Patrick Erben’s Reflections on a Fellowship
From July 1845 to September 1847, Henry David Thoreau conducted his famous “experiment” at Walden Pond, and he condensed his experiences into his book Walden, published in 1854. After spending the last two years at the Omohundro Institute, I have also been asked to reflect on my mode of life. While my fellowship was not with nature, I hope Henry will forgive me for using some of his words in describing what I discovered (all citations—in italics—are taken from the 2000 Modern Library paperback edition).
After procuring with no little difficulty a place for my family and myself to live, I arrived in Williamsburg in July 2004. The Institute furnished an office in the old Bell Building, and my thoughts turned to how I should employ my two fellowship years. I knew that I wanted to approach my work in a way impossible to do under the daily obligations of teaching, grading, preparing, and committee meetings required by a tenure-track job. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day . . . he has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? I explored entirely new questions as well as things I had left out of my dissertation—theories of language difference in early-modern Europe, ideas of musical harmony and spiritual community, the mystical compositions of the Ephrata Cloister, the extensive translations of Moravian missionaries among the Indians, a common quest for peace among English Quakers and German sectarians during the French and Indian Wars. I relish the thought that the Institute will publish the outcome of this process and that I did not have to make the academic marketplace the sole guideline for my intellectual pursuits. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them . . . I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. I would like to thank the Institute—especially Ron Hoffman—for all the support I received for my endeavor.
Eventually, I settled into a cozy office in the new Institute space on the ground floor of Swem Library. I immediately began to accumulate stacks of files and binders filled with copies of interlibrary loans and archival materials waiting to be read and analyzed. Simplify, simplify . . . Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. Every morning, I would get a cup of Gil’s freshly brewed coffee and, on Fridays, a mid-morning treat. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion . . . To be awake is to be alive. After a few weeks, I discussed my work during a roundtable attended by external readers, Institute staff, and fellows, who all made many useful and productive comments. Equally enlightening was a colloquium at the Institute, as well as presentations at the McNeil Center, the 2005 Institute Conference, the 2005 SEA Conference, and the Second Ibero-American Summit. I hope that I can eventually do justice to the insight and knowledge of the many scholars and colleagues who have taken time to read and comment on my work. I have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. Once united with the other fellows and the members of the Institute’s book program at the back of the office, I enjoyed many stimulating, friendly, and productive conversations—I especially thank Fredrika Teute, Mendy Gladden, Wendy Bellion, Brett Rushforth, and Alec Haskell for tarrying in front of the M&M dispensers for deep reflection or idle chatter. I loved talking to Ginny about children, and I cherished how Sally and Beverly doted on my son Samuel and welcomed my new daughter Ruby.
I read and thought much about ideas and books that meant a great deal to writers and readers in early America but have largely dropped out of the consciousness of literary and cultural historians. How, for instance, did the seventeenth-century vogue of searching for the original, perfect, or universal language appeal to writers, missionaries, and community-builders who found themselves in a “New World Babel”? Why did a host of Ephrata papermakers, printers, bookbinders, and translators invest the better of three years to publish the Dutch-Mennonite Martyrs’ Mirror in German? Who were the “martyrs” of early Pennsylvania? My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university . . . I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world. . . Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, “Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.” I hope to capture in my book the exciting prospect that early Americans maintained a keen sense of the hidden or “esoteric” knowledge sought by writers and thinkers of late Renaissance Europe and that they maintained a fear of persecution and hope for a utopian beginning characteristic of radical Protestants in the early modern period. Similar to mystics and utopian philosophers of the seventeenth century, early Pennsylvanians—English and German, Quaker and Pietist— believed that spiritual connections could bind together seemingly disparate parts of their new community.
Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. The glassy surface of a lake may also be a fit metaphor for the people and the texts I have studied. They always reflect concerns for the earthly and the divine—both being divided by an almost invisible line. The many people of colonial Pennsylvania who lived and wrote in the space between cultures and languages—especially the many translators and linguistic mediators—detected mystical connections as well as subtle differences that escaped those seeking to inscribe ostensibly essential ethnic and cultural divisions. Like the rest of our waters . . . [Walden Pond] appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribably light blue . . . Ultimately, the “divided vision” of translation has become the central trope and the central argument of my book: translators could find unity among apparent opposites while appreciating beauty in differences.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. When I first applied for this fellowship, I was not sure whether the Institute would be interested in the mix of close readings, history-of-the-book research, and translation study present in my dissertation. The support and encouragement has been overwhelming. I still believe that my book will ultimately traverse many disciplines, while trying not to offend any disciplinary sensibilities. My contact with some of the most acclaimed historians in the field has sharpened my ability to distinguish between “context” and historical evidence. At the same time, I hope to heighten my readers’ curiosity for the intangible possibilities of spiritual community that the writers and readers of early America located and inscribed in texts, even if “on the ground” records do not always reflect such ideals.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. As my fellowship is nearing its end, I look forward to working with students and colleagues at the University of West Georgia, where I will begin a tenure-track position in English. I am eager to inform my new life with the wealth of experiences and ideas that I am taking away from my fellowship at the Institute in Williamsburg.
757.221-1114
PO Box 8781,Williamsburg, Virginia 23187
Contact