Lucius Aurelius Apolaustus Memphius, a slave by birth, caught the eye of Roman Emperor Lucius Aurelius Verus for his exposition in dance of Pythagoras’ philosophy of the transmigration of souls.
Review of “Populus” by Guy de la Bedoyere, The Wall Street Journal
It was, as the MFAs in the campus coffee shop said, a “fraught” situation. They never said what it was fraught with, but they didn’t have to; it was fraught with tension, fear of failure, anxiety. It was the day of senior oral exams at the University of Chicago, but I wasn’t going to the dentist; instead, I would be facing my senior advisor and a second professor of philosophy–there I suppose to revive me in case I passed out, or choked on the words “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”–in defense of my senior thesis.
It wasn’t altogether clear what my thesis was; I’d been, shall we say, distracted in my final year of college by the onset of legal drinking age that had allowed me to imbibe the regional beers of Illinois, Heileman’s Special Export in particular. You know you’ve developed a drinking habit when the bartender at your campus watering hole slides a free beer across the bar at you, a customer appreciation lagniappe that, unfortunately, you can’t take with you due to draconian open container laws in the Land of Lincoln.
As a result, my thesis was less a thesis than a mere observation: some metaphors that employ the same term–“bear,” for example–equate them with vastly different objects. There is both Paul “Bear” Bryant, college football coach, and poet Delmore Schwartz, who described his corporeal self as “The heavy bear who goes with me.” There could not have been two more dissimilar men–both, as it happens, born in 1913–and yet they were both bears in metaphorical terms. Had I drank less and thought more during my last year under the tutelage of chalky pedagogues I might have actually developed this into a thesis; instead, it just lay there, like roadkill, to be avoided if possible, or crushed to death if not.
I was thus in the position of paleontologist Anne Elk, a character created by John Cleese of Monty Python fame; after much belabored throat-clearing and credential-citing (“A. Elk, brackets, Miss, brackets”) prefatory to the elaboration of her new theory, it turned out that the theory was utterly fatuous: “All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.” There was a rather high probability that when I expounded my theory that while Bryant and Schwartz are both metaphorically bears, they are nonetheless very unlike each other!–my examiners Knox Hill and Ted Cohen would purse their lips and say “Huh, fancy that. So what?” when I was through.
Hill I could handle, no problem. He was the slow, deliberative type; a ruminative cud-chewer of a philosopher, a bovine blovinator who’d rather masticate a concept until it is mush than come to a conclusion. He was the author of a text on ethical philosophy, so I had the home court advantage over him since my concentration was in aesthetics.
Cohen, on the other hand, was a philosophical Muhammad Ali; he floated like a butterfly, lulling you with a low-pitched voice and a distracted air, then stung like a bee with an apercu that seemed to come out of left field–to mix my metaphors–but stayed with you a long time: “Anthropological evidence cuts both ways,” for example, and “You can read too much existentialism,” both antidotes for what ailed many relativistic undergrads of my era. I could expect some light jabs from him to begin the sparring, then a knockout punch that I wouldn’t see coming before it landed.
I prepared for my examination with my usual performance-enhancing drug fix– Dannon blueberry yogurt and bad campus dining hall coffee–and made my way to Cohen’s third-floor office, which I used to haunt back when I was trying to persuade him to be my senior advisor. I had originally been assigned to the chair of the department who, in Bishop Berkeley-fashion–seemed to think that I wasn’t a material substance, just a tuition-paying cipher.
Eventually I persuaded Cohen to take me on, but he didn’t seem particularly excited about it. I assume it was because I added to his workload but not his paycheck, in the manner of the new teacher who’s asked to be the drama coach at a high school strapped for funds. Eventually we reached a sort of Midwestern detente; he told me jokes from his downstate Illinois boyhood, I parried with snappy one-liners from central Missouri. The material wouldn’t get past a censorious woke mind of today, but some of his made its way into his Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, the leading–if not the only–book of serious philosophical thought on comic matters.
I knocked softly on the door and entered to find Cohen chatting away–his mind never rested–and Hill soaking it in like an over-serious sponge. I really shouldn’t be so hard on the latter; he gave me a straight A in Ethics even though at that time in my life I was one of the least ethical persons I knew.
“C’mon in,” Cohen said, and Hill sort-of smiled. They probably wanted to pass me just so I’d get on with my life and not hang around campus another year, a prospect for which I had no taste, they needn’t have worried. I had asked my friend Smitty what he planned to do after he graduated and there followed a sort of Ralph Waldo Emerson-Henry David Thoreau patter routine I’d learned about in high school; Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax, which he believed was used to fund a war that he opposed (the Mexican-American, for those keeping score at home). He went to jail where Emerson visited him and asked “What are you doing in there?” to which Thoreau responded “What are you doing out there?” “Why?” I’d asked Smitty what he was doing once he graduated and he’d replied “Stick around Hyde Park–what else am I gonna do?”
After a bit of casual banter (“Heard any good syllogisms lately?”) we got down to the nitty-gritty: What, exactly, did I have to show for my four years of philosophizing? I have to say that I delivered an Anne Elk-like tour de force; nobody, but nobody, knew my thesis like I did. I doubt Aristotle himself, whose Poetics contains a number of passages dealing with metaphor, could have explicated it better. He’d been dead for 2,225 years at the time, but even with that head start he couldn’t have touched me.
As I brought my presentation to a less-than-rousing conclusion, Cohen smiled knowingly, since he’d been working with me for the better part of the year to refine what passed for my thinking. Hill, by contrast, seemed befuddled. Little furrows of doubt formed across his forehead–and try saying that five times fast. Back then many professors smoked pipes indoors, and he fiddled with his, tamping the tobacco down, then re-lighting it. He stared off into the distance–which given that we were in a faculty office wasn’t that far–and a cloud of concern scudded across his face. If the furrows on his forehead were lucky, he might have broken out into a spring shower.
I can joke about it now, but at the time I was genuinely concerned that he’d pull a Gertrude Stein on me, saying as she did of Oakland that “there’s no there there” and hold me back. He had, as T.S. Eliot said of Henry James, “a mind so fine no idea could violate it,” so it was possible my diaphanous subtlety had eluded him. Didn’t he realize that senior seminars are pass-fail? My job was not to score high, but merely to show up and make it to the end of the hour.
He stirred slightly in his chair, as if troubled by the deep superficiality of my reasoning. “Is it possible,” he said finally, “that you could repeat that doing the Hokey-Pokey?”