1992

Had the idea of such an invitation ever crossed my mind, I would have thought the chances of being asked to give the Haskins Lecture as a good deal less likely than being struck by lightning. I found it a stunning experience, and I cannot be sure that I have recovered sufficiently to deliver a coherent response. I can only assume that I was selected because I am one of a rare species in the United States—an historical humanistic geographer—and someone must have suggested it might be of interest to have a look at such a creature, see how he might describe himself and hear how he got into such an obscure profession. Geographers are an endangered species in America, as, alas, attested by their status on this very campus [the University of Chicago], where one of the oldest and greatest graduate departments, founded ninety years ago, has been reduced to some sort of committee, and the few remaining geographers live out their lives without hope of local reproduction. I shall have more to say about this general situation, for while I have never personally felt endangered, no American geographer can work unaware of the losses of positions we suffered over many years and of the latent dangers of sudden raids from preying administrators who see us as awkward and vulnerable misfits who can be culled from the expensive herds of academics they try to manage. I have always been a geographer, but it took me a while to learn that one could make a living at it. My career began when I first looked out upon a wider world from a farmhouse on a hill overlooking a small town on the eastern edge of Washington State. My arrival on this earth at that particular place was the result of the convergence (this is a geographer’s explanation of such an event) of two quite common strands of American migration history. My paternal grandparents emigrated from a village in Saxony to Iowa in 1880, following the path of some kin.

1989

I am a bookworm. Since the age of eleven I have read and read, and enjoyed almost every moment of it. Yet I was very slow to learn how to read at all, and I hated school, avoiding it as long and as often as I could, without being an actual dropout. It was certainly not in the various schools that I attended so unwillingly that I learned to read or to write. In fact, my exasperated parents had to hire a tutor to get me started. Nor were my first encounters with literature always happy, though they certainly made a deep impression upon me. The first book I ever read through by myself was a German translation of David Copperfteld. I read it over and over again and I still love it. The second book was a children’s novel about two boys in the Thirty Years War, which led me to look it up in a wonderful illustrated world history in many volumes in my parents’ library. I was hooked for life on fiction and history. It was not, however, all pleasure. One day I picked up the first volume of Shakespeare in the Schlegel-Tieck translation. The first play was Titus Andronicus, and I read it all. To this day I can still feel the fear and horror it inspired. I was so afraid and confused that I could not even bring myself to tell anyone what was bothering me. Finally I managed to spill it out to my oldest sister. As soon as I told her I, of course, felt infinitely relieved, especially as she assured me that these things did not really happen. The trouble was that both she and I knew that far worse was going on all around us. By 1939 I already understood that books, even scary ones, would be my best refuge from a world that was far more terrible than anything they might reveal. And that is how I became a bookworm. It was also the end of my childhood. Biography, novels, and plays are the delight of young readers, and they certainly were mine.

1986

I began my academic career most inauspiciously by being detained after school in the first grade. My offense was that, when called upon to read, I could never find the point at which my predecessor in the reading lesson had left off. Then I aggravated the situation by a similar failure after school. I do not now recall how many times I had to submit to this humiliation. Nor can I understand why I did not have the wit to point out in my defense that I had learned to read with ease long before entering the first grade. My trouble was that, as soon as the class started to read about the enthralling adventures of Jack and Jill, Fannie and her apple, the house that Jack built, and the rest, I raced on excitedly to the end of the tale, so as to discover for myself how these noble characters had made out in their perilous confrontation with the universe. Consequently, when my turn came to read, I was completely lost and had no idea of what part of the story had been left to me. As I ponder this lugubrious chapter in my history, I cannot remember how I explained my ignominy to my mother. She was a generous and kindly lady, who, however, was altogether intolerant of academic derelictions on the part of her offspring. Had she known of the undeserved suffering I had been undergoing, she would have stormed upon my schoolhouse and torn the place apart—brick by brick. So much, then, for my agonies in the first grade. But at least I was never left back in kindergarten. This ignominious fate, candor compels me to point out, overtook my dear wife, Rosemary Park, that peerless college president and vice-chancellor of UCLA. Despite her virtuosity in such kindergarten exercises as weaving—over one, under one; over two, under two, etc.—that poor girl got stuck in kindergarten for two years.

1987

My first encounter with the world of learning took place, if family account is to be believed, when I entered kindergarten in Scarsdale, New York. To break the ice among the little strangers, my teacher, Miss Howl, asked her pupils to volunteer a song. I gladly offered a German one, called “Morgenrot.” It was a rather gloomy number that I had learned at home, about a soldier fatalistically contemplating his death in battle at dawn. The year was 1919, and America’s hatred of the Hun still ran strong. Miss Howl was outraged at my performance. She took what she called her “little enemy” by the hand and marched him off to the principal’s office. That wise administrator resolved in my interest the problems of politics and the academy. She promoted me at once to the first grade under Mrs. Beyer, a fine teacher who expected me to work but not to sing. Was this episode a portent of my life in the halls of learning? Hardly. But it was my unwitting introduction to the interaction of culture and politics, my later field of scholarly interest. When I taught European intellectual history at Berkeley in the early 1960s,I devoted a portion of my course to the way in which the same cultural materials were put to different uses in different national societies. One day, I gave a lecture on William Morris and Richard Wagner. The intellectual journeys of these two quite dissimilar artist-thinkers involved stops at many of the same cultural stations. Morris began by using Arthurian legend to champion a religion of beauty, then became an enthusiast for Norse mythology and folk art, and ended a socialist. Wagner traversed much the same itinerary as Morris, but in the reverse direction, starting as a social radical, then reworking Nordic sagas, and ending, with the Arthurian hero Parsifal, in a pseudoreligion of art. In the midst of delivering my lecture, I suddenly saw before me a picture from my childhood that I thought to be by Morris.

1993

Once upon a time there lived a little girl in Erfurt, a beautiful town in central Germany—a town that boasted a number of Gothic cathedrals and was a center of horticulture. The great medieval mystic Meister Eckhart had preached there; Luther had taken his vow to become a monk there and spent years in the Augustine monastery in its walls; and Goethe had met Napoleon in Erfurt, for the town’s distance from the centers of classical German literature, Weimar and Jena, was only a few hours by horseback or coach. The little girl loved reading and drawing but hated outdoor activities. As she was the only child, born rather late in her parents’ lives, they surrounded her with measureless love and care. Her father, hailing from central Germany, not far from the Erzgebirge, was an employee in the post and telegraph service; her mother, however, had grown up in the north not far from the Dutch border, daughter of a family with a centuries-long tradition of seafaring. The father was mild and gentle, and his love of mystical literature from all religions complemented the religious bent of the mother, grown up in the rigid tradition of northern German protestantism, but also endowed with strong psychic faculties as is not rare in people living close to the unpredictable ocean. To spend the summer vacations in grandmother’s village was wonderful: the stories of relatives who had performed dangerous voyages around Cape Horn or to India, of grandfather losing his frail clipper near Rio Grande del Sul after more than a hundred days of sailing with precious goods—all these stories were in the air. Mother’s younger sister was later to weave them into a novel and to capture the life in the coastal area in numerous radio plays. Both parents loved poetry, and the father used to read aloud German and, later, French classical literature to us on Sunday afternoons.

1991

I am grateful and flattered to have had my talk . . . included under the ongoing rubric of “A Life of Learning,” but in all accuracy and necessary realism I must be permitted the protective sub-rubric of “A Composer of a Certain Age,” for how might a composer justify his presence before learned representatives of learned bodies, when the very term learned has appeared and disappeared in the history of music only in the most apologetic and fugitive of roles, in such expressions as learned writing or—more specifically— learned, counterpoint, usually with the intimation of the anachronistic, the factitious, and—even—the jejune? There does appear to have been a fleeting moment or so in eighteenth-century France when the term learned was invoked to characterize a “taste” distinguished from the “general.” Apparently, compositions were deemed to be “learned” if it was thought that their understanding demanded some musical knowledge. But this elitist distinction did not, could not, survive the guillotine, and never was to be reheaded, certainly not with the subsequent and continuing triumph of what Goodman has called the Tingle—Immersion theory, which—when applied to music—demands that music be anyone’s anodyne, a non-habit-forming nepenthe. I could dig even deeper historically and dare to remind you that, in the medieval curriculum, music was a member of the quadrivium, but that curriculum, like so many demanding curricula after it, has long since been banished. And, in any case consider the company that music kept in the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. If that curriculum had survived, music would be burdened further with guilt by association, because—for reasons apparently more sociological than methodological—there is no characterization that guarantees music more immediate, automatic, and ultimate derogation and dismissal than mathematical, thereby joining learned and, above all, academic. But it is as academics that we join here. ... I trust it does not come as a surprise, or as an unpleasant embarrassment, or as further evidence of the Greshamization of the university, to learn that there are composers in your very midst on your faculties.

1988

As I began the task of putting the pieces together that would describe how I moved from one stage of intellectual development to another, I was reminded of a remark that Eubie Blake made as he approached his ninety-ninth birthday. He said, “If I had known that I would live this long I would have taken better care of myself.” To paraphrase him, if I had known that I would become an historian and the Haskins Lecturer for 1988 I would have kept better records of my own pilgrimage through life. I may be forgiven, therefore, if I report that the beginnings are a bit hazy, not only to me but to my parents as well. For example, they had no clear idea of when I learned to read and write. It was when I was about three or four, I am told. My mother, an elementary school teacher, introduced me to the world of learning when I was three years old. Since there were no day-care centers in the village where we lived, she had no alternative to taking me to school and seating me in the rear where she could keep an eye on me. I remained quiet but presumably I also remained attentive, for when I was about five my mother noticed that on the sheet of paper she gave me each morning, I was no longer making lines and sketching out some notable examples of abstract art. I was writing words, to be sure almost as abstract as my art, and making sentences. My mother later said that she was not surprised much less astonished at what some, not she, would have called my precocity. Her only reproach—to herself, not me—was that my penmanship was hopelessly flawed since she had not monitored my progress as she had done for her enrolled students. From that point on, I would endeavor to write and through the written word to communicate my thoughts to others. My interest in having some thoughts of my own to express was stimulated by my father who, among other tasks, practiced law by day and read and wrote by night.

1983

I am reminded by Professor [Georges] May’s generous introduction of a story about Winston Churchill. After World War II and his stint as prime minister, he was invited back to his old school, Harrow, to give the commencement address and decided he ought probably to oblige. So he went, weathered an introduction almost as laudatory as the one you’ve just listened to (except in his case deserved) then got to his feet and said to the graduating class, “Nevah give up!” and sat down. I think you will agree that this is the most memorable commencement address you have ever heard as well as perhaps the wisest possible comment on the life that all of us here are engaged in fostering, and that I, alas, on grounds that will be no more apparent to you than they are to me, have been singled out (“fingered” is, I believe, the underworld term) to address: the life of learning. . . . Although I stand here before my betters, I do not stand here before very many of my elders. I have already drawn down from that mysterious fund with which we all begin three and a half years beyond my Biblical allowance, with the result that on any reasonably quiet afternoon I can hear my brain cells dying so fast they sound like popcorn. And that, I came to realize, is precisely what ACLS had in mind: they wanted to exhibit me, the way the Egyptians used to exhibit a skeleton at the beginning of their feasts. “Nothing like a mouldy old professor,” I could hear the Executive Board whispering, “to energize an audience of other professors into taking thought—before they get to be like him.” So do take thought, ladies and gentlemen, golden lads and girls; and as an old gravestone in Exeter churchyard says, “The faults you saw in me, Pray strive to shun; And look at home: There’s something to be done.” My instructions for this talk urged me to be somewhat personal, even to reminisce.

1990

I welcome this opportunity to pay my personal tribute to Charles Homer Haskins, a great American scholar and historian whose work I have always admired, whose contributions are still valid and worth reading many decades after his death, and whom I consider a worthy guide and model for all present and future practitioners of historical scholarship. This honor comes to me quite unexpected, and even as a surprise, for my background is foreign and untypical (though I have lived in this country for over half a century); the subject that interests me most, the history of Western philosophy and thought, has become increasingly unfashionable, and has been called irrelevant and useless, elitist and Eurocentric, and even undemocratic (perhaps I could make it more palatable by calling it the study of interconceptual space); and my method, which tries to combine the philosophical interpretation of original texts with the pertinent skills of history and philology, and of their auxiliary disciplines such as diplomatics and chronology, palaeography and bibliography, is now considered hopelessly traditional and even antiquated, as I have been told more than once by foundation officials, administrators and colleagues, reviewers and critics. This occasion prompts me to say a few words that reflect my experience and my opinions, and I apologize in case they displease some of my listeners. I have been exposed over the years to many words and thoughts that displease me, and I might claim for once my right to the freedom of speech. I do not think that I am unwilling to stand corrected when some of my statements are refuted by solid facts or arguments, and I am quite ready to admit that there are many areas and problems that lie outside my special field of interest and that deserve to be explored by other scholars. I also admit that my advanced age may make me obtuse and unresponsive to certain new subjects or methods that may turn out to be perfectly legitimate.