An Economy of Words

Metropolitan Life Insurance Building

" 'Thus, in the brief and crude account I give, did it come about that biblical scholarship and studies in Greek and Roman antiquity came to be coupled in a relationship never without antagonism, and thus did it come about that textual scholarship and its attendant disciplines came to fall under the rubric 'the humanities'.

'So much for history. So much for why you, diverse and ill-assorted as you may privately feel yourselves to be, find yourselves assembled this morning under a single roof as graduates-to-be in the humanities. Now, in the few minutes left to me, I am going to tell you why I do not belong among you and have no message of comfort to bring to you, despite the generosity of the gesture you have extended to me.

'The message I bring is that you lost your way long ago, perhaps as long as five centuries ago. The handful of men among whom the movement originated of which you represent, I fear, the sad tail -- those men were animated, at least at first, by the purpose of finding the True Word, by which they understood then, and I understand now, the redemptive word. ...' " (122 ).

"In the past, few had had the privilege of being led by a god to the Elysian Fields with their bodies still intact. And Hades was defined as that place where there is no body. But now, along with Kore's body, Eros penetrated the kingdom of the dead. The slender-ankled Persephone was the supple arrow Aphrodite ordered Eros to let fly at Hades when the goddess summoned her son to the black rock of Eryx. The world had reached a point at which the economy of metamorphosis that had sustained it for so long through the period of Zeus's adventures was no longer enough. Things had lost their primordial fluidity , had hardened into profile, and the game that had once been played out between one shape and another was now reduced to the mere alternation of appearance and disappearance. From now on, it was a question not only of accepting life in a single immutable form but of accepting the certainty that that form would one day disappear without a trace. Demeter's anger is the revolt against this new regime of life. But the goddess didn't know that at the same moment a new regime of death had also been inaugurated" (211-212).