An Overheard Conversation: Loving History, a Sixteenth Birthday, Blogging, and Youth against the Youth Culture

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Yesterday, I suddenly found myself in the position of a fly on the wall in a conversation

between a graduate student in her late twenties and someone who was just about to

turn sixteen--today. It made me think of a different side of the subject of my recent posts

here regarding the drastically increased role of electronics technologies in early twentyfirst-

century life. While I've been voicing my concerns, of necessity, given my focus on

the fate of letter writing, in the more somber registers, I want to sound a different note

here. It's a rather simple one, and hardly new. I just want to add my own hope and

enthusiasm to that of others who see true benefit in some uses of the new medium.

Technology's role is all in how we use it and today some people are using it to

undermine illegitimate hierarchies and unfair limits on aspiration that are placed by the

dominant culture. While there are other examples, I'm thinking of the truly remarkable

blogs--the USIH blog is at the forefront of my mind, of course--that have arisen, outside

of the usual corridors of cultural power and influence. Some of these represent a true

alternative to prevailing practices and, because an alternative is so badly needed, in our

profession as in many others, I want to acknowledge this most emphatically. For all of

the drawbacks, there are heartening developments. One of them is the way in which the

art of blogging can allow people to move forward to fruition of their creative powers even

when the powers that be may never grant them permission or entrance to the club. As

the autodidacts inside and outside of professions prove again and again, industry and

true passion for a subject can constitute their own invitation to the table.

First, the conversation; then just a hint of one of the many reasons why some of the

more penetrating blogs out there today can be so inspiring to someone probably

basically a Luddite at heart (my preference will always be for the real, no matter how

you spin it).

The near sixteen-year-old began by expressing her passion for the liberal arts,

especially history. While to date she had done well at the full range of subjects taught in

school, and cultivated an interest in all aspects of the curriculum, which worked well in

accordance with her aims of doing well, she admitted to being less than excited about

what was on offer in her eleventh-grade science and math classes. She revealed this in

a set of questions revolving around a two-pronged issue for her: what difference there

might be, if any, between the pursuit of science and math, which she saw as lying on

one part of the spectrum, and another part involving history and literature, where she

confessed her greatest interests lay; and whether it was acceptable, at her level, to feel

a strong preference for the history, in particular, over science. Of vital importance in

understanding her tentativeness, perhaps, and the rather turgid response her inquiry

drew, in turn, was that her interlocutor declared herself to be pursuing a doctorate in

chemistry.

The graduate student began with a dubious claim, which maybe you have heard before,

or even hold to be the case. The 15-year old had not heard it before, and, in fact, I too

had been previously spared. It is the idea that the liberal arts has to do with people

whereas science concerns "the world." (The latter words even seemed to be uttered

with a kind of breathlessness that seemed to underscore the limited horizons of the

former, but I could have been hearing things.)

Well, this dichotomy did not sit well with the teenager and I must say, more power to her.

With the utmost respect and even deference, she begged to differ, mostly by means of a

quiet yet persistent line of inquiry. She got across her sense that history, her favorite

subject, also has to do with the world, just as science can have rather a lot to do with

people; in fact, people and the world are so closely entwined as to be difficult to

extricate from one another. The graduate student, conceding nothing, pulled out all the

stops, including referring to the great many people she knew who thought as she did.

The teenager's argument, for it really was one, however cloaked in query, continued to

be conveyed in this deft manner until the topic changed somewhat, along with the tenor

of the conversation, into a question of whether it is really possible to know, at such an

early age, whether one's main interests lay in history and literature or the hard sciences.

The youngster momentarily sought the firmer grounding, usually a sure-fire argument

winner in this age of personal preference, the emotivism Alasdair MacIntyre criticizes,

by reiterating and underscoring the depth of her interest in matters of interpretation over

scientific empiricism, but this was a no go and she soon returned to her style of goodnatured

yet relentless questioning. It was a formidable modus operandi. Her stealth

would have put many a trained rhetorician to shame.

The 15-year-old unfurled a line of reasoning qua inquiry that ran something like this (I'm

paraphrasing for brevity's sake): if she herself already knew that this was where her

greatest passion lay, and that the subject was simply pregnant with potential illumination

and exciting beyond one's wildest imagination, wasn't it okay to go ahead and choose

now, before her own inner judge and jury, securing a verdict that it was fine to cultivate a

vision of a future for herself that involved the liberal arts somehow and did not

necessarily involve math and science? Was it normal and healthy to have this

inclination? It seems to me she was wondering, as teenagers are wont to do, though

often regarding matters less academic, whether her desires were natural and legitimate.

She seemed to be referring to the allowances we tend either to allow or deprive

ourselves regarding the hopes and dreams that populate our hours and days; in the

case of the young, as we desperately await the chance to grow up and enter into adult

work life as equal partners.

The graduate student's response interested and, I admit, surprised me by its certainty.

The years separating the conversation partners couldn't have been much more than

eight or ten. Yet they didn't seem close to seeing eye to eye on this, at least in that

sitting. For the older person, who had clearly now opted for role of advisor, insisted that

the advisee was way too young to cast her lot--that it was premature to bestow her

scholarly affections in this way. Look at me, she said. At your age I thought I would be a

nurse and "now I am a chemist." When asked by her companion whether being a nurse

wasn't also a profession, she was told it is "more of a trade."

There are all sorts of points latent in this rich (for someone in hearing range) exchange,

and you will take from it what you will. But the one that stands out for my purposes is

that here I saw a young person, poised right on the brink of the birthday we often think

of as a kind of landmark or turning point, the onset of adulthood, asking piercing

questions of herself and others about her present and future.

It was impressive.

What was she getting at, really, with this line of questioning? Did she really think she

needed someone else's permission to like some subjects and not others in high school?

Probably not. Did she want confirmation that it was okay not to like science? I doubt it,

as she seemed well aware the graduate student, given her own evident passion for her

own subject, would not provide anything of the sort. What were they arguing over and

why would neither budge?

Maybe it was just an obvious case of love of history coming head to head with love of

science. And the subtext might have been each subject's relative merits in representing

and illuminating "the world."

But also at stake seemed to be the meaning of childhood and adulthood and when and

where the one was to phase into the next. Unconsciously perhaps the fifteen-year-old

was thinking about what it meant to turn sixteen and the twenty-something

unconsciously reminding her that sixteen is not twenty something. We won't know the

inner workings of the unconscious and conscious minds of these incredibly bright and

thoughtful individuals.

It reminded me of the Cat Stevens song from 1970, "Father and Son," that non-duet duet in which the singer-songwriter sings both parts, expressing the tension in the intimate

generational bond, the father's primordial instinct to protect coming up against the son's

desire to be free--to get away from authority, yes, in the sixties' generation gap sort of

way but also to be free to enter full adulthood in that small "r" republican way we study

so much in our field. The song seems to be suggesting that the son wants to be freed

up so he can follow his own dreams in order to find out what unique contribution he can

make. The father counsels patience and conformity:

"It's not time to make a change,

Just relax, take it easy.

You're still young, that's your fault,

There's so much you have to know.

Find a girl, settle down,

If you want you can marry.

Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy.

I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,

To be calm when you've found something going on.

But take your time, think a lot,

Why, think of everything you've got.

For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not."

It seems to me that the conversation to which I was privy had elements of this same

tension. The dominant culture we have inherited, charted in too-painful detail by recent

historians and social critics, is one that supposedly holds youth in high regard. Yet, as

we know well, by placing youth on a pedestal for people of all ages, as the most

desirable state, it fosters a basic defeatism or nihilism, since our nature, the fortunate

ones among us, is to grow and to age. If we cannot muster enthusiasm for those things,

the very definition of what it is to be alive, can we about anything?

One of the things that is so glorious about bløgging, as I've spelled it elsewhere in order

to distinguish the elegant, deep, worthwhile, and meaningful variety from the not-so, is

that it is, in some cases anyway, turning the mainstream cult of youth on its head, and

along with it some other cultish practices such as a kind of professionalism that

discourages free thought and speech until such time as a person has all of the proper

passports, visas, degrees, tenure and promotion votes--until all of the working papers

are in order. At the foundation of today's culture rests an unquestioned assumption--that

the longer we delay the onset of adulthood the better. This might be partially true

enough when we have an adult world of such dreary predictability as so much of ours

today, which is protected from any serious questioning by elephantine bureaucracies,

protracted credentialing systems, and narrow notions of professionalism that really

mean gatekeeping and homogenization. But it is sure to cut us off from the sustainable

practices and renewable intellectual energies we so badly need in order to marshal

forces against just such stultifying realities. Continually depleting the influx of the sorely

needed powers of new energy and fresh perspectives, all in the name of the protection

and extension of youth, has become a way of life. It never makes sense, but is

especially useless when there aren't even very many credentialized, overprofessionalized

jobs to speak of.

I think high-quality blogging is one of the more exciting things to appear on the

intellectual horizon in recent years. In the case of the contribution of newer scholars,

especially in a time in which the terrible outlook for the future of our field and the

humanities generally is a given, this public intellectual activity has potentially farreaching

ramifications for the prospects of our field and profession--and, to a certain

degree, the state of intellectual, social, and political life more broadly.

I think a lot about that line, the father's charge that you are young and it's your fault. Of

course, that charge is unfair; it goes without saying. How young we are is precisely one

of the only things for which we cannot possibly be held responsible. Then I remember

the wisdom and yearning of that remarkable conversationalist, who turns sixteen this

very day, and I am forced to ask...or can we?

She was quietly insistent on winning the case for at least a hypothetical acceptance that

her scholarly passions and goals might be real ones in the long-term, as if presciently

aware that if she does not press and even win the case now in behalf of her visions of

contribution and fulfillment she might be here tomorrow but her dreams may not. It was

as if she couldn't rest her case until the question was answered in the affirmative.

Happy Birthday, passionate young scholar, wherever you are. I have a feeling your

dreams will still be there with you, wherever you choose to go.

Inarticulate by Choice: The Decline of Letter Writing and the Future of the Intellectual Past, Part One

Should someone interested in intellectual history be worried about the near demise of letter writing in our lifetimes? In the next couple of posts, I'll offer some of my thoughts on this, for whatever they're worth. Perhaps you will say my affirmative answer is all too predictable, but perhaps my reasons will be of interest to some readers, if only for their humor value or quaintness. Even as I write this I realize how dated my reflections must already sound to some. But to those I say, did you ever think the record player, albums, bell bottoms, and the Beach Boys would have another run? Yes, I am logging one person's protest. But please note that I am not arguing a Luddite either/or position, as cathartic as that might be, but rather making a case for a marriage of ideals, past and present, or at least peaceful coexistence. That would seem preferable to ditching one altogether, on the grounds of irreconcilable differences.

I grew up in a household in which letter writing was at least as common as watching a show on tv; no, even more so. Honestly. I regularly wrote to and received letters from my grandparents, my uncle, and friends out of town even for a few weeks in the summer. Summertime, in fact, was always a great time for letters. Reading or writing them was one of our favorite summer activities, along with swimming, riding horses, reading for fun, and just lying in the long grass watching the clouds go by. (And I didn't even walk to school and back for ten miles in a snowstorm. Ever.) Later additional regular correspondents included my parents, romantic interests, teachers, friends of my family, and others. I still have many of the letters I received. The delivery of the mail each day was always a treat, as you never knew when you might receive a letter or postcard addressed to you personally.

The advent of email thus at first filled me, as it did many others who knew the deep satisfactions of this pursuit, with trepidation. What would a cold, impersonal, and computerized way of communicating do to this beloved part of life, the wellspring of so much joy and meaning?


I still remember experiencing an aversion (gag?) reflex when I first saw an actual email address. An unsightly and awkward non-word, here it was, in all lower-case letters, like the dreamer who shows up on the first day of class without his or her pants. But not a dream. Worse off than being caught in a plain old birthday suit, this figure was deliberately accessorized with the bizarre and, to borrow Lewis Mumford's term, paleo-technic @ mark, and the infantile "dot...dot" (we had learned to call it a period since about age three, after all). It seemed like something a robot would designate an address, hardly comparable with words written out long-hand or typed on an envelope calling up a particular, unique person and a particular, unique place in the world. The integrity and dignity of those names were protected by the buffer and frame of standard spacing and punctuation. We had never begrudged those little spaces the miniscule space they were taking up. We never thought of merging all of the letters and symbols together like some kind of sudden pile-up accident on the highway.

As time went by and it became clear that email was displacing letter-writing as we knew it, I wondered whether I would, could, or should make my peace with this new mode of communicating. I resisted using email as long as possible, until it made such inroads at the workplace as to make it nearly mandatory. When I found that fruitful exchanges with students often occurred on email because they seemed so comfortable with the medium, I became more reconciled to the (no longer new) technology. A few awkward initial work emails morphed into an ever-expanding list of messages to click on and "open" (a faded memory of what it used to mean to open a piece of mail). (Apparently in Poland, anyway, there was initially some controversy over whether "click" was even the proper word, since a mouse does not click so much as squeak). While I suppose I experienced an occasional frisson of excitement on rare occasions when I saw that particular person had written me, the Christmas-morning level of anticipation attending the daily mail was not an intrinsic part of email. Needless to say, when someone attached the "s" word to the word "mail" in a cruel act of name-calling directed at what I had come to treasure as a complete, life-giving practice--it was hardly reducible to just another mode of transporting a piece of freight, with words as the un-precious cargo to be lugged around any old way--I was not amused.

Turning momentarily to the @, the terms used to refer to this "at" sign or "commercial at," as it is known in English, vary greatly from country to country. The LINGUIST LIST website's list gives an entertaining assortment of them here, collected from all over the world. For a lovely commentary, see also this piece from the e-zine of Michael Quinion, British author of Why is Q Always Followed by U? (answers to language questions), Gallimaufry (about words that are vanishing from English), and the UK bestseller Port Out, Starboard Home--in the USA Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds--, debunking legends about word origins.

Most commonly, @ is rendered with animal metaphors, such as monkey tail, cat or dog or pig tail, or elephant trunk. Some of my favorites are strudel, little puppy, little kitten, and meow. Can you imagine the possibilities for a fuzzier, furrier future and humbler, humanized technology if we were to start spelling our email addresses with a "meow"? The commercial at instead has connotations of *insert number* at the price of *insert price*. How cold, impersonal, and computerized can you get?

Meow.

But wait! What does Italy call the @ you might ask, and rightly so. It calls it a "chiocciola," the Italian word for snail, especially the shell. A beautiful image. Likewise in Hebrew, Korean, and Esperanto. And French? Mai oui, you are correct. Un escargot! So, who is looking like the real snail now? Or is it already implied; does everyone but me already know e-mail is short for "escargot" mail?

In the last couple of years, I developed a close friendship with a woman twenty years my senior. I had known her for decades but had previously socialized with her only when our two families had gotten together. Discovering one another as true friends, which means also learning the other is capable of doing what it takes to sustain a friendship, has been a joy.

In anticipation of my going out of the country for the Spring 2012 semester, we wondered together over lunch what would be the best way to keep in touch. We both liked the idea of experimenting with exchanging old-fashioned letters. We already had our own preferred and customary forms of communicating--a combination of long, leisurely lunches about every other week, and longish, personalized emails in between only to make arrangements to see one another or to report something of unusual interest like an interesting article, stunning weather, or a wildlife sighting. We had no idea whether we would take to letter writing. We agreed on the experiment only with mutual assurances that if ever it was inconvenient, we should instead fall back on the easier path of enhancing our email communication for the duration of my stay abroad. Here, I'll just report that our experiment was a great success.

But for now I hope you'll join me in considering what alternative to the s-word could help reflect the honorable tradition of exchanging regular mail. Quinion writes, re the @ symbol: "the most-used Hebrew term is strudel, from the famous Viennese rolled-up apple sweet. Another common Swedish name is kanelbulle, 'cinnamon bun', which is rolled up in a similar way." If the cold and distant commercial at, with its echoes of the cash register, is preferred for one of the key building blocks of email, clearly the territory of the warm and charming has been ceded to those who might wish to restore the practice of exchanging old-fashioned letters to its central place in life. Certainly another name for the mail that captures the essence of what is so sublime about a real letter will come to someone's mind. Does anyone have any ideas? Maybe rhyming with email could be just The Mail, with the accent on the "The," pronounced thee. Is this coincidentally apt? Perhaps Thee Mail is just the corrective we need to to e- (me-?) mail.

In the next post I hope to convey some of the differences between letter-writing, as I have just recently re-experienced it, and the use of emails. In doing so I merely add my brief to that of others who have lamented the decline of this delicious pursuit. You might dismiss this, I know, as nothing but nostalgia, another all-purpose epithet designed for just such occasions. But the line between nostalgia and retro isn't always so clear, is it?

To be continued...