My Life and Thoughts

Inscrutable youth, with their enormous sweatshirts and tiny telephones: what are their hopes, their dreams, their intellectual interests? It is in my nature to sit around making big generalizations about things, so that is what I was asking myself as I paged through the thesis proposals of my potential future students (see previous post).  Here are my findings.

Today’s youth is interested in: virtual reality, hyperreality, simulacra and mimicry; spaces and places; and the ethical status of various aesthetic objects, including but not limited to, virtual civilizations, the Aids Memorial Quilt, the HBO drama Real Women Have Curves, and Peter Eisenmann’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

I was particularly fascinated by the “murdered Jews” proposal—it engages Habermas and Adorno in a debate about “the Aesthetics of Memorializing the Holocaust”—due to the theoretically irrelevant but extremely interesting circumstance that the author is not only a double major in chemistry and biological sciences, but is also called YunXiang Chu (and thus unlikely to be either German or Jewish). The proposal included some beautiful photographs of the memorial, taken by Chu in Berlin.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Photo by Boris Mehl.
Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas.

Returning to the subject of today’s youth, it would be a mistake to conclude that they have left Christian “humanism” by the wayside; there was a proposal about Dante, and one each on my two favorite saints: St. Ignatius of Loyola (“Ignatian influence” in Donne’s Holy Sonnets), and St. Jerome (“The Shifting Authority of Biblical Text in Jerome’s Hebrew Questions”).

I wrote about St. Ignatius of Loyola in an earlier post; today, I will leave you with some thoughts about St. Jerome and why he is so great.

St. Jerome was born c. 420 A.D. in Stridon (Štrigova, in modern-day Croatia). When he was in his twenties, he moved to Rome, where he assembled a beautiful library of Latin books. This library was the most difficult thing for Jerome to renounce when he became a Christian. Instead he continued to read his favorite pagan authors, punishing himself afterwards by fasting, weeping, and vigils, and then forcing himself to read the Bible, in a kind of ongoing binge-and-purge cycle:

After shedding tears which the remembrance of past sins brought forth from my inmost heart I would take in my hands a volume of Plautus. When I came to myself and began to read a prophet again, I rebelled at the uncouth style and… with my blinded eyes… I thought this the fault not of my eyes but of the sun.

Jerome had been living in this fashion for some time, when he contracted a mysterious wasting disease and fell into what appeared to be mortal fever. In this fever, while his friends were already preparing for his funeral, Jerome dreamed that he had died and come up before the Lord’s tribunal. He identified himself before God as Jerome and a Christian; but God called him a liar—“Thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian. Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also’”—and ordered him to be beaten.

Jerome awoke to find his shoulders covered with bruises. Shortly afterwards, he made a full recovery from his illness, and gave away all of his Latin books.

I love this story because it shows how hard it is to give up your favorite books. This is a renunciation which every writer has to make at some point, because when you write a book, it can’t be exactly like other books; it has to be about life, too, and life is constantly changing. Proust writes about this problem: from earliest childhood, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time wants to be a writer… but he loves the Arabian Nights so much that he is horrified by the thought that “his” book would have to be different:

When one is in love with a literary work, one would like… to write something just like it, but one must sacrifice this love… and think, not of one’s taste, but of a truth which does not ask for our preferences, and prohibits us from thinking about them. And only if one faithfully follows this truth will one sometimes stumble again upon what one has renounced, finding that, in forgetting these works, one has written the Arabian Nights or the Memoirs of Saint-Simon of another age.

I write more about this in my dissertation.

The great thing in the life of St. Jerome is that he finally does “stumble again upon what he has renounced”: after being made so miserable by the “uncouth style” of the Greek and Hebrew prophets, by comparison to the elegant Latin of Plautus and Cicero, he hits upon a solution: he will simply devote the whole rest of his life translating the Bible into Latin, producing the Vulgate for which he is still famous. He stopped reading his favorite books, learned to ignore his “preferences,” and created the new literature of his time.

A thousand years after the death of St. Jerome, a similar kind of renunciation led to the birth of the novel, in Cervantes’s Don Quijote. Don Quijote, like St. Jerome, has to have his favorite books literally beaten out of him. (It is while Quijote is sick in bed, recovering from his first knightly adventure, that the barber and priest destroy his library of chivalric romances.) As St. Jerome devoted his life to rehabilitating Ciceronian Latin in the “truth” of the new Christian world, so does Don Quijote devote his life to rehabilitating the elegant discourse of knight errantry, while remaining faithful to the truth of everyday life in La Mancha.

One of the most beautiful paintings, of many beautiful paintings that I saw during my travels in Spain in October was Joachim Patinir’s Landscape with St. Jerome (1516–17), which shows Jerome removing a thorn from the paw of a lion.

Patinir’s St. Jerome, in the Prado.

This is another reason why I like St. Jerome: I am quite fond of lions. Jerome is often depicted removing a thorn from the paw of a lion.

Here is another good one, by Niccolò Colantonio.

Niccolò Colantonio, St. Jerome in His Study (ca. 1445)
in the National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples.

I especially like this painting because of the setting in Jerome’s study—as if the lion has come to Jerome’s office hours for help with his paw.

(The doctor is in.)

Tags: academic life, animals, dissertation, Don Quijote, Spain, St. Ignatius of Loyola, Stanford, today's youth

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.