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Norman Maclean, an Aristotelian, learned deeply what Aristotle taught: tragic art is cathartic. Toward the end of his life, he wrote a small American tragedy, A River Runs Through It, and in writing it released himself from decades of grief and confusion over his murdered brother.

UD finds it strange and moving that Maclean’s creative life, at the end of his long teaching life, turned into an embodiment of theories he’d spent years conveying rather than embodying. Few literary scholars have the luck to accomplish their own aesthetic expression of the aesthetics they’ve studied and taught — an aesthetic expression, in Maclean’s case, that became a powerful story and film.

Those who can’t do, teach. In the case of Maclean, he taught and got it done, for himself and for the readers of his story.

He did what people who’ve elaborated on Aristotle’s argument — Edmund Wilson, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes — say artists do: He took a wound and lent it symbolic dignity and in this way healed himself.

Here’s how Hughes puts it, in a letter:

[All art] is an attempt by someone unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi… In other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session. [Poetry is] nothing more than a facility… for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction… [T]he physical body, so to speak, of poetry is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Aristotle says we emerge from our catharsis at the spectacle of tragic drama reconciled anew to the conditions of our existence; the drama offers an aestheticized but true and tolerable (few can take this knowledge on directly) engagement in the suffering realities of human lives. Ted Hughes, carrying his own notorious wound, also talks of reconciliation. The creation and reception of art is a way to go on living.

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Start at the very end of River, the passage in which an elderly Maclean goes fishing in the Blackfoot by himself:

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Maclean the poet has, in the prose that precedes this, already played each of these figurative lines out skillfully, so that by the time the reader arrives at this conclusion, she feels consciousness as a force electrically charged with meaning: Not until the cool of the evening — the end of life — can we begin to sense what our life has been; even then, our understanding is always partial, half-light. We can put ourselves in the way of cathartic insight only when we reduce ourselves, when we subdue our egotism and become receptive to a reality that transcends us. “All existence fades to a being with my soul and memories...”

It sounds, at first blush, madly narcissistic — to imagine that all existence is nothing but oneself. But in fact this is a merging with the world that — in language that also sounds narcissistic — allows one, as Kierkegaard wrote, to “become important with [one’s] despair.”

The whole age can be divided into those who write and those who do not write. Those who write represent despair, and those who read disapprove of it and believe that they have a superior wisdom — and yet if they were able to write, they would write the same thing. Basically they are all equally despairing, but when one does not have the opportunity to become important with his despair, then it is hardly worth the trouble to despair and show it.

Writing your life, finding a way to evince and aestheticize your despair, doesn’t rid you of despair the way a pill rids you of a headache, but it does free you from the pain of its seeming contingency — the possibility that it’s all been meaningless suffering and loss. To become important with your despair means both to give it the specific shape it has by virtue of having emerged out of your life and no other, and to sense the way your despair flows naturally out of the history of human despair — how it is finally indistinguishable from Aristotle’s tragic plot.

So again — “the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River” — are the soundings from the depth of existence, from the antediluvian world, that the artist’s hyperattentive ear receives. (Clever Charles Wright calls this, in his poem Disjecta Membra, “a music my ear would be heir to.") A “four-count rhythm” — the way Maclean’s father said you should cast for fish — assumes this late in the story a meaning having to do with the life well-lived, lived in accordance with the rhythms of nature. The “hope that a fish will rise” is the definitive, profoundest hope of A River Runs Through It — that we will have the power not merely to catch the underlying truths of our lives, but that we will be subtle and persistent enough to wrestle them free of their murkiness and consider them in evening’s half-light.

More details from River in my next post.

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UD has stepped in the same river twice, and reread, after twenty years, Norman Maclean’s story, A River Runs Through It. She hasn’t seen the film again, but she remembers admiring it.

Maclean was an English professor at the University of Chicago when UD was a graduate student there. He must have been retired, or almost retired.

Not that UD would have taken a course with this mountain man from the Big Sky. She was appalled enough when Wayne Booth assigned as the first reading in one of his Chicago seminars the novel Ceremony in Lone Tree, an unceremonial paean to the great western emptiness.

UD had come to the U of C from the urban east; once in Hyde Park, she encountered professors like Booth and Maclean, who’d come from the other direction, places like Utah and Montana, trailing missionary mothers and preacher fathers.

What UD was used to, what UD liked, was a professor like Erich Heller, with whom she’d studied as an undergraduate. A refugee from Prague, Heller specialized in European high modernism and its antecedents: Kafka, Rilke, Goethe, Kleist. She liked Heller’s heavy accent. She liked his weltschmerz. Booth and Maclean were slaphappy, with broad vowels.

Snugly — smugly — fitted to the confines of Gregor Samsa’s room, UD had no idea what do with the wide open literary spaces of Fenimore Cooper and Wright Morris. Most of American literature embarrassed her.

But university education is supposed to broaden us, and UD gradually stretched her mind to accommodate the value of these men and their worldviews.

***********************************************************

Of course once you look with any care at the worldview of a reflective person, someone like Norman Maclean, you discover it’s not much different from Heller’s. Wading into A River Runs Through It yields the same conviction of the painful enigma of life, a pain lifted from us occasionally through ecstatic moments of clarity that seem, when you look at all of them together late in the day, to disclose our life’s otherwise hidden pattern, meaning, and flow.

Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory. In death it had its pattern, and we can only hope for as much.

Maclean’s memoir, written when he was in his seventies, enlivens his murdered brother’s remains in this way. He comes to know — or at least to evoke with artistic persuasiveness — this enigmatic, self-destructive man, killed in a fight when he was still young.

Maclean does what writers do: He doesn’t just look at epiphanic moments with his brother; he renders them. That’s what A River Runs Through It is — a prose seance, a stirring of dead waters. And in rendering his brother, Maclean renders himself: In death it had its pattern, and we can only hope for as much.

Aristotle (Booth and Maclean were Chicago Aristotelians) writes of the superiority of poetic truth to historical truth: “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” At the very end of his story, Maclean quotes his father asking him to “make up a story and the people to go with it,” for only with an aesthetic rendering “will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

Literary art is an act of meaning-imposition in an enigmatic world. It consists in, as Don DeLillo said of Norman Mailer at Mailer’s memorial service, “figuring out the world, sentence by sentence.” What we figure out in this way has provisional value; it’s not empirical or revealed but poetic truth. But it is our figuring, our own freed-up imaginative and intellectual energies at work. Art concedes the mystery of the world; the artist is someone who listens more carefully than other people to the hints the world drops.
Look at Gary Snyder’s poem, Regarding Wave:

The voice of the Dharma
the voice
now

A shimmering bell
through all.

Every hill, still.
Every tree alive. Every leaf.
All the slopes flow.
old woods, new seedlings,
tall grasses plumes.

Dark hollows; peaks of light.
wind stirs the cool side
Each leaf living.
All the hills.

The Voice
is a wife
to

him still.

The artist listens with profound receptivity to the voice of the world. The enduring beauty and originality of Maclean’s artistry lies in the particular ways in which he records and seeks to understand that voice.

In Part Two of this post, I’ll enter Maclean’s text and follow the flow of his style and content.

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It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and UD’s gazing at twelve white roses in a twelve-cup teapot. That’s her foreground. Her background is the Atlantic Ocean. She’s on sabbatical from her university and living at the beach, where quiet autumn days and an exhilarating setting create the perfect conditions for thought and for writing.

She gathered the roses last night, from Table 10 at St. John’s College’s Evening of Appreciation. This is the Great Books St. John’s, in Annapolis, and UD was part of the evening because she gave money to the college in memory of her mother, who admired the serious liberal arts curriculum there.

Among the things the college bought with UD’s money was a bench in front of the library with UD’s mother’s name on it. Here UD likes to sit and imagine students lounging, reading out of the same translation of Marcus Aurelius her mother read.

The drive from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chesapeake Bay was rainy, with dark clouds over the narrows and creeks on the way to Annapolis. This was absolutely flat terrain — soy fields with linear irrigation machines, corn fields done for the season.

Once in Annapolis, we waited in traffic for happy Naval Academy people to leave the stadium where their team just beat SMU.

“With a clear and single purpose.” This was the night’s theme, the phrase repeated on banners that hung from the ceiling of the softly lit interior, and UD thought of the admirable simplicity, the fidelity to basic intellectual principles, implicit in this college’s course offerings... One of her favorite things about the St. John’s curriculum, for instance, is the music requirement, in which all students learn notation. So clear and simple a fact, that educated people should know that language. So bold a purpose, more generally, to transmit the ideas and modes of thought actually needful.

The clarity and containment of St. John’s attracts UD as much as it attracted her mother, and she’s been happy to tread ever closer each year to an actual human acquaintance with it. She and Mr. UD, each clutching a club soda with lime, surveyed the well-dressed, affluent crowd, the numbered tables dressed in coral tablecloths and candles and white roses, and the student jazz trio playing All of Me. UD wasn’t a multimillionaire, like some of the people being thanked tonight — like the young, semi-retired lawyer at her table who spends most of his time reading books at his house in Woodstock — but even her modest gift clearly meant something to the school, and she was happy to be thanked.

People — and schools — that openly ask basic questions about the meaning of life, about virtue, about love, are always being called naive. Old-fashioned. It’s so naive to read primary documents about first things and speak to one another in small groups about them. Haven’t you read... You can’t open your mouth until you’ve studied... Technology has made obsolete... Aren’t you being ethnocentric...

But sometimes, UD thought, you need to go back to first principles. Hell, maybe you’ve never been to first principles. You need to go there and establish a foundation for thought. The real difference between educated and less educated people is that educated people have learned intellectual discipline. They know that there are better and worse ways of proceeding to frame, think about, and argue any human matter — The question of the existence of God. How best to offer health care to a large population. Under what conditions we should harvest stem cells. Whether poetry should rhyme.

UD’s perhaps quirky take on our presidential elections would have it that McCain is unraveling — losing a focus on his policy philosophy and gaining a desperate casting-about — while Obama maintains his notorious calm and focus, in part because one of these men took college seriously, and internalized there not only disciplined habits of mind, but arguments in favor of maintaining intellectual and emotional composure through vicissitudes. Obama has maintained a clear and single purpose because he seems to have learned the great lesson great colleges offer: That in to order to train your mind to think seriously and well about the world, you need to clear your thoughts and emotions of their customary vagueness and narcissism, and cut a clear path toward what matters.

On the two-hour trip back to the beach, UD considered, sleepily, the Bay Bridge under a gray shroud at one in the morning. Tomorrow at the ocean would be another clear day.

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Start here: The more highly corporatized the university, the more corporate in their attitudes the faculty. Especially faculty imports from the corporate world — people who aren’t really professors, but who, usually for reasons of vanity, play them on campus.

I mean, if you want to understand the origin of catastrophes like Emory University’s Charles Nemeroff, you need to understand his mental world.

So start here: Start with a recent news story about the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The man who presided over the collapse got five hundred million dollars in compensation while doing so. To be sure, he and his family have suffered like everyone else because of the economic crisis:

‘Mr. Fuld was once worth close to $1 billion and now has a net worth estimated at about $100 million. He and his wife have been forced to sell some of their renowned art collection.’

Start there. Start with the understanding that Charles Nemeroff’s understanding of his personal value, his social status, comes from Fuld’s world. He’s not about ... whatever professors are about ... intellectual discovery, pedagogy, communities of scholars...

He’s not comparing himself to Freud. He’s comparing himself to Fuld.

If one hundred million dollars a year represents your sense of what your compensation should be, and if you find yourself in a university, you’re up shit’s creek. There’s no way, even with a medical professor’s salary, you’re going to get there.

But you can make a respectable, extra-university ton of money by selling your reputation to drug companies.

Keep front and center the fact that in this sense the university is immensely valuable, even to people like Nemeroff, for whom the shabby, earnest ethos of the institution is a joke and a personal insult. To play the professor is to play the man with integrity, the man who has eschewed the corporate world because he’s above single-minded profit-taking. He’s motivated by science and altruism.

And it is precisely everyone’s appraisal of the university professor as a serious person, motivated more by ideas than money, that Nemeroff and his corporate clients exploit. Professor Nemeroff shares with you his admiration for our new drug! This admiration emerges solely out of his intellectual scrutiny of its properties. You can trust his sober, disinterested point of view because... he’s a professor...

The character emerging from what UD’s been describing comes out of a nineteenth century novel. The fraud, the poseur, the hypocrite, the confidence man who breaks the rules more and more flagrantly because he’s sure he can get away with it. The world, after all, is a cynical place. He knows how to play it.

This is a comic character, full of high sentence and secret hoardings. The only writer today who can do him justice is Tom Wolfe.

Charles Nemeroffs are amusing in novels. Their reality is sad, sad, sad. If you care about the American university.

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Universities are winsome, dappled, pathetic things.

Their two main constituents, students and professors, are cute and idealistic. They worry about Darfur and solar power and whether we can be said to reason autonomously.

Other important university constituents, like proud parents and alumni sports boosters, are also adorable in their excitement about things like intellectual cultivation and school spirit.

Universities are pathetic as well as adorable because their optimistic, trusting, idealizing nature makes them hopelessly vulnerable. Like Blanche Dubois, the innocent yearning ways of universities invite ravagement by cynics — people who represent the world outside the university, where things are more Kowalskiesque.

These mercenaries don’t give a shit about the dewy-eyed self-appraisal of the university as a place apart, a place dedicated to the best that’s been thought, blah blah. They’re in it for the money, and they know a sucker when they see one.

The growing scandal of endemic, third-world corruption in American university psychiatry departments reached a sort of peak the other day, when Senator Charles Grassley added the name of Charles Nemeroff, chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University (chair until last night, when Emory hastily dumped him), to his long list of professors who take massive amounts of drug industry money in exchange for promoting industry products.

These professors already enjoy among the highest salaries on campus, courtesy of students who pay high tuition. Every year, these professors fill out conflict of interest forms and submit them to their universities, where administrators diligently review their claims not to have broken rules about limits on how much money they can accept from drug companies. Every year, plenty of these professors lie through their teeth, but, as the professors know quite well, the administrators who review their claims are going on trust. It’s a university and all.... We’re civilized... Administrators aren’t the police!

UD detests cliches, but laughing all the way to the bank fits too well.

The question is whether universities can defend themselves against Nemeroffs.

The answer is that they cannot.

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Suicides, especially the suicides of sensitive writers we love (Virginia Woolf, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace), are a serious body blow. They anger and demoralize us. They make us brood.

Even if he’d left a tightly argued, thousand page suicide letter — with endnotes — we’d find what Wallace did mysterious, unaccountable.

Yet if suicide is a million miles away from our experience, it’s also luridly intimate.

To be sure, most of us are so wedded to existence that we struggle, without a second thought, even under dire circumstances, to stay alive; yet when someone we know or know about commits suicide, the act can unearth a buried but rather extensive region of thought and feeling in us that has to do with the worth of existence.

One way we try to neutralize suicide’s threat to our affirmations about life is to medicalize it, and modern psychology has given us all we could ask for along these lines, a pharmacopia of terms and treatments for what, in my suicidal grandmother’s day, people called involutional melancholia. The fact that in many cases anti-depressants recharge depressives’ batteries reassures us that brain chemistry, not philosophy, pertains. But in the case of Wallace, even shock therapy failed to spark him.

Like Wallace, my father — twenty-five years ago — hanged himself. His blood teemed with psychotropics.

We can continue to medicalize these outcomes. We can say modern science hasn’t yet fully conquered depression. But even when we come up with a pill that keeps everyone away from nooses, the pull toward suicide on the part of so many people will continue to shake us.

*************************************
A British writer, Julian Gough, argues that something about universities helped drive Wallace to suicide. UD wants to consider this argument:

“… [H]e was unplugged from electric, living America, by a life spent in the university system. His father was a professor of philosophy, his mother a professor of English. He majored in English and philosophy at Amherst, did an MFA in creative writing in Arizona, turned his English thesis into his first novel, studied philosophy at Harvard, got a job in the English department of Illinois State University, which he left to teach creative writing at Pomona College in California, where he died.

He was an immensely gifted and original writer, with a brilliant, hyper-analytical mind. The two things such people should avoid are marijuana and universities. He was aware of the dangers of the former (which was not just a threat to his prose—after his first novel he checked into rehab and asked to be put on suicide watch). But he couldn’t escape the warm, welcoming trap of the latter. Only universities will give a job for life and full health insurance to a novelist with heavy-metal hair and a history of depression. He was, as ever, aware of the risk to his fiction. In a brilliant, painful television interview with Charlie Rose in 1997, he said, “Oh boy, don’t even get me started on teaching… The more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time spent on your own work… I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year, and it’s a little bit horrifying.” He looked like a trapped animal. He’d been teaching for four years. Eleven years later, still teaching creative writing, never having written another novel, he killed himself.

… A life in academia formed, deformed and almost ruined Wallace’s writing. Infinite Jest is nearly a thousand pages of exhausting, inexhaustible, hugely flawed and brilliant novel. It is followed by almost a hundred pages of endnotes (his editor made him cut as many again). The endnotes have footnotes. Wallace was, on one level, aware that he was cut off from ordinary America, but the knowledge put his prose into a hyper-analytic death spiral. Like so many academics, he became obsessed with the white whale (or pink elephant) of the authentic. He spent much of his time attacking forms of language of which he disapproved (pharmaceutical jargon, advertising, corporate PR). This was literary criticism disguised as literature—grenade attacks on a theme park.

Wallace was not alone in this; it happens to most American academic novelists (like the superbly gifted writer George Saunders who, at 49, has still never written a novel or left school.) They waste time on America’s debased, overwhelming, industrial pop culture. They attack it with an energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that culture (bad television, movies, ads, pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating, billion-dollar cur. It has to be chosen to be consumed, so it flashes its tits, laughs at your jokes, replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn’t worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes.

But under all that froth, that energy wasted attacking confectionery ads, lies the true, hard core of Wallace’s work: its engagement with depression, addiction and death. Infinite Jest contains the most accurate and moving descriptions of clinical depression in modern literature. Read now, the Kate Gompert chapters provide a mature, gentle explanation of Wallace’s own death. And they forgive us, his wife, his parents, his friends: we weren’t to blame. They are noble pages. As Thomas Pynchon has said: “When we speak of ’seriousness’ in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death.” It is a tribute to modern America that this is so. Modern America beat fascism and it beat communism. Death is the last oppressor left standing in America…”

*******************************************************

The real shock therapy Wallace needed, in other words, was to get the hell off campus. The university, with its obsessive reflection upon authentic and inauthentic modes of existence, put his hyper-analytical mind into a philosophical death spiral. His art and life crashed because he fixated on the wrong things... the sort of things that academics fixate on. He over-intellectualized, and he wasted time dreaming of an authentic life when he should have been living among and writing about people experiencing actual lives.

Although Gough doesn’t offer examples of the sort of literary artists he has in mind, UD figures he means someone like Tom Wolfe, with his out there, fully connected, electric acid America... In a way, Gough’s argument goes back to the sort of thing critics like Georg Lukacs, a Marxist, were saying in the ‘thirties and ‘forties when they attacked modernists like Kafka and Beckett: An art of surreal depressive nattering fails to engage with the realities of human lives; it also — like suicide itself — undermines our will to live, and our faith in our ability to improve the world.

Yet Gough doesn’t really consider the connections between America’s debased culture and suicidal tendencies. Nor does he include in his description of that culture what Wallace was really talking about — not so much the lowest of elements of popular culture (moronic tv, etc.) as higher-level, therapeutic culture — the culture into which, as the son of university professors, he was born. This culture can indeed be, as cultural critics like Christopher Lasch made clear, an enervating, disconnected form of life. And of course the university might be considered the epitome of the tendency. But this life is just as real, in its contours and effects, as the middle-class Rabbit Angstrom’s life in the work of John Updike.

In a limited sense, though, Gough may be right: If your subject is the dangerous-trance-inducing unreality of affluent, pleasant, postmodern America, you might want to avoid full-time immersion in the particularly narcotic undertow (the phrase is Don DeLillo’s) of the university.

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I’m sitting on Leslie Whittington’s bench. Born 1955.

You can only follow one or two stories, and of course UD — a George Washington University professor who has spent research time in Australia — has followed Leslie’s. She was a Georgetown University professor, on sabbatical, on her way — with her husband and daughters — to a research appointment in Australia. She was almost the same age as UD.

My mind trails her onto the plane. I pace myself at her pace, sit down, buckle. I enter her terror and disbelief. Her despair at what her daughters’ eyes widen on.

*********************************

Well, I’m communing with you in a different way now. While a small rain starts up, and the clouds thicken, and airplanes angle in to land, I’m sitting on your bench, leaning over to look at the little reflecting pool underneath it.

I’m not sure about the reflecting pool. I’m not sure it works.

Each bench, memorializing each person who died in the plane or in the Pentagon, floats a foot or so above a lit rectangular pond. The play of light against stone, the rippling of birth dates, the shadows from shaggy bark trees — this lends life and movement to the memorial. Water’s part of that, and it’s a good idea. But I’m not sure about the pondlet in particular. It’s a puddle more than a pool.

The benches, though. The benches work. They don’t shrink from the reality of the crash. They look like airplane wings stuck into the ground.

Also birds’ wings.

You’re supposed to sit on the “cantilevered benches,” as the memorial’s website describes them, and commune there with the dead. But only UD and one other woman are doing this. Others seem to think it disrespectful to sit.

Another design failure?

No. It’s early days — the first full day — and there’s a tentative feel. People aren’t ready to think of the benches as furniture. They place little stones on them, and peonies, and military medals, and photos, under clear wrap, of bare-chested guys sitting together on lawn chairs and drinking beer. At the foot of Leslie’s bench there’s a hardback book — A Very Long Engagement, by Sebastien Japrisot. On a white sheet of paper peeking out of the book, a typed message, all in caps, appears: OUR BOOK CLUB REMEMBERS OUR FOUNDING MEMBER, LESLIE. The page lists all the books they would have read.

Look up, and you see the immense American flag draped over the rebuilt wing of the Pentagon. Nearby, construction workers dismantle the high rafters from yesterday’s dedication ceremony. Skinny long-haired country boys in white shirts that say REMEMBER undo the reviewing stands and the wiring. In the farther background, George Washington Parkway traffic washes by, and, behind that, the dull midrises of DC rise, making absolutely no statement against the gloomy sky.

Strange that UD cried only when she read, on a big memorial stone at the entry, the word CLAIM. We claim this ground... the message on the stone began. It had a great power in this context, that word, conveying somehow the immense wound still suffered, and the insistence on regenerating the world. Our world.

“Ma’am. See that beam? It’s about to swing around. Hold off.”

As UD walked back to the Pentagon Metro stop, a uniformed man held her and the rest of the departing crowd to one side while the workers directed a crane operator in lifting and depositing the structure. “Back it out, Eddie. Back it out. Hey where you goin.”

We watch, patient, silent, polite, as they delicately bring it down to earth.

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The fiery debates about Sarah Palin’s capacity to lead — the quality of her intellect, the nature of her academic and political preparation — focus national attention on a theme dear to UD: Higher education. Why do we call it higher? Does it matter whether one has this rather obscure, somehow elevated, experience?

Does Palin’s spotty, undistinguished college career matter? A communications major, she probably had little exposure to history, philosophy, languages (Obama doesn’t speak any language besides English, but UD assumes that as a political science major at Columbia University, specializing in international relations, he had at least to study one for a few years), and what we used to call civics. Communications, after all, is radically present-oriented: It’s about public relations, television, advertising, radio ...

Here are a couple of course descriptions from Idaho’s current catalog:

JAMM 468 The Advertising Agency (3 cr). Functioning of an advertising agency, including management, accounting, creative and media buying systems, government regulation, account management, and creative strategies in the marketplace. Field trips. Recommended preparation: JAMM 466.

JAMM 376 Digital Animation in Mass Media (3 cr). Creation and animation of both video and graphics in the digital realm for television, film, and interactive multi-media. Production fundamentals through individual projects will be emphasized as a means to help stimulate viewer attention and to improve the processing of information and content. Prereq: JAMM 275.

I put the link to the University of Idaho page over “a means to help stimulate viewer attention” in order to highlight the point of a lot of these courses. They’re about very helpfully keeping us awake while we stare at screens. Or, as the first example suggests, they’re vocational.

Obama’s course of study (here’s the current political science course list for Columbia University) incorporated history, theory, global politics. Many of the courses (Classical and Medieval Political Thought) are almost purely intellectual, having no immediate vocational utility. Recall, too, Columbia’s Great Books undergraduate curriculum, which would have given Obama an exceptional exposure to general civilization courses.

Like a lot of people whose lives are changed by excellent educations, Obama describes himself — a wild kid — finding mental focus at Columbia: “I decided to buckle down and get serious. I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.”
********************************************************
Does it matter? Does it matter that unlike Obama — who seems to have had a transformative intellectual experience at Columbia — Palin completed an undistinguished vocational undergraduate degree?

No. In the scheme of things, if a politician has a lively, curious intellect anyway, and a lot of political experience, and good political judgment, a substandard college experience, while a pity, isn’t a campaign-ender.

We won’t know whether Palin possesses these qualities on a presidential level until she has her first serious press conference. Until then, it’s worth reminding ourselves why all over the world people cherish a good education. It’s not just about jobs. It’s about expanding your consciousness in a way that profoundly enhances the quality of your life.
But that’s still pretty obscure, isn’t it? Consider this excerpt from Errata, George Steiner’s account of his undergraduate years at the University of Chicago:

A worthwhile university of college is quite simply one in which the student is brought into personal contact with, is made vulnerable to, the aura and the threat of the first-class. In the most direct sense, this is a matter of proximity, of sight and hearing. The institution, particularly in the humanities, should not be too large. The scholar, the significant teacher ought to be readily visible. We cross his or her daily path. The consequence, as in the Periclean polis, in medieval Bologna, or nineteenth-century Tubingen, is one of implosive and cumulative contamination. The whole is energized beyond its eminent parts. By unforced contiguity, the student, the young researcher will (or should be) infected. He will catch the scent of the real thing. I resort to sensory terms because the impact can be physical. Thinkers, the erudite, mathematicians, or theoretical and natural scientists are beings possessed. They are in the grip of a mastering unreason.

What could, by the lights of the utilitarian or hedonistic commonwealth, be more irrational, more against the grain of common sense than to devote one’s existence to, say, the conservation and classification of archaic Chinese bronzes, to the solution of Fermat’s last theorem, to the comparative syntax of Altaic languages (many now defunct), or the hairs-breadth nuances in modal logic? The requisite abstentions from distraction, the imperative labors, the tightening of nerve and brain to a constancy and pitch far beyond the ordinary, entail a pathological stress. The ‘mad professor’ is the caricature, as ancient as Thales falling into the well, of a certain truth. There is something of a cancer, of autism in the necessary negations of common life, with its disheveled inconsequence and waste motion.

In the critical mass of a successful academic community, the orbits of individual obsessions will cross and re-cross. Once he has collided with them, the student will forget neither their luminosity nor their menace to complacency.

...Once a young man or woman has been exposed to the virus of the absolute, once she or he has seen, heard, ’smelt’ the fever in those who hunt after disinterested truth, something of the afterglow will persist. For the remainder of their, perhaps, quite normal, albeit undistinguished careers and private lives, such men and women will be equipped with some safeguard against emptiness.

The aura and the threat of the first-class. Americans, with their complacent preferences for politicians who are just like them, are particularly keen on the threat part ...

But Steiner has in mind a different sense of threat: When you’ve been, at some point in your life, seriously inside higher ed (to coin a phrase), you’re forever unsettled by the possibility you’ve glimpsed of existence pitched very high, dedicated daily to as much lucidity about the world within and without as humanly possible.

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