In Which I Get One Up on Socrates

I remember noticing when I had outlived Keats (26) Shelley (29), Charlie Parker (34), Mozart (35), Byron (36), Pascal (39), Shakespeare (52)—even Thomas Chatterton (17).

Now I have outlived Socrates (70): I turn 71 today The computer programmers would remind me that I am now in my seventy-second year, having started at t=0. The mathematicians would say that t→n. I’m closing on Goethe (83), Sophocles (90) and Irving Berlin (101).

Socrates, readying himself to to drink the hemlock at 70, said it didn’t matter all that much because he was going to die soon anyway. I don’t share his cheerful insouciance, but I must say that so far I have had almost unspeakable good luck. I have dodged almost every important bullet on the health front (so far). I’ve got a nice wife who treats me with indulgence. I’m proud of my kids and delighted by my grandchildren. I’ve got interesting work to do, when I do it—indeed, I had better shut up now, lest I tempt fate.

I’m not at all disposed to give a final accounting just yet, but if pressed, I suppose I could draw up a trial balance. In the church of my childhood, we used to say: we have done the things we ought not to have done, and we have left undone the things we ought to have done. Guilty on all counts, your honor, at least in a general way. We Presbyterians didn’t fancy being too specific about our sins, and I’d just as well not make an allocution. I don’t think I have committed any major crimes in life, unless you count being one of those rich Americans (or unless you count being male).

I surely have committed any number of acts of unkindness or inconsideration, and when the blood sugar is down at three o’clock in the morning, I can actually make myself pretty blue over some Dumb Thing I did to somebody 30 years ago. I usually remind myself that it’s past caring now: the victim has probably long since closed the books on the matter, writing me off as a clown or a jerk. If I met them again and tried to apologize today, they’d probably try to run away (“Waiter! Check, please!”—or perhaps worse, “Security!”).

I suspect my main concern is that St. Peter, scrutinizing his clipboard, will say “I just don’t see anything very interesting in your resumé” Well, St. Peter can take his time—maybe it will look better later. Meanwhile I will abide by the insight of the guy in the Larry Block novel—the one who said that “any day above ground is a good day.” And, from the Oxford Book of Ages, a few comparisons for item #71:

A man who has settled his opinions does not love to have the tranquillity of his convictions disturbed; and at seventy-one it is time to be in earnest.

--Samuel Johnson,
A Journey to the Western Islands (1773)

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not, but I am getting old and soon I shall remember only the latter.

--Mark Twain (of course), letter to A.B. Paine

[I wonder what the neighbors thought of this next one:]

You think it horrible that Lust and Rage
Should dance attendance upon my old age.
They were not such a plague when I was young.
What else have I to spur me into song?

--W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley,December 1936

[And surely the best possible epigraph for 71:]

In July, when I bury my nose in a hazel bush, I feel fifteen years old again. It’s good! It smells of love!

--Corot, still feeling the compulsion
to go into the country and paint, 1867

--All the above from the Oxford Book of Ages
Chosen by Anthony and Sally Sampson (1985)

Philology RIP

There’s a remarkable pairing on the obituary page of this mornings' New York Times. On the right, spread over four columns, we have Bruce M. Metzger, a translator of the Bible, and an authority on the New Testament in its original Greek. On the left over two columns, perhaps more of a niche player but no less worthy, Mordkhe Schaechter, as the Times calls him, “a leading Yiddish linguist.”

In another time, there used to be an academic discipline called “philology”—okay, there still is, but not what it used to be. Anyway, “philology,” in the classic sense of the “love of language”—its grammar, its syntax, its evolution, but inseparable from its literature. Language matters, “it makes us different from the beasts,” it is culture, it is what we are.

Both Metzger and Schaechter qualify as philologists in the grand sense, but with provocative differences. Schaechter’s life was an essay in preservation, or retrieval: he consecrated himself to the task of sustaining Yiddish as itself a sustaining force. Metzger’s career presents a different aspect. No doubt about his achievement in language, nor his ability: “besides Greek, Latin and Hebrew,” the Times recounts, he “knew Coptic, Syriac, Russian, German, Spanish, French and Dutch, among others.” A formidable portion of his formidable achievement was dedicated to Getting it Right—to assessing and evaluating the famously refractory corpus of Biblical manuscripts.

Yet perhaps is more visible achievement is the line in the first paragraph of the obituary: he “oversaw the publication of a widely used modern edition” of the Bible—an edition which “eliminated all the these and thous and many of the hes.” Stated plainly, for all his achievement in language, Metzger in the end committed himself to the view that language in the end is not All That Important.

It’s a irony not of his own making. Christianity has always taken a relaxed view of originalism in its textual tradition. Set aside the fact that most Americans think the Bible was written by King James: the vocation of Biblical scholars has been to get the Good News into as many languages as possible (I assume it is available in Sign Language and Klingon).

Muslims, at least, would find this incomprehensible. From one end of Indonesia to the other end of Africa, the core of the Muslim tradition is that Allah speaks with one voice, and that voice is Classical Arabic. Never mind the fact that so many reciters of the Koran have no idea what they are saying: at least they are speaking the authentic Word.

Schaechter in this sense was a lot closer to the tradition of Islam than to Christianity—exemplifying, perhaps, that Islam draws on its Hebrew roots even more directly than Christianity. His job was specifically not to make Yiddish culture available in English, but to make Yiddish culture available in Yiddish—to keep it alive as a language and a way of life.

This distinction seems to me important, but at the end of the day, the unity remains. Language is what makes us what we are. Remember Auden on Yeats.

Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent,

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honours at their feet.

--W. H. Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats d. Jan. 1939

Fn.: The Times obit of Metzger includes a couple of amusing examples of translational lacunae in the New Testmant. I admit I like these Biblical word games. Abraham needed a computer and Isaac asked him where he would get the hardware. “God,” said Abraham, “will provide the RAM.” Does the Bible mention fleas? Yes, God told Joseph to take his wife and Son and flea into Egypt. Language. It matters.

Poetic License

Stop babbling man, how much?

--Yeats on winning the Nobel Prize 1923

(per BBC)