What's it All For?

What’s It All For?

November 23,2009

It’s for this. For Russian. That’s why, at this instant, you are reading this, and why you signed up for this course, not knowing and not even caring whether it would ever prove to be useful. You wanted to try something and see what it was like, to venture down a path, or a fork in the road taken, as Yogi Berra suggested, just because it was a fork in the road. Tulane doesn’t specialize in this area, nor does it necessarily fit Tulane’s mission statement, its geographic, geopolitical environment, New Orleans, or the strategic needs of the USA. (Russian was heavily funded in the sixties as a critical language, and who knows — it might come back again some day.) Nonetheless it is here at Tulane, as this is a research university, and mere curiosity in itself ought to be answered at a research university.

If only because of the aesthetic bliss of the finding out, as Henry James might say. The neurologist Oliver Sachs wrote of two deeply autistic twins who communicated best only with each other, and on deep alpha- or delta-levels, so it seemed. They were mathematical geniuses, as idiot savants often may be, and their greatest pleasure in life was sitting together and thinking up new prime numbers that had never been discovered. These are numbers divisible by no other natural whole number but themselves — a metaphor for the twins, I guess. They didn’t need a calulator, pencil and paper, or other aids, they just sat until one twin thought up, say, a seven-digit number, which he would announce to his brother, who would forrow his brow in concentration and, sooner or later, usually sooner, discover another imposing number. They were each wide-eyed with pleasure at the beauty of the discovery. I think they also could tell you the day of the week on which fell any date, by Julian or Gregorian calendar, for centuries past. Sachs theorized they could sift through huge blocks of correlations, the nature of which no one knows, somewhat like leafing through a book in search of a picture of a familiar face. Then they would tell you, “February 19, 2010, is a Friday.” One bright summer day they gradually began to lose both of these magical abilities, discovering prime numbers and finding days of the week. They lived in a kind of stultification or stupefaction for a few years, finally dying, of loneliness or despair. They had lost the beauty of their lives, the only thrill, the only happiness.

This just goes to show you don’t have to be a brilliant scholar, or a “normal” genius to have the pleasure of research; you don’t, of course, have to be an autistic savant with a weird talent, either. It is the natural property of all humans, I believe, to thirst for this and to experience it.

I was lucky; I wanted to read Dostoevsky in the original and really, deeply, understand him. I did it, and they paid me for it. Even though I never became wealthy, I met many fascinating scholars, most of them much smarter than I am, in Russian and Czech, and have many friends among them and among my former students. All of us share this one love — not Dostoevsky, of course, and not some blanket conception of “Slavic culture,” which doesn’t exist, but some sense of creativity that comes from working there. I suppose I could have been creative as an insurance salesman or even a high school teacher (that would have worn me out long ago), but this permitted me to be challenged to the utmost by colleagues and students who inspired me to “think again,” as Stanley Fish says.

I believe it important to have the very best possible teachers, and that’s why I went to Harvard,not for its reputation, but for the teachers in Slavic. My English professor in college, who was informed in these matters, said to me: “So you choose Jakobson over Victor Erlich (the great Yale slavist).” It wasn’t the personality of Jakobson, but linguistics in an empirical perspective, the perspective of Slavic languages, that I wanted. I was richly rewarded. The scholarly arc has shot away from Slavists, Slavic linguistics, Slavics, so that we seem to be dinosaurs, but as Charles Townsend wrote, “dinosaurs may some day come back to fashion, and they seem to be much loved among the young.” One beautiful thing about the degree awarded by the Slavic department was its grandiose generality: “Slavic languages and literatures,” “linguas literasque slavicas,” which in lordly fashion confers a cloak of presumed knowledge so vast that no one, really, but Jakobson could know so much. Not even him, and not him. Nonetheless is was a goal to shoot for.

One can do the same at Tulane as in those days at Harvard, and one doesn’t need a Jakobson for a teacher, only a very, very good teacher who really knows what’s happening in the field you are looking into and can lead you to the best sources, who can show you how creative work in the field is done and give you examples of how you may do it yourself. There are such very, very good teachers in of out-of-the-way fields at Tulane. One of the beauties of the American undergraduate system is that you needn’t declare yourself as a major, you needn’t sign yourself away. You can seek it out, try it out. To boot, you can go there, if "there" is a place, in your Study Abroad. An amazing opportunity.

This is what it's all for.

gmc