Jacques Barzun's 100th Birthday

On the occasion of his 100th birthday, it seems appropriate to write a short note about how much Jacques Barzun has influenced me in the five years that I've known him through his books (of which I have only 14: From Dawn to Decadence; The House of Intellect; Begin Here; Teacher in America; The Modern Researcher; Classic, Romantic, and Modern; Darwin, Marx, Wagner; Berlioz and the Romantic Century; The American University; Clio and the Doctors; A Stroll with William James; The Culture We Deserve; God's Country and Mine; and The Jacques Barzun Reader).

But as I'm not nearly as prodigious a writer as he is, and with dinner imminent, I'll just limit myself, for the moment, to these lines from A Stroll with William James . Barzun is describing his intellectual debt to James at the beginning of the book:

I find him visibly and testably right -- right in intuition, range of considerations, sequence of reasons, and fully rounded power of expression. He is for me the most inclusive mind I can listen to, the most concrete and the last hampered by trifles. He is moreover entirely candid and full of gaiety...The tone and temper of his thought, aside from its purport and contents, is a prop to independence of mind, an antidote to the opium of modern ideologies, a tonic in the resistance to the sludge of "modern communications," popular and advanced. His resolving lucidity in analysis, his hard-won freedom that frees others (a rare consequence of liberation movements) enables me to better endure or enjoy whatever befalls me -- and all this in the simplest way of making actual and unmistakable what I would otherwise grope toward or dimly sense.

Happy 100th, Professor.
Posted by kungfuzi at 7:57 pm |