The past is unevenly distributed, too.

William Gibson famously said ("many times"), "The future is already here; it's just not very evenly distributed." What if we turn this around, and think about the past? "The past is still here; it's just not very evenly distributed." 

Traveling in Europe (as an American), it's easy to be jealous of the past, the overwhelming physicality of cathedrals and castles, ruins and walls, stone roads with thousand-year-old ruts. We need a Faulkner to remind us that we are saturated in the past, too (and a Woody Allen to remind us that Faulkner reminded us). Our past is in the stories we tell, and mistake, and repeat, and tell falsely, and misattribute, and misrepresent.

The great error, of course, is thinking that the past is gone. But the other (greater?) error is to have a crappy copy of the past. A cheap knockoff past, that looks, from one angle, and in a dim light, like the past. But it's beyond fake; it's a toy, a cardboard cutout that could never have worked.

Or worse, it's a working model, like a model railroad: it chugs along, clean and on-schedule and under control in its little world; but again, the past isn't that utopian memory. It's got an infinite number of moving parts, it doesn't run on some magical plug in outside the universe; it's coal fired and the coal has to be mined by dirty men and shoveled with dirty shovels and Jesus everything is dirty and your lungs are eventually dirty and you die.

But refusing to be bound by the past is one of the freedoms of America. And freedoms are never free ("Thank a serviceman" the bumper sticker goes on). Belle da Costa Greene passed for white, broke free of the centuries of being Black in America; she spent (incredibly well) vast sums of money collecting the best of the past for J.Pierpont Morgan, and never spoke to her father, Harvard-educated lawyer and diplomat Richard Greener.

Richard Greener lived at 5237 S. Ellis, a few blocks from where I sit  now. The apartment building he lived in was, evidently, home also to Ida Platt, admitted to the Illinois bar in 1894 as the first Black female lawyer in the state. She was making a living in 1910 passing as a white woman. In 1920, while Platt was still practicing, Violette Anderson became the (second!) first Black female lawyer in Illinois. While Richard Greener watched, Ida Platt gave up her place in history, for flourishing in the present, just as his daughter had. The past came and went and folded back over itself.

And the apartment building is gone, now, replaced by townhouses. The past cropped up a few miles away, in Englewood, though--unevenly distributed.

Emmet Larkin, R.I.P.

Emmet Larkin has passed away. He may have been the finest professor I had in my time at the University of Chicago; he taught me what it means to be a historian: to discover, interpret, and, perhaps most importantly, to maintain mental access to, a massive body of knowledge, and then to synthesize new understandings from that knowledge. It was an old-school sort of history: as Mr. Larkin said, you can't do really good history until you're in your forties; you just can't know enough until then. Such an approach doesn't fit well with the "publish two groundbreaking works by the time you're up for tenure" requirements of the modern academy, it hardly needs to be said.
But Larkin was of a different generation, the one that came to college (for him as for many, the first ones in the their family) on the GI Bill, with an understanding that work was central to life, achievement, recognition, awards were secondary. Ora et labora. He set his sights higher, no, broader, than merely slogging through archives and finding unpublished letters between bishops and cardinals (and translating them, contextualizing them, and, most importantly reading between their lines, knowing whose brother had married whose cousin seventeen years before…)
Today's scholars seek new interpretations, and crunch vast amounts of data in their databases, and do things, above all, quickly--someone else may be working on this and you might be scooped! No, Larkin's project was simple, vast, and, as he foresaw, unachievable: The History of the Catholic Church in Ireland. This was the work of a lifetime and more; even in 1997, he knew that he probably wouldn't finish.
But the inspiration to work, to toil in the library, to learn and to know and to know what you know--This was inspiring to a would-be historian. To think historically and precisely on any topic--to know why you know what you know--this was an achievement beyond the scale of his nine (excellent) books.
He challenged us on every front: "Who was the greatest American President?" he asked us one day (I can't remember the context), "and why?" Larkin's own answer was Lincoln--for he excelled in magnanimity. This story has a classical ring about it, as if from Plutarch or Aristotle; perhaps Larkin was already a Great Man, of the Sort They No Longer Make in his own generation, as much as he was to mine. Virtue and knowledge; ora et labora.

Juxtaposition: University of Chicago Alumni opportunities

Today there came in the mail an offer for "Around the World by Private Jet: An exploration of the world's greatest treasures & legendary places"--a trip sponsored by the University of Chicago Alumni Association (I didn't get invited. They must target their advertising by graduation year).

Cusco & Machu Picchu! Easter Island! Samoa! Great Barrier Reef!...you get the idea. Oh, and at each leg of the journey, there are alternate options, seeing Xi'an, China, instead of Tibet, for example, in case you've BTDT. All this for the mere pittance of $56,950 per person.

Are you free November 1-24, 2009?

It was the dates that caught my eye, and made me immediately think of the email that I'd received from a graduating (class of '09, having finished his physics major and also learnt a fistful of languages in three years) student the previous day:
Yesterday I received my official nomination to serve in the
Peace Corps in the republic of Turkmenistan as a teacher,
from September 29, 2009 to December 11, 2011. Tomorrow I
will accept this invitation, which is a binding commitment.

Bravo, MSK!

Weather or not...

It's got to be the length and thoroughness of the winter, but depression is everywhere. Not, happily enough, among our own students, but it's hitting students across campus, other friends and family...it's been a hard couple of weeks. What to say? How to light a hopeful little fire? Jeez, how to get outside for a couple of hours?

Seen in Newark Airport

White sneakers, white socks wrapped around old-man-skinny ankles, tan pants, white belt, beige shirt covering a bit of a belly, sand-colored bucket hat over a sunburned and wrinkled face. Plastic framed glasses sat on a nose with a couple of funny kinks to it. He was talking into his cell phone, placing his bets for the afternoon's horse racing "Spanish... in the fourth ... that's right ... to win...."