Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2019 i The American Scholar

The Phi Beta Kappa Society is grateful for the support of all of our extraordinary members. We would like to extend special thanks to our members of The Secretary’s Circle over the past year. Your generous gift shows tremendous commitment to the liberal arts and the Society’s vital programs. We thank you. GOLD LAUREATE LEVEL Mr. Ronald D. Abramson Ms. Patricia Bauman Carl F. Cranor, Ph.D., M.S.L. Julie and Davin Gebauer Ethel Gofen Mrs. Judith L. Hardardt Dr. Neil Ann Stuckey Levine Mr. Jonathan E. Lewis Mr. Simon M. Lorne Dr. John W. Melone SILVER LAUREATE LEVEL Robert Appel Ms. Janet R. Dakan Gary S. and Denise N. David Mr. Robert M. Falzon Mr. Joel Paul Fried Judy Genshaft and Steven Greenbaum Linda Greenhouse Alan M. Klein Dr. Peter H.…

To prepare for the 2020 census, the Census Bureau expects to hire about 500,000 people early next year. It’s the largest mobilization of federal employees short of a war, but that number is about a 25 percent decrease since the last census. For the first time, the U.S. census will accept online responses, replacing paper-pushers and pavement-pounders with technology. Census planners anticipate that most responses will come in online, which could save time and money. But they also have no other choice. Traditional census taking relies on address lists and mailboxes. Adults under 40 are much less likely to have a phone or mailbox that is linked to a physical address, and millennials, who now make up one-third of the U.S. adult population, use the postal service much less than…

Dana Gioia has published five collections of poetry, most recently 99 Poems: New & Selected. A former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he now serves as the poet laureate of California. “Travel” is the second part of a forthcoming book-length poem called The Underworld, which depicts a descent into the mythic kingdom of the dead. Here, the unnamed central character speaks for the first time. To lean over the rail of an ocean liner above the crowded dock as the gangway rises and the blast horn bellows its throbbing farewell, scattering the screeching gulls, and the great vessel slides through the azure harbor to the open sea is an experience I prefer to see on screens. The images of holiday cruise buffets, iced pyramids of rosy shrimp…

THE SPERCHEIOS RIVER—which, legend tells us, was dear to the warrior Achilles—marks the southern boundary of the great Thessalian plain in central Greece. I arrived there in late October, but it still felt like summer, and few people were around. Away on the left, the foothills of Mount Oiti were hazed with heat. On my right, at some distance from the road, screened by cotton fields and intermittent olive groves, flowed the Spercheios. At the village of Paliourio, road and river converged, and leaving my car, I wandered down a track that led to a shattered bridge shored with makeshift planking. The river itself was sparkling, picturesquely overhung with oak and wild olive, but on closer inspection I saw machinery and discarded appliances rusting in its shallows. It is this…

My Children’s Inheritance A fancy for high green hills by a sea, baggy spacesin the day, a knack for gunpowder thinking,a library humming like a swarm of gnats; the intrigue of a woman with a pitch-perfect mind,blinking eyes whose silence is ancient and naked,a grave that is not a grave but a ruin to visit in middle age; a chifforobe of half-empty cologne bottles in various colorsand dried flowers more dignified in death, bothevidence that I once cherished bouquets and timelessness; bullet casings, a bowl of seashells, fine pens, oneThe Aurora Diamante with its two-toned rhodium platingthat glitters when my right hand rages toward heaven; a love of big plates of pasta, Argentinian folk music,African rainforests and the speeches of Lincoln thatmist the pages of my books more than my…

I RECENTLY DROVE A TESLA for the first time, or rather it drove me. The Model 3 was beautifully appointed, embraced the road like a lover, and boasted the kind of instant acceleration that car aficionados like to call head-snapping. It was a terrific experience right up until the moment I switched on Autopilot and the car’s computer took command, eerily changing lanes and keeping pace in traffic. The car even parked itself. I marveled at the Tesla’s otherworldly powers, but I couldn’t help feeling sad. The Model 3 and its electric kin can’t reliably steer themselves without a human copilot, but that limitation won’t last forever. When it’s gone, driving and all the wonderful things that go with it will be roadkill. Elon Musk’s remarkable driving machine will someday…

A PRIMER FOR FORGETTING: Getting Past the Past BY LEWIS HYDE Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 341 pp., $28 LEWIS HYDE’S MIND is on tumble dry here, an ornate and earnest chaos. It’s as if he’d awakened morning after morning to find jottings on his night table, like a pile of leaves. Not quite understanding them, Hyde would hypothesize that they sprang from forgotten truths he might or might not have understood at the time he had thought of them. Now he’d remembered them in the dreams that, on waking, he has forgotten, too. Are you with me? (I can hear a small cheer from the Proustians in the audience.) Hyde never defines forgetting, perhaps because it’s impossible, like taking a scenic tour of a black hole. Instead he is out…

HAS THE PACE AT WHICH we revisit events of 50 years ago quickened lately? If so, is that because those events were so significant or because the present has become so unnerving to look upon? Yes, 1968 brought momentous assassinations and democracy-in-the-streets happenings at Columbia and the Democratic convention in Chicago, and 1969 saw the moon landing and Woodstock. Of these, the one that makes the pulse quicken is Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon’s surface and his poetic commemoration of it. A giant leap for mankind, but what was the nature of that leap? For Armstrong the engineer-astronaut, it must have been technological—imagination fulfilled by ingenuity. But even a roomful of Leonardos or Elon Musks could not have accomplished it. Too much needed to be done too fast.…

HERE ARE 20 USEFUL TIPS for all of you out there who want, for reasons defying common sense, to write lofty critical essays for prestigious journals: 1. Write that the subject of your choice, “as he [or she] recedes into history, seems more a product of his [or her] time than an agent of transformation.” This can be said of everyone except Napoleon, Jesus, and possibly Freud. 2. In a profile about a corporate executive in the news, it is always a good idea to mingle a classical prototype with a contemporary idiom, e.g., “Like Augustus Caesar, he is at peace with his tradeoffs,” the “he” in this sentence being Mark Zuckerberg. 3. In high-minded discourse on philosophers and their quarrels, see if you can’t summarize the argument in 10…

From the back seat of the car, Benjamin read the gold-lettered sign at the edge of the rolling green lawn and said, “Why do they call it a correctional facility?” He’d meant only to think the question, rather than speak it, but lately, more and more, he experienced this kind of hotwiring between his thoughts and speech, a trend he recognized as risky business. His older brother, Randall, had recently emphasized the importance of taking control of your own destiny, and Benjamin could see that saying aloud what you would prefer to keep to yourself was the opposite. He also recalled an earlier period of bed-wetting, which, gratefully, hadn’t happened in many years, though the memory of it, zombielike, lived on to horrify. “So they don’t have to call it…

THIS LAND: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West BY CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM Viking, 422 pp., $29 THE TITLE OF Christopher Ketcham’s ferocious new book—This Land—is of course an allusion to the great Woody Guthrie song, which, depending on the version you sing, is either a song about geographical patriotism or a bitter attack on private property. “This land is your land, this land is my land,” and yet nowhere in Guthrie’s lyrics do you find the words “our land.” Ketcham’s subject is our land—public land—and its despoliation. In the American West, it’s more often called federal land, a name that seems to deprive you and me—the “you and me” in Guthrie’s song—of ownership. It’s worth stating plainly that the federal lands administered by the Bureau of Land…

CONSCIENCE: The Origins of Moral Intuition BY PATRICIA S. CHURCHLAND Norton, 226 pp., $27.95 THE WAR FOR KINDNESS: Building Empathy in a Fractured World BY JAMIL ZAKI Crown, 261 pp., $27 THESE TWO NEW books give lucid, stimulating accounts of recent discoveries in neuroscience and psychology. Both authors aim to challenge antiquated views of the brain and human behavior. In so doing, they help us think through perennial debates about the sources of morality and the degree to which we inherit or can enhance traits like empathy. Both are careful to evaluate the cogency of the research they cite, noting when it remains inconclusive or unpersuasive. Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford, who also directs its Social Neuroscience Laboratory, usefully includes an appendix summarizing the evidence for the…

You are old when your longtime friend Melvin, turned seventy-five, writes you in rage about becoming old. … Melvin knows nothing about old age: Melvin can walk upstairs! Melvin flies to the West Indies with his girlfriend and his wife! In your eighties you are invisible. Nearing ninety you hope nobody sees you. At nineteen you were six foot two. At ninety-one you will be two foot six. —Donald Hall, “You Are Old,” A Carnival of Losses, 2018 Oh, praised be the beauty of this earth, the beauty, and the bloom, and the mirthfulness thereof! The first worlds made were winter worlds; the second made, were vernal worlds; the third, and last, and perfectest, was this summer world of ours. —Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, 1852 On June 26,…

The First Impeachment The SCHOLAR is to be commended for calling timely attention to the first use of presidential impeachment. But Brenda Wineapple’s article (“The First President to Be Impeached,” Spring 2019) could have been improved by closer constitutional analysis. Central to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was the charge that he had violated the Tenure of Office Act, whose origins lay in a typical but unusually exacerbated power struggle between the president and Congress—a congressional attempt to reduce the appointive power to a near nullity. The act provided that any executive official whose appointment required Senate confirmation could be removed only with Senate consent. Had the act altered the balance of executive and legislative powers, it may be imagined what would have become of the presidential duty to “see…

ELIZABETH RUSH, the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, has written for The New York Times, Harper’s, and The New Republic. In 2019, she served as the Antarctic artist and writer for the National Science Foundation, accompanying a team of scientists on a research trip to the remote Thwaites Glacier. We asked her to pose four questions about the future of Antarctica. 1. Starting in the late ’80s, glaciologists began calculating whether Antarctica was gaining or losing mass. They concluded that the southernmost continent was the epitome of stability. But in the intervening three decades, the scales have started to tip, and what was once considered one of the steadiest environments in the cryosphere is now steadily losing…

THE APOLLO MOONWALKERS marveled at the golden glow of the lunar mountains, at the green rocks, white crystals, orange soil, brown patina—a palette of colors so surprising that the astronauts kept lifting their sun visors to make sure it was real. From lunar orbit, the landscape basked in the soft bluish glow of earthlight. Dust and airlessness played tricks on the eye. Bright halos ringed the astronauts’ shadows, distant hills seemed right at hand, the horizon was shrunken. Gene Cernan of Apollo 17 said, “You just stand out there and say, I don’t believe what I’m looking at! ” Almost as unfathomable was the scale of the backroom effort. In documentaries such as Moonwalk One and the recently released Apollo 11, camera footage carries you past row upon row of…

WHAT DO ANY OF US have to pass on, really? What will be left of us in the end? Major Jackson thinks hard and playfully about those questions in his poem “My Children’s Inheritance.” His answer takes the form of an inventory, a list, but there are no items of property on it, unless we count “a chifforobe of half-empty cologne bottles in various colors / and dried flowers more dignified in death,” and even these are not so much material objects as tokens of one man’s vanities and longings, “evidence that I once cherished bouquets and timelessness.” The self that Jackson evokes in this poem is intangible and turbulent, difficult to represent. It can only be gestured at by symbols and metaphors, and perhaps only by mixed metaphors. Catachresis…

IN JUNE 1808, AS HE LEFT North America for the one and only time in his life, Aaron Burr recorded the briefest of notes for his adored daughter, Theodosia. “Fair winds,” the founding father and former vice president wrote before clambering aboard a packet, the Clarissa Ann, in New York Harbor. Traveling under the assumed name of H. E. Edwards, Burr was headed across the Atlantic, the Furies at his heels. It wasn’t the first time he’d fled. In 1804, after killing Alexander Hamilton in their famous duel, he had escaped southward. This time he was facing even more severe consequences. Charged with treason after allegedly organizing a conspiracy to roust the Spaniards from their colonies in Mexico and the Southwest Territory, Burr was acquitted in September 1807, after a…