At the end of the week before Thanksgiving I spent several days in Texas on a professional mission. Since I am a good boy, I had made as many preparations as I could to cover the work I would be missing here, and I sent in copy for my weekly Thursday column ridiculously early. Reading my webmail in Waco upon my arrival in the middle of the night on Wednesday, I was accordingly slightly annoyed to find a message from the 'Prince' saying that some technical glitch would postpone the column's appearance by a day. Thursday night's webmail brought unexpected and compensatory solace, however, when the screen was full of queries about my health and continuing existence, and laments expressing that genre of distress at my journalistic absence reserved, in a delightful musical satire by Peter Schickele, for such occasions of Upper West Side bourgeois tragedy as when "the book review section is missing from the 'Times'" or "the Korean grocery is out of limes." Only one of these messages had a princeton@ address, but that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country is so obviously true that it is accepted as authentic even by the "Jesus Seminar."
In my own renewed attempt to do honor to local prophets, I read last week's papers with care. I learn from my study that the crisis in faculty salaries has now reached the point at which assistant professors must attempt to cadge a free lunch from students via this opinion page (Patrick Deneen, "Professor life is really not that bad after all," Nov. 26). Perhaps my friend Deneen can find a couple of scraps still adhering to the bone I now have to pick with him. Although the layout editors at the 'Prince' did their best to tame his zeal by imposing upon his essay a really lame title, no careful reader will fail to discern its disturbing element of enthusiasm. I use that word carefully, and in the disapproving sense with which eighteenth-century Anglicans applied it to Methodists. Were it a question of the purely private opinion of a colleague, I could remain silent. But in asking out loud of professorial life "What's not to like?," and in trumpeting to the world that "a professor's life is really one of magic, mystery, and majesty," Deneen has wounded his tribe by violating a sacred law of all labor syndicates: Thou shalt never, ever, express unqualified job satisfaction.
Some truths, if they must be uttered at all, should be approached only with studied understatement. Consider, if you please, the Almighty. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. No mean feat, one might think, but He immediately followed up by creating sun and moon, great oceans and towering mountains, teeming botanical and zoological life, including every whale catalogued in "Moby Dick." He then made a man out of the dust of the earth. The pièce de résistance was a woman, but created not out of mud, but out of what up until that moment had been the most precious material of God's manufacture. Throughout his account of this amazing hexameron Moses studiously eschews all rhetorical enthusiasm, his most excited commentary being no more heated than "God saw that it was good".
Good? If you or I created a great whale, let alone a woman, I'd say "sensational" was more like it, or maybe "far, freaking fantastic!" Admittedly it would have been even better if the sacred author had said that "God saw that it was really not that bad after all," but there were no 'Prince' editors around at the time, and under the circumstances we may consider the simple "good" as a litotes nearly adequate for the circumstances.
The truth of the matter is that the job of being a college professor in general, and of being a tenured college professor in particular, and of being a tenured college professor at Princeton in most particular, is one zip-code away from the Celestial Jerusalem. There are days when I have to pinch myself to ascertain that I am not merely dreaming that somebody is actually paying me — far less than I am worth, of course, but that is neither here nor there — to do what no twelve-step program could ever wean me from: reading and writing books, explaining the union of scatology and eschatology in Chaucer's "Summoner's Tale," hanging out with attractive, endlessly resourceful young people, and, every decade or so, engaging is deep, abstruse and wholly footling and inconclusive debate concerning the proposed reform of the Princeton academic calendar. As Deneen said, "What's not to like?" The trouble is that he said it. Administrators, even — God forbid! — trustees, might be listening. You don't want the CEO of the railroad to find out that we've been using diesel-powered trains for the last few decades. That might lead to difficult negotiations concerning the compensation of the contract-mandated coal-stoker's assistant. John Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.
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