Minding my P's and L's

I am enjoying some extended and uninterrupted time in Firestone Library, and reacquainting myself with old familiar nooks and crannies, such as 3-7-J, the locked "Philosophy Graduate Study Room," surprising home to a viable non-circulating set of the Patrologia Latina. Few undergraduates will be familiar with this huge nineteenth-century collection of medieval Latin Christian writings from the age of Tertullian (second century) to that of Innocent III (early thirteenth.) Its more than 220 thick, tall, double-columned, and typographically repellent volumes remain an indispensable archive for medievalists in many fields. Its standard abbreviation (PL) usefully distinguishes medievalists from Renaissance scholars, who think first of "Paradise Lost". There is a jumbled and ratty set of the PL in the open stacks; but the volume I need seems always to be lost or temporarily absent; so off I go to 3-7-J. Mr. Casaubon merely had the Key to All Mythologies; I have the Key to All Graduate Study Rooms. We spend too little time contemplating the romance and mystery of quotidian places such as this spacious room of daylight, silence, and roughly thirty-six linear feet of crowded Latin.

The presence of the Patrologia Latina in the "Philosophy Room" — where, incidentally, I have never once encountered a Philosophy graduate or anybody else — is my first minor mystery. If a Philosophy graduate student has ever read one its columns, I'm Immanuel Kant. Years ago when we were trying to found interdisciplinary Medieval Studies I asked a certain chairman of Philosophy why his department, rising above all aspirant competitors, had no expert in medieval philosophy, nor any course on medieval philosophers. His answer was memorable. "Princeton mathematicians don't do thirteenth-century mathematics. Why should we do thirteenth-century philosophy?" Well, it's a point of view. Princeton medievalists have just had to make do with bootlegged Eriugena, Aquinas, and Maimonides.

The next mystery is this: most, though not all, of the first 44 volumes of the Patrologia bear handwritten, pasted labels reading "In Memoriam Rose Rand." My paleographic skills detect two quite different hands, one commanding a calligrapher's pen if not a calligrapher's skill. Who was Rose Rand? Why does 19.4% of "my" Patrologia memorialize her? Time was when every good library had a few exotic and/or mysterious characters padding about its stacks, usually in high-top Keds. In my early days in Princeton, before the implementation of draconian security, there were several in Firestone, including a little old lady of furtive manner, gimlet gaze, and impenetrable accent, who hung out mainly on the third floor and at the A&P, long since defunct, in the Princeton shopping center. This was Rose Rand; but knowledge of her name came only after years of anonymous library encounters. She was universally referred to among awed library regulars as "the Polish Logician". One didn't know whether this meant a logician who was by nationality a Pole, or a practitioner of logic in a Polish mode. (Both things apparently were true.) Rumors swirled around her. It was bruited that she had been the amanuensis for the Vienna Circle. I had, and have, no idea what the "Vienna Circle" was, of course, but I knew that, like the "Frankfurt School" and the "École de Chartres," it must be among those ghostly, vanished intellectual galaxies whose very names weave magic. And the Polish Logician was there! The rumor that she had been Wittgenstein's girlfriend seemed improbable, but still . . .

In my experience and that of others known to me the Polish Logician was a bit of a cadger. She cadged pencils from me in the library, and rides home for her and her bagged groceries from the A&P. The carlessness of the Polish Logician was an index of her generally straightened circumstances. Like many another heroic middle European intellectual cruelly tossed on the stormy ocean of Nazism, Dr. Rand, who would have been 100 this year, was apparently destined to live out an ascetic life of the mind on the far margins of the Academy.

The Polish Logician never expressed to me an explicit interest in things medieval; indeed, I seldom understood in its entirely any sentence she uttered. But I did once witness her hurried retreat from the general area of the Richardson 6044s (Saint Augustine), so that it is at least possible that in the heavenly city of the philosophers she now smiles faintly in approbation of her partial memorialization in the Patrologia. She would probably beam as radiant as Beatrice herself if some charitable apprentice philosophers would finish the job. I could show them where their graduate study room is; and the Princeton Philosophy Department, which is rich as Croesus, surely could spring for the packets of white, permanent-adhesive address labels by Avery that would finish the job. Then "Paradise Lost" could be the third thing to think of when you see the abbreviation "PL." John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.