'From One Master to Another'

“[T]here is no method in reading; getting educated is going from one master to another. A sophister will demand that his pupil ransack a given period, but I prefer to go here and there, ambling from the Georgics of Virgil to the Spectator Papers, and then perhaps picking up the Journal to Stella.” 

I often amble to the Donald N. Levin Collection in a lounge on the fourth floor of the Fondren Library. Levin taught classics at Rice University from 1963 until his death in 1991 at age sixty-four. One wall in the lounge is covered with shelves of books in at least four languages, thousands of them, from Levin’s personal library, donated by his children to the Fondren. They range from sumptuous-looking leather-bound nineteenth-century volumes to humble paperbacks. All the Greek and Roman classics are here, in the original languages and English translations, as well as biographies, histories and critical studies. This is where I found the work of Ronald Syme after Joseph Epstein wrote about him five years ago. Among the books is Levin’s own two-volume Apollonius’ Argonautica. Re-examined (Brill, 1971).

 

I love the notion of a scholar’s library being absorbed into a larger collection and made available to students and researchers. It’s a reminder that libraries and books in general represent democracy. No one is excluded.

 

Archived in the Fondren are twelve boxes of Levin’s records, including “papers, articles, theses and ‘An Unorthodox Diary’.” In the summer 1992 issue of “The Flyleaf,” the discontinued quarterly publication of the Friends of Fondren Library, is a tribute to Levin, “Classics – a way of life.” It includes excerpts from Levin’s diary, in which he sounds old-fashioned and commonsensical:

 

“If it is true that children ought not to act snottily, it is also true that adults should treat children not as objects of derision or contempt, but as fellow human beings endowed both with sensibilities & with a capacity for rational thought.

     

“Clashes between the generations is nothing new, to be sure. Ancient Greek literature is full of it. Think of SOPHOCLES’ CREON & HAEMON, for example, or of ARISTOPHANES’ STREPSIADES & PHEIDEIPPIDES.”

 

[The quoted passage at the top is from The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg (George Braziller, 1971). Dahlberg continues: “In this regard I have the assistance of Gibbon. To cite d’Israeli: ‘Thus in the midst of Homer he read Longinus; a chapter of Longinus led to and epistle of Pliny.’ Petrarch writes of learning in a similar vein: ‘The Academics of Cicero made Marcus Varro dear to me; it was in the Office that I first heard the name of Ennius; through the treatise on Old Age I became acquainted with Cato’s Origins.’”]