Curse of Ham.

So this is worth knowing. One of the purported Biblical justifications for slavery was the "Curse of Ham;" the idea was that all black Africans were living under an ancient curse which made it all right for white people to own them. According to a short review Mark Noll posted today at Books & Culture, the "Curse of Ham" was first specifically linked to Africa in a book published in 1498; before that, biblical commentators had only treated the passage as an explanation of serfdom as a general condition, not specifically tied to race.

Here's the upshot:

You do not have to look far today to find continuing efforts to apply the "curse of Ham" to Africans and use it as vindication for slavery. None of it is true. It has been made up out of whole cloth. It is a depressing tale from first to last.

"Cultivating our historical imagination."

Peter Wicks on liberal education:

The question of what the humanities are for has no simple answer, but if I had to sum it up in 60 seconds here is what I would say:

The best time to have a midlife crisis is in college. I don’t mean that anyone should expect to graduate feeling as if they have life all worked out, but by the time they graduate they should be in the habit of thinking seriously about what gives life meaning and value.

The humanities equip us for such reflection by cultivating our historical imagination. By studying the literature and ideas of those who came before us we learn that, like them, we are living in a particular historical period, and we come to recognize its prejudices and blind spots. We also discover that our sense of what is obvious has a history, and that what now seems obvious once seemed revolutionary. We don’t just learn to quote the great thinkers of the past; we learn that we have been quoting them without realizing it for a long time.

My favorite entry in the "Table of Dates" included in the Penguin Classics edition of Ben Jonson's Complete Poems.

"1618-19: Walks to Scotland and back; meets Drummond in Scotland."

Solitude, stillness, creativity.

A friend shared a speech that William Deresiewicz gave at Westpoint called “Solitude and Leadership.” One way to sum it up is to say that it's a defense of the value of a cultivated inner life in our times.

Strangely enough, I kept thinking of a passage from Elizabeth Gilbert's The Last American Man while I read the speech. Upon finding what I was remembering, I realized it's about something different. Here, Gilbert describes the sort of people with enough emotional fortitude to work on the mountain farm of a modern survivalist:

“But the people who thrive here—and there aren't many of them—are an interesting species. They are among the most quietly self-aware people I've ever met. They have in common a profound psychic stillness. They don't talk a lot, and they don't seek praise, but they seem confident of themselves. They are able to make themselves vessels of learning without drowning in it. It's as if they decide, when they come here, to take their fragile and sensitive self-identity, fold it up tight, tuck it away someplace safe, and promise to retrieve it two years later, when the apprenticeship will be over.” (215)

New ignorance.

In The Narnian, Alan Jacobs repeatedly recommends English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) as the best-written book by C.S. Lewis. Every other work, Jacobs says, could have used at least one more revision; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century was a scholarly work with an unusually long gestation. The introductory essay, “New Learning and New Ignorance,” is strong stuff; I recommend it to anyone who wants to see Lewis in full force. From page 26 of the 1954 edition:

“In the fourth chapter of Eothen Kinglake draws a contrast between a child reading Homer (in Pope's version) and a ‘learned commentator’. The child, he says, is ‘nearer by twenty centuries to the old Greeks’ because he is ‘not grubbing for beauties but pressing the siege’. In some ways this is a parallel to the difference between the medieval and the humanistic reader. The latter never really cares about the siege: he is too interested in literature, literature conceived almost exclusively as style, and style valued chiefly as a model for imitation.”

And, a little further, on page 27:

“Chapman's Homer might almost have been written to show that the real Homer was in that age impossible for us to assimilate. The great age of Greek influence is not the sixteenth century but the nineteenth. Shelley, Landor, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Ruskin, and even Morris, were all, in their different ways, more receptive of the Greek spirit than any Elizabethan.”

The whole thing is like that: a whirl of names whose work you feel you should have read, a familiar perspective on imagination and beauty freshly applied, and an utterly lucid line of argument.

(By the way, Lewis's line on the humanists is pretty similar to James Franklin's in the “Renaissance Myth” essay I mentioned last month.)

C.S. Lewis's poetry.

For Keats' Sake! has posted a few of C.S. Lewis's poems, with some commentary. If you're interested in Lewis's early dislike of T.S. Eliot, or if you want to know what Lewis thought of gnomes, it's worth reading.

Speaking of Lewis and verse, a family member gave me a copy of Alan Jacobs's biography of Lewis, The Narnian, for Christmas. Jacobs discusses poetry's power over the intellectuals of Lewis's generation; the best illustration of this comes in the context of Lewis's lifelong love for A. E. Housman's The Shropshire Lad:

When [Lewis] was about sixty he and his wife were found—by her son—weeping in the common room of their house. "Nothing's wrong, Doug," Lewis said. "We're reading the poems of A. E. Housman and they always do this to us."

Generally, the best responses my generation can summon for verse are genial admiration and contemplative silence; I only know one or two people who admit to ever having wept over poetry.