school | Richard Nilsen

Everyone has at least one minority taste — a love of some obscure discipline that the vast majority of the public find uninteresting or unimportant. It could be stamp collecting or motocross racing. The majority watch popular shows on TV, listen to Top-40 music and read best-sellers. But pick any individual from such an audience, and you’ll find at least one out-of-the-way obsession. Surfing, perhaps, or Civil War re-enacting.

For those lucky or persistent enough, this may turn out to be a vocation: Universities are full of those who have turned their love of Medieval linguistics or non-Newtonian physics into a meal ticket. In fact, this is where we expect to find these eccentrics. It is their niche.

But there are a few of us, a benighted few, whose lives are made up entirely out of the odder corners of life, who have almost no popular tastes and have not turned our weird fascinations into a job. We are the outcasts who love all those things that normal people find irrelevant, and we bury ourselves in the obscure, arcane, esoteric, hermetic or recondite.

I cannot speak for others of our brotherhood (and sisterhood), but I’m afraid I was born that way. It was not a reaction to anything — no childhood traumas drove me away from things popular; no deprivations led me to seek fulfillment in those oddments of culture I find so absorbing.

From as long back as I can remember, my interests were not those of my peers. I heard classmates complain about school, having to learn things they didn’t feel they would ever need to know in life. And I admit, it is very seldom I have ever needed to calculate the area of a circle. But I loved school from first grade on.

In the early grades, I adored diagraming sentences. I spent free moments between classes in the school library. I never found sports persuasive. I was in dire peril of losing myself in something as abstruse as lepidoptery or studying the history of bottle making. In third grade, I could tell you anything you wished to know about the Mesozoic Era — rather more than you would wish to know, really.

I grew up just outside New York City, and spent many fine hours at the American Museum of Natural History, in its darker recesses, and at the Hayden Planetarium.

As a teenager, when everyone else was listening to Paul Anka or Chubby Checker. I was listening to Leonard Bernstein. My Four Seasons was Antonio Vivaldi, not Frankie Valli. My make-out music was Stravinsky. Honestly; I’m not making that up.

I am not claiming special merit for my tastes. There is great value in the best pop music, and some of our classic authors were best-sellers in their own time. So I’m not making a case for being high-brow, but rather confessing my own weirdness, my own unfitness for human society.

Not all my minority tastes are so high-falutin’ as Orlando di Lassus. I have in my bones more specialized knowledge of 1930s B Westerns than should block up any segment of a person’s long-term memory bank. Do you know the difference between Ken Maynard and his brother, Kermit? Can you name even one of the cast line-up of the ever-changing Three Mesquiteers? I can. The same for science-fiction movies from the 1950s. They are all there, clogging my brain-case.

As I take inventory of what is boxed up in my brain-attic, I find any number of things most people don’t care about. In fact, what most people don’t care about pretty well defines who I am.

When visiting France, I never went to the Eiffel Tower, but did drive through all of the north, visiting Gothic cathedrals. I’ve been to Chartres three times, and in Paris, Notre Dame was practically a second home. I cannot remember how many visits to it. So, yes, my tastes are not the normal tastes.

On weekends, I watch C-Span’s “Book TV.” I search YouTube for college lectures. I have a huge collection of Great Courses DVDs.

When it comes to movies, I love them slow and arty, preferably with subtitles. I have all of Tarkovsky on DVD, all of Almodovar, and all that are available of Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. And tons of Bergman and Herzog and Renoir. I would have a bunch of Marcel Pagnol, but there isn’t a bunch. Nor is there much of Guy Maddin available, but if you ever needed bona fides as a weirdo, a confessed love of Maddin’s films is proof.

Then, there’s classical music. If I had to lose a sense, I would ask for sight to go before hearing. I need music. Nothing else so precisely both describes and evokes the most profound human emotions. My insides swell up when I listen to the greatest music. Pop music does an excellent job of pumping up energy and cheerleading for the happiest emotions. But classical music is needed to speak for grief, transcendence, fear, anxiety, love, power — and even more, the interplay between all these feelings. The virtue of popular music is its simplicity and directness; that of classical music is its complexity and depth.

But even amidst the classical repertoire, I find myself drawn to the outskirts. Yes, I love my Beethoven and Brahms, but I also love my Schoenberg, my Morton Subotnick, my Colin McPhee. And even when dealing with Beethoven, I’m more likely to pull up the Grosse Fuge than the Appassionata.

Then, there’s my reading. The authors I most often re-read are Homer and Ovid. I collect Loeb Library editions. I have seven translations of the Iliad on my shelves behind my writing desk. Five Odysseys.

And not just Greek or Roman lit. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been over Beowulf. There’s the poetry of Rumi and Basho. I’ve read two different translations of the Indian Mahabharata. I am currently reading two very different translations of Gilgamesh, one is a line-by-line literal translation of the extant fragments, the other is a re-telling from all the varied bits of the epic that have survived, into a single version. Comparing the two gives me a better handle on Mesopotamian thought and literature. These current two now join the two earlier translations that I had previously read.

I have often wondered why I am so out of step with my fellow beings. Any one of them might well enjoy any one of the things I’ve mentioned, but the concatenation of them defines me. You can see the wide range of things I write about in this blog.

My late wife used to say I’m “the man who can’t have fun,” and laugh at me because I cannot bear musical theater, don’t dance, don’t listen to pop music, don’t read popular novels, and lord save me from theme parks. I shudder. But I respond that I have lots of fun with my oddments. I get tremendous pleasure from string quartets or visiting art galleries or reading multiple translations of German poetry.

If we are what we eat, we are also what we read, see and listen to. It all goes into us and feeds us, body and soul, and fashions who we have become. For better or worse.

We were watching a TV show about ancient Egypt and the voiceover told us the pyramids we were visiting were “35 centuries old,” and that phrase suddenly struck me in a new way.

I am now 68 years old, which is a bit more than two-thirds of a century, and I have a body-sense, a memory-sense — a conceptual awareness — of what a century feels like. I wrote for the newspaper for a quarter of a century. Four times that and Bingo! So, a century has a palpable meaning for me. I feel it in my bones. Hearing the TV presenter, then, made me react, “Thirty-five is not a very large number.” I can picture in my mind’s eye what 35 centuries might be, and it really doesn’t seem like all that long. The Viking Age ended only 10 of them ago.

Anton and Laura Nilsen

After all, my grandfather, who I knew when I was a boy, was born in 1890, which was the year Vincent van Gogh died. It was also the year Sitting Bull died, and the Elephant Man (John Merrick), and Heinrich Schliemann — the man who discovered Troy. My grandfather was seven years old before Johannes Brahms died. These historical figures seem that much less remote when I think of it that way.

Rowan and Nancy Steele

For my wife, it is even more present. When she was a girl, her great-grandmother lived with her family. Her great-grandmother, Nancy Jane Steele, was a Civil War widow. She married Rowan Steele after that war, but Rowan had been a cavalry soldier during the battle at Appomattox. That dumps the War Between the States right in my wife’s lap. History is not some remote collection of facts gathered from a book, it is family.

The word, “century,” has its roots in family. The Latin word was “saeculum,” which was an indistinct time period that measured, basically, the time from your grandfather to the time of your grandchild. Caesar Augustus regularized that time to be 110 years, but in effect it varied from 90 years to about 120 years. It was an “age.”

History, as a subject, is different if you think of it that way. It is not a set of facts for a trivia contest, but a continuity, of which we are each a knot along a string.

For many, these days, that continuity is found in genealogy: How far back can you trace your ancestors? With various DNA tests, you can discover ancestry beyond the civic records of the standard genealogy. A y-DNA test can follow the paternal haplogroup all the way back to Africa, with punctuated stops along the way. A maternal mitochondrial DNA test can do the same for the distaff side.

It means that you are very personally connected to the history you study in school. Somewhere among those pogroms, crusades, wars and massacres, your strands of DNA were either slaughtered or doing the slaughtering, and probably both at different times. Looked at through the small lens, genealogy is your story; looked at through the big lens, all of history is your story. How can one not be interested?

Carol Lily

My granddaughter is now studying AP world history, and sometimes, she comes to me for help understanding the subject. I wish I could somehow inspire her to see it not as an impersonal school subject she has to be graded on, but the story of how she got here, what happened on the way to her creation, and how she fits into that grand, long picture. She makes good grades, but it would be more important to think of history as something personal, something that informs her life: She is Southern, so the slavery that ended 151 years ago colors her life every day; the arguments held in Philadelphia in 1787 affect what she can and cannot do today; that the battle of Plataea in 479 BC is part of the reason she speaks English today and not some descendant of Farsi.

The horsemen from Mongolia shaped what later became Russia, which became the Soviet Union, which defeated Nazi Germany, became our enemy in the Cold War, and led to Vladimir Putin today. It is not ancient history, it is merely the dangling end of a long cord: The same people who gave us Xanadu and Kublai Khan gave us the Silk Road and the Golden Horde, and is one of the reasons given for why Hungary is named HUN-gary, and, incidentally, gave their name to the tartar sauce you put on fried fish.

Know-Nothing poster

It is disappointing to see so many Americans with so little sense of history, of where we came from. We hear the resurrected Know-Nothing-ism of Donald Trump and too many of his followers hear no resonance of the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish sentiment of the earlier wave of xenophobia. The past, for them, is a black hole out of which no wisdom can emerge.

Presentism, as it is sometimes called, is rampant: the belief that what is now is somehow “true,” and the past was all a big mistake; it is the error that what we think and believe now is the “right” and “correct” version of the world, and those benighted people of old were merely beta-versions of humanity. We require more humility; history can provide that humility.

I can remember when the faces of Eisenhower and Stevenson on the tiny black and white television we had in the house when I was yet too young to go to school. I remember the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. I remember when they added the second deck to the George Washington Bridge. These things are now history. They are ink on a page in the history book my granddaughter reads for class. But I was a real person who lived through them. My father lived through the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. My great-uncle wore puttees as a dough boy in the first War to End Wars. My wife’s great-grandfather fought in the Civil War. Somewhere, back before my genealogy became writ into the family bible, I surely had ancestors who went a-viking and worshipped the lord Odin.

I feel those connections, not as dry intellectual answers to history-class homework questions. History is not something merely read, it is red, it runs through our veins. It’s been there for 35 centuries, at least.

—Richard Nilsen

Archive

Tag Archives: school

Failure to fit in

History of the blood