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Clover Adams on knowledge and perception

“How true it is that the mind sees what it has means of seeing. I get so little, while the others about me are so intelligent and cultivated about everything that appeals to them.” Quoted from Clover Adams correspondence in The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics and the Opening of Old Japan by Christopher Benfey (Random House, 2003) p.120. (Clover, who was designated by no less than Henry James as a “Voltaire in petticoats”, was given to depressiveness that became increasingly menacing. She maintained the correspondence from which the quote is taken during a trip with Henry along the Nile in 1872.

Death and transmogrification

I listened today to Selected Shorts. It retailed the story of a dying businessman and his family's well-organized efforts to deal with his impending death of old age as matter-of-factly as a to-do list. This leads me to think that if you want a lot of grief, die early. When you die young (or relatively so) you are mourned for the unfulfilled hopes of the grieving, the what-might-have-been, and so are likely to be remembered longer (and, unless you have been a rat, more deeply cherished.)

May, 1776

"Back in Manhattan, the young captain [Alexander Hamilton] found a city engaged in a spree of wanton violence against Tory sympathizers. Many Loyalists were subjected to a harrowing ritual known as “riding the rail,” in which they were carried through the streets sitting astride a sharp rail borne by two tall, strong men. The prisoners’ names were proclaimed at each street corner as spectators lustily cheered their humiliation. One bystander reported, “We had some grand Tory rides in the city this week. . .Several of them were handled very roughly, being carried through the streets on rails, their clothes torn off their backs and their bodies pretty well mingled with dust. . .There is hardly a Tory face to be seen this morning.”
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, page 75.
OK, but rape of juveniles?

I just entered "scapegoat" in the Google news panel and got 1,840 hits. There appear to be scapegoats everywhere, not just in Iraq (by any means). I'm not sure what to make of this, but I'll think on it.

Boo!

Two thoughts, each of of them frightening, occurred to me while I was listening to President Bush's coming attractions announcement on the upcoming testimony of his national security advisor. One is a quotation from a letter written by Clover (Marian Hooper) Adams while floating down the Nile in 1872 with her famous husband, Henry: "How true it is that the mind sees what it has means of seeing."
The other thought is that, to judge from Sen Kerry's recent appearances, the President seems to have a corner on the charisma available for the coming campaign.

Jonathan Miller, the director of a new production of Shakespeare’s Lear in New York, declares his intention in an interview that comes included with the program. (I owe this intelligence to Geoffrey O'Brien in a brilliant review in the March 25 of The New York Review.) Miller says: “I feel there’s nothing epic or mythic about it, in exactly the same way that I don’t think there's anything cosmic about it. . .The desire for the archetypal—it’s so simple-minded and sentimental, you know?” Miller’s “crucial decision has been to drop the play back into the time and space-its own time and' space, England in the seventeenth century-from which it has so often been abstracted. Abstraction itself, no matter how harrowing its intended effect, might itself be seen as some form of consolation, a way of rarefying the suffering of the characters by situating it elsewhere, in a realm of pure art. If Peter Brook's influential production of Lear in 1962 famously presented Shakespeare as (in Jan Kott's phrase) "our contemporary," Miller presents him as the only slightly older contemporary of Thomas Hobbes and John Webster. It is a momentary shock to find King Lear reinserted into the ambience of a Van Dyck or Rubens portrait.”
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At the time I read that I happened also to be reading “Persons and Mask of the Law” by [now Judge] John T. Noonan, Jr. It appears that the law, too, finds some form of consolation in abstraction, in “a way of rareifying” the very existence of the person, of “situating it elsewhere in a realm of pure art.”

“Rules, not persons, are the ordinary subject matter of legal study,” Noonan writes. “Legal reasoning is by analogy or example, as the classic introduction of Edward Levi describes it; and the problem addressed is, "When will it be just to treat different cases as though they were the same?" But the cases are classified by the rules they exemplify, and judicial decisions come in the form of rules stated so as to be applicable to all similar situations. What atoms are to chemistry, such units of discourse are to the study of law. Rearrangements and permutations of them are the normal way of legal development and the normal center of legal scholarship. The cataloguing work of the digest-makers, encyclopedists, and annotators consists of their analysis and arrangement. The evaluating work of treatise writers and law reviews consists of their analysis and criticism.

“Little or no attention is given to the persons in whose minds and in whose interaction the rules have lived-to the persons whose difficulties have occasioned the articulation of the rule, to the lawyers who have tried the case, to the judges who have decided it. No key reporting system is keyed to counsel. No encyclopedia is arranged in terms of judges. The prime teaching tools, the casebooks, have been composed to shed light on the life of a rule, not upon the parts of the participants in the process. Those in the classic mold, with snippets of appellate opinions arranged to display variations and contradictions of a principle, carry the indifference to the participants to the maximum. “

Who would you rather be President?

IT WAS HERE THAT Roosevelt was irresistible and inimitable. He liked people, almost any people. He liked their company, liked to pick their minds and see what they were thinking, liked to know the details of their lives and their problems.
I know nothing that illustrates the contrast between him and Woodrow Wilson, the previous Democratic President, better than their attitudes toward Henry Ford. I lunched with journalist George Creel one day,who told me the difficulty they had with Wilson in the early days of World War I, getting him to confer with American businessmen to gain their cooperation in the war effort. He refused to see most of them, saying they were specialists who had nothing to teach him with his general problems affecting the whole nation. Finally they prevailed upon him to see Henry Ford, and after the interview, Creel entered and said to the President, "What do you think of Henry Ford?" Wilson impatiently answered, "I think he' is the most comprehensively ignorant man I ever met." He had complete contempt for Ford. Two or three days after that lunch with Creel, I noticed that Ford was President Roosevelt's luncheon guest. I happened to be at the White House that afternoon late and opened the conversation by saying, "Mr. President, I see you had lunch with Henry Ford." "Yes,", he said, "I had a grand time with Uncle Henry." He then described the conversation enthusiastically and with gestures. He said he tried to discuss with Ford the problem of an annual wage for workmen. Roosevelt described how he edged him up to the subject, and when Ford saw what he was leading up to, he would draw back, then he would work him up to it from another angle and Ford would draw back, and he said he spent his whole luncheon hour playing chess with "Uncle Henry, as he called him, trying to get him up to the subject. Roosevelt said, "You know, I never got him to it." But he liked Ford and respected him for the things in which he was able and had none of the contempt that characterized the Wilsonian attitude.'

Robert H. Jackson, That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. New York. Oxford, 2003. p.135.

To judge by its selection of page one photos, The Financial Times favors the candidacy of John Kerry. Tuesday’s front page bore a large picture of Kerry arriving in Virginia where he is being greeted by an African American porter of a certain age. The two men are shown shaking hands warmly while looking off camera and smiling broadly as if amused by someone performing a stunt or shouting some amiable words of encouragement. I was struck by the impression that here were two grown men celebrating a kind of mature, and not alone politically, knowingness. This is in contrast with the impressions I have harvested of G.W. Bush as a kind of perennial adolescent, swooping onto the stage as if to make a cameo appearance in a college historical pageant. The question is whether a substantial block of the voting citizenship is in itself caught in a kind of adolescence, shaped by the forces of a media that in itself is juvenile. I don’t know how otherwise to account for the “bring it on” mentality that seems to cause a general blindness to the spectacularly evident failings of this administration.

The LA Times op-ed page today contains a piece by Gary Marcus that is worth the time of anyone at all wanting to know what's meant by the biotech revolution. Marcus' new book on the subject has been well reviewed. (See Amazon.)