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Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explain: Design and Pattern in Narrative rises from her own interest in narratives that proceed in patterns other than the classic Aristotelian arc (conflict, complication, rising action, climax, dénouement). This not only strikes her as "something that swells and tautens until it collapses" (very male), but also very dependent upon the power relations that characterize many sexual acts. John Gardner tied this to the "energeic" novel: exposition, development, dénounment: something happens, something changes. But fiction doesn't merely narrate. Alison is seeking a fiction that is organic, but not necessarily orgasmic.

She finds an alternative in Peter Steven's 1974 book Patterns in Nature. (Stevens is an architect.) There are several ways that energy can propagate through space and matter in the nature of the universe. His ideas were updated in a different direction by Philip Ball with a book with the same title. (Ball was an editor of Nature.). Alison takes such natural patterns: spiral (fiddlehead fern, whirlpool), meander (river), explosion or radial (splash of dripping water), as well as cellular, fractal and branching patterns. "There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make things. Those natural patterns have inspired visual artists and architects for centuries. Why wouldn't they form our narratives, too?" (p. 22)

Alison goes on in the book to read fiction with an eye towards these patterns, with a lively set of authors: W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Raymond Carver, Gabriel Garcîa Márquez, Marguerite Duras, Tobias Wolff, Nicholson Baker. Each of these sets out fiction that takes a variety of narrative forms, building up patterns that spiral, twist, meander, explode, or form repetitive multiple perspectives that build a text differently from a single sweeping narrative. They do this even as all literature has to negotiate the word-by-word sequential act of reading, line by line.

I wondered if Alison might consider fiction or literature in other languages (not only through translation): how differently sentences can function in inflected languages such as German, Russian, or Greek, with the puzzles that can be placed within clauses finally to resolve in patterns by the end of the sentence. (The old joke about Thomas Mann's last work: he died before he could get to the verb.)

This is a very lively book that rewards reflection and thought, and it has led me to read authors I would not otherwise have read (probably), as well as re-read authors differently. I'm more aware of the variety of narrative forms that Dostoyevesky uses in a long work such as The Karamazov Brothers, and how these multiple layers of texts, some set pieces, build upon each other. What is the relationship, for example, of the famous episode "The Grand Inquisitor" with the process of Dimitri Karamzov's trial?

This book is not a how-to, but it made me want to write , to imagine. Alison is a novelist who teaches writing at the University of Virginia, and a wonderful translator of Ovid's tales of eroticism and strange sexuality in Change Me, based on Amores and Metamorphoses.

Bryan Alexander's Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education, and Joshua Kim's and Edward Maloney's Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education (both 2020 from Johns Hopkins University Press) set very different boundaries and take very different approaches to their subject.
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Bryan Alexander's Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education, and Joshua Kim's and Edward Maloney's Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education (both 2020 from Johns Hopkins University Press) set very different boundaries and take very different approaches to their subject.  Yet they are also fascinating to read in imaginary dialog: the one expansive, the other organizational; the one a futurist's set of questions and the other seeking to establish a new discipline and its role in academia as well as on any particular campus.  They don't say similar things, but they do offer contrasting and useful perspectives.

Academia Next is by a futurist, and if you're allergic to futurist kinds of thinking, stop here (or skip to below).  Alexander is trying to extrapolate likely, possible, or unexpected consequences from visible trends, and ask what are possible, desirable, and aspirational scenarios by 2035.  Like other examples in the futurist genre, he might be faulted for inadequately understanding the complexities and contingencies of historical causation, which neither repeats nor hardly ever rhymes (pace Mark Twain).  In addition, historical development is hardly continuous improvement in one direction: there are lapses, losses, lacunae, and outright blunders which will be forever hard to explain. 

Nevertheless, Alexander's scenarios can be variously compelling and repellant: (1) higher education in decline; or (2) higher education as an adjunct to "health care nation;" or (3) higher education transformed by open resources, scholarship, and enrollments; or (4) the "augmented" campus or face-to-face learning with significant augmented and mixed reality; or (5) more automated learning ("Siri, tutor me") or (6) the self-consciously retro campus that carefully limits digital entanglements.  Alexander mentions the very real problems of digital security, and articulated understandings of privacy and self-ownership of data only in passing.  The potential growth of a surveillance campus that would rival China's surveillance state carries numerous moral and legal questions.  Exactly who is entrusted with all that information, and if outside vendors, then under which circumstances? Cui bono? student, administrator, parent, government official, funding lender, teacher? 

Academia Next was published on the cusp of the multiple meltdowns of 2020: pandemic, economy, anti-racism, and paranoid conspiracy-mongering.  Although these entangled crises might have disqualified Alexander's futurism, they erve to focus what is at stake in higher education: cui bono? again.  Current forecasts for what will change or remain the same in higher education post-pandemic, post-neoliberal economics, post-conspiracy are doubtless premature, and the real gains or losses are bound to be unexpected or only half-expected: things fall apart (and racism, alas, is unlikely to dissipate quickly).  Through all that he knew about in early 2020, and learned in subsequent events, Alexander calls for clarity of vision, courage, and persistence: the traditional values of higher education will not be entirely misplaced and some expensive commitments will continue to be worthwhile.

Kim's & Maloney's Learning Innovation is decidedly more modest regarding the future, and grounded regarding current practice.  They ask what are the organizational, pedagogical, and disciplinary consequences of presently developing theoretical frameworks, methodological practices, shared challenges, and goals as regards learning innovation?  K&M unpack the title words themselves (learning, innovation), and their chapters on changing understandings of learning and institutional change clarify many issues often buried in the bustle of actively producing instruction. 

K&M's chapter "Reclaiming Innovation from Disruption" alone is worth the price of the book: they show carefully how "disruptive innovation" poorly serves higher education (especially when devotees to the cult throw shade on anyone who questions it).  Higher education is a complex ecosystem; learners are not products; higher education is diverse.  The fundamental orientation towards sharing learning, ideas, and plans, right down to budgets, communications strategies, and technical know-how "would shock anyone who has spent a career in the corporate world."  It is easier to ask what is not shared than what is.  K&M's brief history of PLATO, the 40-year progenitor of all subsequent digital learning platforms clinches their case.   The oft-unexamined faith that new technologies will disrupt the future of colleges and universities almost always ignores the history of educational technologies and erases the impact of other sources of change.  (This is a pertinent rejoinder to Alexander, as above.)

Academia Next at this date is available in SHU library only in print copy; Learning Innovation is available both in print and online (with unlimited concurrent users, and printing or e-mailing unlimited pages).  Learning Innovation is easy to read as long as you can bear to read from a screen.  (A leading cause of eye strain during the pandemic.) I hear Buzz Lightyear: "To infinity and beyond!"

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Hisham Matar's book A Month in Siena is a beautiful volume that speaks of memory, loss, art, and finally some qualified hope.

Towards the end of the book, as he looks at Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo, painted around 1445, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. The painting shows pairs (and one trio) of individuals greeting each other, as if from a long absence or journey. Matar writes:

What is it for the dead to remember the living, I wondered, to still be able to recognize those we knew when the soul was flesh . . .

That must surely be the ambition of every reunion, not only to identify and be identified, but also to have an accurate account of al that has come since the last encounter. And it must surely follow that what lies behind our longing and nostalgia is exactly this need to be accounted for. . . . We want to be seen by [those closest to us] and, in turn, rediscover our own powers of remembrance, and finally to find the consolation that lies between intention and expression, between the concealed sentiment and its outward shape. The painting understands this. It knows that what we wish for most, even more than paradise, is to be recognized; that regardless of how transformed and transfigured we might be by the passage, something of us might sustain and remain perceptible to those we have spent so long loving. Perhaps the entire history of art is the unfolding of this ambition: that every book, painting, or symphony is an attempt to give a faithful account for all that concerns us.

Is that not the power of an education, even an education in the liberal arts, to attempt to give that faithful account? Is not the deep knowledge of the liberal arts the felt-and-touched experience of being seen by works of art, buildings, texts of all kinds, music, the biological world, the realm of physics? That something might sustain and remain perceptible to those we have spent to long loving.

Is this not exactly why an education in the liberal arts can never be marketed, and in the commodified space of the self as defined by neoliberal capitalism, so impossible to sell?

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David Ulin's The Lost Art of Reading (subtitle: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time) was published in 2010 on the basis of essays in the Los Angeles Times (where he had been a book critic) and other publications. Gary Luke, the former editorial director of Sasquatch Books (Seattle) persuaded Ulin to recast his writing and publish his expanded essay as a book in 2010. In 2018 together they published a new edition, with a new introduction and afterword, which expanded his original article and brought it forward to the age of the short-fingered vulgarian casino operator from Queens, in the memorable phrases by Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen.

The gist of the essay remains the same: the quiet, focus, and concentration required of deep reading of long-form fiction is hard to summon up in the age of the web, of the shouting multitudes on every side, and of the way that all our concentration and reading attention has been cracked if not shattered by the combination of political and technological disasters of the past decade. "We are in the midst of a broken story, and we have lost the ability to parse its lines." (p. xv) Some of the stories are what Ulin (and many others) fear: the stories of racism, the fear of all kinds of others, the ready labeling of disagreement as treason or heresy. "I have come to recognize that all these narratives of incomplete and every one turns out to be unfulfilling, because none of them add up to a vision larger than themselves." (p. xviii) Yet "every narrative is conditional" and "we can live only in our own time." (p. xxi-xxii) Surveying both the positive and horrifying narratives of American history and literature, Ulin writes:

I don't mean to trivialize our situation by referring to it through the lens of narrative, but rather to contextualize. This is how the world works: first we tell ourselves a story, then we dream our way inside as a way of bringing it to life. it's why we have to be careful about the narratives we evoke or create, because they are bound by (or they bind) the limits of what we can imagine, the limits of our ability to think. . . . [This is] a difficult world in which to be human, in which to try to live with integrity. . .
Why do I read? I am looking for authority, intelligence. . . . But even more, I seek engagement—with both the text and the creator of the text. . . . Faith again, some sort of transfiguration, the closest we come to real communion between ourselves and another who shares with us something in common (common cause, common courtesy, common knowledge, common sense). . . . Why should we fear one another's stories? The true act of resistance is to respond with hope. All those voices are what connect us. In a culture intent on keeping us divided, they are, they have been always, the necessary narrative. (p. xxvii—xxxiii)

The connective thread of narratives, both the horrifying and the hopeful, have made 2018 look almost like a preface. Ulin refused to give up hope, and for good reason. Through the ravages of pandemic, policing brutalities, willful cruelty and grift at the highest levels of power, some hope can emerge. The 2020 election answered the grifter in the only way really possible (even as he refuses to acknowledge it). The pandemic has revealed cleavages in America that can no longer be ignored, even though many will try, will deny, will stonewall. In the ravages of pandemic, how can we not all sense this is but a dress rehearsal for the disasters of climate change. People have risen up and refused to give up hope, refused simply to accept corruption, brutality, and incompetence, even though many voted to continue those things exactly. Ulin saw signs of a quiet protest in art, a reclamation of aesthetic faith. As in February 2018, so in November and December 2020, in Samuel Becket's words, "I can't go on, I'll go on." (p. 156)

For those concerned with liberal arts traditions and education, Ulin's essay now reads as a call to memory that became a call to action. Narratives can still connect; we can still imagine our way into a world and inhabit it. In aesthetic terms—in all the arts—we will all only begin to acknowledge, lament, and celebrate the immense disasters, griefs, and passions of this year. That reckoning may (or should) go on for a generation. Unlike the historical response to the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, we can't and won't simply ignore it and forget it. The lost of art of reading can lead to the new art of connecting, the new narrative cobbled together on the streets, from disorientation, "art as communion, art as community, art as (yes) resistance in the sense that it invites or provokes us to complexity." Ulin might be willing to extend it, in his own heritage, as tikkun olam: to rebuilt the ancient ruins, repair the breach, and restore the streets to live in.

Tolle, lege: take and read.

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Virginia Woolf's essay, like most of her writing, is densely layered and ironically subversive. Among her several layers one finds a gently devastating critique of privilege (gender, class, ethnicity), critical yet bold imagination, vivid insights into characters, and a range and command of literature rarely equaled elsewhere. All in 5,500 words, give or take. (For a fine discussion see R. Fowler's 1983 article.)

Start with the title. Far from not knowing Greek, it is quickly apparent that Woolf knows Greek exceedingly well. Her knowledge sets her apart in her time. In Victorian and Edwardian English upper middle classes, Greek was taught to "public" (prep) school boys as a formal or expected requirement to Oxford or Cambridge, the universities of the ruling class. Knowing Greek was a badge of membership in gender and class. It was part and parcel of the cultural colonialism that brought ancient Greek art to the British Museum, an attitude shared with German and French rivals (and others), and founded British academies in Athens and Rome. A British schoolboy or undergraduate, with ancient Greek, was imagined or supposed to understand the ancients better than modern Greeks. They had become lazy southerners, who had somehow missed all their shots since at least the Byzantine Empire. On the surface, not knowing Greek is exactly what the essay is not about.

Woolf challenges that exclusive attitude of privilege in her first paragraph:

For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and
tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition.

Privileged English males hold the same position as everyone else. School and university study of Greek does not convey a special knowledge shared by the elite: we're all in the same boat, at the bottom of any class of schoolboys. At several points Woolf drives the point of the "tremendous breach of tradition," or elsewhere, "The Greeks remain in a fastness of their own."

Woolf's crucial argument is simple: we don't know how Greek sounded. The written language only hints at the spoken, and the spoken had to be direct. Sophocles had to speak with an instant immediacy: "every sentence had to explode on striking the ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might descend, and however enigmatic their final purport might be." With knowing how ancient Greek sounded, we truly lack a means to comprehend them fully.

Woolf's Greeks lived in an outdoor, public, sunlit life transacted in the street during those months of warmth and fine weather: their speech mirrored their environment of earth and stone. Such a life required and produced an oral, performative culture. Woolf's remaining English prejudices lead her to imagine that such an outdoor life inspires "that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races" that is "known to all who visit Italy." (One thinks of Forster's A Room With A View.) She compares such a life with "the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors." Her life as a sheltered, upper-middle-class young woman apparently shielded her from the rough-and-tumble British street life portrayed by Dickens, Chesterton, or even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those outdoorsy ancient Greeks certainly excelled stuffy English households bifurcated between upstairs and downstairs.

Woolf saw in Plato an exception, insofar as "winter fell on these villages, and "There must have been some place indoors where men could retire" and where "they sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their ease, where they could talk." Enter the symposium: "some handsome boy ventured a question, or quoted an opinion, and Socrates took it up, fingered it, turned it round, looked at it this way and that" and "brought the whole company by degrees to gaze with him at the truth." She alludes to Greek homophilia, not to say homo-eroticism (exactly what is Socrates fingering?). At the end of this extended scene, "Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties." Socrates' sense of beauty was never simply ornament. "Naturally, living in the open, it was not the lip or the eye that struck them, but the carriage of the body and the proportions of its parts." A male body, one might add. "Thus when we quote and extract we do the Greeks more damage than we do the English."

Woolf brings us round to her first observation: the Greeks "could say, “If to die nobly is the chief part of excellence, to us out of all men Fortune gave this lot; for hastening to set a crown of freedom on Greece we lie possessed of praise that grows not old." —"But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek as it was written when we say this?" The cultural chasm has never closed, "Does not the whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature? They admit us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a vigour which pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the young." The distance admits more mistakes and errors: "Back and back we are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imagined in the heart of a northern winter." The unapproachable language itself both extends the Greek's binding influence and our misunderstanding.

We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which aphrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless, it is the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us back.

The language is both our means of approach and evidence of our inability to approach the Greeks. "Greek is the impersonal literature; it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no schools; no forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process working in many men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately at last in one." Woolf's examples: "Thus we have Sappho with her constellations of adjectives; Plato daring extravagant flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and quietly, apparently motionless, and then, with a flicker of fins, off and away." Finally we have the Odyssey, the "triumph of narrative . . . the instinctive story-telling of a sea-faring race." Its people are full-grown, "crafty, subtle, and passionate." Its world of the sea "separates island from island has to be crossed by little hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls." Its characters "actions seem laden with beauty."

. . . They do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate.

The characters in the Odyssey stand in the shadow of that fate, and yet are "alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure." The concluding sentence of this dense essay finally voices Woolf's thorough critique: "it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own time."

At the beginning, Woolf succinctly dissolved the élite privilege that pretended that we are not all in the same boat: "in our ignorance [of Greek] we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys." In the end, she critiques the whole comfortable, English ideological structure of Empire, Church, and University. Her mention of John Paston, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith (a Radical Liberal), Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen range her with relative outsiders to the ideology of Crown and Mitre. One can forget how marginal and dubious these authors may have been in a conventional upper-middle-class English household. Woolf was raised in stultifying Victorian and Edwardian Anglican Christianity which did so much to restrict her intellectual development and personal freedom as a woman.

The Greeks offered Woolf a way out of this plush tomb, and prepared Woolf for the kind of reader that she hoped or imagined for her writing. The startlingly clear-sightedness of the Greeks let her see her own oppressive, imperialist society for what it was. Knowing Greek, a presumed mark of élite education and privileged position, is in fact the basis for the devastating social critique implicit in her novels. Knowing Greek, as the official mark of high status, reveals truly not knowing Greek, for the real knowledge of Greek demands a clarity of vision that will completely discount the pretense of privilege.

"On not knowing Greek" equals "on not knowing yourself and your society," against Socrates' watchword: know thyself. Like Socrates, Woolf brings her reader by degrees to gaze with her at the truth. "What matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it." A fitting epigram for this most remarkable and insightful author. How much she would have loved that life outside that she idealizes in her essay.

The secret of knowing Greek, then, is to critique the very society that pretends that the person who knows Greek accepts his place (and I do mean his). Knowing Greek is a deadly arrow against the pretense of a tradition shot from directly within that tradition. Knowing Greek—on "not knowing Greek"—is an inside job.

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In a time that is beyond unsettling and strange, I have found some comfort in returning to contemplate what a liberal arts education is or was, and how it interacted with elements in American culture which were horribly flawed with systemic racism. Such an education, when it worked, offered a way out of lying, self-delusion, and social delusion. For me, a liberal arts education above all meant engaging with ancient Greek and Roman writers.

While the label "classics" is unquestionably, unfashionably elitist and redolent of a great deal of European and American imperialism, it points out the way these ancient writers set a template for understanding tragedy, grief, and loss. These writers seem to read us as much as we read them: the warnings they suggest about how a life, world, and culture can fall apart is more pertinent with each passing month.

In these past several disastrous and tragic months, I was enlivened to read Andrea Marcolongo's The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek. La lingua geniale in the original Italian: "ingenious" is not an incorrect translation, but neither is it sufficient: ingenious suggests superficially clever rather than boldly inventive. The language provides undeniable evidence that ancient Greeks thought in a precise and different manner than how we might imagine them to have thought. As L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" —especially when the past is so remote and long ago.

I wish to turn to this theme of the utter strangeness of ancient Greek in some longer elegy for the liberal arts and the role the might have or could have played in American culture in the past two centuries. The two elements of aspect and mood in the ancient Greek language carry this water: these elements of verbs structure a different world of thinking through that channel, that language.

In English, the nouns do a great deal of the work of making sense transparent from writer to reader. In Greek, the verbs do the work. Aspect encodes a way of thinking about verbs and actions that go to the heart of Greek sense-making. Because most later languages so lack verbal aspect, it is impossible to describe without using too many words.

Begin with English. English verbs are locked into the iron frame of time: past, present, and future. What the person who acts intends by the action is either beside the point or rendered through adverbs or some other locution. Maybe the action is a layered past —before such-and-so happened, this-and-that had already happened (a past perfect), or some kind of ordering of future affairs: when that-and-this will happen, such-and-so will already have happened (a future perfect). In any case, the verbal periphrastic combinations establish an intricate temporal order.

Greek verbs live with but the haziest notion of this iron law of past, present, and future. A present aspect is durative: it's happening right now and maybe into an infinite future. (Marcolongo's example, "I'm calling you," καλέω) The aorist aspect (a-orist means indefinite or without bounds; an ὁριστής is a boundary-maker, with the α-negative or privative) is momentary, taken as such (and not necessarily in the past!) (Marcolongo's example: an idea of calling you, "I'll call you," έκάλεσα with no reference to when in present or future.) The perfective aspect is a completed action that stands completed with no going back on it. (Marcolongo's example: κέκληκα, I called you --and you never called back, lost the note by the phone, or are ignoring me). These aspects do not function as temporal "when" signals, but as "how" performative signals that take time, or are not yet in time or stand-or-fall on the facts. Ancient Greek retains aspect of verbs from the fabled proto-Indo-European language (that maybe never was), as does Serbo-Croatian, Hawaiian, and in some was African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

In modern languages, aspect and time become conflated: when it happened is taken to mean how it happened. Many Greek verbs have three distinct stems that are conjugated in different aspects: their suffix-like endings indicate 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person and singular or plural (or dual, another topic entirely). "I look and I am looking," όράω is a present durative action: still looking. What grammarians call the "future" ὄψομαι is really much more an indefinite intention: I'll look when I get around to it, I intend to look. The Greeks were not much interested in characterizing the future: it simply had to be experienced, like the will of the gods. The aorist εἷδον is I look, once, and that was enough, because: now the perfect: I am in the state of having seen, which is; I know οἴδα, and finally ὤφθην, I looked and it's a matter of record: it's known that I looked. That all these verb parts are stitched together by grammarians and lexicographers does not mean that ordinary ancient Greeks thought them related: they simply used them as the wished to make themselves clear.

Dividing how an action occurs from when it occurs is obvious only to a modern speaker of a few languages (Serbo-Croatian; Hawaiian). A bit closer to most Americans, the aspectual distinctions in African American Vernacular English, which sometimes obscure tense (time), can be the habitual, perfective, or resultant: "he do be eating," "he have bin ate," "he have done ate" (properly "dən ate"). Those may not tie the past or present action of eating to a time-frame, but indicate how it happens, or happens, or what is the result of it happening. This comparison begins to get at the power of aspect: how it happened.

To their credit, authors of high school or college grammars of ancient Greek, such those by as Herbert Weir Smyth, James Hadley & F. D. Allen, or H.L. Crosby & J.N. Schaeffer, completely fail to mention aspect, which seems to have come into the study of ancient Greek from comparative study of Slavic languages; the first OED entry for grammatical aspect dates to 1853. Joseph Dongell's much more recent Elementary New Testament Greek (2014) incorporates an unavoidably confusing discussion of aspect as internal (inside the event, "I am washing the car"), external (suspended above & viewing the action as a simple singular event: "Today we wash the car," as a flat description), and perfect: once-and-done "I'm happy to say I have washed the car". Dongell then muddies the water a bit with discussion of a perspective chosen by the speaker and not property of an action itself. His example is Jesus' resurrection, always a loaded topic (best stay away from it). When he notes that verbal aspect doesn't tell us very much about how to picture an event in reality, he appeals to the developing idea of a "fuller picture" of a verb called Aktionsart, a "type of action" distinguishing elements of activity, accomplishment, achievement, and state. Aktionsart picks apart categories on a grid of perception to get at a "fuller picture" a verb does, and has little practical consequence. Aspect is the contrary: by distinguishing how an action occurs: how a verb "walks" (as it were), Greeks could pick apart sense from nonsense. Plato wields aspect very carefully (see Timeaus 37e—38c: please don't complain that Timeaus isn't or wasn't by Plato)(See also two entries by Seumas Macdonald here and here.)

This recondite aspective element of verbs combines with a second perspective on ancient Greek verbs: mood. The subjunctive mood in modern English is nearly disappearing, but most of us can still remember the subjective, distinguishing "was he a fool?" from "were he fool." In the first, he was or wasn't a fool, or perhaps we can disagree about that; but the second points to the real possibility that he isn't or wasn't but could be, might be, or might have been. "I wouldn't bring up Paris if I were you. It's poor salesmanship," Ricky admonishes Elsa in Casablanca. (English also has the infinitive mood, to do something, and the imperative mood, do something! but they don't matter so much here.)

But ancient Greek adds a third mood: optative, the mood of desire. The optative depends on the slight shift in the speaker's desire and the conditions that might allow it. Marcolongo's examples are clear: "I want to sail/intend to sail" (indicative: my boat is docked, I'm ready); "I would like to sail; I might go sailing" (subjective: My boat is docked but the winds are foul); "I would like to sail/I might go sailing" (optative: My boat is docked; I don't know how to sail; I'll have to learn how and then I really want to), finally back to: "I would like to sail/I would have liked to sail" (but I don't have a boat; I live in Kansas; it's a lost cause--indicative again).

What separates those moods? Possibility, the speaker's projection of desire, and perception of herself as strong enough, brave enough, even decisive enough. That volitional optative is completely dependent upon her sense of responsibility and resolve to turn words into action.

Both desire and regret (negative in the optative) might not draw a line between possibility and impossibility, the desire that it might come true versus the historic indicative which indicates that it never will come true. If the odds are ever in your favor, as they say in Hunger Games, it could be optative (or merely subjective: they'll change, you know); if the odds are that you're going to die, the indicative. Between the poles of real and unreal is a whole force field of human desire, likelihood, or impossibility. That's where the optative supplements the subjective—but was utterly lost as Greek spread in the Alexandrian world. Hence in the New Testament, the only real optative is μὴ γένοιτο: may it not be! which the Authorized Version plumped up as:" God forbid!" The optative became a sort of second-string, bench-team subjective.

There are uses of the optative mood: volitional ("I want to write"); potential ("I could write") and oblique ("He said that I would write"), but enough already. When Odysseus says "Would that I were young and my strength firm," his fervent and binding desire is so strong that he uses the optative for the tenacity of his intention to return to Ithaka and reclaim his ancestral seat, even though it is (or seems) impossible. (Odyssey 14:70-71)

Back to our perilous present in which many wait in dread for violence they believe will ensue after the 2020 election. The liberal arts spoke to a nation that had been divided by war, failed to liberate and reconstruct, and stood by while robber barons plundered the wealth of many in the first Gilded Age. Liberal education, nevertheless, offered a way out of predatory capitalism and cultural enslavement to a renewed sense of purpose, even with its blind spots, that resulted in the achievements of the Progressive era and laid the foundations for the New Deal. The means of this education were a steady focus on language, on truth and its expression, on desire, on the aspect of how things come to be, choosing to hope in the optative in the face of impossibility.

That education was an heir of those who wrote an English language that we have lost the ability to speak accurately. Its speakers picked apart truth and desire because they mattered more than market indices and predictions of future profit. The care with which the far more remote ancient Greeks thought, about how things happen and how they desired them to happen contrasts oddly with their rather simplistic and one-dimensional view of the future. (Greek future verbs are almost an afterthought.) With the (controversial) advent of writing, they picked apart these elements in texts that lack punctuation and diacritics. Their flow of thought depended on particle and enclitics, those little bits of words that signaled the flow of thinking and of speech. Liberal arts educations --there was more than one model--flourished in an America culture that prized language and its use: the Lyceum circuits, Milton, the Bible, even Emerson. That care with language was a direct ally of intensive study of Latin and ancient Greek literatures.

I am working out more thoughts about these topics, using other concepts as well: what I have written is only a workshop model, a sketch, and maybe a bad one. The foundation of the liberal arts, the careful usage and analysis of expressive language, was foundational and now almost extinct outside of few precincts of wealthy institutions. Whether such an education can ever return is another subject.

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David Denby, staff writer and film critic for The New Yorker, published (June 29, 2020) an account of reading Crime and Punishment with a Lit Hum class at Columbia taught by Nick Dames, one of its best teachers.  "Lit Hum," or Literary Humanities, is a required course for all undergraduates, and depending on the teacher can be anything from brilliant tour to an arduous trek. Under Dames' astute guidance, the students and Denby read Dostoyevsky's impassioned, digressive, and intricate prose and connected the critical passages.

Illustration in The New Yorker by Tom Gauld

The survey course in Spring 2020 took place throughout the great disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic; eight hours of discussion of the novel took place after the great disapora sent students from on-ground class in Hamilton Hall to a Zoom room wherever each might have landed.  For Denby, the novel dovetailed with his  life stuck in an Upper West Side apartment, hearing constant sirens, joining the 7:00 p.m. banging of pots at windows, sounds that connected isolated individuals in their social responsibility with the city's life, in the catastrophic solidarity of a Greek chorus.

            Denby's moving account resists easy summary; I will not summarize it but pick out two elements that yet resonate now months later. Raskolnikov's haunting dream of social breakdown, a war of all against all in which each, infected by virus-like trichinae, knows that he or she alone is right, "each thought the truth was contained in himself alone . . . . They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good"—this dream struck several readers uncannily. One young student (Julia) saw in it a political science fiction, evoking our present conflicts and mutually-assured contradictions that brook no shared facts or vocabulary.  She saw in the faces of demonstrators in Michigan (in April, armed and angry at their state capitol) the unshakeable convictions of blind self-assurance, just as the fury of those infected by the novel trichinae in the dream.

            Raskolnikov's dream comes a few pages before the end of novel, an Epilogue that places the reader outside of the feral voices in Raskolnikov's head, so filled with conflict and outrage. Sonya, a teenage prostitute who befriended him in St. Petersburg, and despite his rejection even came to love him, followed him to a camp outside a distant Siberian town. He can no longer avoid confrontation with Sonya's lived, real-world "insatiable compassion" and the implacable necessity of his own suffering. He discovers that "instead of dialectics, there was life." Instead of acrid theories of banal murder, "he could only feel. . . . [S]omething completely different had to work itself out in his consciousness." Denby quotes Nick Dames' remark: "The novel is a strong rebuke to individual happiness and individual rights and autonomy." Denby concludes,

Every day, in Trump's America, it seemed as though we were coming closer to the annihilating turmoil—the mixed state of vexation and fear—in Raskolnikov's dream. . . . I kept returning to Dostoyesvsky's book, looking for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions and injustices, stoking hope and resolve along side fear, anything that would overtake the desperate anomie that Raskolnikov's dream had conjured: "In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why.

            The bells led me back to the ending of The Brothers Karamazov, and perhaps a durable response to Denby's and Rasknolnikov's searches.

            The Brothers Karamazov also ends with an Epilogue that ties up most of the complex narrative threads. A family drama, a who-dunit, a coming-of-age novel, and an ersatz romance (among many other angles), the novel is maddeningly difficult both to read and to conclude. Tthe characters' lives seem capable of carrying on with neither author nor reader.

            After five hundred pages, an unlikely sort of Greek chorus of schoolboys emerges on the heels of a hitherto minor incident. The impulsive Dimitri Karamzov humiliated an impoverished Captain (Snegiryov) by pulling him out of local tavern by his beard.  Snegiryov's proud, frail son (Ilyusha or Ilyuschechka) bitterly resented his father's humiliation and the mocking he had to endure from his schoolmates: he stabbed their leader, Kolya Krasotkin, with a pen knife. When Ilyusha threw stones at them, he accidentally hit Aloysha (Alexei Karamazov), the nineteen-year-old, handsome brother who is the moral center of the book: kind, energetic, and empathetic almost to a fault (as religiously very conservative for his generation). Alyosha reached out to Ilyuschechka and all the boys. They wind up obliquely commenting on adults around them.

            The novel careens through Dimitri's trial, who is charged with murdering their wily, fatuous, knave of a father. His brother Ivan organized his brother's defense and orchestrated his planned escape, along with the machinations of two women (Gruschenka and Katerina Ivanovna) who forlornly loved their Mitya.  Meanwhile Alyosha and the schoolboys inhabit almost a kind of parallel universe in the small, unnamed town, and the parallel drama of Ilyuschechka's death from tuberculosis two days after Dmitri's sentencing.

            As Aloysha rushed from Katerina's decisive encounter Dimitri and Gruschenka, church bells summoned him and the boys to Ilyuschechka's funeral. The melodramatic narrative of alcohol, flowers, Ilyuschechka's frail mother, and the passage of the coffin to the church gives way to solemnity of the boys standing watch by the casket through the service. This bells are no western, tolling bourdon; the extravangant, Russian tinntabulation that builds up overtones and reverberates down the streets conjures the otherworldly play of light, incense, chanting, and movement in the old church, "rather poor, many of the icons were without settings." The author himself experienced such shock, loss, and splendor at the death of his 3-year-old son Alyosha in 1878, as he wrote the book.

                        Dostoyevsky, turned to Orthodoxy after reading the Gospels in a Siberian prison, and always paid careful attention to liturgical details. After the Epistle (probably I Thessalonians 4:13-17), Snegiryov "suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing beside him, that the reading had not been done right," without explanation. During the Cherubic Hymn (sung at the priest's Entrance to the Sanctuary), "kneeling down, [Snegiryov] touched his forehead to the stone floor of the church, and remained lying like that for quite a long time," prostrate before the divine splendor. Though the hymn's text is short, the chant is in a drawn-out, ethereal style, a human supplement to the singing of the heavenly hosts:

We, who mystically represent the Cherubim, And chant the thrice-holy hymn tot he Life-giving Trinity, Let us set aside the cares of life, That we may receive the King of all, Who comes invisibly escorted by the Divine Hosts.

"Let us set aside the cares of life" is exactly what Snegiryov still cannot do in his grief, clutching at the funeral flowers from the casket, as he crumbles bread crumbs for the birds who will keep his son company in his grave, symbolically receiving the King of all on his behalf. But rising from the cares of life is exactly what Aloysha did, when he and the boys came upon Ilyuschechka's standing stone, where the dead boy had cried out against his father's humiliation at Mitya's hands. Aloysha's speech to the boys concludesthe book, "Gentlemen, we shall be parting soon." He commanded them to promise never to forget Ilyuschechka, "whom we once threw stones at—and whom afterwards we all came to love so much."

And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune—all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, altogether, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.

Even should one of the boys become the "most cruel and jeering man," he "will still not dare laugh within himself at how kind and good he was at this present moment! Moveover, perhaps just this memory alone will keep him from great evil, and he will think better of it and say: 'Yes, I was kind, brave, and honest then.'"  Alyosha implored them, "let us never forget one another . . . I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts, too! Well, and who united us in this good, kind feeling . . . who, if not Ilyuschechka, that good boy, that kind boy, that boy dear to us unto ages of ages! . . . . Dear friends, do not be afraid of life!"

And then the thrust of the whole book:

"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it really be true as religion says, that we all shall rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyuschechka?"

"Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been," Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy.

Then the detail both eschatological and incarnational: "Well, and now let's end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner.  Don't be disturbed that we'll be eating pancakes.  It's an ancient, eternal thing, and there's good in that too."  Kolya cried, "And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand!  Hurrah for Karamazov!"

The book's epigraph reads, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (John 12:24)

Karamazov's bells—ringing for Ilyuschechka, for the resurrection—answers the summoning bells in Raskolnikov's dream.  A westerner might assume that the bell's summoning in Crime and Punishment is a single ring, perhaps fast as in colonial New England--but in a Russian city "the bells rang all day," many bells in vivid strike and reverberation.  In this Epilogue, too,  Dostoyevsky's mastery of liturgical details goes to work. "During the second week of the Great Lent, it was [Raskolnikov's] turn to fast and go to services together with his barracks" (undoubtedly because the whole camp would fit in or even around the church). The Gospel for that Saturday (John 5:24-30) is the same as was used in the Orthodox funeral liturgy for Ilyuschechka: For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself . . . for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.  While Rodya moped, Sonya acted on behalf of the prisoners and families stood in for the healing Christ; "they even came to her with their ailments."

"Raskolnikov lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week" when he recalled his haunting dream in this liturgical context—but never named Easter directly. The second week after Holy Week, recovered enough to be put back to work, Raskolnikov walked out of his work shed and looked across a wide, desolate river, to see an utterly different, pastoral people live free, where "time itself seemed to stop, as if the centuries of Abraham and his flocks had not passed."  Suddenly Sonya was beside him, "came up almost inaudibly," alluding to Jesus' appearing to St. Thomas and the twelve (John 20:19 ff.), the traditional reading for the second week of Easter.  Where Jesus showed Thomas his side, Sonya gives Rodya her hand, and "it was as if something lifted him and flung him down at her feet . . . for her there was no longer any doubt that he loved her," that he was capable of love.

"There already shone the dawn of a renewed future, of a complete resurrection into a new life.  They were resurrected by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other."  But this is no romantic fade-out: "They still had seven years more, and until then so much unbearable suffering, and so much infinite happiness!  But he was risen and he knew it, he felt it fully with the whole of his renewed being, and she—she lived just by his life alone!"

All his past torments began to feel strange to Raskolnikov, unable to resolve anything; "he could only feel. Instead of dialectics, there was life."  In response, he took the Gospels from under his pillow, from which she had read to him about the raising of Lazarus." He did not even open the book; he did not yet know the kind of new life that would not be given him for nothing, which still had to be dearly bought, "to be paid for with a great future deed. . . "

Denby's search for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions finds no easy conclusion in Trump's America now, as Dostoyevsky's found none in Tsarist Russia. Dostoyevsky seemed in retrospect to have sensed all the warning signs of repression, Revolution and the descent into the Abyss of Stalinism (and now Putinism). Whether in the Spring pandemic (and its Summer and Fall continuation), the continuing racial unrest, economic disaster, environmental apocalypse, and craven, hypocritical electoral and judicial politics, many Americans have completely disengaged from the Constitutional order.  With all of our society's social and ecological danger signs are blinking red, is this search for signs in literature merely quixotic pursuit of bitter old people teaching impressionable youth?

I must answer No: Dostoyevsky's great books still offer us renewal through remembering our hope and suffering (such as the awakening to past and continuing witnessed this Summer). They can awaken us to responsibility for the ecological, public health, and economic mess that we have made.  Both Alyosha and Sonya point to what is greater: "instead of dialectics, there was life," contradictory, complex, compelling and above all creative. Those bells summon us to engage neither domination nor surrender, but memory and hope: to remember the great, humane story of suffering and rebirth that transcends our mess (bad as it is), to the ancient and eternal act of eating pancakes for the dead. In Beloved, Amy said to Sethe while massaging her swollen feet, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts." It's hurting now: life instead of dialectics.

These summons also suggest the fevered, prolix, impossibly complex Angels in America. At the end of Perestroika (Part 2) Prior Walter, in his final febrile vision, tells the Continental Principalities (Angels) "I still want . . . My blessing.  Even sick. I want to be alive." To which his Angel replies, "You only think you do. Life is a habit with you. You have not seen what is to come: We have: What will the grim Unfolding of these Latter Days bring?" Despite her vivid invocation of more horror than can be borne, Prior insists, "But still. Still. Bless me anyway.  I want more life.  I can't help myself. I do . . . . I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive.  We live past hope.  If I can find hope anywhere, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate but . . . Bless me anyway.  I want more life."

We live past hope, past dialectics, past disease and chaos.  In this hinge of history, when horror meets horror and hope seems so much not enough, so inadequate — we still want more life.   We still hear the bells summoning us to responsibility, thrice-holy, with the One whom comes invisibly escorted by Divine hosts.  We stand at the stone of remembering, live past hope, and eat our pancakes for the dead.

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W. S. Merwin (1927-2019) was an essential poet: one who shows us life, who writes us into living and into becoming old. His last poems, collected in Garden Time, were written as he was going blind.

Kevin Young's beautiful remembrance tribute to Merwin in The New York (March 20, 2019) remembered his oysters; Dan Chiasson's remembrance reprinted his arresting and beautiful poem For the Anniversary of My Death:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

As Chiasson writes, now we know which day: March 12, 2019.

In the clip below, W.S. Merwin talks about writing poetry and about meeting Ezra Pound when he was 18 and still at college and Pound was in the psychiatric ward at St Elizabeth's Hospital. He then reads 'Late Spring', a poem included in his Bloodaxe Selected Poems. This film is from the Academy of American Poets DVD The Poet's View: Intimate Profiles of Five Major American Poets, which features Kay Ryan, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Anthony Hecht and W.S. Merwin:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17029

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Timothy Snyder (Yale professor) has written two books that not only demonstrate—with exhaustive annotation—the intricate links between Russian and American oligarchs and autocratic fascism, but make pertinent observations about how to respond in a way that can retain and build up democratic institutions.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

In this crazy year, these books remain remarkably pertinent in a summer of pandemic, economic meltdown, and long-delayed social turmoil over profound, historic racial injustice.

I will be interested to read his upcoming book Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (to be published September 2020). Snyder fell ill on December 29, 2019; he did not have COVID 19. Yet his experience led him to reflect on how American health care is part and parcel of an evolving tyranny of "who deserves and who doesn't." The current pandemic and consequent economic collapse seems to have been precisely aimed at the pretentions of the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity (his terms). Facts come back to bite, as authoritarian fascists are discovering, from Putin to Trump to Bolsonaro to Xi Jinping. Will the world be able to respond in a manner than builds up healthy, human freedom, and economic and racial justice?