In a corner of my private library I have a small shelf of "Princeton books" — some of them devoted to Princeton history, others written by some of my more eminent predecessors in Princeton literary study. Perhaps my favorite is a book curiously entitled "Poetry as a means of grace," published by the Princeton and Oxford Presses in 1941, by Charles Grosvenor Osgood. Osgood was one of the original "preceptor guys." I never met him; he died at the age of 93 the year before I joined the faculty, but no literature student of my generation could have been unaware of his great work on Spenser. If you want a quicker and more user-friendly introduction to his graceful erudition I would suggest the paperback "Boccaccio on Poetry."
It is impossible that "Poetry as a means of grace" could be conceived of today, let alone actually written, published by a distinguished press or widely and favorably reviewed in the intellectual journals. The title tells it all: Osgood seriously presents the great poets of the Western cultural tradition as vital sources of spiritual instruction and nourishment for contemporary readers. His particular four poets are Dante, Spenser, Milton and Johnson, though with Johnson it is the poem of a man's life that most engages him. It is perhaps an index of my own old-fashioned love of literature that Osgood's book makes so much sense to me. I entered my profession because I love literature in a highly unprofessional way. Poetry remains for me sustenance, not merely the commodity through which I win my daily bread.
A famous poem that gives me sustenance just at the moment is John Donne's "Goodfriday, 1613: Riding Westward." In this poem the speaker finds himself on a Good Friday required by some unnamed, banal, secular errand to be riding toward the west of England, when he should and would in spirit be "riding" toward the east, toward Jerusalem, the site of Jesus' crucifixion, the event commemorated on Good Friday. He catches the paradox of the situation with a typically brilliant image of "metaphysical wit": "Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West,/ This day, when my Soule's forme bends toward the East./ There should I see a Sunne by rising set,/ And by that setting endlesse day beget. . ."
Whatever your spiritual geography of choice, or freedom from it, you can see fossilized in the word "disorient" that sense of drifting free of one's moral moorings, that cruel victory of the inessential over the vital, that is often the larger part of the experience of daily life.
Donne's idea is relevant at the most literal level, since I find myself sitting here on Good Friday occupied with the entirely quotidian task of writing a newspaper column. Expanding the focus slightly to scan the whole of my "Holy Week" I discover that a mere nine hours of it was taken up in talking about great poetry with great students, with a good deal more of it devoted to business ranging from the merely boring to the decidedly horrid, tasks for which I am well suited neither by training nor by temperament but which are demanded by the iron necessity of professional life.
I am not complaining. It would require cosmic ingratitude to complain about one of the world's greatest jobs. After all I still have my ivory tower, even if I don't get to hang out in it enough to suit me. If a college professor so often feels "disoriented," what must it be like for deans and provosts and presidents?
American higher education is among the biggest of big businesses. That is a fact, not an attitude. Today's Princeton is immeasurably more complicated than the Princeton I first saw in 1961; and old-timers then were already lamenting the demise of the "real" Princeton, Osgood's Princeton, in the victory of a bureaucratic professionalism over a high-minded civility and a shared cultural consensus. We strive to keep the "central mission" of education, as we like to call it — our eastwardness or orientation — ever clearly in mind. But one can spend only so many hours talking westward about zoning variances, parking lots, accounting systems, and meal plans before parking lots come to seem terminal goods on their own.
It's all well and good to contemplate "expansion" into West Windsor; but remember that God planted his garden eastward, in Eden.
John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays.
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