THE BIZARRE, THE LOONY, AND THE UGLY

No doubt you have all heard of the cry now going up from Republican spokespersons to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, so that Hispanic children born in the United States of parents who are not citizens will have stripped from them their citizenship. I can only assume that this new demand originated with an extensive survey of the Hispanic community, which revealed that there were still isolated pockets of potential Hispanic Republican voters who had not been completely alienated by the Arizona law and the anti-immigration rhetoric of the Republican leadership. So the call to repeal the 14th Amendment is a last-ditch effort by the Republicans to guarantee that they will never again get another Hispanic vote.

It is not hard to ridicule this latest Republican talking point, although it is difficult to pay it as much attention as it deserves, considering all the other bizarrerie being dumped into the public conversation by the Republicans. But I do think it is useful to distinguish those right-wing causes that are merely loony from those that are deeply ugly and immoral. For example, the call by Iowan Republicans to resurrect the original failed 13th Amendment, so as to be able to strip Obama of his citizenship for accepting the Nobel Prize, qualifies as gloriously loony. But the proposal to strip children of their citizenship is among the ugliest ideas to drip from the festering sore that today is called The Republican Party.

As is so often the case, I find that the most satisfactory response to Jon Kyl and Lindsey Graham can be found in The Good Book. I have in mind the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:27: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." [I prefer "whited sepulches" to the Revised Standard's "white-washed tombs." They are synonymous, and the latter is undoubtedly easier for modern readers to understand, but "whited sepulchres" is one of the most beautiful phrases in early modern English, and is worth preserving.]

Oh, by the way, if you did not understand my reference to "the original 13th Amendment" and the Nobel Prize, here is an explanation copied from an interesting blog called "Vast Public Indifference," whose author I was unable to find on the site:

"Last month, the Iowa Republican Party adopted a platform that calls for "the reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th Amendment, not the 13th amendment in today’s Constitution." They mean the 13th Amendment that was passed by congress and ratified by 12 states in 1812 — the one that reads,

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

As far as I can tell, the "Thirteenthers'" interpretation of this almost-amendment is fairly silly — they think it applies to titles such as "Esquire" and awards such as the Nobel Prize."

I think you will agree that this qualifies as loony.

THE OLD BOB RETURNS

For months now, I have been maintaining an elevated tone in this blog as I wrote my memoirs. But my friends know that there is a nasty little ideologue lurking beneath this gentlemanly surface, so the time has come to get some things off my chest. Let me begin with the 44%, or one hundred million plus, of adult Americans who, according to a 2008 Gallup survey, agree with the statement that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at sometime within the last 10,000 years or so." This comports well with a 2005 survey that showed roughly the same number [42%] claiming to be strict creationists.

These figures can in part be explained by sheer ignorance. This is, after all, a country in which very large percentages of adults cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map, even though those same people will wear little yellow ribbons to show their support for the troops. But as the recent decisions of the Texas Board of Education make clear, the embrace of so-called Creationism, which is to say the denial of the fact of evolution, is grounded in Christian beliefs as well as in just plain ignorance or garden variety stupidity.

Now, I don't want to enter into a serious conversation with any of these folks, in which I adduce the experimental and observational evidence. Let Richard Dawkins do that. I just want to see a law passed that mandates that hospitals ask whether patients hold these views, and then, if they say yes, requires a doctor to explain the scientific basis of any procedure that the hospital is about to use in treating the patient. Here is how it would work:

A Fundamentalist Christian is brought into the hospital suffering from life-threatening colon cancer. On the forms he fills out at Patient Intake, he says he is a Born-Again Evangelical Christian who believes that the world is ten thousand years old. The doctors then tell him that his best chance of conquering the cancer is radiation therapy. However, they explain, radiation therapy rests on the theory of radioactive decay, and that in turn depends on the fact that the half lives of the relevant elements are millions of years long, etc etc. So, before they violate his most deeply held convictions by beginning the radiation therapy, they just want him to sign a release acknowledging that he no longer believes that the earth is ten thousand years old.

I mean, these are the people who pass laws requiring doctors to show pictures of aborted fetuses to women who want abortions, right? What do you suppose would have happened if someone had put my proposed requirement into the omnibus health care reform bill?

Then I want someone to ask Sarah Palin what she thought she was doing when she had amniocentesis to find out whether her unborn baby suffered from Down's Syndrome. Did she recant her rejection of evolution before the procedure, which, after all, depends on Genetics built on that theory?

We could save a ton of money nationally if all the Fundamentalist Creationists would forswear treatment that conflicts with their religious beliefs, and just die. Of course, we would have to require them to permit their children to be treated, but since we are talking about maybe one hundred million adults, you have to think that's a lot of expensive high tech treatment that wouldn't have to be delivered.

And it won't do for these folks to say, "Well, I am still a Fundamentalist Evangelical Born-Again Inerrant Christian about most things, but I am willing to make an exception for radiation." That would be like a triskaidaphobic saying, "I have a deep-rooted fear of the number thirteen, so although I accept addition and subtraction, multiplication and division generally, I draw the line at any calculation that involves the number thirteen." You cannot pick and choose the implications you like and the ones hyou don't like of a proposition whose general calidity you deny. [I love the fact that hotels routinely omit the number thirteen when labeling their floors. Do they not understand that the floor after twelve is the thirteenth, even if you call it Fred?]

I know, I know. You will say that secular humanist rationalists just don't have the stomach to let people die a hideous, unnecessary death simply because they profess ignorant, stupid beliefs that contradict the medical treatment that will save their lives. But I am not a secular humanist rationalist. I am an atheistical anarchistic Marxist, and we are made of sterner stuff.

Just saying.

THE RETURN OF THE SNARK

Whew! Who would have thought it would take eight hundred pages to tell the story of my life? Now that I am done, I want to go back to commenting on the passing scene, but first I need to say just a bit about the experience of reliving my life before a live audience [a bit like The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey]. I learned some things about myself along the way, of course. One of them may surprise you. I have always thought of myself as something of a slacker. I mean, mostly, I daydream and play endless games of Spider Solitaire and FreeCell on my computer [I maintain a 77% win average in Spider, making full use of the undo function, and a 96% win rate in FreeCell without using the undo. That takes a lot of practice.] I watch an hour of The Young and the Restless five days a week, and all the reruns of NCIS I can find. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover how much I have actually done in my life. I think this simply shows that if you live to be seventy-six, it is hard to avoid doing something.

I have been delighted and astonished and moved by the warmth and generosity of your responses, both in on-line comments and in email messages. To misquote Sally Fields, you like me, you really like me. Who would have thought that an old balding philosopher with a facial tic could make so many friends on the web? Maybe this online dating thing has a future.

While I have been madly writing and posting, writing and posting, the world has been going to hell in a handbag. Rightwingers have reached levels of sheer nuttiness that are beyond the powers even of a Jonathan Swift to satirize. I have a good deal of snark pent up in me, and if I do not unload some of it, I fear that it will do permanent damage to my nervous system. Starting tomorrow, I will try to catch up.
However, today is a day for rejoicing and bragging, so here goes.

I have just received word that the University of the Western Cape in South Africa has decided to confer on me the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa. This honor comes to me in recognition of my efforts over two decades to help young Black South Africans to get a university education, so it really belongs to all the people who have donated to USSAS over the years, and to the folks in South Africa who have selected the students and mentored them, and to Susie, who has folded and stuffed endless envelopes with me. Next March, Susie and I will be the guests of the University at their annual commencement ceremonies. As it happens, this coincides with Archbishop Tutu's last appearance as the Honorary Chancellor of the University, and as close readers of my Memoir will recall, he is the Honorary Chair of the Advisory Committee of University Scholarships for South African Students, although I am sure he does not recall that fact. I am thrilled, needless to say. I shall carry to South Africa my silk Harvard doctoral robes, a present from my parents in 1957, and shall have a chance to say a few words at the Commencement ceremonies. [Wisely and somewhat cautiously, they indicated that I would have "three to five minutes" to speak.]

So, as Kim Leighton suggested in an email, I am now to be addressed as Doctor Doctor Wolff [rather like Major Major Major Major in Catch-22. ]

LIFE ENDS -- THE VERY LAST INSTALLMENT OF MY MEMOIR

While I was going on cruises and safaris, buying an apartment in Paris, practicing the viola, running the Afro-American Studies doctoral program, and attending Patrick's wedding, I was also working on yet another book. I had not really planned it, but as time went by, I felt the old urge to put pen to paper -- or ones and zeroes in a word processing program's memory, as writing has now become. For the first time in my life, I consulted a literary agent, John "Ike" Williams, a pretty high end operator with offices in Boston. I pitched several ideas to him, and he seized on my suggestion that I write a book growing out of my experience in an Afro-American Studies Department. Thus was conceived Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, yet another title taken from a well-known work. [Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson, for those who do not recognize the allusion.]

I began the book with a long narrative account of my transition from Philosophy to Afro-American Studies and the ways in which the experience changed my life. Much of that first chapter has been incorporated into this Memoir. Then I undertook to tell the real story of America, as I had learned it from my colleagues, and to contrast it with the false story embalmed in generations in college American History textbooks. I traced the ways in which those textbooks, edition by edition, slowly altered their narratives to accommodate the pressures generated by the Civil Rights Movement, after which I began again, and told the true story of America as a land of Slavery and Freedom, Bondage and Citizenship.

Ike was very upbeat about the prospects of placing my little book with a commercial publisher, and did his level best to find a home for it, but thirty or more houses turned it down. Hugh van Dusen was still running Harper Torchbooks, and allowed as how my earlier book for him, In Defense of Anarchism, had sold 200,000 copies, but even that was not a good enough reason, apparently, for him to publish this new manuscript. Eventually, Ike sent me a letter formally terminating our contractual agreement. I figured when even your agent gives up on you, it is time to move on, so I put the book on the shelf and went back to having fun.

Several years later, Jennifer Jensen-Wallach urged me to try to find a publisher. I got the addresses of thirty or so academic houses from the library and sent out a host of letters. In that crowd of editors was a philosopher, Tim Madigan, who was teaching at St. John Fisher College in Rochester and serving as the Philosophy Editor of the University of Rochester Press. Tim knew In Defense of Anarchism and decided to take a chance on my Afro-Am book. In due course, it appeared, with a 2005 publication date. Alas, yet another offspring stillborn. Autobiography did only marginally better than Moneybags, though it did finally sell enough copies to justify a paperback edition. It is by no means one of my favorites among the books I have written, but it has some good things in it, besides the stories of my departmental adventures. Still and all, if you are going to read only one work of revisionist American history, I would certainly send you to Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States rather than to my little effort.

On November 8, 2003, I returned from one of my regular South African trips. It was six weeks before my seventieth birthday, an event that I had decided to memorialize by throwing myself a dinner at Del Raye, an upscale Northampton restaurant that Susie and I particularly liked. My sister, Barbara, would be there, as well as Tobias, Patrick, and Diana.

Something about the prospect of turning seventy triggered in me a feverish, irresistible need to write my memoirs, and without any hesitation, I sat down at my computer and began to type. It was immediately clear to me that my life fell naturally into three major stages: the twenty-seven years of my childhood, youth, and education, ending when I completed my Instructorship at Harvard and moved to the University of Chicago; the twenty-four years that encompassed my marriage to Cindy; and the final years during which I rediscovered my childhood sweetheart, Susie Shaeffer, and persuaded her to marry me.

I was so seized by the desire to get my story onto the page that I even suspended my viola lessons and practicing while I wrote. Although I had no reason to suppose that anyone, even members of my own family, would have much interest in reading the memoir, it seemed desperately important to me that I complete the first part of it before my birthday party. The only person to whom I showed what I was writing was Jennifer Jensen Wallach, who at that very moment was hard at work, under my direction, on a dissertation dealing with literary memoirs of Jim Crow. Jennifer offered some invaluable advice about the writings of memoirs that I incorporated into my manuscript as I churned out the pages. After four weeks of the most intense effort, I had reached the moment in my life when I set out from Cambridge for Chicago, bringing to a close the first part of my story. The manuscript was almost three hundred pages long. Virtually unaltered, it is the text that I eventually posted on this blog.

To this day, I have no idea what impelled me to pour my earliest memories onto the page. After I was finished, I made a few half-hearted efforts to find a publisher, but I was neither surprised nor really disheartened when I was told, repeatedly, that there was no market for the memoirs of someone neither famous nor infamous. So it joined my other unpublished books on my shelf -- the early deterrence and military strategy book, the two books about my family. As has been the case on five or six other occasions, the writing was itself exhilarating and satisfying. I do not even think I mentioned it at the dinner.

And so the years passed, easily and happily. Our periodic trips to Paris became the high points of each year. Somehow it was decided that when we were in Paris, I would do the cooking, so each Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I would take a large shopping bag to the open air market in Place Maubert and buy several quail or half a rabbit or some thon or espadon. Then I would wander from stall to stall, gathering up courgettes, eschallottes, and champignon, perhaps some real butter [which, miraculously, in Paris does not have either calories or cholesterol], and always two or three kinds of fromage. The kitchen of our apartment, although small, is fully equipped, and I have cooked hazelnut encrusted rabbit, quail, dorade royale, and even a full scale absolutely authentic bouef bourguignonne. Susie and I love to eat out, returning often to little bistros and restaurants within walking distance of our apartment, but I especially enjoy the dinners I have cooked myself. We sit in our Philippe Stark chairs at the tiny two-tiered plexiglas table that serves as our dining table, turn the lights low, put some baroque music on the Bose CD player, and sip wine -- red for me, white for Susie.

All my life, there has been a voice in my head telling me that I am not working hard enough, that I am not doing enough. Each time I finish a book, the voice is momentarily silent, but inexorably it reappears. For reasons that are completely mysterious to me, when I am in Paris that voice is stilled. As I arrive in the fifth arrondissement, a great weight falls from me, and I am able simply to enjoy the streets, the shops, and the buildings of Paris. The Cathedral of Notre Dame is our neighborhood church, a block and a half away; the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages is up the street; and the Jardin du Luxembourg is close enough for the two of us to have a picnic on the grass and watch children sail their boats in the circular pond.

On December 22, 2005, Diana gave birth to Samuel Emerson Wolff, my first grandchild. He was followed, two and a half years later, by his sister, Athena Emily. By this time, Patrick and Diana had moved back to San Francisco, so I am able to see my grandchildren no more than two or three times a year, but when I do visit, I can see that Patrick has grown to be a loving and devoted father, delighted by his son and daughter as I was, so many years ago, by him and his brother.

As I was taking my daily walk this morning, turning over in my mind what I would say in this portion of my memoir, a thought occurred to me that, although banal and commonplace, is nonetheless deeply resonant with meaning for me. Chapter Six of this volume makes it evident that I am intensely aware of my relationship with my father's father, Barnet Wolff. I now find myself standing in the same relationship to Samuel and Athena that Barnet stood to me. We span five generations, with me as the pivot between the late nineteenth century world of immigrant socialists in Lower East Side New York, and the twenty-first century world of San Francisco. My fondest wish is that Samuel and Athena will eventually find in my life something of the inspiration that I found in Barnet's. Perhaps the day will come when they will turn the pages of this Memoir, as I turned the pages of my grandfather's letters to my grandmother, looking for a usable past.

In time, the big house and the harsh New England winters grew too difficult for Susie to handle. Her MS progressed slowly, to be sure. There were long periods when her condition was stable, and yet, inexorably, she suffered some loss of mobility. At the same time, I was beginning to think seriously about retirement. With my characteristic braggadocio, I had told my colleagues and students that I would remain in the department, running the graduate program and the personnel committee and the Scholars program until I was eighty. But the truth is that all of these tasks, at first so challenging, had become routine. Susie and I puzzled for a bit over where we ought to move. Florida held no charms for either of us, and both of us felt uprooted when we were on the West Coast, even though Jon and Tamara, Susie's son and daughter-in-law and their children live in Seattle, and Patrick and Diana and my grandchildren live in San Francisco.

Susie had spent many years in Chapel Hill -- it was there that I found her after my marriage to Cindy ended -- and Susie's older son, Lawrence, was now living in Cary with his new wife, not far from Chapel Hill and close to his two sons from his first marriage. We decided that we would relocate to the upper South. Since I had dragged Susie to New England for the first twenty-one years of our marriage, it seemed only fair that we should choose for the next chapter of our life together someplace that was her turf.

2007-2008 was a terrible time to sell a house, of course. The economy was collapsing, prices were plummeting, and houses in Amherst were lingering on the market for 350 days and more before selling. We placed our house in the hands of a hotshot agent at the leading firm in town and turned our home into a showcase, ready to be walked through by potential buyers, if indeed there were any. At that point I had a brilliant idea -- I say this without any false modesty. "Put the word out," I said to our agent, Jackie Zuzgo, "that the real estate agent who succeeds in bringing in the buyer will get a free week in our Paris apartment, with money for plane fare as well." That did the trick. Anyone in a three state area who showed the slightest interest in housing of any sort was wheeled through our house by agents eager for a trip to Paris. Within a month, we had sold our house -- at a loss, to be sure, but we sold it -- and we were free to leave.

That still left unanswered the question that was preying on my mind. Ever since 1936, when my parents placed me in the Sunnyside Progressive School as a two year old, I had been in school. Each Fall, for seventy-two years, the world had started anew for me as the next school year commenced. What on earth was I going to do with myself? Barbara, long retired from the World Bank, told me not to try too hard to make plans, because whatever I decided would be changed within six months after I retired. I thought about starting a career as an educational consultant. I saw myself flying Business Class to campuses across America to advise them on how to recruit and keep minority undergraduates, or perhaps how to restructure the Humanities to fit the Information Age. A little time with Google revealed to me that in the real world, "educational consultant" means "someone who can tell you how to get your son or daughter into an Ivy League college."

Since I had long since been forgotten by the world of academic Philosophy, it seemed unlikely that any universities would be calling with invitations to spend a few comfortable years as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar. [The original Wikipedia entry on me began "Robert Paul Wolff was ..." That did not bode well.]

What to do with myself? I was talking with Patrick about this conundrum one day, when he said: Why don't you start a blog?" And so I did. I launched The Philosopher's Stone on April 28, 2007, more than a year before I finally retired, but after nineteen posts, I lost interest and suspended it. Then, on June 1, 2008, I returned to the world wide web, posting a steady stream of ruminations, comments on the passing scene, and even the first five chapters of the Memoir I had written four years earlier. In early April 2009, I decided to post the last chapter of my memoir, a segment at a time. Then something remarkable happened.

It came about because Tobias forwarded to me an essay he had read and admired by a University of Chicago Professor of Law and philosopher, Brian Leiter. Leiter, it seemed, runs two blogs, one on law and the other on philosophy, and although I did not know this then, he had become the clearing house for news and information about academic philosophy around the world. I looked him up on the U of C website, found his email address, and sent him a message telling him how much I had enjoyed his essay. [I do this quite often. It has always seemed a pity to me that people reserve their nicest remarks about someone for the funeral.] Leiter responded in very friendly fashion.

My old student Rita Reynolds had figured out how to put a hit counter on my blog, and I had been keeping tabs of the number of people who visited each day. I was averaging about 150, maybe a few more on a really busy day. Suddenly, in a single day, eleven thousand people visited my blog. Leiter had posted a small note about my blog, and I had gone viral. When things quieted down, I was left with two thousand or so folks visiting my blog regularly and reading my stories about the Harvard Philosophy Department back in the late fifties.

I was thrilled. By the sheerest chance, I had re-entered the public conversation. I decided to continue writing my memoirs, posting a segment each day. Thus began the most extraordinary three and a half months of my writing career. I found myself writing morning, noon, and night, pouring words onto the screen and posting them as fast as I could compose them. As I soldiered on, through the Chicago years, the Columbia years, and into the UMass years, I began hearing from people around the world who were reading my memoirs as I was writing them. This was an experience completely different from any I had ever had as a writer. Always before, I would write quietly and anonymously in my study until a book was finished. Then I would publish it and wait to find out whether it had found a readership. But now, people were making comments on each episode, or contacting me by email, the very day that I had written the words.

I heard from old students, former colleagues, and people I had never known who took the time to send me a message. Charles Parsons, my old classmate, graduate student apartment mate, and Columbia colleague, wrote several long, fascinating messages in which he corrected all manner of errors in my memory and typos in my writing. It seems that in addition to knowing everything and being super smart, Charlie is also the world's best copy editor. Andrew Levine, the distinguished political philosopher whose dissertation I directed at Columbia, sent several long, fascinating emails about his own experiences in the Academy and his ideas about what I might turn my efforts to once the memoir was finished. Todd Gitlin, whom I still think of as my student, although he is now an important senior voice on the left, checked in with suggestions for getting the memoirs published [no luck there, I am afraid].

These months have been a grand international conversation. The quality of the comments has been extraordinarily high, and the generosity of those who have commented means more to me than I shall ever be able to say. In all, well over one hundred people from every part of the world have joined the conversation sparked by my memoires and stories. Here they all are, in the order in which they appeared [and my apologies if I missed anyone]:

Corey McCall, NotHobbes, Ahmed, PhiloDemos, Kenosser, Bob, Ajrosa, Jacob T. Levy, David, mew123, Andrew, Ann Davis, Graeme Wood, Steven, Todd Gitlin, Bryan, Mohan Matthen, Aaron Garrett, Tombo, David Pilavin, Emily, John S. Wilkins, Matt, Benjamin, Brenda, Andrew N. Carpenter, Warren Goldfarb, Jeff Englehardt, Aliyah, Michael Zhou, David Berry, Velicia MacKay, Pranay, Ryan Dischinger, M, Aaron Preston, wj, flying scotsman - Graeme Forbes, Jeff House, David Berry, Roberto Loja, sbrown 07 - Ken Brown Cal Poly, Brian Leiter, Blanca Macelroy 1230, Margaret, The Rooster, Kristina, Buck, John M., raistlin7000, Jim, Brenda, Tobias Wolff, Charles Parsons, Enzo, Meat Sounds, Michael, Adam, a student, Patrick, Interlocuter, Philosophy, Allen Hazen, hilde, Konigsberg Walker [a favorite of mine, that one], Noumena [another favorite], Laurence B. McCullough, Jonathan, rvincent63, Ian J. Seda Irizarry, Ter@LV - Thomas Ryckman, Bob Unwin, Ionnis, Simon Halliday, Enzo Rossi, Eric Schliesser, Steve_Strasnick, analyticphilosopher, gwern, Anna, marinus, KWH, Al Cyone, aman, wj, andy, tom, Mr. Lonely, JP (Smits), Pat (Greenspan), Dorothee (Benz), Robert Viennau, Charles, Aleph, Carissa, Steven, Angus, Chad, C, Wade, Awesome, Chris, Oboe 316, andrEw, J. Vlasits, Liviu, Kristina, CW, and Philip Kovacs,

In addition, forty five of you took the time to send me email messages. Here you all are: Charles Parsons, Ann Davis, Patricia Greenspan, Todd Gitlin, Andrew Levine, Warren Goldfarb, William Polk, Boram Lee, David Pilavin, Ernest Sosa, Tobias Wolff, Kenneth Wray, David Kane, Douglas Quine, Kevin Hall, Andrew Flynn, Mack Sullivan, Amato Stuart Nocera, Dick Schmitt, Jerome Doolittle, Alex Rose, Srivatsa Monthi, James Klagge, Andrew Lugg, Kenneth Winkler, Pranay Sanklecha, Roman Bonzon, Rita Moss, Allan Silver, Eddie Goldman, Michael Ruse, JP Smits, Andy Jones, Arthur Danto, Rosa Cao, Chris Byson, Gail Rodney, Rita Reynolds, Andrew Rosa, Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Deborah Haar, Lloren Foster, Barbara Searle, and Kim Leighton.

What is it like to write one's memoirs? I am reminded once again [see Volume One, Chapter Four] of the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired on June 1, 1992 -- "Planet Kataan" -- the twenty-fifth episode of the fifth season. The Enterprise, you will recall, encounters a beacon in deep space that emits a signal which knocks Captain Picard unconscious. While lying on the floor of the flight deck of the Enterprise, he imagines himself marooned on planet Kataan, which is going to be destroyed by the explosion of its sun. Picard lives an entire life on Kataan, marrying, having children, growing old, having grandchildren, absorbing the culture and history of Kataan. When Dr. Crusher manages to bring him back to consciousness, he finds that he has been out for only half an hour, but there remain in his mind a lifetime of memories. In these past four months, since early April, I have been in a fugue state, reliving at a frenzied pace the entire seventy-six years of my life. It would not be accurate to say that my life has flashed before my eyes, as is often said to happen when one faces death, for that is a passive experience, something that happens to you. Rather, I have, with a remarkable urgency and intensity, recreated my life in my words.

There is a certain inexorability about writing one's memoirs. As one goes on, one gets closer and closer to the present day until, abruptly, not exactly unexpectedly but certainly with a considerable measure of regret, one runs out of life to write about. At this point, it seems I have only two options: to die, or to get another life. Since I am not yet ready to die, I am afraid I shall have to get a life, for the life I had is now a book.

MEMOIR VOLUME THREE LAST CHAPTER SECOND INSTALLMENT

My rediscovery of Susie started with a trip to Dubrovnik, and throughout our marriage, we have traveled as often as we could arrange for me to be away from the university. I was eager to make up for the long stretch of years during which I had stayed close to home because of Cindy's phobias, and Susie loves to travel, for all that it takes her a week to pack for an overnight jaunt. I was making trips to South Africa at least once and often twice a year, and on several of them, Susie flew out to meet me after my USSAS business was done so that we could go on safari. Although my first attempt at a safari had been a comic disaster, I still longed to see the wild animals and birds of the African plains. The easiest and least expensive way to do that in South Africa is to make a driving visit to the Kruger National Park, located in the northeast corner of the country. Kruger is enormous -- two hundred fifty miles from north to south, roughly the distance from Boston to Philadelphia. The park is crisscrossed with roads, and the rules are that you stay on the roads and in your car. Even so, in several days driving slowly this way and that, you can see lions prowling, elephants tearing the tops off trees, hyenas fighting over the remain of a kill, eagles, vultures, Lilac Breasted Rollers, herds of impala and zebra, giraffe, even on occasion an elusive rhinoceros. During one of our several visits, I was driving slowly along a road in the northern part of the park when I came upon a large elephant walking parallel to the road in the brush with her baby beside her. I followed along for a while, but she grew irritated by my presence and suddenly wheeled into the road in front of me, flaring her ears and making it very clear that she did not want me around. As carefully as I could, I backed up until she lost interest in me and disappeared into the brush. One of our other trips occurred in the early Spring [which is to say, October or November, it being the Southern Hemisphere.] The mothers had recently given birth, and everywhere we looked, we saw baby animals -- elephants, giraffe, impala, wildebeest, even a hyena nursing her young by the side of the road. I am not much for tourist attractions, but safaris actually live up to the travel company hype.

Far and away our best safari -- and, taking all in all, our best trip of any sort -- was ten days in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. This was a real safari -- private camps, crashing through the brush in open Land Rovers, sundowner cocktails by the boot of the truck on the open veldt, lavish dinners at night in our elegantly tented camp. One day, as we were driving across the open plain, we came upon a pride of seven or eight female lions lying lazily on a mound. As we paused, they got up, one after the other, and padded off. We followed, and after a bit they flopped down on another mound maybe half a mile away. Then they were off again, and this time with a serious purpose in mind. In the distance we saw several warthogs grazing -- not much of a meal for seven lions, but apparently they were hungry. As we trailed after the pride, they approached the warthogs slowly from downwind, and very carefully, clearly communicating with one another, began to position themselves in a net around their prey. The lions were low to the ground, using the tall grass to hide them. We sat very still, actually inside the circumference of the net they had created, watching. Suddenly, by a signal we could not hear or see, three of the lions charged simultaneously -- and missed! The warthogs skittered away as fast as their little legs could carry them. The lions gathered together, rubbed noses and heads, and plopped down to rest.

Susie and I returned to Dubrovnik twice more, and spent a lovely time touring northern Italy in a rented car, but somehow we found ourselves coming back again and again to Paris. Our very first Paris trip was in 1987, even before we were married, to visit Patrick and his Isabel. Very quickly, we fixed upon the île St. Louis as a lovely and centrally located quartier in which to stay. The first two or three times we went, we stayed at first one and then another little hotel on the main street of the île, but then I stumbled on an advertisement in the back pages of the New York Review of Books. A Washington, D. C. psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Frank, was offering an apartment on a side street of the île St. Louis for short term rentals, and we began going for a week at a time.

Those were happy visits, made memorable by lovely walks, exquisite meals, and even the occasional trip to a museum. On one occasion, we met Marx Wartofsky and Carol Gould, who were spending time in a rented apartment with their new baby son. The four of us had dinner at La Miraville, a one-star restaurant that is unfortunately no longer on the right bank quai. Susie and I returned there for a Christmas Eve dinner several years later and I ordered a beignet de foie gras that virtually floated off plate. I can taste it still.

We tried cruises, three in all. The first was a standard tourist excursion around the Hawaiian Islands. Next, we signed up for a Mass Audubon bird watching cruise to Baja, California. Finally, we joined a Harvard/Stanford Alumni/ae tour of the Dalmatian Coast that started at Athens and ended at Venice. All of these cruises suffered from the same problem, in my eyes. We were trapped on a boat for a week or more with people we did not know, whose politics we could only guess. Under the circumstances, the only safe thing to do was to eat, and the only safe things to talk about were grandchildren and previous cruises. Two moments stand out in my memory, both on the Athens-to-Venice cruise. In Athens, before we got on the boat, we were strolling downtown, checking out the new subway being built for the Olympics. The traffic was pretty heavy, and I noticed a truck stuck in a driveway waiting to get out onto the street. Now, I do not know any Greek, but as a result of a life spent teaching philosophy, I have learned to read the Greek alphabet, so having nothing better to do, I sounded out the word printed on the side of the truck. It was μεταφοροσ [I hope I have that right], which is to say "metaphoros." In other words, "metaphor." It was a moving van. The scales fell from my eyes, and I realized what the word "metaphor" means. And then it struck me that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. How cool is that!

The other event was a bit darker. The tour directors had arranged some lectures to amuse us when we tired of eating. One of the speakers was Marvin Kalb, the long-time television news reporter and commentator who was then the director of something called the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. This cruise was in September, 2002, during the run up to America's invasion of Iraq, so Kalb devoted his lecture to a discussion of the pros and cons of the Bush Administration plans. During the question period, I raised my hand and made a comment about America's imperial foreign policy. There was a round of applause when I finished, but Kalb, this literate, educated, sophisticated public intellectual, assured me that America was not an empire, offering as proof the observation that our motives and intentions were always benign and altruistic. I realized that I was in the presence of an idiot, and shut up. Later, on the line at the buffet table at dinner, several people came up to me and very quietly thanked me for speaking up.

On December 31, 2003, Susie and I made our last mortgage payment on our Pelham house and owned it outright. The next April, we rented Dr. Frank's apartment once again and flew to Paris for a one week stay. On the plane, I said to Susie, "This time around, why don't we go into a real estate office and pretend that we are rich Americans looking to buy a pied à terre in Paris. We will get to see the insides of some apartments, and it will be fun." She was game, so the next day, we went around the corner to a little office on the île St. Louis and made our pitch. They were happy to oblige, and in the next few days we got to see four or five apartments. Spotting us as Jewish right off the bat, they started in the Marais, near rue des francs bourgeois, the heart of the old Jewish section, but Susie and I really had our hearts set on the Left Bank. The agent came up with a small rez de chaussėe studio in a seventeenth century building that formed part of a copropriėtė, or co-op, on a little one block long street called rue Maître Albert, which runs between quai de la tournelle and Place Maubert. I was thrilled when I discovered that Maître Albert was actually Albertus Magnus, the great thirteenth century teacher of Thomas Aquinas, but the apartment looked to me to be a disaster -- dark, gloomy, the walls covered with ugly brown grass paper.

We continued looking, but Susie had a vision I lacked, and insisted that we return to the little studio. With her help, I began to see its possibilities, and on Friday, we agreed to buy it. Getting a French mortgage is a complicated undertaking, so we decided to re-mortgage our Pelham house, so recently freed of all encumbrances, and buy the apartment outright. I asked myself, "Which would our four sons prefer to inherit when we die -- a fully paid up house in Pelham that not one of them will ever want to spend the night in, or a house in Pelham mortgaged to the hilt and a fully paid up apartment on the Left Bank in Paris?" The question answered itself.

We found an elegant "interior architect," Victoire de Boissieu, who transformed our gloomy flat into a light, airy, lovely, efficient apartment -- tiny by American standards, but more than adequate for a Parisian couple. To fill the shelves Victoire had designed, I brought over my complete forty volume set of the works of Marx and Engels [in German], all of my books about Immanuel Kant, and one copy of every edition of every book I had written, some sixty or seventy volumes in all. I threw in my small collection of French history from my days at Harvard teaching European history, and we settled in. It was an insane extravagance, and the smartest purchase Susie and I have ever made.

With the new millennium looming, Patrick decided to bring his professional chess career to an end and return to college to finish up his undergraduate degree. In 1995, Viswanathan Anand, the great young Indian Grandmaster, played Gary Kasparov for the world title. Anand hired Patrick as a second, and Patrick spent months training with "Vishy" for the face off, later publishing a book about the match. Patrick told me that seeing the level at which Anand played, and recognizing what it would take for him to rise to that level and become a genuine contender for the world title, he decided not to continue his professional career as a chess player. After completing his degree at Harvard, Patrick got a job with a business consulting firm. A year or so later, he moved to the West Coast and worked for two little dot com start-ups, neither of which was able to get off the ground.

While Patrick was in Silicon Valley, he decided to try his luck at on-line dating. Wonder of wonders, he met a simply marvelous young woman, Diana Schneider, who was working in San Francisco for a non-profit. Patrick had described himself in his little on-line blurb as a "former United States chess champion." I guess absolute accuracy is not all that common in the on-line dating world, and Diana apparently said to herself, "Yeah, right. Let's see who he really is." I met Diana in 2000 at the seventieth birthday party that my sister threw for herself in Washington, D. C. I was totally taken by her, and was beside myself with delight when Patrick announced some time later that he and Diana would be married.

The couple settled on a Napa Valley winery as the location for the affair, and picked July 14th as the date. I very much wanted to believe that Bastille Day had a political meaning to them, but I am afraid it was just a date that turned out to be convenient for everyone. Susie and I had met Diana's parents, Larry and Elizabeth, on an earlier trip to the West Coast. Just as you do not get to choose your relatives, so you do not, at least in our society, get to choose your in-laws. I had been rather unlucky with Cindy's parents, but Larry and Elizabeth turned out to be charming and sympatico. Larry was retired from a career as a college teacher, and I did not have to worry about making political remarks.

Patrick and Diana asked Barbara's son, Josh, to preside. Josh is actually a professor of psychology at Alleghany College in Meadville, PA, but he has also had careers as a baritone sax player, a tour guide in Russia, a story teller, and a lay minister. With great foresight, I had spent the previous summer dieting and working out with a personal trainer, so I actually looked pretty svelte in my tux. I danced at my son's wedding, and toasted him with champagne. When you get to be sixty-eight, as I was then, there is not much more you can ask.

During these same years, Tobias went from being a brilliant law student, an appellate court clerk, an Associate at Paul Weiss, and an Assistant Professor of Law at UC Davis to being the leading young Civil Proceduralist in academic law, a powerful voice for gay legal rights, and an important public intellectual. I watched every step of this transformation, and yet it continues to astonish and delight me. Tobias has played an important part in almost every successful legal effort to win marriage rights for same-sex couples in State courts. In 2004, he advised the Kerry campaign on LGBT issues, and in 2008, he was invited to serve as Chair of the Advisory Committee on LGBT issues to the Obama campaign. When Obama accepted the Democratic Party's nomination in Denver, he and I were in the audience [along with a football stadium of other people, of course.] Now, Tobias is a tenured Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, ending, as I write these words, a year spent visiting at Harvard and NYU Law Schools. He consults regularly with the White House and various branches of the Administration on the Defense of Marriage Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy [on both of which he has written excoriatingly], and many other issues of public importance. I think it is a fair judgment to say that at the age of forty, he has already had a much larger impact on public policy than have I in a lifetime of writing.

MEMOIR VOLUME THREE LAST CHAPTER FIRST INSTALLMENT

Life wasn't all program building and good works, heaven knows. A good deal of fun stuff happened once we had all survived the Y2K panic. While the new decade, century, and millennium were getting themselves going, I decided to make a serious re-entry into the world of amateur chamber music. As with so many important turning points in my life, this came about quite by accident. Susie and I were shopping at a little fresh produce market one day -- a sort of Whole Foods without the pretension and self importance -- when we ran into Barbara Greenstein, a fellow resident of Pelham and wife of George, an Amherst College Physics Professor. Barbara was a warm, lively, pixy of a woman, deeply involved in all manner of Valley good works, and also a long-time serious classical quartet player. She knew that I had played a little violin in my time, and invited me to join her at her home for some quartets that next week. I dusted off my violin [and the bow I had bought at the urging of Rose Mary Harbison], and sat in as second violin. With her signature kindness, Barbara assured me that I had not done badly, but of course I knew better.

In Watertown, I had switched to viola, the better to find people willing to tolerate my playing, so I decided that if I was going to give quartets a try, I had better stay with that instrument and find someone to teach me how to play the thing. Stammel Strings, the local Amherst luthier, kept a mimeographed list of people in the Valley who offered lessons on the violin and viola, and I picked a woman who played viola with a local early music group that Susie and I liked. But she turned out to be having carpel tunnel problems [the bane of string players], so I went down the list a bit further and found another woman living in the town of Hadley, which sits like a strip mall between Northampton and Amherst. I made the call, and was set up for a first lesson.

Delores Thayer turned out to be a tall, beautiful blond woman who was co-principal violist of the nearby Springfield Symphony Orchestra -- a serious professional musician. After listening to me play for a bit, she started me out with a C major three octave scale -- one small step beyond learning which hand to hold the instrument with. Thus began an extraordinary eight year journey that brought me, by dint of countless hours of practice and weekly ninety minute lessons, to a point at which I could do a creditable job of the viola part in a middle Beethoven quartet or Schubert's Trout Quintet. I studied every major and minor three octave scale. I learned how to play them one note on a bow, two notes, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven [hard one, that], and twelve notes on a bow. I studied all of the natural, harmonic, and melodic minor scales, and then began on two octave double stop scales -- thirds, fourths, sixths, and octaves. I worked my way slowly and with great determination through Kreutzer and every other book of exercises Dolores had on her shelf, and tackled one solo piece after another, even essaying the Spring Sonata and the Bach Suites for unaccompanied cello, arranged for the viola.

A word about the little matter of arrangements for the viola. In the world of string instruments, the viola don't get no respect. There are websites devoted entirely to viola jokes [example: What is the difference between a lawnmower and a viola? Answer: You can tune a lawnmower.] Relatively little in the way of solo literature, or even exercise books, has been written expressly for the viola, so violists subsist on arrangements, usually from the vast violin literature, but sometimes, as in the case of the Bach Suites, from the smaller but still impressive cello literature. The one corner of the musical world in which the viola is acknowledged and respected is in the domain of the string quartet. I mean, if you don't have a viola, a quartet is just a trio. I had no illusions about being a solo violist, of course, nor even any real desire to be one. I just wanted to play well enough to be invited to participate in amateur quartets.

Very early on, I made a rather surprising discovery about arrangements. Many of the ones I was playing had been made by Joseph Vieland. Joe and Vera Vieland had been among my parents' closet friends, and I actually learned from their daughter not too many years ago that it was the Vielands who recommended to my parents that I study the violin with Irma Zacharias.

As a boy, I never practiced [I am here rehearsing some things that I say in Volume One, Chapter One of this Memoir, for those of you who joined me along life's way], but since I was, as teachers liked to say to parents, "talented," I managed to learn to play with some rudimentary facility. This time around was a totally different experience. Loree Thayer was a no-nonsense teacher, and I think she quickly sensed in me a pupil who was ready to do some serious work. Each day, I would go into the second floor spare bedroom next to my study and practice for an hour. Now, an hour a day is not much practicing for a real student of a string instrument. Those boys and girls on the way to careers as performers think nothing of putting in six or even eight hours of hard work each day. One hour, for them, is just a kind of clearing of the throat, some leg stretches before the serious running begins. But an hour was a great deal more than I had ever done, and before too long I could hear the difference. I actually learned how to play in tune.

Some things eluded me. Despite weeks on end of boring repetition and finger exercises, I never did develop a slow, beautiful vibrato. I had learned a sort of nervous shake as a boy, and could not break that bad habit. But I did learn how to play double stops, which as a boy had intimidated and baffled me.

Very shortly after I began my lessons, Barbara invited me to join several of her friends for regular weekly quartet playing. Don White, a retired professor, was a short man with considerable facility on both the violin and the viola. He would play first violin. Don actually had a case that could hold both a violin and a viola nestled side by side, something I had never seen before, but that I learned is common in the amateur quartet world. Barbara Davis was our cellist. Barbara was a young mother [young compared with the rest of us, that is to say] married to a neurologist who was in practice with Susie's MS doctor. Barbara was very self-deprecating, but she had a beautiful tone, and since, as viola, I sat next to her, I got to enjoy that sound while we played.

I was hopelessly outmatched by Don and the two Barbaras. They had been playing quartets forever, it seemed. Barbara Greenstein, who was several years older than I, had started when she was a girl, and told stories about her own teacher, who lived to be a hundred. Although each Haydn or Mozart or Beethoven quartet we played was an old, familiar friend to the three of them, it was terra incognita to me. Their customary modus operandi was simply to sit down and say, "What shall we play today?" But I insisted that they decide a week in advance which several quartets we would attempt, so that I could work on the viola parts before we met.

Real amateur quartet playing is a social as much as a musical event. At its best, it is a conversation among the instruments, and through the instruments, among the players. Really to enjoy amateur quartet playing, you have to like the people you are playing with. In addition, the second violinist, the violist, and the cellist have to be fortunate enough to find a first violinist who is willing to play with them despite being a great deal more proficient than they. The reason is that in the classical literature -- Haydn, Mozart, early and middle Beethoven, Schubert -- the first violin part is much, much harder than the other three. Indeed, in some cases, as for example in the Haydn opus 20 quartets, the first violin part is really a virtuoso turn with accompaniment from the rest of the quartet. Now, human nature and musical enjoyment being what they are, a violinist good enough to do a creditable job with the first violin part is probably going to want to play with folks who are up to his or her speed, so it is rare indeed to find four amateurs who will stay together and really enjoy playing with one another.

For some reason, with a generosity and patience at which I marvel even now, many years later, Don White and Barbara Greenstein and Barbara Davis chose to put up with my inferior playing as I practiced and practiced to catch up with them. Eventually, I think I did, and I hope that in the end they found it as enjoyable to play with me as I did to play with them.

The turning point came, in my mind at any rate, when we undertook to play Beethoven's Opus 59, Number 3, the third of the three Razumovsky quartets [so called because Beethoven dedicated them to Count Razumovsky]. As good fortune would have it, Susie and I were scheduled to spend a month in our Paris apartment just then, so I took my viola with me and devoted the month to working on my part. I figured -- four movements, four weeks, one week on each movement. Since the apartment is very small, Susie would sit in the little courtyard garden, or maybe go have her hair done, while I sawed away and tried to get myself up to speed. I say "get myself up to speed" advisedly, because the last movement poses some serious challenges. It is written by Beethoven in the form of a fugue, and mirabile dictu, the viola starts off. This, I can tell you, is very unusual in the classical quartet literature. I had a recording of the piece by the Emerson Quartet, who are well known for playing at manic speeds, and by my watch, they played the last movement at 165 quarter notes to the minute, a tempo so fast one cannot actually listen to the music. I took that as just another example of their bravado until I looked at a facsimile of the original and discovered that Beethoven himself had scored it for that speed.

Well, 165 was out of the question, so I started out legato, mastered the fingerings and bowings, and slowly ratcheted up the speed as the week went by. As we prepared to leave for home, I managed to play the entire movement at 100 quarter notes to the minute. Not even two-thirds what Beethoven called for, but not chopped chicken liver either. I hoped my quartet mates would be satisfied. Oh, did I mentioned that it is a simply gorgeous quartet?

When we met and started to play, I soldiered through the first three movements, steeling myself for my big solo in the last movement. The end of the third movement is scored attaca, which means that one does not pause, but goes directly from the coda at the end of the third movement into the fugue of the fourth. I plunged in at one hundred quarter notes to the minute, playing my heart out. After about five measures, the others stopped me and said that was too fast for them. I HAD ARRIVED.

Back in '86, when I was living in Watertown the year before Susie and I got married, I had bought myself a three thousand dollar viola, a very big step up from the violin my parents bought for me when I started studying with Mrs. Zacharias. But after I had been studying for three or four years, Loree told me that my instrument really was not capable of producing the sort of sound I was now skillful enough to make. She suggested I might want to look into a new and better viola. As it happened, the royalties from my textbook were piling up in a savings account, so I was in a position to make a move, if I could find the right instrument. I spent several long hours in an upstairs practice room at Stammel's, trying out violas. As you can imagine, that is a rather daunting undertaking for someone of my limited abilities. How could I be sure that an instrument's inferior tone was not simply a result of my incompetence? Nevertheless, I found a beautiful viola that had been made by Marten Cornellisen, a master luthier who lived in Northampton. This was a serious instrument, fully good enough to be used by a professional performer. It cost $17,000, and I was quite sure bargaining about the price was not an option.

That left the bow, which I had finally come to realize was quite as important as the viola. Barbara Greenstein agreed to come with me to Stammel to serve as an independent ear. We took a bunch of bows and my new viola upstairs to try them out. The bows ranged in price from twenty-five hundred to five thousand dollars, so this was going to be a major part of the total bill. I tried one bow after another, playing the Prelude to the Second Bach Suite, which I had mastered so that I could perform it as a gift at my sister's seventieth birthday party. [She had told the guests she did not want presents, because she had enough stuff, so I presented her with the performance of the Prelude with the explanation that it had cost me a great deal of effort but would take up no room at all in her apartment.] When I picked up the five thousand dollar bow made by the French bowmaker Benoit Roland, the viola began to sing. At the same moment, Barbara and I nodded. I had found my bow.

I brought my new viola and bow to my next lesson and showed them proudly to Loree. She took them from me, tried them out, and pronounced them excellent. "Now," she remarked dryly, "you have no more excuses."

Which brings me to the subject of excuses and T-shirts. I would work diligently at home on my exercises and my "piece," and then I would come into my lesson to play them for Loree. Quite often, I would flub a passage I had mastered at home. By now I had something of a crush on Loree, and I did not want her to think I had been shirking, so I would say, a bit plaintively, "I played it better at home." Each year Loree would hold a "recital" at which each pupil would play his or her best piece. Since her private pupils were mostly children, she would give each one of them a little gift at the recital. One year, she presented me with a T-shirt on which was written the message "I Played It Better At Home." This was not too long before I went off to Paris to master the third Razumovsky. When I got home, I ran right out and had a T-Shirt made with the message "I Played It Better In Paris," which I wore to my next lesson. That is the T-shirt that I wear as I take my morning walk here in Chapel Hill, and several fellow joggers and walkers have asked what it is that I played better in Paris.

The annual recitals were a trial for me. At one of the first in which I performed, I found when my turn came that my hand was shaking violently. As you will understand, this is a bit of a disaster for a string player. It always amused me that Loree, who regularly played for paying patrons of the Springfield Symphony, was terrified of speaking in public, something that I did with no qualms or terrors, even if the audience numbered a thousand. When I mentioned my bad experience to my quartet mates, they all said, "Oh, you need to take Indurol. It is a beta blocker." Now, I am no pharmacist, but I knew that beta blockers were serious medications given to patients with irregular heartbeats. My primary care physician at that point was a cardiologist, and I could just see myself asking him for a prescription for a beta blocker so that I could play at a viola recital. But Barbara Greenstein and Don were insistent. "Half the first violin section of the New York Philharmonic take them before a concert," they assured me. So, feeling like a fool, I called Dr. Larkin and explained my problem. "Sure," he said. "My wife takes them all the time." They really worked. Apparently, the shaking is caused by a flow of adrenaline into the blood stream, and the beta blocker interrupts the signal to the adrenal gland. The next time I had to play in public, I took a pill an hour in advance, and my hand was as steady as a rock.

For eight years, my viola was my constant companion. I even took it with me to Kutztown, Pennsylvania when I had a speaking gig there, and practiced in the room in which the University put me up. The world of amateur chamber music is like many other hobbyist worlds, complete with a national organization, the Amateur Chamber Music Players. I joined the ACMP and received their international directory, a publication listing hundreds, indeed thousands, of violinists, violists, cellists, oboists, flautists, pianists and others eager to make connections with fellow enthusiasts and play. There was one obvious problem with the listings. The ACMP members include everyone from beginners barely able to make their way through an early Haydn quartet to performance level musicians and even instructors. Some way is needed to sort these folks out, so that they will not suffer needlessly in a group either too good for them or not good enough. The ACMP solution is a system of self-ratings. When you fill out the form that gets you listed in the annual directory, you are required to rate yourself as an A player or a B- player or a D+ player, and so forth. Well, you can imagine the dangers of that sort of system. Some people regularly exaggerate their abilities, either from a genuine failure of self-understanding or in hopes of being invited to play in a group that is really above them. Others, like me, engage in ritual acts of self-abasement out of a morbid fear of being thought to have gotten above oneself.

The real difficulty for me with the ACMP system is that I did not want to play with people I did not know, people I did not feel at ease with. Professional musicians like Loree have an entirely different attitude, of course. They care only about the technical skill and musicianship of their orchestra or ensemble colleagues. So I shied away from cold-calling people listed in the directory and limited myself to my little quartet and a few other playing opportunities.

My most memorable bit of ensemble playing took place in Barbara Greenstein's living room, but not as part of a quartet. One of Barbara's oldest friends was James Yannatos, a violinist and composer who for forty-five years until this past season conducted the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra. Barbara and Jimmy [as she always called him] had apparently been students together at the Greenwood Summer Music Camp in the Berkshires, and remained close throughout their lives. One day, Jimmy came out from Cambridge to see Barbara, and our quartet assembled to play Mozart viola quintets with him. For the occasion, Don White switched to viola, and I played second viola. [A viola quintet is a composition for quartet plus an additional viola. It is actually quite astonishing how completely the tonality of the ensemble is altered by the addition of the second viola.] Jimmy, who is a performance class violinist, played first violin, of course. and for the first and only time in my life, I discovered what it is like to be inside a quintet when the first violinist is playing the music as it is meant to be played. The experience was a revelation, not at all diminished [at least for me] by my own mediocre play. I have sometimes thought that if I found myself in possession of vast amounts of money, I would hire a professional quartet -- say, the Borromeo -- to let me sit in and play along with them. But then I reflect that no amount of money could compensate them for the musical pain of playing with me, so I revise my daydream and imagine myself hiring them to play for me while I sip wine and eat exquisite canapés.

In the winter of 2007-8, as I was preparing to retire, Barbara's cancer returned, and this time there seemed little hope that she could beat it. I drove her to Boston several times for her chemotherapy, and she was cheerful, upbeat, greeting the other patients as old friends, telling stories about Greenwood Music Camp. But is was to no avail. Very quickly, she declined, and passed away. I miss her still.

With Barbara's death, something went out of my involvement with the viola. I continued to take lessons that last Spring, and played a few times with one group or another, but somehow it did not seem to make sense to go on practicing. When Susie and I moved to Chapel Hill, I made efforts to find a quartet, without success. It is now two years since we packed up that big house and moved into a comfortable condominium in Meadowmont Village, and from that day to this, I have not taken the viola out of its case.

MEMOIR VOLUME THREE CHAPTER SEVEN THIRD INSTALLMENT

The discerning reader will have noticed that several themes run through the programs I created and ran in the latter portions of my career. I have in mind particularly USSAS in South Africa, the SUMMA program in IASH, and the Scholars program in the Afro-American Studies department. In each case, I focused on ordinary students, not the handful of outstanding students, and in each case I sought to combine academic rigor with positive, supportive programmatic structures designed to counteract the discouragements and obstacles that average students so often face on their way to tertiary education. These concerns have their origin in the aversion I developed to the elite private higher educational sector that was my world for two decades, from 1950 to 1971. My concerns were reinforced by, but did not originate in, my ideological orientation, which very early on became radically progressive and has remained so, unwaveringly, to the present day. When I look back on the arc of my evolution in matters pedagogical, I am somewhat bemused by the fact that this populist, egalitarian strain in my thinking and action goes hand in hand with an utterly uncompromising elitism in the theoretical writing that I consider my real work.

I have never known how to make these two strains in my thought compatible, and I have long since given up trying. But several years ago, I finally made an attempt to think through the rationale for my commitment to the educational needs of ordinary, rather than extraordinary, students. The occasion for this effort was a request from Esther Terry. At about the time that I was retiring from my professorship and preparing to leave Amherst with Susie for Chapel Hill, Esther decided to seek State funding for yet another minority school-to-college program. She had made contact with Stan Rosenberg, a progressive State Senator from our part of Massachusetts who was a strong and faithful supporter of public higher education. Esther by this time had been appointed Vice-Chancellor for Student Affairs, and she hoped to enlist the approval of a new Chancellor just arriving on the campus for her idea. She asked me to write a few lines that could serve as a rationale for her scheme, and as is my wont, I sat right down and banged out a little essay that gave voice, in an organized fashion, to convictions I had held for may decades. Nothing ever came of Esther's attempt -- the new Chancellor was quite uninterested in the needs of young minority men and women in the Commonwealth -- and as a consequence my essay never saw the light of day. I have decided to incorporate it into this Memoir because it says, more clearly than I ever have before, just why I believe that it is our responsibility as educators to concern ourselves with the needs of the great majority of young men and women who cannot compel our attention by the outstanding excellence of their talents and accomplishments.

Some Heretical Thoughts on the Rat Race for the Top Jobs

A society is an articulated structure of roles occupied by, and functions performed by, adult men and women. Every society, in order to continue in existence, must endlessly reproduce itself by preparing the young to occupy or perform those economic, governmental, religious, legal, military roles and functions, so that in time they can take the place of their parents’ generation. Some of this work of social reproduction takes place in the family, some of it takes place in the workplace, some of it is carried on by formal and informal social groupings and organizations, and, especially in societies like ours, much of the work of social reproduction is assigned to the schools.

In an agricultural economy, young boys and girls learn to grow crops and tend flocks. In a hunter/gatherer economy, the young are taken along on foraging and hunting expeditions so that they can acquire the skills necessary to obtain food. In some societies, the young apprentice to carpenters, masons, wheelwrights, or silversmiths. They serve as pages to knights while they master the sword and mace. As acolytes, they learn the religious mysteries of the temple. They are articled to barristers so that they may be initiated into the arcana of the law.

Now it happens, from time to time, that a young man or woman comes along who has a special gift for one or another of the adult social roles in his or her society. Some young women take naturally to the sword; some young men have a special gift for tending to the sick. Some people have green thumbs. Others are able to craft beautiful furniture with a chisel and saw. But no society can survive that depends on a regular supply of outstandingly talented young people. A little reflection will make it clear that every society must define its adult social and economic roles so that averagely gifted young people can fill them.

How could it be otherwise? If the food supply were to depend on the talents of outstanding agronomers, the society would likely starve before those young Luther Burbanks appeared. If the governance needed for survival absolutely required the gifts of a Thomas Jefferson or an Elizabeth Tudor, then a society would be doomed, for even if such a leader were to appear, he or she would not likely be followed by another, and another, and another. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, a Millard Fillmore or George W. Bush would appear. The legal institutions of a society must be so fashioned that lawyers of average ability can manage its essential functions. The society will celebrate a Louis Brandeis, should one appear, but it cannot depend on a regular supply of jurisprudential giants.

The truth of these observations is reinforced by the fact that almost every society systematically excludes large portions of its population from whole ranges of adult roles and functions. Most societies up to the present have excluded women from the military, the law, medicine, government, and major portions of the economy. Similar exclusions are regularly imposed on groups identified by race, class, religion, or ethnicity. The effect of these exclusions, of course, is dramatically to decrease the pool from which young people will be drawn to fill adult roles, thus making it ever more unlikely that outstandingly talented boys and girls will be available. In effect, the more exclusionary a society is, the more it depends on its institutions being manageable by average talents.

In American society in recent decades, formal education has taken the place of almost every other social mechanism for preparing the young for adult life. The legal, medical, business, and military spheres have come to rely on schooling and the associated credentials and degrees to prepare young people and determine which among them shall be assigned to one or another adult role or function.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with society choosing this way of reproducing itself, although listening to lectures and taking written examinations is not always the best way to prepare for a productive role in adult society. But the process is powerfully warped and conditioned by an extraneous factor so pervasive that many of us fail even to recognize it for what it is. I refer to the steeply pyramidal structure of the rewards and privileges associated with the various roles in modern society. To state the point simply, in post-industrial societies world-wide, there are a relatively few really good jobs with big salaries and great benefits, and lots of mediocre jobs with small salaries and very few benefits. In a society like ours, the quality of life of a young person is determined almost entirely by what sort of job he or she ends up in, and that, in turn, is very considerably determined by the character and quantity of education he or she obtains.

Now, the top jobs [corporate lawyer, business manager, doctor, engineer, etc] are scarce, and their rewards are way out of proportion to those associated with jobs lower down on the pyramid. Hence, there is a ferocious competition for the scarce slots. Since we live in a society that gives lip service to fairness, justice, and equality, those who end up in the favored positions quite naturally tell themselves – and also tell those who fail to make it – that success is a reward for extraordinary accomplishment. Those at the top, they tell themselves in self-congratulatory fashion, are the truly gifted and exquisitely trained. But as we observed above, this is surely not true. No society, not even ours, can survive if it must rely on finding an endless supply of outstanding lawyers, doctors, or CEOs to fill its positions. The simple truth is that despite the ferocity of the competition, those in the favored roles are, by and large, only averagely competent at them .

Enter “metrics” – Grades, the SAT, the LSAT, and all the other impressively mathematical devices for sifting and sorting young people, of allocating them to scarce positions and justifying that allocation. These measuring exercises play absolutely no role at all in preparing young people for productive adult life. Their sole purpose is to decide, in an ostensibly objective and neutral fashion, which boys and girls will be allowed to ascend to the heights of the job pyramid.

Now, in sheepherding society, all the young boys and girls learn to herd sheep. Some do it better than others, of course, but virtually all of them learn how to tend sheep sufficiently well to become shepherds. If someone were to propose that the boys and girls be tested every two years to determine their progress in sheepherding, he would be laughed out of the village. But in our society, every stage from infancy to young adulthood is accompanied by batteries of “objective” [which is to say machine graded] tests, and at crucial junctures – the completion of secondary school, the transition to college, and later the transition to graduate study – success on these tests, however that is defined, is treated as an absolute precondition for advancement to the next, more exclusive stage of education, and thus for admission to the ever more lucrative jobs.

After this system has been in place for a while, it quite naturally comes to be the case that the adults occupying the most favored social roles turn out to be the ones who performed unusually well on the various tests at each stage in their growing up. After all, since performance on the tests determines whether they are admitted to the cushy jobs, it is self-evident that those in the cushy jobs will be the ones who did well on the tests.

And now, by a flagrant bit of circular logic, society concludes that success on those tests is evidence of the outstanding ability absolutely required by the cushy jobs! After all, if the cushy jobs do NOT require outstanding ability and accomplishment, then how can we possibly justify their cushiness and their scarcity? And if the tests do not identify those special few capable of performing at the heights of the economy and society, then how can we explain the fact that those at the top have all done so well on the tests?

All of this is dangerous and arrant nonsense. But it is the nonsense on which our entire educational system rests. There is very little evidence that success in pre-school, in elementary school, in high school, on SAT exams, in college, on GRE exams, and in graduate school is intimately linked with the ability actually to perform well the jobs that are won by these strings of successes. It is of course true that the senior partners of the most prestigious law firms graduated from the most prestigious law schools. How could it be otherwise? Those are the schools from which the law firm’s young associates are recruited. But has anyone ever done an objective, double-blind evaluation of the work of such lawyers and of their counterparts at less prestigious firms who graduated from less prestigious law schools? We are no better able to carry out such evaluations of the performance of lawyers, doctors, and corporate executives than we are to evaluate the performance of auto mechanics. In the end, the “evidence” of the superiority of those in the privileged positions is the fact that they accumulated all the grades, degrees, and other markers that we have chosen to use as filters in allocating scarce desirable positions to an excess of applicants.

Let me say it again: virtually all of the boys and girls in our society are capable of learning how to perform well-compensated jobs in a perfectly adequate fashion, and most of them could perform creditably in even the most demanding jobs, if given half a chance and the proper preparation. The lesson I learn from a lifetime in the Academy is very simply this: Any group of averagely intelligent young boys and girls, given the proper support, socialization, assistance, and opportunity, can prepare themselves to fill successfully one of the good jobs in American society. If a large proportion of the young people of some racial, ethnic, religious, or gendered group are failing to do this, the fault lies with the society, not with the boys and girls. Performance on so-called objective tests is neither evidence of, nor a prerequisite for, the ability to succeed in American society. The boys and girls of every city, town, or village in every society in the world, are capable of becoming averagely competent and productive members of their adult world. If they are failing to do so, it is the fault of the adults in the society. With attention, guidance, and with the unshakable conviction on our part that they are going to succeed, they will in fact succeed in becoming averagely successful.