A decidedly productive way to fiddle around

Most college professors at one time or another have to face the Ivory Tower Crisis, by which I mean we must come to terms with the fact that we lead privileged lives of leisured contemplation in a world in which millions scavenge for the merest elements of subsistence. A few engineers, economists and applied scientists can claim to address the world's practical needs in a direct fashion, but for most of us, most of the time, the sense of social engagement can only be oblique. The strain of anti-intellectualism in American life, still marked, is not unrelated to the popular perception that most academics are above it all.

In the spring of 1970, I lost forever the friendship of a senior with whom I had been close because I opposed the popular agitation for a "strike" in response to the extension of bombing to Cambodia and the military murder of several students at Kent State University. "I never thought," he told me with anger, "that you would be one to fiddle while Rome burns!" Of course "to fiddle while Rome burns" means to pursue the tangential and the irrelevant at the expense of the insistent and the essential. The more modern version, perhaps, is "to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic." The phrase has a historical, or pseudo-historical origin. The mad emperor Nero is supposed to have played the fiddle while his capital burned about him. So powerful has the imagined episode been that, despite the fact that the mastery of the violin demands intense mental application and extraordinary manual dexterity, the very words "to fiddle around" have come to denote the pursuit of the fruitless by the feckless.

For me personally, the shades of the Ivory Tower Crisis are regularly invoked by the pomp of academic ceremonies, so often balanced uneasily as they are between moral grandeur and Ruritanian whimsy. This year's Opening Exercises ceremony — featuring the solemn celebration of some of our finest students and a nobly hortatory address by the President — was decorated by liturgical kites, African percussion, and a south-of-the-border "Sanctus," memorably rendered by our energetic chapel choir. Once again I, was proved wrong in thinking that there's not another drop of vintage to be squeezed from the winepress of institutional self-congratulation. This year's innovation was the "Pre-Rade". Our newest students marched out of the chapel, crossed through East Pyne, and flanked the front campus to Nassau Street before returning through FitzRandolph Gate. They were met by the band, before proceeding on to a cookout on Alexander Beach. We have thus reduced the gap between matriculation and donor training from four years to four days.

In the context of a more or less permanent state of world crisis, and most immediately in the wake of the substantial destruction of a great American city, this might have seemed Ivory Tower fiddling had it not been redeemed by some fiddlers of a different sort. Amid the flurry of pre-semester email, I had had two invitations to attend a "Hurricane Katrina Benefit Concert" being organized by Lauren Carpenter '06 and Ben Smolen '07. One invitation came from a former student with a prominent place in the proposed program. If undergraduates knew just how loathe a professor is to decline such a personal invitation — to an artistic event, to a club or college lunch, simply to a cup of coffee — they might proffer more of them. Notice was short; it was in hectic registration week; no doubt opportunities for publicity had been limited. Even so, at least a third of Alexander Hall must have been filled.

I don't know how much money the concert realized. I hope it was a lot. But the moral capital invested by Princeton undergraduates beggars the dreams of avarice. You will never experience a more electric evening at the Royal Albert Hall or the Salle Playel. The all-star numbers were two trios of fiddling families, the Carpenters and the Kendes, and they played their hearts out. For personal reasons, the piece that most moved me was the luxuriant and plangent "Swan" of Saint-Saëns, played by cellist Ami Connolly '07 and pianist Jennifer Hsiao '07. As they played it, could anyone hear that piece tearless? Jazz is of course the music of New Orleans, but there are memorable aspects of the city's lingering high Romanticism imperfectly conveyed by jazz but perfectly captured in the lush bittersweetness and fatal grace of "The Swan". In any event, this species of fiddling while the city burns makes me proud to be connected with the academic enterprise. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.