Flowers Bloom (2)—An Open Book

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Flowers Bloom."

[a] Open  RF

 During the summer, I will be posting segments of a memoir project I have begun that discusses teaching, learning, scholarship, reading...and the venerable, odd University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, whose bestseller The Closing of the American Mind rocked American education almost twenty-five years ago. I have already written a little bit about Bloom on this blog, and had promised to start posting more pieces starting in June. Read the introduction to the series if you want the full context, but the individual posts are meant to be read on their own (with hints throughout of the larger context).

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6

Flowers Bloom—A Teaching Memoir
An Open Book

As I opened the letter from the Committee on Social Thought—its heft had calmed me considerably—I began to think about how I was going to organize my time over the next six months, the last period of preparation that I would have before my years of planning and hoping would turn to actual graduate training. I was in, and the pressure was on. I had received a fellowship that humbled me—what was called then a "Century Fellowship"—and had heard from one of my college professors that they expected me to do well. It could have registered as negative pressure, but I was floating. I felt like a Daoist who had found the way.

[b] Leaves  RF

I learned that I was to begin my studies in October, and that I would spend my first two years attempting a complex balance of work in Chinese history and literature, on the one hand, and reading deeply from a list of twelve to fifteen “great books” of my own choosing, on the other. For the former, I was to study my languages, engage in seminar work, and begin the slow process that would lead eventually to the doctoral dissertation. I knew even then that I would take anthropological theory and classical Chinese, and look for the kinds of seminars that would teach me more about the “borderlands” between history, anthropology, and Chinese literature. For the latter—this strange concoction of a dozen or more “great books”—I was less sure, but I set out to learn more. I had already studied some formidable texts in my two years in Taiwan.

Now, I was to make my choices early, consult all faculty members (getting their signatures in the process), and begin the process of methodically studying the texts, reflecting upon the perspectives of other scholars, anticipating questions, and writing several original essays, to be submitted to the Chairperson each spring. That line of inquiry would culminate in the third year with the Fundamentals Examination—nine questions in three, broad categories, from which I would eventually write three “substantial” essays over a four-day period, with a fifth day added (it seemed quaint, even at the time), for “typing.” This was the fundamental goal that would shape my life for the next three years. It would be the most formidable cut in the entire program. “Don’t blow it,” I murmured to myself. I was in, and now it was time to put all of those years of longing together.

***  ***

Within a week, I heard the word “bloom” again as a proper name—Allan Bloom, the “unparalleled” translator of Plato’s Republic. I had read his translation carefully three times while in Taiwan, and was enchanted by the audaciousness and insight of Bloom's “interpretive essay” at the end. I had also—just by chance—discovered that Bloom had translated Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, a kind of Enlightenment era Republic focusing on child rearing and education. I had found a copy on a quick trip to Hong Kong, and began it with an utter disdain that turned rapidly to admiration and eventually into a permanent sense of awe for both the author (Rousseau) and the translator (Bloom). I still regard, to this day, the translation of Rousseau’s Emile as the greatest service that Allan Bloom has done for English-speaking humanity. Any of a small number of people could have translated The Republic in an astute new way. By now, several more have done so. It took a genius to “see” that Rousseau’s Emile is one of the greatest books ever written.

That is all that I knew of Bloom by the time that I had processed my acceptance into the Committee on Social Thought. It was only a few weeks later, though, that I heard his name again. It seems that the professor had written a very different kind of book that had caught the attention of several reviewers, including Christopher Lehman-Haupt, writing in the New York Times and published jointly in the International Herald-Tribune, which I read avidly. Lehman-Haupt liked it, and wrote that it “hits with the approximate force and effect of what electric-shock therapy must be like.”  I was intrigued, and not least because I saw myself (or a vision of what I wanted not to be) in his portrayals.

Allan Bloom fools you in his remarkable new book, The Closing of the American Mind, which hits with the approximate force and effect of what electric-shock therapy must be like. He begins by describing contemporary college students—or at least the ones he has taught and observed at such schools as Yale, Cornell, Amherst and the University of Chicago, where he now teaches—and he finds these students wanting and symptomatic of what’s wrong with American society today.

They don't read the classics. They get their information from movies and drug out on rock music. They lack passion and commitment and the capacity to love. They are confused, and the universities they seek help from merely reflect their confusion. The problem, Professor Bloom asserts, is the relativity of truth in the academic mind today. “Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings–is the great insight of our times,” he writes. But this openness has had the paradoxical effect of closing the American mind.

[c] Breeze 

His criticism of students was pointed, but I was less offended than fascinated. I could not help but see all of the intersecting themes from Western intellectual history coursing through his arguments. He might be saying on the surface that students don't read enough, but he was invoking great thinkers with whom I was only beginning to be acquainted. 

It all sounded rather odd—an argument and a set of texts that would be hard to put together in one place. Plato, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Heidegger, Nietsczhe…and a complex argument about the failure of the American university system. Was the Committee on Social Thought a breeding ground for scholars putting together oddly disparate texts in pursuit of larger questions?  I was not sure, but—if so—I wanted to be a part of it even more. The critiques of the text had not yet begun to surface, and the New York Times’ about-face was still several weeks away. In any case, I had not yet read the book. I special ordered a copy at Caves Books in Taipei, and waited.

It took a month for the book to arrive, but the reviews began to cool, even as the Taipei weather warmed. I continued to study classical Chinese, read a great and complicated history of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), and walk with my “anthropological” notebooks up and down the alleys and byways of Taipei—leaving the city for southern and western locations (the pull of “the exotic” was ever upon me) whenever I could put a few days together. I started making lists of books that I might want to study for the big exam that now was fewer than three years away, and I longed—pined daily—for a setting in Chicago that still seemed a distant dream.

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6 

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Growing up History...and Culture

Flashback to early education. How "longing" for knowledge can begin early, even (and perhaps especially) on the North Dakota prairie.