Nomenclature of the sedentary

My morning routine takes me from Dillon Gym to Olive's on Witherspoon Street (large cup of decaffeinated Hazelnut) before getting to the library about opening time. One quiet, balmy morning during the break, finding myself running five minutes early, I sat down to sip on one of the new benches in the new plaza by the new Humanities Building. I was surprised to discover that I was sitting on a bench with a name. Rather unfairly, indeed, considering that no other bench in sight bore even one, my bench had two names. I was sitting on "Gene and Tony."

Since my youth I've known that out here we have a name for things, like wind and rain and fire. The rain is Tess, the fire Jo, and they call the wind "Maria". That's a hillbilly memorial to the fact that the English words "name" and "noun" are actually one in origin, a fact remembered in Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" and earlier in Juliet's lament to Romeo — What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

There was a time, during the reign of romance, when many inanimate objects had names. Forgings in cuprous and ferrous metals formed a special category. There are famous bells of cathedral and clock tower named Tom and Louisa. When Maria blows, Mary tolls. One of the bells at Exeter, if I mistake not, is named Cobthorne. That classy name should be adequate for a dark and tortured Brontë antihero, let alone a bronze casting — an idea that comes to me, perhaps, because Charlotte Brontë, seeking a masculine pen name, fell on Currer Bell.

Swords, and then as civilization refined its technologies of slaughter, guns, likewise gained individual names, sometimes at a baptismal font! King Arthur ranks among the Twelve Worthies of Christendom, but so might I if I had a sword named "Excalibur". Excalibur! How that name thrilled me the first time I saw it, furtively reading in a hot hayloft where I hid from work my uncles thought I was doing. Perhaps it would have been better if Krupp, the German armourer-in-chief, had married a woman named for the Valkyrie Brunhilde. For then "Big Bertha," the enormous howitzer of 420 mm that laid waste the forts of Liege at the beginning of the Great War, could have had a name as terrifying as its muzzle capacity.

Though inanimate, Big Bertha was moved around almost as much as the streetcar named Desire. Only in academia do we name the intentionally sedentary. I refer to "named chairs" held by "distinguished professors." To "get the chair" has for professors a meaning altogether different from that current in old gangster movies. The chair in which I myself have sat motionless for two decades bears the name of an eminent alumnus, the patriarch of a great American publishing dynasty. Since his empire included the famous trade journal "Women's Wear Daily," Chaucerians at lesser institutions have been known to refer to me snidely as the "Ladies' Undergarments Professor." Transparent jealousy, of course.

What they should really be jealous about is not my named chair but my named bench. For like Gene and Tony, I do have one. Indeed I shall risk giving offense by claiming that I am the only active (sort of) Princeton professor with both a named chair and a named bench. The bench is somewhat obscurely placed, but it is definitely there, on a gravel patch amid picnic tables flanking the east wall of the Julian Street library in the corner of the "Old New Quad," alias Wilson College. One day last year, as I left Wilcox Hall in the late spring twilight after some event I had attended in the college, I came across a couple necking on the bench named John V. Fleming. The circumstances were remarkable in at least two ways. First, I had never before seen anyone actually sitting on John V. Fleming. Secondly it is my experience that Princeton undergraduates very rarely neck in public. Paradoxically, public necking at Princeton, rife in my days as an assistant professor, seems to have been one of the casualties of coeducation; but that is a subject I must surrender to some colleague in psychology or sociology.

It was a tender moment, that discovery of amatory vitality on my very own eponym, and I thought it required a cheerful word of semi-witticism. "Hello," I said in friendly greeting. "How are you two making out there on my bench?" But they only looked at me as though I were some kind of weirdo, then quickly fled.