Dartblog

I, for one, am thankful for our very splendid readers. Without their attention we would be writing only emails and letters, in foreclosed loops, and what use is that? Our readers are by now a rather completely self-selected group of industry titans, librarians, master sommeliers, pianists, manservants, and dyspeptic baseball executives. (These are not real people, I promise.) We also have some students in the readership, and former students—oh, and their professors and half-deans who are wondering how they shall put bread on the table. They check in daily on the progress of the scythe.

Of course politics and business and layoffs at Dartmouth are not very fun to cover, and we report on these things because that is now expected of this page. What makes writing this page worthwhile is when you win a dozen new converts to a young French pianist who is freshening Domenico Scarlatti—and then she herself e-mails you to say thanks. A double good that is: new listeners and apostates from Perahia.

Another story which I remembered at dinner two nights ago: some post, somewhere, mentions the G.K. Chesterton quotation about Oscar Wilde. (“…But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”)

And some bereft middle school student sent me a note after seeing that. She was responsible for a book report on Chesterton, and couldn’t understand what Wilde meant when he said cynically that sunsets are worthless because they cannot be bought; nor could she apprehend Chesterton’s meaning when he replied that we can surely pay for sunsets—we buy them by not being like Oscar Wilde, by “pay[ing] for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals.”

Eighteen years of New Jersey public education and four of Dartmouth had passed without mention of old G.K.; thus delighted by the early advantage this girl seemed to enjoy, we hooked up on the phone and I explained Chesterton’s rebuke of the dandy, and the argument of which it was part. (It was part of a counter to Wilde’s many screeds, veiled and explicit, against the putative arbitrariness of the Christian morality.) I think we spoke for over an hour, and she said that although even her teacher couldn’t explain the passages, my explanation would allow her to write her report.

Anyway: thanks.