Baking Grace

To those who found the preceding post far too abstract, I apologize. I know that few people may want to read the thematic ramblings of a crazed grad student who suffers from a mental illness in which she connects utterly dissimilar events, objects, and quotations to eachother in a late-night blog post. Hopefully, though, for those of you of this ilk, this post will seem slightly more fulfilling. 

Let's face it: New Yorkers have a reputation. I see it played out before me every day. Especially when I go grocery shopping. You see, rather than pay the outrageous Manhattan prices, once every few weeks I make the trek to Shoprite in Brooklyn. It's at least a three-hour adventure, assuming I have a grocery list in hand and the lines aren't too long. But I make up the price of a metro trip in a couple of cans of diced tomatoes, so I think it's worth it. Plus, I get a cultural experience. The first time I went, I had barely wanted in the door when a lady with a strong Brooklyn accent held out small votive candles and asked me, "You want some Shabbos candles?" My befuddlement was clearly visible (though I did know what "Shabbos" was): "You're not Jewish are you?" she commented. Umm, no. She walked off, rolling her eyes as if to say, Great. One of them again. Yes, I'm one of them, as evidenced by the fact that I spent nearly fifteen minutes circling the store in search of ground pork.

Then there are the checkout lines. The magazines that would normally advertise everything from Marie Osmond's latest of weightloss treatment to the best way to baste your turkey are covered with black pieces of plastic, no doubt in consideration of the Orthodox Jewish inhabitants. 

But my favorite Shoprite cultural moment? I was just about to check out, when I saw a wizened couple shuffling the other way. They were at least 60, bearing the marks of a long and familiar existence, and the wife was scolding her husband in the thickest New York accent I had ever heard. "You didn't get the can of beans? I thought I told you to get the beans..." I couldn't help but think, It's true! Jewish mothers, they're real! It could have been a scene straight out of Seinfeld. 

But perhaps the thing New Yorkers are most known for is their, ahem, hospitality. New York drivers, New York soup Nazis, we've all heard about them. So it was with complete astonishment that I experienced a fragment of commercial hospitality that I have a hard time imagining happening even in relatively cozy Rochester, MN. I had gone into my little corner housewares store to get a baking sheet on which to make homemade bread. You know, one of those tiny Manhattan housewares stores that are about two feet wide and twenty feet deep? But I had stopped unexpectedly at another store right before to get a just-remembered item, and I consequently lacked the cash necessary to buy the pan of the ideal size I wanted. But I didn't realize this until I was at the cash register. I apologized, and moved to exchange the pan for a smaller, cheaper one commensurate with the cash funds in my hand. 

"Don't worry about it," the shop (owner?) drawled, waving his hand in a laissez-faire dismissal not compatible with laissez-faire economics. "I'll just mark how much you owe on the receipt, and you can bring in the difference next time." 

My jaw dropped. He was spotting me the money? Here he was, a man I had never even met before, much less knew, forgiving the $2.87 I owed him and trusting me to come pay him back? He wrote the total down on the receipt, with such nonchalance that I guessed he knew he may not see the money again, but still wasn't bothered by such a loss.

I returned to my apartment, a few blocks away. And don't worry, I did return to the shop a few days later, when I returned the $2.87 along with the value of another purchase. The guy who had forgiven me the money wasn't there, so I have it to a different cashier, who look confused at my action. I guess he doesn't ordinarily have people give him more than what is written on the receipt. 

Perhaps, I reflected, he was just as confused as I was. I had not expected a businessman, and a New York one at that, to show such faith in a complete stranger. He forgave my debt and let me buy my pan, despite the very likely possibility that he would never recover the money. Yet I could hardly believe it. Maybe it is not so strange then, that the second cashier was so bemused. Perhaps he did not expect the recipient to appreciate that grace, any more than I expected to receive it in the first place. Yet I returned with the money, and from now on I try to shop at that store whenever I need something of the kitchen/housewares type.  Who knew that grace would so exceptionally descend, and that it would come in the form of a baking sheet?

Maggots and Monuments

Let's face it: many--perhaps even most--artists are parasites. Just look at Shakespeare: Of his plays, almost all borrowed plots from older sources. Yet most of us would be hard-pressed to cite Boccaccio for Romeo and Juliet, or even Plutarch (translated by Thomas North )for Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra.

Admittedly, Shakespeare (yes, for once and for all, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, not Edward de Vere or some other conspiracy theory crank) amalgamated, rearranged, and lyricized his sources in such remarkable ways as to make him utterly immortal. Ben Jonson declared in his preface to the First Folio, the first collected volume of Shakespeare's works published in 1623,

"Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,/And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live"

 But still, my point is that imitation, intellectual thievery, allusion--whatever you want to call it, it's a part of the act of creation. I had to laugh today when I read Margaret Cavendish's view on the subject. She's not exactly a household name, but I find Cavendish intriguing, not just because she was a published female writer in the mid-seventeenth century, or even because she was a royalist at a time when Charles I, the king of England, had lost his grip on the country--and on his head (courtesy of Oliver Cromwell and his associates). Mostly, I love/hate her because she was utterly shameless. She had her opinions, and she published them loud and clear--most of which involved her own exceeding adequacy in relation to others' utter inadequacy. Just take this bit: towards the end of Nature's Pictures, published in 1654, she includes a cute little story in which the Olympian gods are determining which books to keep in their library of Fame and which ones should be cast into Hell to be burned, or else drowned in the river of oblivion. Cavendish declares that none of her contemporaries' work should be saved,

for most of the moderns have been like a company of Ravens, that live upon dead carckasses, so they upon old Authors, and some have been like Maggots, that have been bred in their dead flesh, which is the living works of dead Authors, and some like Hornetts, and some like Bees, but very few rightly begotten from Nature...

Isn't Cavendish great? She tells it like it is. And she doesn't like people who steal other people's stuff instead of inventing their own.


The thing is, our culture seems to have a congenital, hereditary disease to do just that. Just look at the Low Library here at Columbia--though don't be fooled, it's actually not used as a library now (photo credit Wikipedia):

The Low Memorial Library. Now where have I seen that before?....

Think it looks familiar? Well, it should. Not only is it modeled on the Pantheon in Rome:

Ah, yes, the Pantheon...hmmm...See what I mean?

 But it also happens to look like every other neoclassical building built--not in the first or second century AD--but in the nineteenth or even twentieth century, which abound in New York City. One nineteenth-century real estate magazine, detested by Low Library, even wrote, "there is scarcely any original designing done in this city, except the vagaries of the incompetent. The rest is mostly a copybook reproduction of classical and other detail" (qtd. in The New York Times, Feb 17 2002). And Columbia is full of such buildings. Just look at Bulter, the main library. Now, don't get me wrong, it's beautiful, especially at night; but isn't there something rather pretentious about using a neoclassical model, complete with the names of classical and and classic authors inscribed above its columns, for a building completed in 1934? Columbia, it would seem, had a bit of an identity crisis, after it moved from Park Place, to 49th Street, and finally to Morningside Heights in 1896; with no original buildings to its name after the latest move, it was the landless younger brother in  in an Ivy League governed by architectural primogeniture, so to speak.

But then again, who am I, the proud Princetonian, to scoff? After all, my alma mater literally has stones from Oxford colleges cemented into Firestone Library. Its Graduate College tower is practically an exact replica or that of Magdalen College, and the cloisters of Rocky/Mathey? Well, they have New College, Oxford written all over them. Can we say architectural envy?

I find this insatiable desire to connect with the old, or the ageless, fascinating, given the simultaneous, seemingly equally insatiable desire for progressiveness. These institutions are at the cutting edge of research and education, and they want to show it. I get daily emails about exciting events: forums discussing the Middle East, conferences on epidemiology, and lectures regarding new literary fields (disability studies--who knew?). (Side Note: This is, by the way, a typically American value; the idea of progress for progress' sake does not exist in most countries. I discovered in England that my British friends could just not relate to my stories of motivational middle-school mantras like "Yes we can!" and "If you believe it, you can achieve it." I can't imagine why...)

Yet at the same time universities' profound inability to wrench themselves from admiration of the past is embedded within their very stones. Ambivalence is literally constructed into the fabric of our universities, and our culture as a whole.

So what do we do now? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. But I don't think we should deny the ambivalence, forget our duty to the past, or blind ourselves to the future. Haven't we seen enough of all variants of this in recent politics? By all means, make progress, but only with a firm grasp of what has come before, and what can be done with it. Think Shakespeare, not maggots.

Bringing Forth Fruit: A Prelude

Me, in all sincerity, to a friend several years ago: "I could live anywhere but New York City." 


Look at this sentence. Now back to the blog title. Now back to the sentence. Now back to the title. 


God's irony is cruel sometimes.


I say this half in jest. Truly, despite visiting New York multiple times during college, my vagabond shoes did not long to stay. Wicked on Broadway, Placido Domingo at the Met, Chinese New Year in Chinatown--all of these had failed to seduce me into an urban liaison with Sinatra's metropolis. It was not big cities in and of them selves. I decided after two months in Paris I could live there forever, its arrondissements distilling all its charm and history into manageable size, so as to be accessible even to the naive foreigner. London--not quite as charming, but still pervaded by a class and sense of heritage that only comes from a nation one thousand years old. And it has Ben's Cookies, the finest cookies anywhere in the entire world, hands down. New York, on the other hand, had not yet secured my affections. 


Nevertheless, when graduate school applications rolled around, I applied to Columbia University, lured by its English faculty and its proximity to Princeton (once a Tiger, always a Tiger...). I ranked it solidly among the six solicited schools to which I would be thrilled to be accepted, as opposed to several decent, yet less desirable "safety" schools. Yet in my mind I had not yet made the connection that Columbia=New York, and me=not New York. 


This connection revealed itself in all its brutality, though, when I was accepted into Columbia's Ph.D. program. Suddenly I was forced to confront the fact that I could be spending the next six years of my life in the one city I had rejected as utterly uninhabitable. This was at the forefront of my mind on the campus visiting day, when the department flew me in (from Oxford!) in order to woo me with congenial students, incredibly impressive professors, and tasty Mediterranean food representative of the area's cosmopolitanism (served in a professor's fabulous studio apartment). 


I was pleasantly surprised, then, to discover that Columbia's campus was in fact a campus, though not nearly so sprawling and idyllic as Princeton (famously dubbed "the pleasantest country club in America" by F. Scott Fitzgerald '17 in This Side of Paradise). And Columbia is sandwiched in between not one, but two parks, Riverside and Morningside. Plus, it is close to Central Park, only about six blocks southeast; there were trees in New York after all! Morningside Heights, then, is not Times Square; it is distinctly different from midtown or downtown Manhattan. I thus accepted Columbia's offer contentedly, hopeful--if not altogether confident--that I would somehow be able to eke out a comfortable existence in my least favorite city. 


After living here for six months, remnants of my old attitude remain. I don't know if I will ever truly love or miss the City, or if I will ever forget the sight of a beautiful night landscape rendered fully visible solely by the light of the stars and moon. Such an experience does not and cannot exist in New York City. Indeed, so inconceivable is such existence amid the urban light and vertical architectural cacophony that I did not realize until I returned to Minnesota that I had not seen the moon at all in almost five months. Still, every once in a while I am reminded of the London of William Wordsworth's Prelude, that "monstrous ant-hill on the plain / Of a too busy world…[an] endless stream of men, and moving things," wherein all people are “melted and reduced / To one identity.”

Yet these months have shown me aspects of the city that I did not anticipate. As in Paris, where I prided myself on my intimate knowledge of the city's markets, I took great comfort in discovering the best and cheapest places for groceries in the Upper West Side. And as in London, my runs have provided a detailed mental map of the paths through the City's many public parks. 

Moreover, God has shown me--once again--that I am exactly where He always planned me to be. I have written elsewhere of my theme verse for Princeton, Philippians 1:6, painted in red, trimming the walls of my dorm room senior year: "Being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." Looking daily at this verse reminded me that my present and future are not part of some amorphous, seemingly errant Odyssey; they are but the continuation of a plan that God has been working since before I was aware of Him, before He even knit me together in my mother's womb. 
This path, then, has led me to New York, the Big Apple. Here is where I will spend, roughly, the next six years of my life, where I will enter, presumably, academic maturity, where all the skills I have fostered and gifts I have received, hopefully, will blossom into...what? Thistles, vainglorious self-aggrandizement bleeding those that would hinder its progress? Brambles, unconscious self-absorption producing nothing for the betterment of the world?


I sincerely hope, I hope with all my heart, not. I would blossom into fruit, into the most luscious, succulent grapes the academic world, indeed any world, has ever seen; grapes that provide sustenance to my friends, colleagues, students, and teachers, bursting with the sweetness of literature and all the Christlikeness of the engrafted vine. I was overcome while reading the Princeton Alumni Weekly today with a deep sense of obligation. No, not of obligation, of recognition, a recognition of the privileges I have received and the opportunities to which I am parcel. The providence evidenced in these opportunities creates great gratitude, and with this gratitude comes a desire to inspire change and please God even more than Jodi Picoult '87 does her readers, or Anthony Marx *86 *90 does the patrons of the New York Public Library. 


I realize this dream reeks of all the naive idealism of youth, privilege, and late night insomnia. Nevertheless, I would not give it up. Rather, I would press it close to my chest, and keep it forefront in my mind. My greatest fear is finding that after six years my time in the Big Apple has been wasted. I would have it otherwise, that six years will see the bringing forth of much fruit, fruit by which the tree--the Tree--is known.