Jane Austen and the World of the Community

For two weeks now, I have wallowed in sinful luxury, rereading the six completed Jane Austen novels (especially my favorite parts), basking in the warmth and wit of her collected letters, eagerly absorbing the details of her life from her best biographies, and attentively following the arguments of her leading literary critics. I also saw the recent movie versions of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, falling in love with Emma Thompson and Amanda Root in quick succession, and finished off my orgy with viewings of the BBC videos of Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice. Throughout—at least when I could remember to pay attention—I had two questions in mind. What does Jane Austen have to say about people, communities, and nature? And what is the cause of her resurgent popularity? Perhaps, I allowed myself to think, the questions are related. Answering the questions proved not so simple, but I did have fun trying. Sam and I read Aunt Jane’s letter, dated 8 Jan. 1817, to her nine-year-old niece Cassy, beginning: . . . Ym raed Yssac I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey. Ruoy xis snisuoc emac ereh yadretsey, dna dah hcae a eceip fo ekac . . . . . . I read the amusingly mordant comments she could write about her neighbors, such as the one in her letter of 3July 1813 to her brother Francis, mentioning the “respectable, worthy, clever, agreable Mr Tho. Leigh, who has just closed a good life at the age of 79, & must have died the possesser of one of the finest Estates in England & of more worthless Nephews and Neices [sic] than any other private Man in the United Kingdoms.” I read the last chapters of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion each three times. I read once again about Catherine Morland’s cruel expulsion from Northanger Abbey, and about the ill-omened trip of Fanny Price, the Bertram sisters, and the Crawfords to the Rushworth estate, Sotherton, with its seductive, if too regularly planted, wilderness. And again I was privileged to accompany Emma Woodhouse, Miss Bates, Frank Churchill, and Mr. Knightly on the tension-charged picnic to Box Hill, surely one of the highest peaks in English literature.

Degrees of Intimacy

When we arrived in Vancouver at the start of our vacation, the tabloid headline at the newspaper stand caught our attention. “World’s Bravest Mom,” it shrieked. We stopped to read. The story was simple; it needed no journalistic embellishment. Dusk, August 19, 1996. Mrs. Cindy Parolin is horseback riding with her four children in Tulameen, in southern British Columbia’s Okanagan region. Without warning, a cougar springs out of the vegetation, hurtling at the neck of one of the horses. In the confusion, Steven Parolin, age six, falls off his horse and is seized by the cougar. Mrs. Parolin, armed only with a riding crop, jumps off her horse and challenges the cougar, which drops the bleeding child and springs at her. Ordering her other children to take their wounded brother and go for help, Mrs. Parolin confronts the cougar alone. By the time rescuers reach her an hour later, she is dying. The cat, shot soon afterward, was a small one, little more than sixty pounds. Adult male cougars can weigh as much as 200 pounds, we learn the next day from the BC Environment’s pamphlet entitled “Safety Guide to Cougars.” We are on our way to Garibaldi Provincial Park, where we plan to do some hiking, and have stopped in the park head-quarters for information. “Most British Columbians live all their lives without a glimpse of a cougar, much less a confrontation with one,” says the pamphlet, noting that five people have been killed by cougars in British Columbia in the past hundred years. (Actually, the number is now higher; cougar attacks have become increasingly common in the western United States and Canada in recent years.) “Seeing a cougar should be an exciting and rewarding experience, with both you and the cougar coming away unharmed.”However, the pamphlet notes, cougars seem to be attracted to children as prey, possibly because of “their high-pitched voices, small size, and erratic movements.” When hiking, “make enough noise to prevent surprising a cougar . . . carry a sturdy walking stick to be used as a weapon if necessary,” and “keep children close-at-hand and under control.”

More Field Ecology: Rightofway Island

On all but one of the field trips in my Field Ecology course, I take my students to the sorts of places that they have been to before: the beach, the pinelands, the Highlands forest, farms, old fields, streams, salt marshes, suburbs. But on the third trip, after the ones to the campus and to the experimental plots at Hutcheson Forest, we go to a place that is, for all its superficial familiarity, altogether different and exotic. This trip is to America’s deserted empire, what the person who knew it best, ecologist Frank Egler, described as the Right of way Domain. Right-of-way land comprises at least fifty to seventy-five million acres in the United States, an area larger than New England. It is disposed as long strips of property along railroad tracks, roads, and canals; under power lines; and above buried pipelines. Many of these rights-of-way, even those in heavily populated areas, are scarcely ever visited by people—they are cut off from human presence by fences, no-trespassing signs, patrolling police, dense vegetation, and a scarcity of reasons to set foot in them. True, some abandoned rights-of-way have been put to use. The tow-path and adjacent land along the old Delaware–Raritan Canal, which winds its way for many miles through central New Jersey, has become a very long, very narrow, very popular state park. Indeed, this is the park that has helped protect the forest along the Millstone River, which I de-scribed earlier. Hunters love the rights-of-way under power lines, which attract deer and small game. And disused railroad lines have been turned into foot and bike trails in several parts of the country. But many rights-of-way, totaling a huge amount of land, go for months or years without feeling a human step or hearing a human voice. These places are them-selves neither urban nor suburban nor rural; neither settled nor wilder-ness. They are a quintessential part of what author James Howard Kunstler has called “the geography of nowhere.” In my right-of-way trip we start with a boggy strip of land above a transcontinental gas pipeline.

Social Evolution versus Sudden Change

In an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, meeting at the Vatican on October 22, 1996, Pope John Paul II accepted the theory of evolution, thus bringing to an official end, for the Catholic Church, the most bitter and most persistent of all debates between science and religion. “New knowledge,” John Paul said, “has lead to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” He qualified his statement somewhat by pointing out that there are many readings of evolution, “materialist, reductionist, and [his preference] spiritualist interpretations.” Still, we must not quibble; the Pope has endorsed slow evolutionary change, Darwinian evolution, as the likely way that nature modifies all living creatures, including all human beings. Fashioning us in the image of God, the Pope appears to believe, took a very, very long time. The dust has not yet settled on the great evolution war, nor will it settle soon. A few intelligent scientists are still not convinced that evolutionary theory explains the species richness of our planet and the amazing adaptations, such as eyes, wings, and social behavior, of its in-habitants. There also remain powerful religious orthodoxies that show no sign of giving up the fight for creationist theology. A second war about evolution is now being waged, an invisible, un-publicized struggle between a different set of protagonists; it is a war whose outcome will affect our lives and civilization more directly than the original controversy ever did. The new protagonists are not science and traditional religion; instead, they are the corporate apostles of the religion of progress versus those surviving groups and individuals committed to slow social evolution as a way of life. To understand this other struggle, it is necessary to look at evolution in a broad context that transcends biology. Not just a way of explaining how the camel got her hump or how the elephant got his trunk, the idea of evolution can also be applied to the writing of a play that “evolves” in the mind of the playwright or the “evolution” of treaties, banking systems, and anything else that changes over time in a non random direction.

Pseudocommunities

To begin with a little anecdote. There is a classroom, an ugly, badly shaped, windowless room in a modern university building designed with students not in mind. In this room there is a small class, my class. We have rearranged tables and chairs in a semicircle around my place to defy the terrible ambience and to allow all twenty-five students to see and hear each other and me. Class is in session; I am talking. Two students sitting together in the front row—a thirty-year-old man with a pager on his belt and a twenty-year-old woman—are speaking to each other and laughing quietly; they see that I am looking at them and they continue to laugh, not furtively or offensively but openly and engagingly, as if I weren’t there. I don’t know what they are laughing about. Both of these students will eventually receive an A in the course for their exceptionally fine work. As I speak to the class, a part of my mind is thinking about these students and wondering why they are laughing. Is there chalk on my face? Is my fly open? Have I repeated myself or unconsciously misused a word or inverted a phrase? Then I remember something Bruce Wilshire wrote, and the paranoia fades. The laughter has nothing to do with me. Bruce, a philosopher who works in a nearby building on campus, described the same attitude in his own classes in his book, The Moral Collapse of the University. This passive and casual rudeness, a fairly new phenomenon, has a simple cause, he said: “I sometimes see students looking at me as if they thought I could not see them, as if I were just somebody on their screen.” When my students were laughing, it didn’t occur to them that I would be bothered—at that moment they were treating me as if I were a face on television. That’s what it is; I am sure of it. The students (at least most of them) and I inhabit different worlds, even when we sit in the same room.

Sherlock Nero and Us

Some people have a drink when they get home from work—a martini, a beer. Maybe two or three. Life is especially stressful in the twenty-first century. The same indecent forces that are destroying nature are disrupting our working lives as well. Who will own the company tomorrow? Will there be a “reduction in force” or some other euphemism for the ax? When is the next reorganization coming? Is my ten or twenty years of faithful service an asset or, more likely, a sign of obsolescence and suspicious loyalty to bosses and co-workers now out of favor or working for other companies? How am I to answer the fax that arrived at 4:00 p.m., the one that seemed to contradict the fax that arrived at 11:00? When will I find time to fill out the questionnaire from the Resource Management Office, and does it take precedence over the Goals Enhancement Strategy questionnaire that came from the Administrative Services Division? Are my computer files compatible with the new software system, and, if so, why did the box on the screen say, “This paragraph is un-readable. Do you wish to substitute a standard paragraph?” Just what is our real work, anyway? Alcohol can take the edge off stress, but it is not everyone’s consolation. Some choose television or the Internet; mine is to pick up one of the scores of detective novels that I keep close to hand and plunge in. Then I can forget for a little while the vice presidents, deans, and other academic, corporate-style bosses who do their best to make life in the modern university an unproductive misery. In this way I can put out of mind, temporarily, the pleas of students who don’t understand why there are no courses to take and the ravings of colleagues who can’t figure out how to cope with the contradictory, impossible demands placed on them. Why should detective stories be, for so many, such a good and entertaining way of escaping from reality? That they are is clear; billions of copies have been sold.

Universities and Their Communities

I received an invitation to speak to the Heinz Endowments a few years ago. This major foundation was thinking of starting a program of charitable donations to help the environment and wanted advice about how to make the best use of its money. Would I participate, the director asked, in a one-day meeting on environmental education being organized by David Orr? My topic would be the role of the university. I went, and the following is more or less what I said to Heinz. During my first years as a board member of the Educational Foundation of America, which gives grants in a number of areas, including the environment and education, I was struck by the extreme scarcity of exciting, innovative, useful proposals coming out of the major research universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and the like. The second-tier research universities are no better; they are all scrambling to copy the bad models ahead of them. The problems that the universities are doing little or nothing to address—either in teaching or in research—are those that we must confront if our civilization is to survive. They are materialism in our culture; the deterioration of human communities; anomie; the commercialization (privatization) of former communal functions such as health, charity, and communication; the growth imperative; exploitation of the Third World; the disintegration of agriculture; our ignorance of the ecology of disease, especially epidemic disease; the loss of important skills and knowledge; the devastating decline in the moral and cultural-intellectual education of children; the impoverishment and devaluation of language; and the turning away from environmental and human realities in favor of thin, life-sucking electronic substitutes. Far from confronting these problems, universities are increasingly allying themselves with the multinational commercial forces that are causing them. The institutions that are supposed to be generating the ideas that nourish and sustain society have abandoned this function in their quest for cash. It is typical, for example, that with all the academics working on developing and patenting new crops, the only effective mechanism for monitoring and preserving the priceless and rapidly dwindling stock of existing crops in North America and Europe—the heritage of agriculture—was developed by a young farmer completely outside the university system.

The Vine Cleaners

First fragment. I am in my apartment, a modern, starkly decorated eyrie in a high-rise building. I know it is my apartment in the intuitive but un-challengeable way one knows things in dreams. Actually, I am in a short hallway within the apartment—a parqueted floor and a window at the end of the hall stick in my mind. There is a storm going on, but the other side of the window seems very far away. It grows dark outside; lightning flashes intermittently. Sam, my youngest child, warns me to stay away from the window; he points out that there is a danger of tornadoes. As if to underscore the seriousness of the threat, the lights of the apartment begin to flicker. Second fragment. My wife, Joan, meets me at the door to the apartment. She looks upset. “The vine cleaners are here,” she whispers. It is clear to me that she wants to send them away—we don’t need vine cleaners for our potted plants—but it is too late. Looking past Joan, I see that the vine cleaners, an immigrant couple, are already at work, spraying and polishing the leaves. I can smell the perfumed chemical cleanser they are using. Perhaps, I think to myself, this is a free service provided by the management of the apartment building; but no, it isn’t, for now they are done and the man tells me that the vine cleaning costs $8.50. I hand him a $10 bill and get a one and two quarters in change. The couple waits. Do I tip them? A quarter each is hardly enough. Is a dollar too much? I hesitate. Out-side, the storm rages. Then the lights flicker again and go out, freezing the tableau. I opened my eyes with mixed feelings of relief and disorientation. Re-lief because the vine cleaners had vanished, along with the question of how much to tip them—there is no need to tip people in dreams. Disorientation because the place I had awakened in was so utterly different from the clinging aura of the dream, and yet this real place was also for a moment strange and unfamiliar.

Writing

The semester is over, my grade rosters have been handed to the registrar, and I am home, writing sporadically and glancing through a book by P. G. Wodehouse, whose incomparable prose, as elegant as it is funny, is always very soothing. The thirty students in Conservation Ecology were very good this year. Most of them were informed, outdoors-loving, committed, hard working people who cared for each other and seemed to enjoy the class. With a few exceptions, however, they can’t write English, and I am still recovering from the effects of reading the term papers upon which their grades were largely based. For twenty-five years, I have been assigning a major term paper in lieu (“in loo,” as one student wrote) of an exam. I used to get eighteen- to forty-page papers, acceptably or even nicely written; now the students struggle to reach fourteen pages with the help of triple spacing, margins you could drive a bus along, and type sizes usually reserved for the visually disabled. And the writing! The first mistake the students are making is to use the “spell-checkers” of their computer software as a substitute for proofreading. The results are papers in which all the words are spelled correctly, even if they are not the right words. Reading these spell-checked papers can be like trying to translate from Spanish to English based on the assumption that words that are spelled the same in the two languages have the same meaning. (This can lead to some confusion if, for example, the Spanish words are sin, cabal, or saber.) In one of the papers, I had to erase a long, marginal comment I had written when I realized that illicit was meant to be elicit. In another, I had trouble with the philosophical implications of the word modal, used throughout the text, until I turned it into model, which made more sense. Then there were words such as begum (“a Muslim lady of high rank,” my dictionary told me), which didn’t seem to fit easily into the context of a paper on the genetics of coyotes, and which didn’t have an obvious substitute.

Adaptation

When my wife Joan and I were newly married, we lived in a north Jersey suburb not far from the New York state line. Every weekday morning we drove down the Palisades Interstate Parkway to the George Washington Bridge and crossed the Hudson River to Manhattan, where I taught and Joan was a graduate student. The parkway runs along the Palisades, a magnificent, igneous bluff that flanks the west bank of the Hudson and faces, on the far shore, Yonkers, the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and Manhattan. Wooded parkland extends on both sides of the road for its entire length until just before the approach to the bridge, where many lanes of superhighway converge on the toll booths. We loved the woods along the parkway—they calmed us before our immersion in the chaotic city, and soothed us when we left it at the end of the day. That was before we went on our honeymoon, a three-week hike on the Appalachian Trail (interspersed with some hitchhiking on country roads), from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to the border of the Great Smokies in North Carolina. The forest we walked through was a mixture of tall pines and an incredible variety of native hardwoods—an experience of natural diversity that was overwhelming. Nearly every tree we saw was new to us, yet we could feel the pattern and cohesiveness of the forest as a whole. Rhododendrons formed a closed canopy over our heads, fragmenting the June sunshine into a softly shifting mosaic of dap-pled patches. We stepped on a carpet of rhododendron petals. The trip was over all too quickly. The plane carrying us back de-scended through a dense inversion layer of black smog before touching down on the runway at Newark. Home. We were depressed and silent. The ride from Newark Airport to our house took us on the Palisades Parkway. For the first time, we became aware that the woods along the park way were dominated by thin, ungainly Ailanthus, with their coarse(and, we knew, rank-smelling) foliage, and by other weedy species such as the lanky Paulownia. Suddenly, these exotic species seemed very much out of place.