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When I was 14, I went to the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. This is a story of a camp friendship, at a specific time, and a special place.

That was the summer of 1967: the Summer of Love in San Francisco, but in Detroit the summer of the 1967 (Rebellion), (Uprising), or (Riot)(—pick one). The Vietnam war intensified, against which public opinion was turning, and was first termed a "stalemate" (New York Times, by R. W. Apple, August 7). Martin Luther King, Jr. had declared "a time to break silence" about the War. These events were distant from pine woods between the lakes (Duck and Green), and music in the long summer evenings of the northwest lower peninsula of Michigan.

The National Music Camp (NMC) was was usually just called "Interlochen," then a woodsy crossroads with a state park and a camp store. (Now the Camp is simply termed the Interlochen Arts Camp to distinguish it from the Academy.) Joseph Maddy founded it in 1928. There were far fewer summer camps dedicated to music in 1967. NMC was distinctive, large, and long, a single 9-week session. Its prestige was bolstered by summer visitors such as Aaron Copland (1966), and annual visit by the boyishly handsome Van Cliburn who not only played but conducted. There are scores of notable former campers, in the arts and beyond. Well before 1967 it had become world class (and it still is).

For any 14-year-old, Interlochen was the real deal. I never would have applied without a teacher's earnest recommendation, because I never thought I could possibly be good enough to go there. My instrument was piano, so there was no shortage of competition for a limited number of places. My parents doubted I would be admitted and that they could afford the fees. I sent in an audition tape (reel-to-reel), knowing that a second tape might be requested, and was a few weeks later. Then thin letter arrived, a bad sign. But no!—not only was I admitted, but with a half-scholarship. My parents stretched to afford the rest, and with money left to me by my late grandfather, I had enough to accept admission.

Came Spring, came the deluge of mail: an introduction to the numerous rules and traditions. Lists of what to pack, what would be provided, and scores to choral music. Every camper studied in instrument, was in an ensemble, took theory, ear training, and an elective second instrument. Rather than one second instrument, I choose a class in which students got to play every orchestral instrument a little —not just once, but for several days. When I looked over the repertory list for my level of piano, my nerves rose; the choral music included Mendelssohn's Elijah: I began to be anxious: what had I gotten myself into? Did they really think I could do this?

Yet more mail: lots of rules. Boys' and Girls' camps were not only separated by the state highway, but were strictly off limits to each other. The whole camp was divided into zones by boundaries and those were clearly marked. Campers were strongly advised to sign up for the laundry service (I did). A swim test would be required if I wanted to take a canoe or sailboat out on Duck Lake. I had to sign the Camp Pledge (behavior, respect and commitment to artistic excellence), and then affirm it verbally my first day.

(Digression: Looking at the 2023 Camp Handbook, I'm struck by how little has changed as regards the basics, but how much more complicated life has become. We had no mobile phones, computers, drones, skateboards. I had Kodak Brownie camera (with film); I don't recall policies about substance abuse or weapons. There were definitely policies about "inappropriate intimacy," smoking, leaving your cabin at night, bullying, and misuse of the waterfront. The Camp Pledge is now twice as long. After 40 years of daytime life on a college campus, I hardly dare imagine all the challenges for the 2023 staff.)

Then there was the camp uniform. In 1967 we were told what to wear with no exceptions and little explanation. Now the handbook explains the idea: a tradition since 1928, the uniform represents unity, respect, a blurring of class distinctions, and membership in the Interlochen community. For boys in my day: blue corduroy pants, light blue shirts on weekdays, white on Sundays, always tucked in, with socks. Red sweaters or pullover red sweatshirts (except at performances). Girls wore Blue corduroy knickers and blue socks. Customization was limited to where you wore your camp badge: at the waist, or pants pocket, or on your shirt. (The badges tended to make holes in the shirt fabric, so pants were preferred.)

(Digression: In 2023 the uniform continues largely unchanged, but now boys can wear knickers as well. Wish I could have--I would have looked great in knickers, with long, thin legs. The Boys' camp east of the highway is now "Pines," girl's camps on the west side "Lakeside" and "Meadows." There are now cabins for nonbinary and transgender campers. I suspect they benefit greatly from the uniform: they can wear either and harmonize with everyone else. I'm so glad the world has changed in this regard. In 1967 that was beyond imagining.)

Came June, I finally arrived at camp—a four-hour drive north in those days. I was intimidated. I didn't even think of backing out, but my nerves and fears were at an all-time high. I was assigned cabin 3 with other 14- and 15-year olds and two counsellors, a "good cop" and "bad cop" (but the bad cap was not very bad, just a little stricter). Usually it all worked well. There were minor cabin disputes but I don't recall bullying or real conflict.

We filled our cabin, with barely enough room for bodies, bunks, clothes, and some musical instruments. Our cabin had special shelving for instrument cases—a small luxury; most did not. It also had recurrent problems with water pressure (each cabin had its own complete plumbing), and with 12 boys needing daily showers, that was a problem. Our counsellors had to beg shower space from other cabins; that's how I came to know the boys next door in Cabin 1. (Although arranged in rows under the pines, the cabins were not numbered in sequence, a scheme apparently invented by some chaotic woodland sprite.)

Living in such proximity, boys could not avoid getting to know other boys: who had allergies, and who belched or snored. (Lots of fart jokes, too.) After the first day I loved that life. The first night out came a chessboard—I quickly learned that this was a camp for talented smart kids and I had better keep up. For the first time I felt I was with true peers. Being smart, musical, and a reader was not considered odd but normal. Nicknames: mine was Ferbs, a nickname re-invented decades later for my sons. I was more stimulated and challenged than I had ever been. I forgot the trials of junior high school. It was better than I could have guessed.

I surprised myself by passing the swimming test, so I could use the boats: rowboats (ugh), canoes (OK), sailboats (one- or two-person Sailfishes--cool). The sailboats became my go-to on "forced fun" Friday afternoons. Interlochen had to mandate "fun" because otherwise many campers would practice at any available time something else was not scheduled.

Practice could happen anywhere in the woods, but usually in the practice huts --a long row of narrow practice rooms. The huts were always busy and finding one with a piano could become a chore (although pianists were supposed to have precedence to use those). Practice hours were supervised loosely, because little supervision was needed: student musicians were almost invariably on task, and they had good reason.

The atmosphere of understated but intense competition centered around the practice of challenges. The procedure basically sorted players in a band or orchestra section from first (best) to last (least) by campers voting which of two players performed a designated excerpt better by several criteria. Supposedly the voting was "blind" (everyone had their heads down and raised hands silently to vote). Talk about stress!—but modified in a peculiar way: the player next to you in the section was both a competitor and a key collaborator. Somehow, you had to get along. With a healthy dose of Midwestern "nice," it usually somehow worked. Hence the desire to practice almost all the time.

The challenge system under the right circumstances motivated less skilled players to become more skilled, to buckle down and really work. It worked best when the faculty section leader reminded players: "We admitted you to Interlochen because we know you can do it. So now you're responsible for showing us that you can." It worked with the right musicians, who practiced whenever possible. Others simply grew to accept a chair way down the section. For some, the system felt terrible. Everyone put up with it because that's the way it was.

(In the piano studio, our rankings were based partly on camper vote and partly on faculty evaluation. The motivating prize were performance opportunities for groups ranging in size from the studio to the whole camp.)

The point of all this was the music. The ensembles hooked me. I had never sung before in an 80-member choir with 18 other bass-baritones all of whom, like me, were receiving rigorous ear training. Our first big piece was Vaughan Williams' Toward the Unknown Region, a harmonically lush twelve minutes with full orchestra and organ. The impact of 80 voices was huge, but surpassed by the full orchestra: I had never heard or performed music anything like this. For me, the performance was transformative. I really began to grasp how powerful music can be.

In its best moments Interlochen taught me (a 14-year-old!): it's about the art, its not about me. We were there to learn to do something that connected us with an art far larger than most teenagers could imagine. The experience communicated one thing brilliantly: the music mattered. We were part of something big, summed up in the tradition of the "Interlochen theme" (by Howard Hanson) that closed every concert. It was always conducted by a student (usually the first violinist) Faculty and staff adults left the stage: it was played by campers, conducted by a camper. It pointed forward. Someday this art would be ours.

I was forced to get to know a lot of boys (and a few girls) who were from very different backgrounds and places. As an introvert, a reader and not a talker, this was difficult at first, but I learned. There were some international campers, and scholarship kids like me, and some apparently from wealthy families. Most had siblings (the baby boom). A few had gone to boarding school. For boys from California or the South the weather was usually too cold; for Swedish boy was always far too warm. A lot of boys were from metropolitan Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Almost all of us had nicknames --as I wrote, mine was "Ferbs" . Our knowledge of each other's real names was much hazier --those were on the camp badges, of course, and when counsellors passed out the mail. Otherwise we knew each other by our camp nicknames.

Eppy was a boy from Brooklyn. He played the bassoon, and he was pretty good. He had an off-beat sense of humor, goofy at times, and had a knack for quietly skirting or just barely complying with the rules. He lived in Cabin 1, the cabin where my Cabin 3 often went to shower because of a lack of water pressure. I saw him daily, but usually just casually. Like me, he was a scholarship boy.

Eppy and I were in different musical orbits and ensembles. By chance we wound up in the same theory class, and had the same homework. He chose piano as his second instrument, so we also had that in common. When it came time for me to try to play bassoon for my elective class, I came to appreciate how difficult his instrument was. I was awful, producing something like a very sick goose. Eppy was much better at piano than I was at bassoon.

Eppy and I signed up for one of the sailboats a number of times. A boat allowed some sense of freedom and getting away -- a welcome respite from all the rules and traditions. We both picked up the basic skills quickly, and learned how to tack into or across the wind. Eppy liked sailing on fresh water, no salt. (I had never been on or in salt water.) One late afternoon we had to be towed in from across the lake, because the wind had vanished as storm clouds approached. We weren't in any disciplinary trouble, though. Getting pulled in felt mildly humiliating, but other boys thought it was cool. Sailing those little boats conferred some kind of minor status.

I don't recall any specific conversations with Eppy, though we talked. His brother, a year or two younger, did not come to Interlochen. Like me, Eppy was an introvert, but once started could tell stories about life near the beach in Brooklyn, a life I had not imagined before. He took the subway by himself, saw an occasional city rat, had been to Carnegie Hall, and had seen Bernstein conduct. I was impressed, but tried not to show it. He was a city kid from part of New York, and I was from a farm town in Michigan. He did not put on a sophisticated attitude, so despite our differences we got a long pretty well. I don't recall ever talking about girls or sex with him. We were growing up in a more innocent time. Whatever happened in the 1960s, it hadn't happened yet to either of us.

After I got to know Eppy a little, I realized that he was very smart. He was a reader -he introduced me to Tolkien's saga in the old Ballantine edition. I figured out that he had progressed well beyond ninth grade, though only a few months older than I. He had a big vocabulary, but did not show off. He was very quick with numbers and number games, cards, and chess. As a smart kid, he felt he was an outsider, someone who didn't really belong in our age group, and I shared that feeling with him, though I was by no means so smart as he. We both felt gawky, sometimes out of place, and confused: in short, we were 14-year-old boys.

Eppy's parents visited early in the summer and brought him food from Brooklyn. He missed bagels, and they brought some, but by the time they got to Michigan they were pretty hard. Apparently his family was Jewish, something he had never mentioned --there were other Jewish boys in our cabins, but they all seemed very ordinary and uninterested in this detail. Like my parents visited for a weekend, when his arrived, they fussed over him, embarrassed him mildly, and then left. Unlike my parents, his seemed to feel that their son was in a very strange place very far away. I had no idea how different it must have seemed until I visited someone else in Brooklyn years later.

Though I knew Eppy pretty well --I did sail or otherwise hang around with other boys as well-- ours was strictly a camp friendship. I did not keep up with him after that summer, nor did it occur to me that I might have (though we were all given lists of campers' addresses --that seems incredible now). Eppy receded into my memory, and I do not recall ever thinking about him in succeeding decades.

Like everyone else, I became passingly familiar with the name Jeffrey Epstein in the media twenty years ago --something about a very rich guy in Florida and sex with minors. Later on, we all heard much more in lurid detail. I remember noticing that he had some connection with Interlochen, as well as big universities and Bill Clinton. At the time of his death in a New York prison in 2019, I recalled reading that he had been a amateur pianist. I still did not connect the dots --and in fairness, how many boys over the years have gone to Interlochen with last name of Epstein, Epworth, or something like that. Only in 2022, when I read a complicated story about a cello and an aspiring American concert artist, did I read the key detail that Jeffrey Epstein had attended Interlochen not as a pianist, but as a bassoonist.

By now dear reader has undoubtedly concluded by Eppy was no less than Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous and lurid sexual predator entangled with enormous wealth, rich a powerful people, and numerous criminal charges. With that New York Times article, it all clicked. I had always unthinkingly assumed that somehow Jeffrey Epstein was older than I, and at the National Music Camp sometime in the late 1960s. Wikipedia told me that he had been born in January 1953 (I in July), and was at Interlochen in 1967.

This knowledge was disconcerting at first, to say the least. I certainly never saw it coming, not that I gave the boy I knew as Eppy (or the man Jeffrey Epstein) any particular attention. I asked myself: what did I miss? What eluded me? In short: nothing. Eppy had a sly sense of humor, was very smart, and could subvert Interlochen's numerous rules without going too far. He did not seem mildly threatening, just mildly eccentric.

The camp photograph of his cabin --a standard pose--shows him (standing, at left) looking vaguely annoyed, hands in pockets, slightly out of the even line of boys, possibly not wearing socks, long sleeves rolled up. This photo was probably taken on Sunday, since the boys wearing white shirts. The others seem much more present in that moment. (Two counsellors are standing at right, and third from right.) There is nothing in my memory, or in this photograph, that imply the later Epstein's blazing financial trail, criminal acts, and sad end. He became a dangerous serial fabulist, noxious con artist, repeat offender, fundamentally fraudulent --but none of that could have been foretold from what I saw in 1967. I saw another mildly confused 14-year-old boy.

The journey from Eppy to Epstein is utterly mysterious to me. I cannot resolve it in any genuine or meaningful manner. It's a very sad story, and that statement in no way dismisses or diminishes the profound suffering of his victims.

I had an eerie sympathy with another New York Times story I read in 2023, around the tenth anniversary of the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing. The story told how impossible it has been for former friends and teachers of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the younger brother of the two bombers) to reconcile the friendly guy they thought they knew with the terrorist he became. One of his friends, Youssef Eddafali, eventually wrote two letters to Tsarnaev: to "the old Jahar," whom he thought he knew, and another to "The Monster." Eddafali's own life was turned upside down by the bombing, by interrogation surveillance by the FBI, and it has been a long road back to anything resembling normal life for him. (He expected no reply to his letters, and has received none.) A researcher of mass shootings, Jaclyn Schildkraut, said that such experience “is like being knocked into a parallel universe . . . and you can’t get back.”

I have experienced a minor echo of that getting knocked into a parallel universe --a suddenly rewritten past. I can no longer remember my summer at Interlochen quite so innocently, though it remains overwhelming positive for me. Those memories now come with an important question mark: how did that happen? (--as well as other realizations about how various people were treated there in the 1960s, especially women). I do not believe, theologically or in any other way, that life had to turn out as it did for Eppy. At various points, he made his choices.

The summer at Interlochen that I found life-changing and -affirming was apparently insufficient for another boy, who eventually walked a long ways down a much darker path. I would like it all to make sense, and it does not, nor ever will.

No one needs another review of Anthony Doerr's novel. I enjoyed it. I did not hold unreasonably high expectations for it, and I was rewarded with an enjoyable time with a book. (That is not damning with faint praise, because an enjoyable time cannot always or even usually be found.)

In Cloud Cuckoo Land, the reader has to expend considerable energy and attention shifting from one focus to another. The action of the book happens in three general time periods, each with characters that arise from distinct circumstances. How they will intersect with each other, much less with consequences of characters' actions in one or both of the other time periods, lends the book a puzzle-like quality. Much less the fragments of an ancient text.

The everlasting problem of the mystery genre --whether historical fiction, mysteries of crime and redemption, spying and espionage, or fantasy fiction--is that the reader's attention must be divided between trying to figure who is doing, has done, or will do what, and who those characters really are. The truly best puzzle-books (I'm thinking of P. D. James' Adam Dalgleish novels, for example, or Robertson Davies' Cornish series) build the puzzles through the characters. Their actions reveal their hidden truths --and those of others, usually. Often the character who "did it" (and what is "it"?) appears in the five five or ten pages, but the layers of that character do not become apparent until much later. The reader has to attend carefully to character, because only through characterization will the key be found.

Anthony Doerr's characters were enjoyable but never more than two-dimensional. With one exception: Zeno Nenis, who provides a linkage between ancient text, contemporary libraries and children, and a future dystopia. His sexuality, confusions, and quixotic labors of translation provide insight for the reader into the deeper dimensions of literacy.

"Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered." True of ancient texts, of human desires, of all our fears for the environmental climate cataclysm facing us. More attention to that sentence, in the lives of the characters, and this book would have moved from enjoyable and very good to truly great.

A year ago I wrote Why I'm Not in Church for Lent. This year, I'll have another go at it.

I've been through a lot of changes in the seven months, much less a year. Family members in transition: my younger son finished a graduate degree at Yale; my spouse gently retired from active pastorates after 40 years. My own transitions: I retired in August, and moved to another state in December. I'm both figuratively and literally not in the same place I was a year ago.

While our lives change, sometimes rapidly, the church year placidly sails on,. Like a prism, each year presents a different angle, a different constellation of light and its refractions.

In 2022 I was coming to terms with the reality that I basically have been done with Anglo-Catholicism, as it's been called. It's not a bitter parting at all -- I've just moved on. Granted I was never part of the mainstream of that movement, however defined: I was always on the left fringe, and resonated most strongly with Anglo-Catholic socialists (whether Capital-S or lower case) such as F. D. Maurice, Conrad Noel, R. H. Tawney, or Vida Scudder. These are all generations ago, of course; the political and informally religious perspective of Pete Buttigieg is more current. I was very much influenced by folk at St. Luke in the Fields, New York City, three decades ago —and how that neighborhood of the West Village has changed since the 1990s! I was never part of the creakily conservative mainstream Anglo-Catholic or Ritualist movement typified by the Robert Duncan, a bishop who left the Episcopal Church to found his own sect in Pittsburgh over the issues of gay ordination and bishops.

In the pandemic, the Ritualist enterprise began to seem a bit more sketchy to me. I witnessed my own parish, Christ Church in New Haven, suddenly pulling back after insisting down the decades that the sacrament was essential to Sunday worship. In defense of Christ Church, its leadership was following the directions given by the Diocese of Connecticut, a discourse wholly captured by particularly zealous public-health experts at Yale, amongst other places. (Christ Church is immediately adjacent to Yale and is in many ways a university church.) Yale has lagged other Ivy League institutions when discontinuing pandemic restrictions, without much explanation. Why were restrictions more swiftly dismantled at Brown or Columbia? "Discourse capture" is a good expression of what has happened in Connecticut, wherever the leadership may have found it.

The unavoidable conclusion, however, was the contradiction: is the sacrament so essential? Or can that be set aside in times of pandemic? In addition, the whole vocabulary of 1928-style Rite I in the 1979 Prayer Book began to grate --so much angry-father-god language. In 2020 and 2021, in particular, given everything else happening in the world and in our daily lives, that traditionalist language felt more and more orthogonal --at right angles to the real issues at hand.

Now in Philadelphia, I have yet to find a church home, although a couple of communities seem promising. In particular, I feel addressed by the experience of worship at Old St. Peter's on Pine Street in Philadelphia's Society Hill. Worship there is certainly different (in a positive sense): the church retained its old pew-boxes, and the first portion of Sunday worship, the service of the Word, is from the west end, at the reading desk under a wine-glass pulpit. The Service of the Sacrament is led from the altar area at the east end, so the congregation literally turns around and sits on benches or pews facing the opposite direction to their orientation in the first part of the service. The building itself is both historic and evocative: built in 1761 and designed by Robert Smith, who also designed Princeton University's Nassau Hall, and is surrounded by the very old church yard (well, old for North America) --truly the ancestors are present, in a generalized sense.

Lent at St. Peter's is much lower-key than in my previous parish in New Haven, as is the ceremonial used in the church. Worship is based on relatively new supplementary prayers that use far more inclusive language, and far less father-talk. Major Lenten themes are present physically and symbolically: dust to dust (the church yard), the patterns of the ancestors, the physical structure that links present generations with the past, and the context of Philadelphia. Gun violence in certain sections of Philadelphia is endemic. Regardless of individual congregants' "sins lite," as I have heard it called, the social divisions and divisiveness of Philadelphia and the whole country cannot be avoided. Lent at St. Peter's is adults acknowledging to adults that we have all erred, as a society, and that a better way has been promised and lies open to us, whether present or proleptic.

I have made my peace with Lent in 2023. At least so far.

This weeks news about the recent mass shooting at Michigan State University has prompted me to feel more positive emotion about the place than I have felt in decades. I attended MSU from 1971-1974 and after a fair-to-middle career there transferred to a small private college in Michigan . . . which I have named before and shall not name now. (It has its own deep wrinkles several and strengths.)

Image Courtesy of Yahoo

The moment that grabbed me was a video clip in the news, showing MSU students laying flowers in from of "Party," the statue of a Spartan that greets those who cross the Red Cedar River from the north side to the athletic kingdom portion of the south side. I remembered that Sparty was often the tagline of cringey jokes about when he'll drop the helmet he's carrying in his right hand. ("When a MSU grad gets a Rhodes Scholarship" --turns out there have been 20, most recently in 2019--or "when a virgin graduates from MSU" and who knows when that first happened?) Sparty was the victim of a great deal of vandalism over the years, mostly from fans from the other place before the annual football game that brings the state to a halt. He was renovated in 1988, recast and relocated in 2005, and still stands, a testament both to Leonard Jungwirth, sculptor, and John Hannah, legendary MSU president 1941-1969.

I remember the saying, "the concrete never sets on Hannah's empire," because John Hannah transformed a modest State College to a major institution, now with 50,000 students over something like 5,000 acres (2,00+ hectares). The sheer size of the place has its own quality: an academic city with its own transit system.

My fair-to-middle experience encompassed a year in the Music Department, a failure partly of my own making, and two years in Justin Morrill College, a liberal-arts "alternative" residential college that ultimately failed largely because it was never adequately funded or supported to succeed. MSU is an intensely practical place, and real liberal arts education has always been an awkward fit there. JMC was intended to be a complement to James Madison (public affairs) and Lyman Briggs residential colleges, which have endured. JMC was revived in a sense in 2007 with a generically-named Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) in the self-same Snyder-Phillips residence halls --what goes around comes around, I guess.

In 1971-1974 the baby boom crop was nearly at its peak, moving through higher education, and undergraduate students were surplus. The Music Department employed a number of rigid and only modestly competent faculty whose job was to get reduce enrollment. (They succeeded—there were other far better faculty there, but freshman were not permitted contact with them.) Given the realities of the draft in 1972, the easiest path was to transfer across campus. I learned a lot at MSU about self-discipline and inner motivation, a several remarkable faculty were immensely patient with my confusions, in particular Donald Weinshank and R. Glenn Wright. I eventually settled on Classical Languages as a concentration—how totally out of mainstream MSU!—and when an immensely dedicated and talent professor suddenly died (Carolyn Matzke, some of whose books I still possess), I began to look elsewhere, and transferred out.

So my undergraduate years were bifurcated between two almost entirely different worlds, that of a gigantic Big-10 campus and that of a small church-originated liberal arts college. I wound up, somehow, with an excellent education that combined intensive work in languages with a sense of the world vastly larger than the cloistered life of Dutch West Michigan.

Tim Alberta wrote a beautiful piece Requiem for the Spartans for the Atlantic (February 15, 2023). He remembered MSU in a very positive light, moving past the negativity of the sexual abuse scandal centered on women's gymnastics and Dr. Larry Nasser, the cover-up of which brought down two university presidents and forever soiled MSU's reputation. (See Maria Vinci's opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press, 2018.)

Alberta centered his Atlantic piece on "Spartans Will," what he calls a deft motto, "a defiant mentality that makes the school exceptional." Whatever truth the motto may hold (video) measures how far MSU has come since the early 1970s, when it was still very definitely second fiddle to … the other place in Ann Arbor. Some would say it still is; the comparison is not apt, because the two institutions are so different. In many states, MSU would be the flagship university. Its stature, combined with the other place, illustrates how Michigan (the actual state) has changed over the decades, where two such universities would now be an unattainable luxury and achievement if they did not already exist.

I long pre-dated "Spartans will," but I do recognize the chin-out assertive persistence that it highlights. I remember how differently class dynamics then played out: many of my fellow students were the children of industrial workers who really wanted something better for their kids. The place in Ann Arbor was out of their league, but they still wanted that experience rather than study at one of the smaller regional universities (Eastern, Western, Central, Northern, Wayne State, or Oakland, then growing out of "Michigan State University at Oakland"). Striving was the order of the day, even in the early 1970s. It was accompanied by something else: a strong libertarian streak that contradicted the expensive vision of social justice for farmers that originally underwrote Michigan Agricultural College. (There is still a M.A.C. Avenue!) Also: a dawning environmental awareness of the fragility and beauty of Michigan's environment that was not already degraded by chemical and automobile companies. At MSU I encountered Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons (later substantially modified by Elinor Ostrom and others), and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

The northern part of MSU's campus, with substantial plantings in and beyond Beal Botanical Gardens, cannot be lightly dismissed. Berkey Hall, the center of the latest tragedy (with the neighboring Student Union) is square in the middle of that sea of tranquillity. Tim Alberta's description is apt: "the stately buildings and the sprawling green spaces, the roaring football stadium and the whispering river, the camaraderie and the conviviality and the bottomless school spirit." (The southern part of the campus is much more institutional modern.) The tragedy of the mass shooting was how preventable it was, and how such events are never prevented --that we as a society have settled for mass killing as the price of certain warped ideas of political liberty. Much since D.C. v. Heller, 2008--and I curse the life or memories of Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas (that fraud!) and Samuel "the arrogant" Alito.

I didn't experience the trust the Tim Alberta experienced at MSU. I do know about its social cohesion: "Go Green" response to "Go White" (!--only in the context of Green!) is a reality, a response to the other place's Go Blue (or Go Blow, as MSU alumni/ae like to repeat). I did grow in ways salutary and painful, and in the end I left, because my life was going elsewhere and my thinking led me out more than it ever led me in. (I went to MSU originally almost by mistake.) I do recognize the resilience, the sheer grit at MSU, and I do take solace that despite the serious and irrevocable losses, the shooting will not prevent their victories at MSU. (An allusion to the fight song.)

I despair for MSU, for Michigan, for America. We are unable to stop the slaughter. Of course it will happen again at other universities like MSU: what will stop it? The generation of students (some enrolled at MSU) who survived Sandy Hook, Oxford High School (Michigan), and countless other tragedies, will take with them an awareness: the political and social orders have failed them. I don't see an available alternative. When one arises, it will sweep away much that is good as well as, I hope, much that is evil. Government for the smug by the smug may yet fall, and with it the dangers of chaos. Would that chaos really be worse than what we have now?

(See previous post.)

A month after moving to Philadelphia, I can devote sufficient mental bandwidth to the matter of unpacking my books. Physically moving a library, or any extensive set of books, not only offers new juxtapositions, new combinations, new shelving arrangements, even when the bookcases themselves have been moved —but also a chance for reflection upon what this particular collection of books can mean.

In September 2021 Mary Beard posted a short essay about weeding her books (paywall) in preparation for retirement from Cambridge University after many years. She asked: does anyone have any advice? and I responded. I indicated what kind of criteria we employed in my library when we undertook a massive weeding project in 2015 (in which we shed tens of thousands of redundant volumes).

Then I wrote to Mary more personally: a personal library is a personal expression of loyalties, history, hopes, even disappointments. I asked her:

  • Does this particular book remind me of a significant individual? (colleague, mentor, friend, family)
  • Is this a book that I've always had (since childhood or adolescence)?—and I just can't bear to send it away because it reminds me of where I came from;
  • Is this a book that I have a realistic chance of reading in the coming years? --both in my professional field, and in other subjects that I find interesting;
  • Is this a book I wish to retain because of a future project I seriously intend to undertake? (not just "someday" but a time more specific).

Using these criterion I weeded my book form approximately 1,000 to just under 500. I packed them well, in smaller boxes to avoid back-breaking lifts—and the movers looked at me with some dismay anyway.

When I unpacked and shelved these books in Philadelphia, I was reminded, of course, "Oh, I really want to read that" even if it's several years old and by now thoroughly reviewed. I could also resolve quirks: why were volumes of fiction shelved in different bookcases? I could now put the fiction together, as well as biographical books, and books by a few particularly beloved authors, whether famous (Tolkien) or less well-known (the late Frederick Buechner, RIP).

I can't report finding any particular surprises, or sudden amazing insights. I affirm several long-standing interests (Old English language and literature; classical writers; Karl Barth; seafaring and sea travelers)—and that feels good. Since I'm in a new community where I know a few people, but not many, these authors, living and dead, provide partners for imagined dialogue.

Beyond all that, I can affirm the power of learning well-grounded in life, an integration and differentiation of points of view. What might Kierkegaard have to say to Colson Whitehead? Virginia Woolf to P.D. James? This is the inherited power of formative education in the liberal arts —an idea or ideal (or set of ideals) now passing out of practice or respect. These voices (living and dead) do not sort themselves neatly according to contemporary ideological commitments or political tribes—and thank God for that!

2

After sixteen years we are breaking camp in Connecticut and moving to the Roxborough section of Philadelphia. This will be an important change, although my life beyond moving so far is remaining opaque to me. I'm not sure what it will bring.

Moving after so long a time—by far the longest we have ever lived in one house anywhere—has meant that stuff built up. Much of it had to go. We're downsizing so some decisions were difficult, some timely, some frankly welcome: far less yard care, snow shoveling (but parking in the street, alas). Difficult: giving away the piano. Timely: drastically thinning the books while maintaining my own sense of identity, history, and intentions for the future.

While weeding the collections, I turned up Alberto Manguel's Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions, a book remarkably timely to my condition. Although Manguel is a very different person, with a very different library (now in Lisbon), I recognize the dilemma. Books are friends, and friends form some level of a person's self-definition, my identity. Book on Anglican theology and spirituality (once a greater interest of mine than now): gone. I am unlikely to read those. Books about American history and history of religion went to SHU: who knows whether they will use or retain any of them. (They did apparently retain my copy of America's God by Mark Noll.) Various other miscellany: gone (to Better World Books)

Packing one's books is a peculiar exercise: suddenly what matters most is a book's dimensions and relative physical weight. The contents of the boxes can be most heterogenous and I imagine the books speaking to each other, and hardly at all about me --they have so many more interesting insights to exchange.

Collecting books--even modestly--is to try to assert some control over the unbearable: forgetting, disregarding, mocking, patronizing—all the sniggers of American culture so anti-intellectual that it welcomes conspiracy theories and all manner of paranoid hatreds. Collecting books is somehow a stay against loss, a bricolage of hope in a world of shrinking and ever-darkening horizons. Manguel identifies "shall these stones live?" as a (sic) "Samarian" question (Samaritan question? Sumerian question?). I relate it rather to Ezekiel: shall these bones live? Collecting books is an invitation to the spirit, the wind that will join book to book, joint to joint, bone to bone.

Packing a Library is a hedge against loss, but also a pledge to rediscover when unpacking: in a new setting, new shelving, with new neighbors (both human, and neighboring books on the shelves). It is to assert some kind of strength in an opaque future, a virtue of persistence and commitment to wisdom.

In one of my favorite illustrations: books fall open, you fall in. Packing a library is a promise to fall into the future. With those voices, those presences, those memories shored against my ruin, in Eliot's phrase. To remember to walk with Tiresias, or to borrow the voice of Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh):

The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. . . .

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame--a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.