Season of Light/Season of Darkness.
I have been waiting to compose this message because I fondly hoped that I would be able to send to our friends who have been so supportive throughout the past year news that our time of trial is over. As many of you know I have been involved in another intense period of interviewing which has taken me from Indianapolis to Fond du Lac to Denver, to Dallas to Seoul. Unfortunately, most of these institutions have not yet completed their searches and we are still waiting to hear whether or not I will have a position in January and if so which one.
This has been a terribly difficult year but also, in many ways, a rewarding one. We have had almost no income and have been living off our savings and the –quite extraordinary– generosity of our family and friends. Since May we have been in Upper Michigan, deep in the Northern Hardwood Forest (or foryest, as Coeli calls it, with a Slavic e (ye) which she acquired I know not where). Summer was cool and rainy, with almost no sun. Since the beginning of November it has been dark and cold and I have been hauling wood to heat our tiny cabin. On one occasion I had to postpone an interview because I was unable to reach the airport through the blinding snow. There is only limited cell reception here and we cannot get internet access where we are living, but have to drive into town. We have learned the meaning of exile, continuing to write and hope (it is the word, after all, through which we access the profound truth and power which is the basis of all reasonable hope …) as darkness seemed to close all around.
But there have been moments of joy. Autumn was magnificent as the maples and birches returned to the cosmos the light they must of have been given in an earlier summer, long ago, when the sun actually did shine. Or perhaps they have learned to live off starlight. I have learned that birch bark has great endurance. The Ojibwa have birch bark scrolls containing their wisdom ferreted away all around this forest. Some are thousands of years old. When we leave here I will bring birch bark with me. Wisdom endures, even if we do not.
I have also had the opportunity to travel around the country –and once outside it, to Seoul– and to engage an enormous variety of institutions around this great spiritual and civic discipline which we call the liberal arts. Much of what I found was sobering. It has often felt as if the opening in which I have lived for the past 25 years, cultivating sapiential, civilizational, and civic literacy among students who did not know that they sought it, leading communities in reflecting on fundamental questions of meaning and value, is rapidly closing around me as “higher education” replaces the university and the “instructional delivery” replaces liberating education. It has been frightening. But then I will find myself in a place I would never have expected to be, at a school with very little professed commitment to liberal education, addressing a faculty drawn overwhelmingly from technical or business disciplines, and my talk on the liberal arts will awaken something, “stirring dull roots with spring rain …”
The people crave wisdom; it is the elders who are at fault, have ceased to teach it. Let us just hope that the people find a way to gather the resources and restore wisdom’s house (and give us a room therein) before there is nothing left but those birch bark scrolls …
This is, for us, still a season of darkness and of dark learning. I am hopeful that the New Year will bring proof of the sun’s return. But if not, we will learn to be like those maples and birches of Upper Michigan’s brilliant autumn, returning light received in darkness, a warrant of wisdom’s endurance and a sign and foretaste of what is to come.
