Between something and nothing (presidential address).

• Author: Kroll, Paul W.

Let me say at the outset how grateful I am to the members of this august society, now in its 165th year of existence, and how humbled I have been by the honor of serving as its president for the past year. I thank you all, most sincerely. In terms of the nervous velocity of the present day, one hundred sixty-five years is a long time. Not many of this country's colleges and universities have existed as long. While each of them may have its history, who with any recent experience in them would say that the high educational ideals which launched their construction have truly endured as long as their bricks and mortar? And when our institutions of higher learning seem increasingly to trivialize or abandon the humanistic principles of a liberal-arts education, in favor of the profit-driven, business model of corporate management, it is small wonder that faculty members often tend to identify themselves less as members of a particular institution or even (depending on the character of one's immediate colleagues) as members of a particular academic department, than as members of a disciplinary guild whose shared goals and standards sustain us in the notion that we are not, after all, alone. The AOS is one of these guilds. We can be proud to be part of its more than sesquicentennial history.

Over the front entrance of my university's main library is carved a quotation from Cicero: "Who knows only his own generation remains always a child." (1) The people that make up this honorable society prove the corollary of that statement: most of you are, in Cicero's terms, quite old indeed. We celebrate at these meetings the wisdom of George Saintsbury's axiom, "If, from a purely critical point of view, Ancient without Modern is a stumbling-block. Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable." Saintsbury, like all who care about remembering the hard-won achievements of those that came before, while yet understanding the ways of the present world, would have got on well with Confucius who averred, "Rekindling the old while acknowledging the new, one can be a teacher" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. We might say that just as free men everywhere once had reason to proclaim "Ich bin [ein] Berliner," so all true scholars must at heart be Confucians.

I should like to begin by citing a passage from Niccolo Machiavelli, whose surname has engendered an adjective that cruelly misrepresents the words of the man himself (just as had happened earlier to Epicurus)--Machiavelli the scholar, the historian, the poet, writing to his friend Francesco Vettori in a famous letter dated 10 December 1513. He describes there the commonplace doings of the day in a small hamlet in the hills seven miles north of Florence, where he is dwelling during a time of disfavor at the Medici court. It is evening, and he has left the inn where he has supped, to walk to his house. He writes in Italian, not Latin, and says the following:

With the coming of evening I return home and go into my library. At the door I doff these everyday clothes, full of country mud and filth, and instead put on robes courtly and regal. Clad fittingly now. I enter the ancient courts of the men of old. And there I find a kindly welcome. There I feed on that pasturage which alone is mine, and for which I was born. There I am not ashamed to converse with them and to ask the reason for their actions. And they, in their humanity, give me answer; and for four hours of time I feel no more malaise, I forget every toil, I do not fear poverty, I lose my dread of death. I transfer all of myself into them. (2) This is nearly enough to bring tears to one's eyes; and I submit that no one who has not sometimes felt likewise upon sitting down to his texts is worthy of the title of scholar or humanist.

These visits to the past were not for Niccolo, and other scholars of his day (Erasmus, Thomas More, John Colet) simply antiquarian excursions for the purpose of collecting pretty shells of ignored facts or data to be cleverly rearranged or turned inside-out in a book chapter or journal article. They yielded active wisdom for the present. If the humanities are now regarded, even by some of their professional practitioners, as superfluous to the "real" life we live, fluff and farthingales that are pleasant to fiddle with when nothing more important occupies us, then the two-thousands-and-plus-year ideal of liberal education, which has been the motive of human improvement from the time of Confucius in China and the schoolmen of Rome, is truly in its final days. But, as we here know quite well, the humanities--far from being add-ons or "extra-credit" treats--are essential to a fully realized life precisely because they are physiologically (that is to say, from the viewpoint of a brute animal) unnecessary. This is no paradox, but simple reason: we are more than our bodies, our creature comforts, and the machines we devise. As Helen Gardner noted of literary research in particular and the humanities in general, "No other study touches our own life at so many points and more illuminates the world of daily experience."

It is true that most endeavors, sub specie aeternitatis, can seem inconsequential. But the point of Machiavelli's exercise, and of ours, in reading and conversing with the past, lies ultimately in the closer binding of today with yesterday. And if the study of classical history, or medieval literature, brings to us and our students not merely intellectual joy but, more importantly, helps us become better stewards of the days granted us helps foster an advance (dare I say) in moral worth, then our work has consequence of a high order. What H. G. Wells said some eighty-plus years ago rings even truer today: "Human history becomes more and more a race between catastrophe and education." We are, thus, primary actors in this drama--as Confucius knew, in a time that seemed to him as full of potential danger as our times do now for those who would value humaneness more than sheer force.

It's easy--especially on an occasion like this--to get a bit overwrought or even maudlin about such matters. But the comfort and cheer provided by our annual meeting, like most contentment in this life, wings past too quickly. Twenty-four hours hence this gathering itself will have been deconstructed, we are a "self-consuming artifact," we'll all be flown and scattered back to our separate roosts. And it is this recognition of inevitable transience that supplies the tenor for my remarks today. Let me explain.

I have in mind, to begin with, the famous passage from Zhuangzi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], chapter 22 ("Zhi bei you" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), in which Laozi is instructing Confucius and says: "Man's life between heaven and earth is like a white colt's passing by a gap in a wall--suddenly there, and then gone! Streaming on, dashing on, everything comes out of it; sliding by, sweeping by, everything goes into it. Born of transformation, dying by another transformation; living beings sorrow over it, humankind despairs for it" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] That white colt speeding past the breach in the wall appears often in classical Chinese texts. (3) It is, for instance, quoted (the colt and the wall) as a proverb by the infamous Empress Lu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] to the great minister Zhang Liang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (d. 185 B.C.), in the biography of the latter in Skiji [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and again as a conversational axiom by the warlord Wei Bao [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] prior to his defeat of Liu Bang's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] general Han Xin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in 204 B.C., as recorded in Han shu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. In other early texts a quadriga substitutes for the single white colt; but the lone image seems primary and most fitting, especially when glossed by the commentators Cheng Xuanying [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and Yan Shigu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the mid-seventh century as suggesting the swiftly running progress of the white sun.

The...