Some years ago I experienced a strange and rather powerful coincidence. I had been talking over breakfast in DC with my freind Hunter Rawlings. He urged me to read Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams and noted how strange it was that Adams  never mentioned his wife , Clover, who had committed suicide in 1885. 

Then a few hours after our breakfast chat I wandered into an alcove in the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art and was deeply moved by a seated bronze figure.  I stared at it for some while before reading what it was -- a cast of the sculpture Adams had asked Augustus Saint-Gaudens to  create as a memorial for his late wife.. He wanted, he said, something beyond sadness or joy, exultation or despair -- something that might evoke the Buddhist idea of nirvana. 

I was powerfullymoved by the sculpture, and, honestly, some what awe-stricken by the coincidence, the talk about  Adams  with my friend  and my accidentally stepping into that alcove. Coincidences increasingly seem to me to be invitations to thought. 

Yesterday, visiting friends in DC, I talked them into going to the Rock Creek cemetery (n where near Rock Creek)  to see  the original of the memorial. Again, amazement.  

 The memorial is surrounded by thick evergreens that allow only two ways --  one on the  far left, the other on the right.-- into the  space surrounding the memorial itself. (That space is perhaps 25 feet by 35 feet. )  There is no way to see the sculpture until you enter that space. Even then you may not immediately notice it, since the eye is drawn to the long yellow granite bench, exquisitely polished, gleaming, almost blinding in the sun,

 Then, obliquely, in peripheral vision at first, is the dark figure, looming there. In the bright sun I could not make much out at first, and even after shielding my eyes and letting them adjust, it was beyond describing neither male not female, not of this world nor the beyond.  I knew the identification "nirvana," and a little of what that implied, but there  is no label, neither that name nor "Adams," no dates, no words. Just the presence of this  dark. more than life sized figure seated on rough, dark gray granite, boulder-like, chiseled out just enough to make a seat. 

One more thing -- classicism! Downtown in the Smithsonian museum, I had no idea that behind this figure there  was a rectangular block of the same, bright, yellowish granite, used on the bench, brightly polished, perfectly rectilinear, and capped with an entablature of purest classical form.  

Dark figure, flowing black robe, seated on rough hewn rock,  totally un-classical, anti-classical even, "Buddhist" I suppose, but not like any Buddhist art  I  have ever seen.  Flowing, the flux perhaps, but set up against  the bright geometry of the Greeks. 

Then, if you  step outside, walk around the greenery, there is one gap (other than the  two entrances), a narrow space so that one can see the back of the yellow  granite backdrop, and on it, two interlocking crowns, victory wreaths? lovers' knots? but powerfully  evocative of classical art. There's a model somewhere out there in a hellenistic site in  Asia Minor, I bet.

I thought, Maybe that's what it's for, this strangely persistent classicism, forms that will not go away -- so old-fashioned,  so out-of-date, so irrelevant, so silly, so snobby, so pretentious so much of the time, but once in awhile classiciism reaches out to raw, unshaped, inexpressible feeling, and says "I understand; I know what is beyond words,  beyond light and darkness, seeing and not seeing, beyond categories of thought and experience, beyond male and female,  beyond life and death, beyond feelings even. I know all that,  the shaped marble seems to say,  but emerging from all that  there is yet form, and with form, perhaps only with form, can you live with such intensity."

Have you see the memorial? If so,  tell me what you think.  If not, leave the downtown  memorials to the high school kids and ee for yourself. 

I think the pendulum is swinging back from the jobs-is-all-that-matters talk. I tried  o make the case for that in a recent draft essay  “Classics Now”.  So I was heartened that Nicholas Kristof decided to write about liberal education in his op-ed piece “Starving for Wisdom.”   But it’s not all good news.  The economists are  still at it, even when they try to be helpful: ““A broad liberal arts education is a key pathway to success in the 21st-century economy,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. Katz says that the economic return to pure technical skills has flattened, and the highest return now goes to those who combine soft skills — excellence at communicating and working with people — with technical skills. “ 



Sound familiar? Katz is spouting more of the stale Return on Investment talk that has caused much damage in recent years. 

Is there some Good news?  Sure. Guess what? Scientists have figured out that literature helps develop empathy! “Science magazine published five studies indicating that research subjects who read literary fiction did better at assessing the feelings of a person in a photo than those who read nonfiction or popular fiction. Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.”


I’m sorry if I sound contemptuous.  Kristof, like so many of us, is working his way through some tough issue.  You have to respect him for that.  What’s more Calypso in the Odyssey, may Zeus bless her, come to his aid, and eventually, he gets it, or at least some of it: “wherever our careers lie, much of our happiness depends upon our interactions with those around us, and there’s some evidence that literature nurtures a richer emotional intelligence. “

So maybe the pendulum is swinging a bit. It better, the pit is awfully  deep.

 

 

 

Max Beerbohm’s  treatment of John Singer Sargeant.  Both knew about “elites.”

 

Many years ago “Where the elite meet to eat”  was the motto of the mythical but down-scale Duffy’s Tavern.  Some may still remember it.  But today when the elite meet to eat it may well be in a college food court.  And that sends a guilt pang down the sciatic nerve, especially, I think, among classicists. We often seem especially guilt afflicted when the word “elitist” is spoken.  A classicist friend, for example, writes, “In most colleges and universities that offer classics programs … many, many of the students ARE rich. “  And she went on to point out that I had beaten the drum “about the potential of on-line instruction to bring Latin and Greek - and so much more of Classics! - to those who are not fortunate enough to go to a private school or elite college.  That would be a huge help to us all. “

 

I still think that’s true, though I have not convinced many people of it.  But if for the foreseeable future many of our students will be disproportionately well-to-do, how troubling is it? Classicists are are only elitist, I think, if the stop pressuring the administrations of the schools in which they teach to do all they can to provide financial support to a broad range of students, or if they abandon  their role in helping all students think through what it means to be an effective citizen in a deliberative democracy, and, as my friend puts it, “human beings who have the great gifts of minds, empathy, delight, intellect and the like.’

If we can help the next generation of our "elite" understand these things, rather than just $ $ $ , I think we should feel no guilt.

 And, Oh, yes, while you’re thinking about elitism and democracy take a look at  Scott Samuelson’s essay “Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers: Liberal Arts and the Humanities Aren’t Just for the Elite”


 

It’s hard to stop the media from ranking  colleges on way or another.  Lately the fad has been to rank them by returns on investment (avwrage salary / sticker price).   Why guess who is at the top when The Wall Street Journal will tells you?   It’s a tie: Brigham Young (Provo Utah) and the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology  (Rapid City SD) both come it at 10.9%. 

Not so long ago colleges and universities used to be proud of the number of graduates who went into public service professions, teaching, ministry, social work, NGOs, community organizing (for  example  in Chicago, remember, Barak?)  But since such work is  usually poorly compensated,   every time a graduate takes a job in one of these sectors, the institution’s return on investment ranking goes down.  And, I presume, the unsuspecting applicants head off to Utah or South Dakota for an intellectually challenging, life transforming, richly satisfying education.