THE PAST AS PRESENT: SELECTED THOUGHTS & ESSAYS

[Pages:428]THE PAST AS PRESENT: SELECTED THOUGHTS & ESSAYS

THE PAST AS PRESENT:

SELECTED THOUGHTS & ESSAYS

PAUL T. RUXIN

COMPILED AND EDITED BY

GORDON M. PRADL & SAMUEL B. ELLENPORT

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD

TRUSTEES OF AMHERST COLLEGE

2017

The Editors thank fellow Amherst '65 Classmates

Don MacNaughton, Bruce Wintroub, Charles Bunting, Mark W. Perry, Lew Markoff, and Paul Ehrmann

for their direct financial support and encouragement. Editorial decisions were aided especially by Don MacNaughton,

along with Classmates Marc Green and Jeff Titon. Various Clubs and Organizations to which Paul belonged were helpful in providing copies of his talks and various essays.

The Editors also appreciate the generous cooperation received from the Ruxin family, who supplied additional materials

included in the book.

table of contents

Introduction (William H. Pritchard)

7

part i: Paul's Reading Pleasures

One Thing Leads to Another

17

Edith Warton and Her Friends

25

The Club

49

Dorando and the Douglas Cause

64

Lord Auchinleck's Fingal

81

An Hospitable and Well-Covered Table

95

Soft-Hearted Sam

110

Review of Boswell's An Account of Corsica

132

Review of Johnson's The History of Rasselas

137

How Sam and Dave Helped Save Bill

140

part ii: Paul's Passionate Pursuit of Books

The Future of Book Collecting

165

Synonymy and Satire by Association

173

Not in Fleeman: A Meditation on Collecting

183

A Serendipitous Acquisition

194

Other People's Books

201

Eleven More Fore-edge Paintings

211

Special Collections Libraries and the Uses of the Past

217

part iii: Paul's Legal Writing and Thoughts

The Right Not to Be Modern Men:

The Amish and Compulsory Education

229

Other Thoughts on the Law

268

part iv: A Miscellany of Paul Speaking His Mind

Sarah Ruhl: The 2008 Robert Frost Library Fellow

283

A Fan's Notes

286

Two Letters to Sam Ellenport

289

Beginnings of the Johnsonian News Letter

294

The Artist Known as Will

298

Joseph Epstein's Ruminations on Our Ultimate Demise

299

Reflections on Professor Theodore Baird

300

Reflections on Amherst College

302

25th & 50th Reunion Self-Statements

343

Further Views and Opinions

348

part v: Remembering Paul (1943?2016)

Adam Cohn

369

Sarah Ruxin

372

Sam Ellenport

376

Linn Raney

380

Robert Baker

383

David Spadafora

388

Jerry Morris

392

Michael Witmore

395

Lew Markoff

397

Don MacNaughton

400

Robert DeMaria, Jr.

402

Paul T. Ruxin '65: Amherst Medal for Eminent Service

407

Michael Pohl and Bruce Wintroub (Amherst Obituary)

409

Chicago Tribune Obituary

411

Carl U. Weitman (For The Rowfant Club of Cleveland)

414

Appendix I: Terminus (Edith Wharton)

417

Appendix II: Letters to Paul from Prof. Theodore Baird

419

Introduction

One of Paul Ruxin's talks to the Rowfant Club in Cleveland was

a profile of Archibald MacLeish, the poet, professor, and public man of many sorts. In it Paul quotes a letter from 1916 that MacLeish wrote to his father after he had spent a year in law school (p. 76):

My two remaining free summers I intend to devote to the great mass of reading I have yet to do and for the doing of which my mind is so thirsty. Law and literature are, of course, incompatible, but I want to acquire a sufficient background so that if I am ever able to turn to the thing I most love I shall be able to undertake creative work at once.

The struggle among these options--teaching, law, and literature--was in MacLeish's later life resolved into a single triple-threat identity: now Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard; now Librarian of Congress; and during World War II, Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Relations. I suspect that much of Paul's interest in and admiration for MacLeish's multifarious activities, was his own pull toward both law and literature, the desire to show that, in the story of his own life, they were not incompatible. His passion for books, as demonstrated in the Rowfant talks and elsewhere, was both for reading them, writing about them, and collecting them. In a rash moment he once thanked me for teaching him how to read, and I accepted this over-generous salute even though it drastically simplified the complicated and ongoing story of Paul as a reader.

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introduction

One of Paul's law-related articles concerns the Amish and compulsory education. This volume's editors point out the "very literate ability" of that essay which grew out of his concern for Energy Policy. They praise Paul for his being able "to see the value of multiple perspectives, even as he is clear about his own vision that he brings to the situation." I am reminded of one of William James's early essays, "The Sentiment of Rationality," in which he acknowledges the human need and desire for "simplification," then puts that desire up against its "sister passion . . . for clearness," the desire to be "acquainted with the parts rather than comprehend the whole." But James was clearly on the side of clearness as against simplicity. He is willing to live with "any amount of incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness" as long as the separate facts can be "saved," rather than dissolved into a unitary simplification, however compelling.

In one of the short e-mails to classmates dealing with Supreme Court Justice Scalia's "originalism" in interpreting the constitution, Paul allied himself with the justice insofar as he felt that his own passion was for the close reading he learned to practice at Amherst, rather than for some recent theory about what the text "should" mean. In another, related e-mail, he notes that at Amherst he was, or was told he was, a conservative; while at law school he was deemed a liberal with respect to the same positions. He rejects such labeling as, in William James's terms, the urge to simplify rather than to be clear about things. "Labels are unworthy of the education we were privileged to receive," Paul wrote, and he found it crucial to acknowledge opposition views on a question, each of which has much to be said for it. He notes with regret that certain "demands" made in fall 2015 were unworthy in their fervor to embrace simplification rather than giving the patient consideration of particulars that clarity demands.

One of the best of the literary essays in this volume is "Edith Wharton and her Friends," delivered as a talk in 2003 to the Caxton Club in Chicago. In the essay Paul gives a sympathetic, pointed account of Edith Newbold Jones's early life, a brief treatment of her unfortunate marriage to "Teddy" Wharton, then a glimpse into her friendship with

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