The Hammock Papers: Thank.

12 December 2021

Thank.

From George Steiner's lecture, Universitas? ...

What is a true university? It’s libraries; it is a custodian, and engagement with the living past. It strives to advance knowledge and clarify critically the processes of thought. A true university serves neither political purpose nor social programs, necessarily partisan and transitory. Above all, it rebukes censorship and correctness of any kind. What we have done through political correctness. The lies we are teaching, or having to accept. The questions we are not allowed to ask. Not even to ask. No question of answering. Political correctness makes impossible great fields of comparative study.

A university should house and it should honor anarchic provocation and the passion of uselessness. What is the most wonderful passion in the world? Uselessness. If someone comes to me and says, “I’m going to give my life to the study of Tang Dynasty bronzes,” I say, “You’re a very lucky person. You’re going to be a very happy and hungry person, but you lead a blessed life.” The notion that the useless is the highest form of human activity.

First and foremost we must insist on recapturing some of the ground the humanities have yielded to the sciences. Is a 21st century-educated man or woman literate when in total ignorance of elementary mathematics, of the concept of numeracy, which organize and determine the world around us? When she or he cannot grasp such a notion as a mean average, an irrational? Notions instrumental to our socioeconomic existence, indispensible to current debates on genetic modification, euthanasia, and law. The frequent assignment to the least gifted, to the most disillusioned, of the teaching of mathematics in our schools is a suicidal scandal. How does it go in the university of Newton, and Crick? If you get a first in mathematics, you can go on to research. If you get a good second, you will enter hedge funds and banking, which are very sophisticated in their mathematics. If you are a third—the worst—you will go teach mathematics. [audience laughs] You realize, the self-fulfilling lunacy of such a system. Overnight, Stalin decided that schoolteachers of mathematics would be paid as much as university professors, and honored throughout society. And he brought on the great revolution in Soviet and then in Russian mathematical literacy. It can be done. It can be done, it’s not impossible.

It is never too late. A core curriculum should, I’m persuaded, contain—and now I hope you will bear with me. This is my one very practical reform. At the center of our curriculum should be architecture. Why? It draws on mathematics—very richly, of course; geology; what I call in English the material sciences: steel, iron, wood. It draws on environmental politics at every level. It embodies ancestry and futurity. In architecture the notorious gap between the two cultures is wholly abolished. Archimedes joins Michelangelo. Together they teach us, and the technical phrase is so beautiful, “how to read a building.” How to read a building, that is the phrase they teach you. There is no aspect of law, sociology, environmental economics, but also urban politics, which architecture does not involve in our daily lives. How to read. How to read a building. How to read? Which is the center of my remarks this morning.

We are learning to read together. No secondary text, please. No criticism. No comments on comments on comments. Complete loss of truth. You learn to read together. And what do you do at the end—and this is the end of my too-long remarks this morning. The closing or rather opening motion is that of memorization. We learn by heart, par cœur. Not by brain. We learn by heart. The poem or piece of relevant prose to memorize is to thank for what the text has given us. It’s the only effective way of saying merci, thank you, danke. For the inexhaustible liberality of meaning, for the miracle of sense. What we know by heart cannot be taken from us. Never forget that.

"Science and the Humanities" ...

"The Humanities Don't Humanize" ...

"How to Reform the Humanities" ...

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL