Lux Et Veritas
I’m back in Champaign, after a long weekend in Connecticut and Massachusetts, which was amazing. Above you see a past president of Yale U, who appears to be having an an astonishing realization, or preparing to stand up and whup the fear of God into some young miscreant. Perhaps both?
New England was interesting and beautiful, although I had many travel nightmares both on the way there and back—delayed a day and stuck in a hotel, the plane having to break up into the air again during a too gusty landing, and (on the way home) a crowd of furious passengers beating on the window of my taxi threatening to hurt me if I dared exit the vehicle. I’ll forbear to share more travel stories, but I collected quite a few.
The conference to which I traveled was small, and owing to my delays I missed much of it, but I did manage to hear at least a few interesting talks. One about Walter Crane (by Francesca Tancini) was especially interesting, as an introduction to the tarot-like work of an illustrator who’s work I must confess was entirely new to me. My own talk had to be moved to the last slot in a session on the second day; it went well enough, although there didn’t seem to be a great many early modernists at the conference.
I suppose though that the best part of the trip was that I had a chance to see some Eastern friends, who toured me around Yale and Massachusetts. New England was interesting in many ways, but especially for me in the very palpable puritan influence of the place. Ole’ Ted Wolsey, pictured above, is a bit of a post-Puritan, but not so this fellow, who seems either like an American Hudibras, or else like the squat, angry, hammer of God himself.
Even the name of Yale University—spare, somewhat ugly, but full of purpose and direction, in contrast to the warm clubbiness of “Harvard”—helps to make this point. And so do the memorable architectural features of the campus, like the marble cube in which the cultural patrimony of the West sits like a Leibneitzan mind, or Woolsey Hall (again, named for Theodore Wolsey, above).
Wolsey Hall, especially, provided a remarkable experience. Neo-Classical (but Puritan neo-Classical), this white Mausoleum-like building is a memorial to Yale students who fought, or died, in the service of the United States (”Yes, but where’re all the names of the alums who fought in Iraq?” asked one of my guides).
Yet not withstanding the likely paucity of Yalies on the front lines in Iraq, Wolsey Hall was not entirely uninspiring. As I walked into the dome of Wolsey Hall, I looked at the friezes on walls, and this one in particular, the empty chambers on the ground floor was flooded by inspirational music in rehearsal, which sounded vaguely familiar. Familiar, I realized, because it was the music from Civilization IV, filling the quiet building with the sound of the Lord’s Prayer, sung in Swahili, transformed into an anthem not to God but to Civilization—as if there were something there still worth keeping around—some vast project worth taking up and pursuing, again.
A cheap and vaguely fascist sentiment, brought on by a war memorial and a video-game jingle, right? And what would Theodor Adorno say? I know. And yet maybe not quite.
We had to miss the Video Game music performance later that evening, but most of it is available on You Tube. We made our way back to Massachusetts, where I saw RL in a lovely Under Milk Wood, and visited Emily Dickinson’s house (we couldn’t find her grave).
And after a few delays, and a near riot at O’Hare airport, I was back in Illinois, at 5:30 in the morning.