regrouping

“Philosophy, inevitably, is the human quest for beatitude,
and includes not only a person’s faith and its expansion into the fullness of understanding,
but a person’s will and understanding as well.”

~ A.H. Armstrong & R.A. Markus, Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy.

I’ll bet most of you hear in your workplaces about how close an upcoming Friday is. “It’s almost Friday,” is something I’ve always heard in my midst wherever I’ve worked and gone to school. And I surely feel that headlong lunge toward weekends and days off. “The shore is in sight,” as I hear myself say to the neighborhood postmaster. A colleague of mine likes to say, “we’re almost at forty-eight hours to regroup,” referring to the weekend. As positive as it is to have strong appetites for unstructured and untethered time, there is muted anguish embedded in that stretch for an oasis. Still, it remains vital to keep looking forward to things that are favorable, and no less in these times.

Just as with last year, participating in the recent Oxford Philosophical Society’s seminars was via teleconferencing. But also like last year, I looked forward to our discussions and greatly enjoyed the experience. Indeed, all of us hope next year’s events will happen in person. The pandemic has yet to subside. Fortunately, the desire to teach and learn motivates our technological creativity. The time difference between Maine and the U.K. meant beginning the days at 3am local time, but it was undoubtedly worthwhile. I’ve derived more to share with students, as well as to fuel my own studies in the coming months. Coincidentally, I’ve begun my 7th year of teaching topics in philosophy. For the second year, all of this has to happen online. As with the group at Oxford, the enjoyment of in-person presence is missed, but the benefit of meeting online has removed the limitations of physical location. It’s a strange trade-off, but an undertone of the covid era is to make the best possible out of bad situations.

Surviving intact during a pandemic requires more than those weekly forty-eight hours to regroup, or even the buildup to those two days. In my experience, the regrouping needs to happen daily and obviously in much smaller portions. And those small portions tend to be humbly bland; nowhere as savoury as in pre-covid times. At best, most of us are living compromised lives; often, the regrouping of wits and priorities has to be constant. During the summer, I’ve resumed my monthly travels to the Boston Athenaeum- though complying with all the required health protocols. There’s no telling when things will return to pre-March 2020 life. Thanks to my self-directed studies and my teaching responsibilities, there is encouragement to continually renew, learn, and redeem the time. My working conditions and ambitions continue to ignite my search for a better situation, despite closed doors, rejections, and recession. At least I’m working, producing, surviving, and helping others as much as possible. My studies in philosophy often become sources of wise advice and thought-provoking perspectives.

My discussions and inquiries about the Renaissance-era Oxford reformist philosophers led to a rare 155-year-old book being mailed to me from England. It was more like the gatherings of pages of the book than anything else, as I had to completely rebind the volume’s contents to be able to study the work. The binding was broken, but the textblock was complete and in good condition. The book is The Oxford Reformers of 1498, by Frederic Seebohm. Eager to study a thick tome about Erasmus, Colet, and Thomas More- written by a Quaker social historian, I gathered my best bookbinding ingredients to do justice to the fragments and rebuild them to last. Using conservation-grade cloth, adhesives, endpaper material, and chipboard, I restored the book into something strong enough to inhabit. Restorative projects during tentative times are gestures of hope.

My restorative rebinding of Seebohm's Oxford Reformers of 1498.

Indeed, the book is a treasure filled with treasure. A great read from which I took many notes. The three featured philosophers were kindred spirits and friends who worked together during a time period of wars and plagues. Despite their adversities, they created educational systems and vernacular texts whose influences reached across subsequent centuries and continents. When I find philosophical works that really speak to me, I also seek out biographies about the authors themselves. Seebohm’s volume gave me numerous fine details about the Oxford reformers’ lives. I had never read so much about Colet before. His career in teaching and writing was inspired by having learned from Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, in Florence. After the travels, while still an Oxford student, he began teaching free and public courses which became very popular. He clearly loved doing this, as the preserved letter correspondence attests. The classes, unofficial as they were, continued for more than eight years- until Colet had been appointed Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London. There is surely something for me to enjoy in Seebohm’s poignant observation:

“The leaven, silently but surely, was leavening the surrounding mass. But Colet probably did not see much of the secret results of his work. That it was his duty to do it was reason enough for his doing it. That it bore at least some visible fruit was sufficient encouragement to work on with good heart. So the years went by; and as often as each term came round, Colet was ready with his gratuitous course of lectures...”

Was the early 16th century any more or less hostile and restrictive than the early 21st century? Was inspiring education and benevolence any more or less scarce than compared to now? In any time, diligence and perseverance are needed in order to excel. It also appears as though an individual’s passion for their work and a willingness to give of their resources were as detectable then as now in the isolating present. Hope and consolation have never lost their value.

disciple

“Learn of me.”

~ Matthew 11:29

“Be teachable, and you will make great strides,” wrote Desiderius Erasmus, the exemplary and indefatigable Renaissance author in his Paraclesis. The directive is reminiscent to me of my father who has now been gone fifteen weeks from this life. He also admired Erasmus. When I arrived at Oxford, I was sure to send my Dad an e-mail message about walking the same paths and halls as Erasmus did, as a C. S. Lewis Scholar-in-Residence. Dad remarked about The Praise of Folly, as well as Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. The wisest people we know are those who want us to be teachable. My pilgrimage of learning continues on, but without my father- without adding to our running commentaries. Of his best friend of many years, four years his senior, Dad said, “Jack introduced me to so many things,” particularly in their work as pioneer computer programmers and connoisseurs of classical music. When Jack passed away, Dad wrote me about how one day many years back, while they were working at IBM on Madison Avenue at 57th Street, “a security alarm sent everybody into the street. We had no idea how long we would have to remain outside the building. So we just walked over to nearby Carnegie Hall and, on seeing that the Cleveland Orchestra was in town and giving a matinée performance that very day, we decided we would take our surprise break as an occasion to enjoy Beethoven's Ninth as performed by George Szell. It was a spontaneous thing and an afternoon that we always cherished.” A wonderful story of two New Yorkers making the best of things.

taking stock

In his reflection about his departed best friend, my father immediately remarked about how much he had learned. For my part, throughout these recent months, I’ve been taking stock of how much I learned from my father. Taking stock is the opposite of taking for granted, meaning a conscious cherishing of something valuable that is immediately at hand. It is a form of gratitude. Things of which I take stock are palpable consolations to me. To this day, it astonishes me to recognize how much I learned from my father. Last night during a lonesome road trip on the Maine Turnpike, I started imitating his voice, surprising myself as to how accurate I sounded.

Having a difficult time focusing my thoughts, I took Dad’s portable Royal typewriter (I now have all three of his) with me to write in view of Casco Bay. About sixteen years ago, he gave me his two portables- a customized Olivetti Lettera 32, and a small Royal Signet- which he’d often lend to me. Now I have the heavier Royal DeLuxe he used in school. With a sunny Saturday, I took the Signet with me to the park at the Portland Breakwater. Dad told me he had bought that typewriter in 1965 for $35 during a workday. At the time, company employees’ handwritten reports and letters were typed by a secretarial pool according to priorities assigned to the secretaries. Apparently, these were standard procedures. Dad didn’t see a point in having to wait to get something typed up for him, when he could very well do this himself. He descended to West 23rd Street, a very busy Manhattan thoroughfare- near the Flatiron Building, and walked to a typewriter shop to buy the Signet. From then on, he typed his own documents. Dad also explained to me that he favored ribbons that had both black and red inks, so that he could flip the lever to get red ink when he wanted to emphasize something to his recipients. With such spirit and ambition, success followed success.

The Royal Signet belongs to me, and I’ve proudly left the ‘60s embossed label with Dad’s name on the machine. As with many other gifts from him, this is a living treasure, because it gets used. Like the pocket watches Dad gave me, they work best as long as they are used. He taught me plenty about using and maintaining these mechanical marvels. Neither of us could type in the “proper” office ten-fingered way, but we both found ways to type quickly and effectively. In more recent years, he sent me a set of beautiful pens and I keep the letter which he put in the gift box which refers to our common passions that include fountain pens, opera, trains, and a good portable typewriter. And that was just the beginning of interests we shared and talked about. We did not agree about everything, to be sure, but we had enough in common to provide plenty of subject matter.


equipping for the rest of the way

In my father’s absence, a wise friend suggested that I write my gratitude for the ways I’ve been equipped to go the rest of the way. Typing in the park, using the Signet, I began writing about some of the essential things I’ve learned from Dad. Indeed there are many and detailed practical skills, beyond the tools of writing and the precise ways of play-by-play scoring of baseball games. To this day, whenever I begin a new notebook that does not have a pocket in the inside back-cover, I use a trick Dad taught me a long time ago: folding an envelope flap backwards so that the adhesive adheres to the back cover, creating an instant document sleeve. He taught me how to read and interpret maps when I was very young, showing me how to create a “trip ruler” out of a piece of paper, scribing the scale of miles on it and moving the paper along the lines that represented the roads. Dad taught me to drive, shifting the gears smoothly so that passengers would not sense the jolt of transition. And the deft art of feeding a toll booth coin bucket while still in second gear- and then rocketing out of the gantry at the “paid” signal. Knowing which portion of a subway train to enter, in order to alight at the stairs that will take you to the best street exit for your purpose. Dad taught me that in New York, and I translated that savvy much later in Boston. Numerous nuanced abilities, most of which had to do with making forward progress. He had lots of travel stories about having to combine air and surface transportation, in order to connect locations during weather-related cancellations. The important thing, he’d say, was to keep going in the needed direction. Logic took the forms of navigating, analyzing a baseball strategy, and DOS shortcuts. Always destinations to be reached, puzzles to be solved. As Dad used to like to say, “That keeps things interesting.”

Always a mileage log, and always a tire-pressure gauge:
I will always be my father's son.

As my recollections surface of practical skills learned, I’m writing about them in my journals. Transcending all of these things are the subtler abilities, more like traits, and they have occupied more of my thoughts when I consider what has been left to me for the long haul. The more I navigate the roads of this life, the more I see the extreme rarity of my father’s character: that consistent sense of understated dignity, genuineness, and humor. The torch extended to me, in his physical absence, is his gift of intellectual inquiry. By their examples, both my parents gave me the running start to be able to think on my feet. Question what does not look or sound right- not just ethically, but also aesthetically; this foundation is also owed to both my parents. Dad’s high standards, ever beyond my reach, are somehow also my high standards and expectations. But no two souls are alike, and I must keep in mind that our contexts are as different as our generations, pursuits, and paths. These things notwithstanding, I’ll always admire that practical style of integrity and quick-wittedness amounting to being nobody’s fool. If there’s any downside, it’s how the wit is understood by fewer and fewer by the day.

Dad once quipped that my keeping his typewriters working represents his legacy. Of course it was said in jest, in the midst of our usual multi-faceted discourse. His real legacy as I see it, is his consistent sense of decency. That’s the most important way that I want to be like my father. To be civil, classy, unclichéd and genuine; and to keep making people laugh- not at any person’s expense, but about the amusing and ironic things in life, along with that lighthearted way of pointing out such attributes. Dad’s jovial sense of decency. What a great way to be; the world is missing this trait. Amidst learning about high standards- higher than “just good enough”- was my growing to understand my father’s dislike of mediocrity and half-hearted efforts he called “slap-dash.” In this comprehension were his directives to be ambitious. As I got a bit older, more responsible and aware, I grew to also avoid the “slap-dash” in things- and occasionally in people, as well. Such awareness is not uppity, and sensibly unpretentious. It’s much more a judgment of oneself- to unceasingly seek learning, improvement, and continuity.


daring eclecticism

The clergyman who officiated the funeral service, a Midwesterner and also a friend of my father’s, reverently remarked that the breadth of Dad’s cultivated mind was “so very New York.” Undoubtedly, we all agreed. But one might say “urban,” to describe a spectrum of pursuits that encompassed worlds of the arts, sciences, sports, and politics. Yet to say, “so very New York” acknowledges more than the variety of pursued topics of interest: it’s the intensity and enthusiasm of the pursuits. Stereotype that it may be, there are still many who exemplify the energy of such a densely vast and extraordinary place. Enough has been said about the pluck of old-school New Yorkers to fill many volumes, so I’ll choose one exemplary comment: "You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with,” said the legendary actress Lauren Bacall. “I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you're a New Yorker? The world doesn't owe you a damn thing." Accomplishment must be earned, and the perfunctory is to be exceeded. The mindset is one that tends to be impatient with the mediocre and slipshod, and our quick wits and sharp tongues are often misinterpreted. We don’t think of our critical minds as being “attitudes,” but rather passionate convictions that need to be expressed! Urban common-sense is often vented this way, and notably so among New Yorkers. Dad’s living expression of this was nothing short of lovable. We used to sing Frank Loesser Broadway show tunes to each other on the phone.

Above: The view from Lexington Avenue at 34th Street.
Below: Dad's beloved Caffe Reggio, Greenwich Village.

In the spirit of a legacy that has taught me about ability and perspective, I’ll add what I call inherited instincts. Dad had an admirable knack for reading a situation. This reminds me of how he would say that part of the fascination in baseball is how analysis is built into the game itself as it unfolds. He loved the symmetry of threes and nines- especially in the National League. But reading a situation in real-time is also being a participant. Among the times during which I’m certain of an instinct inherited from my father is when I “break the ice” in a stiff room of inactivity. Another is how I’ve become able to speak with anyone- and getting them to talk. Yet another is having a healthy way of questioning what I perceive: There can be a negatory way of doing this- and I’ve also learned to tell the difference between constructive reflection and simply being a combatant that sets out to confuse things even further. Such traits, practiced at their best, are surely attributed to my father’s example. Finally, “keeping things interesting” is also knowing to have plenty of other things in my life, aside from employment and its related struggles. Learning and being teachable keeps the mind youthful and expanding. Indeed, continuity and improvement, one giving purpose to the other, must always ride together. And thus- like Erasmus of Rotterdam, and like Dad of New York- great strides are made.

iron bridges they rattle, they rattle, they never give way

"Let your state of life motivate you."


~Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani



My Dad likes to tell me that every day is a mini-project. Today that idea has come to mind, with the fortunate circumstance of being able to tie together all of the days street conversations, phone calls, communications, patron queries- all of it- and see it as a large composite mosaic. At the café where I go on my break, their dishwasher overflowed and their roaster broke- and the clerk left in charge needed a cheer. (And I needed someone to talk to.) A traveling researcher needed to find the East End. A singer in a band needed French lyrics. An orphanage worker needed transportation, and then told me she had once tried to commit suicide- and had been mysteriously thwarted. I needed something for my home, and unable to find it in the mazes of the characterless world of Big Boxes, I bumped into a very wise old friend. This was just about an hour ago. Right in the middle of an apparently lifeless, vast and shadeless parking lot, I heard an elderly little voice say, is that you?

At times the search for mercy can be a foraging for a friendly face in a foreign airport. Other times its written on walls and sidewalks. Liminal space is impossible to calculate, and I'm beginning to see that part of the reason for having to dwell in the provisional- as out-of-step with everything around me as it looks- is for me to learn something about who I am and what I know. The wilderness, the desert, as the biblical metaphor goes, is prone to mirages- to false substitutes for what can only be found by holding fast to what is real. The added danger, of course, is not to leave such concepts in the abstract, but to specify what real means