Shyness and Ardor

Recently, the Politics Department at UCSC held a remembrance for Jack Schaar.

Schaar, legendary teacher, commanding lecturer, prose stylist.

He was the last of the great Puritans.  A Calvinist, exalting of pastoral communitarianism.  An anti-federalist in the style of Kropotkin, and an American patriot.  His heroes were Winthrope, Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner and Melville.  He was as likely to advise students to live on farms as he was to usher them into PhD programs.

Along with Sheldon Wolin, Norman Jacobson, Hannah Pitkin, and Michael Rogin, Schaar cultivated the "Berkeley School" of political thought in the 1960s, which emphasized radical democratic participation in political process and community.

He was well known for advocating humility.  Often, at the start of a new semester, Jack would advise his students not to hastily dismiss an author or text.  Rather he asked them to approach reading with "shyness and ardor."

Inviolate Curve

Today I've been reading Hart Crane.

Crane opens his best known epic poem, "The Bridge" with an epigraph from the Book of Job.  It reads: "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it."

My favorite section of the poem comes from "Atlantis:"

"Through the bound cable strands, the arching path upward, veering with light, the flight of strings..."