Indeed, in modern parlance, nature is almost defined as "untouched by man" -- and thus man defined as "not nature." That isn't true, on a variety of levels. Sebastian teaches Charles that it isn't true on the aesthetic level. Art is beautiful precisely because it is an extension, a further development, of nature.

Anthony Blanche was the first to go . . . . The others left soon after him. I rose to go with them, but Sebastian said: "Have some more Cointreau," so I stayed and later he said, "I must go to the Botanical Gardens."

"Why?"

"To see the ivy."

It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.

"I've never been to the Botanical Gardens," I said.

"Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There's a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don't know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens."

A beautiful arch, and more kinds of ivy than I knew existed. Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a man-made arch as for the brilliant natural variety of ivy? Yes. Sebastian does. And really, it's not hard to see it. Of course there is a beautiful arch among the ivy.

Then they go to Brideshead.

It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls . . . to sit, hour after hour, in the pillared shade looking out on the terrace.

This terrace was the final consummation of the house's plan; it stood on massive stone ramparts above the lakes, so that from the hall steps it seemed to overhang them, as though, standing by the balustrade, one could have dropped a pebble into the first of them immediately below one's feet. It was embraced by the two arms of the colonnade; beyond the pavilions groves of lime led to the wooded hillsides. Part of the terrace was paved, part planted with flower-beds and arabesques of dwarf box; taller box grew in a dense hedge, making a wide oval, cut into niches and interspersed with statuary, and, in the centre, dominating the whole splendid space, rose the fountain; such a fountain as one might expect to find in a piazza of Southern Italy, such a fountain as was, indeed, found there a century ago by one of Sebastian's ancestors; found, purchased, imported and re-erected in an alien but welcoming climate.

Sebastian set me to draw it. It was an ambitious subject for an amateur -- an oval basin with an island of formal rocks at its centre; on the rocks grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetation and wild English fern in its natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams of counterfeited springs, and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and camelopards and an ebullient lion all vomiting water; on the rocks, to the height of the pediment, stood an Egyptian obelisk of red sandstone -- but, by some odd chance, for the thing was far beyond me, I brought it off and by judicious omissions and some stylish tricks, produced a very passable echo of Piranesi . . . .

Since the days when, as a school-boy, I used to bicycle round the neighbouring parishes, rubbing brasses and photographing fonts, I have nursed a love of architecture, but though in opinion I had made that easy leap, characteristic of my generation, from the puritanism of Ruskin to the puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and mediaeval.

This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.

Where does nature leave off and art begin? Of course on some level there's a distinction -- but true art springs right out of nature, and ties it together.

Indeed, sometimes nature itself becomes art. Here is Charles returning to Brideshead in war time:

Beyond and about us, more familiar still, lay an exquisite man-made landscape. It was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley. Our camp lay along one gentle slope; opposite us the ground led, still unravished, to the neighbourly horizon, and between us flowed a stream -- it was named the Bride and rose not two miles away at a farm called Bridesprings, where we used sometimes to walk to tea; it became a considerable river lower down before it joined the Avon -- which had been dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the clouds and the mighty beeches at their margin. The woods were full of oak and beech, the oak grey and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds; they made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide green spaces -- Did the fallow deer graze here still? -- and, lest the eye wander aimlessly, a Doric temple stood by the water's edge, and an ivy-grown arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might be seen in its maturity. From where I stood the house was hidden by a green spur, but I knew well how and where it lay, couched among the lime trees like a hind in the bracken.

A "man-made landscape." What can it mean? Well, this. Where does nature leave off and man begin? How can it be that the Doric temple (with its ivy-grown arch!) ties together the play of landscape, that the house itself is like a deer, grazing among the woods?

Note, also, before we move on, the play of political life: the fountain has been brought to this rural setting, but it immediately evokes the piazza in Southern Italy that was its natural home, while Brideshead ties in a farm up river, and indeed a whole community of farmers, while leading the mind down river toward Bristol, a major city, at the mouth of the Avon. To see this natural place is to see its connections to the human world around it.

But now it is time to talk of food. Who could forget that dinner with Rex at Paillard's. Like Charles, let us tune out Rex's awful noise, and attend to the beautiful:

I was there twenty minutes before Rex. If I had to spend an evening with him, it should, at any rate, be in my own way. I remember the dinner well -- soup of oseille [the herb sorrel], a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a caneton a la presse [duckling pressed, then cooked in its own juices], a lemon souffle. At the last minute, fearing that the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bere of 1904.

Living was easy in France then; with the exchange as it was, my allowance went a long way and I did not live frugally. It was very seldom, however, that I had a dinner like this, and I felt well disposed to Rex, when at last he arrived and gave up his hat and coat with the air of not expecting to see them again. He looked round the sombre little place with suspicion, as though hoping to see apaches or a drinking party of students. All he saw was four senators with napkins tucked under their beards eating in absolute silence. I could imagine him telling his commercial friends later: ". . . interesting fellow I know; an art student living in Paris. Took me to a funny little restaurant -- sort of place you'd pass without looking at -- where there was some of the best food I ever ate. There were half a dozen senators there, too, which shows you it was the right place. Wasn't at all cheap, either."

Well, Rex understands some things.

He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I thought, for the house of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could wait until the attention was blunted and one would listen with half the mind only; now in the keen moment when the maitre d'hotel was turning the blinis over in the pan, and, in the background, two humbler men were preparing the press, we would talk of myself . . . .

"Ah." The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed separating each glaucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.

"I like a bit of chopped onion with mine," said Rex. "Chap-who-new told me it brought out the flavour."

"Try it without first," I said. "And tell me more news of myself."

Glaucose is a shade of grey. Cream, butter, caviare, thin blini pancakes. Good cooking begins and ends with natural ingredients, gentle shades of flavor and color, gently brought together, so that each complements and nothing overpowers.

The soup was delicious after the rich blinis -- hot, thin, bitter, frothy.

But Rex is still talking.

"It's the kind of thing I hear . . . . But Ma Marchmain won't do anything about it. I suppose it's something to do with her crack-brain religion, not to take care of the body."

The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. We ate to the music of the press -- the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood and marrow, the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast

The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. The pun is exquisite. Rex criticizes Lady Marchmain for a religion that, by his calculation, does not sufficiently care for the body. That seems "crack-brain" to him because -- well, because the soul is so simple and unobtrusive that Rex fails to notice it. He is bodily in a gross way, in a way that cannot appreciate the soul. But ironically, his grossness also cannot appreciate the body, for just as he overlooks the soul, so too does he overlook the fish, the sole.

The true contrast is not between body and soul, but between gross and fine. Nothing could be more physical than the crunch of bones as they prepare that delicate caneton. But it is a music Rex cannot hear.

Who can fail to think of that lovely dinner with Cordelia at the Ritz Grille in London, after a day of painting poor doomed Marchmain House, some eighteen months later.

"I hope I've got a vocation."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it. Bridey thinks he has a vocation and hasn't. I used to think Sebastian had and hated it -- but I don't know now. Everything has changed so much suddenly."

But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening -- of Browning's Renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

"You'll fall in love," I said.

"Oh, I pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?"

Who has their finger in the succulent pie of creation? Still-secular Charles has seen something extraordinary in his painting. But so has Cordelia. A page before we read:

Presently on the last afternoon I heard a voice behind me say: "May I stay here and watch?"

I turned and found Cordelia.

"Yes," I said, "if you don't talk," and I worked on, oblivious of her, until the failing sun made me put up my brushes.

"It must be lovely to be able to do that."

I had forgotten she was there.

"It is."

So here's this fifteen-year-old girl who can sit in absolute silence and enjoy all the glories of the Renaissance man. He thinks her religion of friars stands between her and the joy of creation. She wants to be a nun and finds meringues scrumptious.

But let us return to Paillard's:

Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I thought.

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James's Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard's with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.

Another wisdom than his. The fabulous thing about viniculture is how it mingles man's wisdom with the wisdom of nature. Like the designer of English parks, the vintner gently harvests the fruit of the earth, pared through generations into subtly different grapes, and allows the yeasts that already inhabit the skins to gently work their magic, sometimes over decades (the wines that night at Paillard's were about twenty years old), in barrels themselves carefully cultivated from just the right oak. Where does nature leave off and art begin? The wisdom of the vintner is an ancient wisdom, slowly gleaned from the wisdom already built into the earth itself by its wise creator. It is a kind of contemplation, and it speaks words of hope that the world is an older and better place than Rex ever knew.

After the duck came a salad of watercress and chicory in a faint mist of chives. I tried to think only of the salad. I succeeded for a time in thinking only of the souffle. Then came the cognac and the proper hour for these confidences . . . .

The cognac was not to Rex's taste. It was clear and pale and it came to us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers. It was only a year or two older than Rex and lately bottled. They gave it to us in very thin tulip-shaped glasses of modest size.

"Brandy's one of the things I do know a bit about," said Rex. "This is a bad colour. What's more, I can't taste it in this thimble."

They brought him a balloon the size of his head. He made them warm it over the spirit lamp. Then he rolled the splendid spirit round, buried his face in the fumes, and pronounced it the sort of stuff he put soda in at home.

So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex's sort.

"That's the stuff," he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it left dark rings round the sides of his glass. "They've always got some tucked away, but they won't bring it out unless you make a fuss. Have some."

"I'm quite happy with this."

"Well, it's a crime to drink it, if you don't really appreciate it."

He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We both were happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night.

A fine coup de grace: even antiquity is not a think to be sought for its own sake, just because a bottle has Napoleonic cyphers on it. Indeed, the truer antiquity is the wisdom that knows when to bottle and when to drink, and how to appreciate the subtler stuff. Antiquity itself is a heroic deed of man -- Napoleonic indeed -- but beauty is a knowledge of something beyond man, the cultivation of a wisdom that does not start with us.