I come from Western civ. I say this neither as a good thing nor a bad one, not to brag or apologize (though I often begin every sentence with an apology)—I say it because it is where I come from and who I am, at the core, no matter what else I have encountered or learned. When I am feeling grandiose I think of myself as a sort of ivory tower, immutable. Winds and time and sometimes protests have altered the façade at Butler Library at Columbia University, but it still reads HOMER HERODOTUS SOPHOCLES PLATO ARISTOTLE and on and on, writers whose work has at one time been required reading for all Columbia undergraduates. When I stand in the center of campus and face that building, as I do every time I’m in New York, I feel not excluded, as I think I’m meant to: I feel at home. I am from Western civ in the way that people are from coal mines in Appalachia, or from the Mormon church, or who grew up in communes of off-the-grid hippies. “You can’t escape the influence a childhood specifically designed to influence you,” Chelsea Cain once wrote, and while her parents made what were, at the time, far stranger choices than those mine did, I feel a kinship with those words.
My father was professor of Classics and humanities at a series of small liberal arts colleges; he held a PhD from Harvard and a BA from Columbia. He died in 1981, when I was five, but his books still fill my shelves. My profile picture here is me peeking out from behind a copy of his dissertation he was revising. Last year, on what would have been his 100th birthday, forty of his former students and colleagues gathered for three hours on Zoom to reminisce and pay tribute to their teacher and friend.
After college my mother applied to secretarial school and to PhD programs—she ended up in the latter, where she specialized in the period of English literature from Shakespeare to the death of Samuel Johnson. She went on to medical school, but we got to know some of our best family friends because one day during her urology rotation, the professor took all the med students for coffee in the cafeteria. He and my mom somehow floated into a conversation about Dante, leaving the other students scrambling. (“Dante? Dante who? Is this going to be on the test???“)
I read
’s newsletter (and you should, too!) and he’s gotten me thinking about this business of who I am and where I come from. Like many white people I know, I want to be the right kind of white. I want to rush in and comment that when I hear news about heinous crimes, I always hope it’s a white dude who committed them, which seems to me somehow like the good white person of “please don’t look like me.” But the more you congratulate yourself for being the right kind of white person—well, I’m not sure what the second half of that sentence is, other than self-serving. See? There I go.So I’m not rushing over to Chuy’s place to say any of that, because I have my own place to say stuff. And when I say stuff, it comes from the place I’m from. All those writers on Butler are on my bookshelves, too. I did not go to Columbia, but I read many of them in college. Others occupied the shelves in the houses where I grew up—they were as familiar to me as the names of the streets I passed on the way to school each day. When they showed up later in textbooks, they seemed like old friends.
I wrote the first half of this post back over a month ago, and perhaps I thought I’d keep writing and come to some grand conclusion. I haven’t. But I do want to acknowledge the place I come from. The grand conclusion is that here we all are, trying to figure out just how to be.
I grew up on a steady diet of the classics and the giants of the first half of the 20th century. It’s been incredibly hard to go back to that world. At some point reading felt like I was being selfish and not helping my family. What a mess.
Nice reflection.