A Sacred Effort: Lincoln's Second Inaugural Addresss

 

Youtube has a worthwhile piece "deconstructing" (analyzing) what makes Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address amazing and qualifies as the best thing he ever wrote--which, in Lincoln's case, is saying something.

It took me some years to appreciate it, for reasons which will become apparent--but once I did appreciate it, I understood why Frederick Douglass described it as "a sacred effort."

It always bothers me that there was no voice amplification in 1865, and looking at photos of the vast sea of humanity stretching out from the Capitol building, I wonder how many could even hear his words. 

Of course, his speech was published in literally thousands of newspapers afterwards so it reached a mass audience. Not surprisingly, many newspaper editors failed to appreciate it, and one can only imagine the reasons for that, but among them, certainly, must be the reason that many newspapermen were not all that bright or well educated.

Lincoln begins by explaining why he will not say more about how he came to this place, this time, and he modestly suggests that to report on the progress of the war with Grant currently closing his stranglehold on Lee in northern Virginia would be unnecessary because the American public knew all that already from the newspapers.

"Fellow countrymen: at this second appearing to take the oath of presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends is as well known to the public as to myself and is I trust reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future no prediction in regard to it is ventured."

Lincoln, who wrote with great economy of style for the 19th century, nevertheless writes with more words than we would today. "No prediction in regard to it is ventured," today would be "military reports are today most encouraging, but predictions in this war have always proved risky."

Then he orients us with a very cogent summary of what led to the war and to the moment he faces on this day:

"On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

So, again, lapsing into a passive voice rather than saying, "Even as I took the oath and gave the last inaugural address, agents of the Confederacy were just around the corner trying to dissolve the Union. They were willing to go to war to do it. I did not want war but I had no choice, to save the Union."

But that "And the war came," could not be more dramatic or effective. The first real indication that there was a force of nature or of history or of Providence that was irresistible.

Then he speaks to history, and for me this is one of the most remarkable parts of the speech: he gives us a demographic description of what must have been obvious and universally known to his audience, but needed to be said:

"One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the Union but localized in the southern part of it."

This sets the stage for what is to come:

"These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war."

Odious Slaver

Even today, I encounter "Lost Cause" acolytes who tell me, with great certainty that slavery was not the cause of the civil war--it was all about economics and the industrial North trying to put the screws to the agrarian South. They have been singing this song since 50 years after the war, by which time most Americans, at least outside the South and even some in the South accepted that slaves were not happy imbeciles and that slavery was an evil.  

So, what I always say to this canard is: "Look, neither you nor I were alive during the Civil War, so neither of us can testify authoritatively. But I'll take it from someone who was alive then, Lincoln, who likely knew as well as anyone what caused the war and he said in his Second Inaugural it was slavery."

Well, it was slavery and the racism that sustained slavery, but that's another topic. But Lincoln went on record and that record sustains us even today.

"To strengthen perpetuate and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war while the government claimed no right to do mor than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it."

Which is to say, the Confederacy was unreasonable. They could have kept their slaves, but when they tried to expand their system, we could not stand for that.

"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict should cease."

What he is saying is that in some ways both sides sleep walked into the war and even after slavery collapsed under the crush of the Union army's march through Georgia and the Carolina's the war did not end because by that time the Union army had another purpose: the destroy the Confederate army and the Southern resistance to Union.

"Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding."

Lincoln would have allowed the South to keep its peculiar institution, just not to expand it. The South thought it could separate and continue to sell its cotton to the North as a friendly neighbor

"Each read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other."

This is Lincoln at his most sly: He is well aware he has been called godless, that Confederates sustain the righteousness of their cause from the pulpits and that the South was even then the Bible Belt. But he is saying, as Christopher Hitchens might say, well, but OUR God tells us to fight you. So how ordained can this fight be?

Then, an even more cunning swipe:

"It may seem strange that any men should dare ask God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we not be judged."

This is the most startling image of the address. It's actually somewhat repulsive--the idea of eating the product of a sweaty face, but it is an economical way of displaying the repulsiveness of slavery. 

And then there is the phrase that surely brought a smile to the faces of those who could hear it, and I wonder if Lincoln smiled as he said it: Let us not be too smug about our own righteousness. After all, we are all sinners.

He did not need to say this. He did not need to allow the Southern people this respect, i.e. "we disagree with you, but we are not going to claim we are superior or more righteous than you." 

Presumably, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" played before and after this address, "We are trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

But this all launches us into an unexpected direction. Lincoln will not vilify the vanquished South. He is big enough, magnanimous enough to say indirectly that the North once participated in the slave trade and that right up to the war, it bought Southern slave cotton, so if God looked down upon America, He would find fault on both sides.

"The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes."

What he is saying is for all those who claim to know the mind of God, forget it. Nobody knows the mind of God. He has his own purposes.

Then Lincoln quotes scripture and tries to explain how, if the North was right and righteous, why it, too, should have suffered such heavy losses smiting the evil foe. And he gets right to the idea of shared guilt:

"If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him."

This is the most dense, incomprehensible passage, for me. "must needs come" and all that sort of Biblical language, which Lincoln--and his audience knew well--makes my head spin. But clearly, Lincoln is attempting to answer the "why" question. He has been confidently describing the answers to the "what" happened questions, but he is now speaking to the mothers who have lost sons, to the cosmic question of the meaning of the war. Why, if we have been doing God's work, have we suffered such unbearable losses?

"Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that his mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

Whew! The man knows his history. Slavery was present in America before there even was a United States of America. It was enshrined in the Constitution. It was not some lapse, some crime committed in 1850. And blood drawn by the lash repaid by blood drawn by the sword is now the recompense for a dark American past, for which our current generation is paying the price.

All of this sets up why Lincoln does not demand punishment for the South, or vengeance on the odious slavers. We are all guilty, in some measure, for this calamity of war.

"With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right."

Again, the reminder we do not and cannot know God's mind.

"Let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Talk about a stunning finish. 

Beginning and Endings

 For anyone who has ever tried to write a novel, the struggle over how to begin and how to end is well known.

One thing that separates a writer with command of his writing is the ability to open and close.

I'm not sure if this is the case with music, or with poetry or with life, but it surely is with writing.

To wit, I offer up two openings and one ending which evoke wonder, at least for me. How did these folks achieve the effect they were looking for? How much work went into these lines? Or did they just sort of flow out, like conversation over a beer?

The first is from "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightening, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

What Hemingway has done here is to set up the story he intends to tell with a sense of foreboding and beauty. He talks about something which may not interest you, a house overlooking a vista, but then slides into the river bed and for anyone who has every looked at water flowing between rocks, that shock of recognition--"Oh, I've noticed that! I didn't know others had." 

And then, out of this nature study the mention of troops. What? What troops? Soldiers? They spoil the lovely landscape. Who are they? And then the spoilage by dust from the marching, and the suggestion the soldiers, their war spoiled it all, but it pulls you along. Soldiers? What kind of story is this? And then more on the war, but mixed again with nature: artillery, no more to worry about than lightening, and the return to the sensuous beauty of cool nights, but then "a storm coming."

I'm sorry, but if that does not totally hook you into this story, there is something wrong with you. Or, maybe, it's just me.

But, the thing is, it sets up the story so perfectly. Jake Barnes is in the army, meets Catherine Barkley, and against the background of the war, the mangled wounded of their hospital, they decide that love is more important than war, and they try to escape. The natural beauty of love and its product is wrecked by the war. They can flee, but they cannot escape its effects on them.

Then there is the purple prose of the neglected, derided Grace Metalious:

"Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an unchartered season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgement, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening."

Again, the trees, the natural elements, and the effects of the elements on the human spirit.

And, again, this opening sets up the story perfectly: This is a story about the old and young, the hot passions of youth, and the ebbing of youthful passion and the defeat of love by human venality and violence. And it is often the old against the young--in this case the rape of a child by her stepfather.

And then there are the endings. 

Of all the endings in literature, none is more often mentioned than F. Scott Fitzgerald's wonderful line:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Again, the perfect summary of what his story was all about--how the past's stranglehold on the present destroyed Gatsby. 

Of course, for my taste, Gatsby was a bit of a silly story about a silly man. But reading biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, who lived his life during the period described by Fitzgerald, the first part of the 20th century--the same time Hemingway was writing about in Farewell to Arms--the poisonous grip of romanticism was what destroyed so many lives. Gatsby was silly but so was Theodore Roosevelt and the whole respectable society which spawned him. Romantic love, the idea of the one and only, the inability to allow for free ranging libidos, the idea of honor, the grip of money and class, all that stuff that made those times nasty and sad, was the operative value system.

Metalious was dealing with all that, but she was more hard boiled and saw the strictures of her small town life clear eyed. She looked at it all with "winter eyes." The fact she addressed sexual desire so openly, so luridly, consigned her book to the trashbin of "potboiler." But she knew better. And so, I suspect, did the reading public. The powers that be dismissed her as a bodice ripper novelist, but she could write and she could connect.

"Only here do I realize the littleness of things that can touch me."

Not a bad line, from a pulp fiction writer.

Losing the Faith

 

Last week I spoke with a man who had COVID a year ago. He's 64 years old and he and his girlfriend had refused vaccines and they were both admitted to hospital and he wound up in the ICU and she died. I asked him if he was feeling fully recovered from the COVID and he said, "Well, I had pneumonia and I'm over that."

And I said, "Well, but that was COVID pneumonia."

"Well, that's what they said."

"But your COVID test was positive."

"Well, that's what the hospital said. They make more money that way."

So there you have it. This man refused to believe in vaccines and even when he got COVID he refused to believe it. He and his girlfriend just happened to get pneumonia for the first time in their lives in the middle of a pandemic but it wasn't COVID.

Those authorities, they just lie all the time, you know. For their own financial gain, don't you know?

This is a man who, for whatever reasons, has embraced a belief system.

Today, I opened my New Yorker magazine which is part of my own belief system: The New Yorker writes the truth and in an elegant way. 

But the first article, the "Talk of the Town" spun into a discussion of the Canadian wild fires which are causing havoc in American cities with smoke. I was told "in some states wildfires in recent years have reversed about half of the air-quality gains that resulted from the Clean Air Act,"-- without specifying which Clean Air Act. 

And that left me wondering, how do you measure "air-quality gains?" And for how long is this reversal going to last? But before I could settle on more questions I was told, "Smoke now accounts for as much pollution as fossil fuels do, if not more." And I wondered: How do they know that?

Is it possible to distinguish smoke particles from fires from pollution from cars and power plants? 

Maybe there's some technology which can do that.

Smoke "can be tens times a toxic as other forms of pollution, including car exhaust." Apparently, they can measure fine particulate matter called PM2.5, and they know these inhaled particles become blood borne and go to brain. I can imagine some technology might be able to do this--after all they can find fetal cells in the maternal circulation, so science is wonderful. 

But then, "When the air quality is poor, studies have shown, that crime goes up, test scores go down, umpires make more bad calls and investors make more mistakes."

Wow! Those must be some special studies!

How could you connect "test scores" in some classroom to air quality? Try to imagine designing a study that could do that, something which could sort out all the variables. Correlation not being causation does not even begin to state that problem.

Then we get the "linked to" thing: "Exposure to air pollution has been linked to asthma and emphysema"--well, that sounds reasonable" but then,  "Alzheimer's and Parkinson's; cancer and strokes; depression and suicide; miscarriages, premature births, and infant mortality. Each year, air pollution contributes to as many as ten million deaths around the world."

Which evoked The Phantom's Law of Large Numbers, to wit, "When you see a really large number quoted, you can be 90% sure the guy using it has no clue what he's talking about."

"According to a 2020 report, the original legislation [The Clean Air Act] still produces 3.8 trillion dollars in economic benefits, and saves nearly four hundred thousand American lives each year." 

Now, you usually hear a stream of numbers like this brewed into a long stream of declarative sentences, so fast and so thoroughly mixed in you don't have time to think about where each number came from, or the sort of study you'd need to design to derive such a conclusion, but if it's in print, you can go back and start teasing out statements.

How would you ever figure out if a piece of legislation which was designed to improve air quality worked, and that if it did work to improve air quality, that its effect was 3.8 trillion dollars?  And how could you know this Act resulted in the saving of 400,000 lives? 

During the pandemic, when they were trying to figure out the number of deaths caused by a relatively discrete cause--a new virus--they still had to resort to "excess death" studies, i.e. how many more people were dying in nursing homes than usually died during a given November. And even then nobody could be sure.

When you are in the hospital with a desperately ill patient it's tough enough to know whether what you did for him actually saved his life--he might have survived even without what you did for him--but to know that for 400,000 lives? Well, that must be quite  study!

And then, from that bedrock of fantasy numbers comes the political/ideological use of such phantoms: "The air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy transition." That is, abandoning fossil fuels will pay for itself in just air quality downstream benefits. 

Now, I'm all for wind, solar and renewal "clean" energy but saying the benefits will pay for the transition neglects that the guys who make and distribute and promote fossil fuels are not going to get paid. They don't believe windfarms and solar panels will benefit them personally, and maybe they have a point.

But, then we are told about more studies: "After a gas-leak scare near Los Angeles, the city school district installed air filters in classrooms and the students' math and English scores shot up, the magnitude roughly on a par with cutting class sizes by a third."

Yowser! Forget those teaching plans--just install air filters!

And, after that, paint the classroom walls bright green and I'll bet you'll see those scores go right through the roof.

Then, at the end of a couple of pages of numbers and definitive statements we get the message: "For much of history, that battle has been waged against microbes, mutations, and the ravages of old age. Increasingly, however, we find ourselves contending with the planet itself--a consequence of the damage that we've inflicted upon it."

Wait! Where did that come from? Okay, I get the fossil fuel thing as part of mankind's disservice to the planet, but we started off with wildfires, which are mostly the result not of mankind, but of lightning strikes. You can't pin all that on mankind.

Well, maybe you can. We played a role but preventing wildfires from getting too close to homes and other property and now we've got the problem of underbrush fed fires, but really, is mankind on the hook for every environmental problem?

Ronald Reagan dismissed efforts at clean air by saying that after years of laws restricting car emissions, a single volcano or a fire season in the West pumped more pollution into the air than all man's depredations. And, he was probably half right. But, the famous LA smog was largely ameliorated after car emission standards were imposed, and there may have been some cause and effect there. 

But what's the harm in an article like this in the New Yorker? The likelihood is, energy from wind and solar are likely better for the planet.

But each solution presents its own problems: Hydroelectric power was thought to be environmentally pure--just use the power of the river or the water to generate electricity: How could that be bad? Well, if you're a salmon trying to get upstream, you may not like the dam much.

Adding corn alcohol to gasoline would displace gas for renewable corn and mean saving burning a million gallons of gas. But, then you have to remember that growing the corn takes oil driven tractors and water and soil and none of that has zero environmental impact.

Even the idea of planting trees, which seems so obviously good, may not be.

Before Europeans arrived in America and cleared the New England forests, the East Coast was covered with trees, breathing in all that CO2 and breathing out oxygen and keeping the planet cool.

But no, it turns out dark green forests are like black asphalt in the sense they absorb sun and heat large parts of the globe. 

It's never simple in biology or earth studies.

The fact is, that guy who refused to believe he had COVID, when his COVID test was positive and he wound up in the ICU he simply refused to believe the stuff authorities told him... when you look at all the stuff thrown at us which fails scrutiny, it's not quite so hard to understand why. 

The Death of Tugboat and the End of Billy Budd

 

To his last moment, Tugboat, the yellow Lab, wagged his tail. Lying in the room, when the veterinarian he knew well entered holding the lethal syringe, Tug wagged his tail.

The Phantom thought of Billy Budd, shouting out from the scaffold, "God Save Captain Vere!"

Tugboat was one of those rare creatures who was all joy, no bite. In the 13 years and two weeks of his life, he never bit another dog or any person. Over the course of his life, he growled 6 times, barked about 3 times, and we never knew why. He had his doggie reasons. Mostly he wagged his otter tail and smelled stuff rapturously. He knew his rules and his schedule and stuck to it. He loved people more than dogs, but he loved both.

He died a week before the beginning of what would have been his 14th summer. 

Oral mucocutaneous melanoma in a dog carries a prognosis of 65 days, and he lasted 90, but it was clear  he could have gone longer. Toward the end, he struggled to be joyful, and just when you thought he could not rise again, he would surprise you with a sprightly gait, at least for a few yards. 

But on that last day, he kept collapsing into the grass, getting up, walking a few steps and collapsing again, panting and wagging his tail.

So his captain made the decision to bring that very gooBoy to the scaffold and end it. He could have lasted longer, no doubt, but either way, it was going to be hard to witness.

What spelled doom for Billy was he stabbed in the heart. 

Tugboat did the same, without ever resorting to violence.

He was a very GooBoy.

Learning from the Dutch

 The transgender sessions--and there are many of them--at the Endocrine Society meetings have been worlds better this year, mostly because they are dominated by the Dutch. They flew in from Amsterdam, and they present clear, unemotional talks, full of data, with no trace of bias, just the facts, only the facts.

What the Dutch showed was that higher doses of testosterone given to patients "transitioning" from female to male developed the complications one might expect from anyone given testosterone--cholesterol profiles shift from the happy range seen in most young females to the less happy state seen in males. Similarly, when estrogen is given in "gender affirming doses" to erstwhile males, strokes become a problem, as do clots in leg veins.

This is very different from the American doctors who run Transgender Clinics and who clearly have a financial stake for every issue.

Joshua Safer, head of the Mt. Sinai (NYC) Transgender Clinic, gave the talk about how he manages "problem cases" in his gender clinic.

His first case was a male to female patient who wanted to become for "feminine" and the question was which estrogen to use and how much. Much of what guided him, he noted, were the "Dutch data." 

To try to reduce unwanted hair on the face, a smorgasbord of drugs was presented. Some of them caused liver failure, but spironolactone got his nod, even though it is questionable how efficacious this is.

A male to female wants a new vagina constructed but the surgeons are worried about her risk for leg clots following surgery--owing to the risk imposed by the estrogen therapy. He decided to cut out the estrogen for weeks after the surgery, although there was no clear evidence this did any good. 

A female who wants testosterone but the patient wants to achieve "an androgenous experience" although wants to avoid facial hair or voice lowering. Dr. Safer never asks himself whether this patient is reasonable in demanding a more boyish body without the beard or voice changes testosterone might cause. This is the "customer is always right." He did, finally, tell the patient he could not guarantee the patient would be free of the undesirable stuff. There was a long digression about the importance of choosing the right pronouns. "Do you want to be 'disgendered' with 'she' or 'he' or 'they?'"

The next patient was a born female who is now male who wants to have a child with his cisgendered partner. The patient has ovaries and uterus and vagina but has had breasts removed. The patient has been on testosterone for years, and the recommendation was to stimulate the ovaries for egg retrieval and storage for future IVF. So now he has got the patient locked into a hundred thousand dollar plan.

The next patient is 19 and has been on testosterone to go from female to male and has attempted suicide. The suicide rate or attempted suicide rate in most transgender clinics is and has remained stubbornly at 40%. The question is what to do with the endocrinologist should do during the hospitalization on the psych ward. His conclusion was the best thing to do was to continue the "gender affirming" testosterone therapy, the argument being to withdraw from testosterone would be to risk a sort of disruption and withdrawal syndrome.

He did not present, this year, the case I liked best from last year's conference: a male to female who has not had castration but was on estrogens who has a female lesbian partner and they want to get pregnant and the question is what to do? The answer that year was to extract eggs from the lesbian partner for IVF and then to use donor sperm for the IVF procedure. The question was raised why not have the patient provide the sperm, but the objection was that this would undermine his new role as a woman. Paul McHugh, the former chief of psychiatry at Hopkins asked the obvious question, which nobody at the conference ever asked: "What sort of sex are these two folks having?"

You can see how Ron DeSantis would love talking about this case, this clinic and this whole way of thinking. 

The Dutch noted that in the Netherlands, nobody who has transitioned can get the gender on their driver's license or government forms until they have been castrated.

Presumably, the Dutch have decided you have to prove you really are completely committed to a new gender before the government will by in. This law may have been changed recently, but it is instructive about the thinking of a society with socialized medicine.

Eurasian Hotties

Stop me, if I've told this story before.

When you get my age, you tend to tell the same stories over and over to people with various levels of tolerance. This particular blog has over 800 posts (and not quite twice than on the Mad Dog blog) so I can't recall. 

But I am prompted to tell this story for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with articles in the Globe about meritocracy, which got me reflecting on how we measure intellectual achievement, and "qualifications" and how we award the glittering prizes of academia, and also because we recently welcomed into the family my new granddaughter, who happens to be Eurasian.

All of which triggered a flashback to Eva Inoue, a woman I met, on very brief acquaintance, when I was a sophomore in college. The fact is, I had one date with her, our first and last, which was actually quite a successful and pleasant experience, but, for reasons which will become clear, went nowhere, for very good reasons.

When I was a sophomore, I roomed with a very gaudy senior, who spoke dozens of languages and spent most of his time in the main library's Humanities Reading room lounge, which was separated from the actual reading room where students read books reserved for various classes (long before the internet) at desks but then pushed through the swinging glass doors and flopped down in the capacious couches in the lounge, to talk, flirt, smoke and be young. The reading room lounges were the social hot spots of the campus for a certain set of student who were serious enough about Camus and Kant and Kierkegaard to not want to simply hang out in bars, but who did not see spending all their time studying. 

Why, you might ask, would a senior want to live with a sophomore? I was a very desirable roommate, mainly because I was never there. Because he had lived in this dorm, Diman House, longer than any other student, Nick was entitled to his choice of rooms and he choose the largest room on the 3rd floor, which had been meant to be some sort of lounge but was converted to a two bedded room. It was also across the hall from the bathroom and next to the stair well, so it was convenient. I got up at 6:30, ran for 20 minutes, showered and was out of the room by 7:30 so I could make my 8 o'clock class. I came home to drop off books and pick up other books at noon, left for the library and did not come home until 10 or 10:30 PM.

When I got home, the room was usually filled with slackers from several different floors, but upon my arrival, they deferentially got up and melted away, out the door and Nick would either read in bed or go down to the first floor lounge and watch TV. 

We both studied at "The Rock," the Rockefeller Library,  the aforementioned main library, and several times over the course of the evening, I'd go down to the Humanities Reading Room lounge because there were bathrooms down there. As I'd pass through, I'd nod and wave to Nick, who was usually surrounded by  fetching young women, eager to talk about the comparative virtues of Camus vs. Sartre as philosophers and as novelists.  The women were Pembrokers, or "Brokers" which really meant they were simply co-eds, but the women's college had not been completely absorbed into the university, just as Radcliffe was not actually Harvard. Brokers, as a rule were smarter than the male students at the college--if you wanted to know where you are on the curve in class grading, the wags said, you look around the classroom and add up the number of 'Brokers and add the number of Asians and that is where you began, so 10 Brokers and 4 Asians, you were number 15 on the grading curve.

One night, I got home at my usual hour and walked to my desk at the far end of the room, threw down my books and slumped onto my bed to take off my snow covered boots and noticed that none of the ten or so slackers had budged. They all just stood or sat where they had been when I walked in and stared at me, with a sort of determined looked I had never seen before from them. It was as if I had violated some unspoken rule and they were there to let me know they weren't going to stand for it. 

Nick got up off his bed and took a few paces toward me and, backed up by his friends, spoke.

I should say now I was aware there was a certain level of wariness, if not trepidation, about me in the dorm. Because I never hung out in the TV lounge, or attended the Saturday night party, or lingered over dinner at the Ratty (the student dining hall), I was called, "The Phantom," from which this blog derives its name. One of the most psychopathic boys in the dorm, Jim Metcalf, a boy who urinated down the stairwells when the urge took hold of him, a boy who liked bouncing a bowling ball from the third floor down to the ground floor in the stairwell because he loved the explosive sound it made and he knew it jangled up the nerves of the students who lived in the stairwell rooms, this guy, I was told, was terrified of me. This is in the days before school shootings, but we did have storied axe murderers, and Jim, hearing about my habits visibly blanched, and said, "He doesn't even come to the parties, Saturday night? That's not normal! This guy is not normal!" And so he avoided me like the proverbial plague and I had only once or twice ever laid eyes on him, or his back, as he took flight like a gazelle pursued. 

The other guys in the dorm were not that intimidated; they just thought I was odd and to their great credit, they gave me my distance and did not try to interfere with my schedule. They were pleasant in the bathroom if they found themselves standing next to me shaving and they smiled and nodded in the stairwells, or on the sidewalks from the dorm to the Ratty or the library, if they passed me, the way you might acknowledge an officer if you passed him along the way, not saluting, but sort of respectful like. 

But this night, there was a difference and Nick quickly got to the point: "Eva Inoue wants to go out with you," he said portentously. 

"Oh," I said, not understanding who Eva Inoue was or why she might want to go out with me or what the significance of that desire might be. "Who is Eva Inoue?"

A collective groan arose from the assembled collegians. 

They all exchanged glances, as if they were going to have to communicate with a space alien who likely had only very limited knowledge of Earth speak.

"Uh," said one of them. "She is the one girl any of us would give our right nut to go out with."

That struck me as a serious sort of woman, but I could not resist asking, "And why would that be?"

"First of all," said another, "She is drop dead gorgeous, one of maybe three verifiably beautiful Brokers on the Hill."

"And insanely brilliant," added Nick, hoping to appeal to my better angels. "She gets papers back which don't just have 'A' on the top, but the professor writes, and I'm quoting, 'In thirty years at this college I have never read a better paper.' And all like that."

"So," I said, "Sounds like a nice girl for one of you guys."

"You didn't hear me," Nick said, exasperated. "She wants to go out with you!"

"But I've never met her. Why?"

Nick threw one of his innocent looks in my direction, shrugging, hands held palms upward, "Well, she's seen you in the lounge and she might have asked me about you, seeing you wave in our direction and I might have told her about you, a little."

"Must have been quite a description for her to want to go out with me like this."

"What does it matter?" one of the slackers expostulated. 

"She is Eva..." another sputtered.

"She has never come to a Diman House party. If you go out with her, you could bring her."

I could now see their stake in this. Scarlett O'Hara might just swoop in and be surrounded by the Diman House groupies and new luster would accrue to the House and who knows who else might have a chance with her.

"What did you tell her about me?" I asked Nick.

"Oh, nothing," Nick sputtered, not meeting my eyes, "A little about you, like how all you ever do is  study and how we call you the Phantom, and how even Jim Metcalf leaves you alone--she knows Jim and hates him--and all like that. Nothing that isn't true."

The mob walked me down to the pay  telephone at the end of the hall and shoved a paper with Eva's number at the Andrews dorm, and when I protested I didn't have a dime, one was shoved into my hand and they stood around listening to be sure I didn't wimp out.

"Hello?"

"Hi, I'm trying to reach Eva Inoue."

"You got her."

"Sorry to call so late, but..."

"S'alright," she said. "I guess you just got back from the library."

"I did. You're right, and I wonder if you might be free Saturday night?"

"Sure."

"Oh. You're sure? It's sort of short notice. We could make it next weekend or the one after."

"No," she said. "You might get distracted by some organic chemistry homework and forget all about me."

"Oh," I said, "You know more about me than I do about you."

"For sure," she laughed. "But we'll fix that Saturday. Where are we going?"

"No idea."

"Well, Trinity Rep is doing something interesting, we could do that."

"Fine. When?"

"If we leave at seven that should be plenty of time."

"Good, see you then."

"Come to the desk at Andrews."

"Right."

"Where is Trinity Rep," I asked turning to the crowd outside the phone cubby. 

A loud groan. We'll show you. 

I had to call my parents to be sure they put money into my checking account to cover the cost of the tickets, the cab fare and whatever we might do for dinner. 

My mother was delighted: "Your first date at college! Who is she?"

"Oh, just some girl from the library."

"Figures," said my father. 

During the intermission, I spotted my graduate student lab instructor from organic chemistry class in the crowd. He was a very nice and funny Nigerian with that lovely British accent and I went over to talk to him, grateful for a familiar face.  Within minutes his date, a very blonde Swedish woman, another grad student in organic chemistry (who would turn out to be my lab instructor for the 2nd semester) joined us and she kissed his cheek and held his hand. This being Providence, Rhode Island, my Nigerian lab instructor was the only Black guy in the room, and the racially mixed couple was getting a lot of surreptitious attention from the theater going throng, a very White audience. Just as I was noticing the racial thing, Eva, who, did I mention is Eurasian? shows up and loops her arm through mine and shakes hands with the only other mix race couple in the room and we all have a wonderful good time until intermission was over. 

I never got anything less than an "A" in organic chemistry lab assignments both semesters--a greater enhancement to my grade than all the hours spent in the library. Completely random. Not right. Sort of a "Risky Business" effect.

Anyway, we got back to the dorm after the show and the Diman House crowd was in a major swoon at our belated entrance. The play had ended at 8:30 and by the time we made it back to campus it was 9:30. The band was enough to knock you through the window with sound volume and I got some beers for us and we escaped to the stone patio outside. It was a cool October night and sitting on the stone wall was bracing but tolerable and she leaned against me with her shoulder. 

She leaned over to kiss me after one beer and she was the sort of girl who could be a major distraction.

"The thing is," I said, "I didn't come to college to have an experience. I am here to get passed it. This is a stop along the line to medical school, if I'm lucky."

"Well, you certainly are not homosexual," she said. 

"This is true," I said. "But how can you know that?"

"The way you look at women. The way you handle me. The way you're reacting to me right now. We could be up in your room in a heartbeat."

"But what then?" I said. "Girlfriends take time, or they should take time. I don't have time. I have a study schedule. I'm not smart enough to just study the night before the exam."

"I get it," Eva said. "It's nothing personal."

"Now, if you could just get back to me in about two years," said, "All my premed course will be done by senior year."

"Oh, well, that's an attractive offer!" she laughed. "No, you go do your dedicated thing. I can respect that. My father is Japanese."

"And your mother Austrian," I noted. "Which sounds like a recipe for obsessive compulsiveness."

"Something I struggle to avoid," she said. "But I can respect it, even if I don't want it for myself."

Eva made Phi Beta Kappa her junior year, the earliest you can be voted in. 

My grades by senior year were good enough to be considered for that honor society but the letter announcing your "election" into the society says very clearly, "You have been elected into Phi Beta Kappa."

When I got my letter in the campus mailbox I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt who had led the voting in my favor.

Of course, I have no way of really knowing that. It's a belief I cling to, for some reason. It may be the Miss Havisham effect, from "Great Expectations," --if you come into a great fortune you look around and say, well who else could have done this?

But I'm pretty sure it was Eva.

Eva did not wait for me. By our senior year she married a guy who was a budding poet, and when Alan Ginsberg came to campus, he and Eva hung out with him. She found a right guy for her. She became a professor of classics, a scholar of Prometheus, the guy who brought fire from the gods and gave it to man and who paid dearly for that. And she understood about fire and how it could burn you and how I had demurred when it came to the fire she represented. I could have quoted her from the Odyssey and the sirens who sang so alluringly, Odysseus had to plug the ears of his crew and have himself tied to the mast so he could not respond to the siren call and steer his ship away from the course he had plotted to get home. I'm sure she was familiar with all that story. 

So, now I have this honor, this Phi Beta Kappa key for which I'm very grateful, but when I think of how I studied all those hours and what really pushed me over the top had nothing to do with those hours, but with the one time I did not study, just took the night off to be with a girl and enjoy life, it makes you wonder about "qualifications" and the meritocracy.