Uomo della gleba

Having spent a sizable chunk of my days in the Ivory Tower -- first in academia, then in the ecclesial version of the same -- here's how it is: living life in academic confinement, there's no hard work in arriving at a belief that what's really important is the echo off the elephant tusk fortifications that 1) keep one insulated (etymology: Latin, insula, -ae, island) from the barbarians at the gates, and 2) can foster the sort of ego-building that encourages one to inscribe the words Pontifex Maximus Jovis Optimi Maximi after one's signature.  If you've ever given a paper to a room of academic collegues, but then re-examined the scene from a standpoint outside the Tower, the whole affair seems a farce.  Behind the desk, reading 20 pages of esoteric bilge to 50 philologists is (what the rude swain would call) nothing short of an invitation to a pissing contest.  While sifting through mounds of block quotes and supported theories and propositions, the audience are hard at work, not listening, but preparing questions to refute and debate.  Not because they're interested in what the reader has to present, but because they're pissed that they hadn't thought of this all themselves.  How silly it seems now, looking back, reading a load of crap to just such a crowd assembled in a Gothic wood-paneled hall at Yale about tangential fantasy worlds in a particular work of German Romantic literature, when, down the street people still waited in their cars at the McDonald's drive-through, a kid somewhere ate the cream center from her Oreo before the chocolate cookie part, and someone's dog relieved himself beside a tree.  Life went on regardless whether there ever existed a frame story, a magic crystal, or a mystical passage through a secret cavern.  The Tower's echo and re-echo had caused us to levitate (or at least believe that we could) several inches off the floor, and what all else went on outside didn't have much consequence.  The Ivory Tower rewires one's thinking, a fact that becomes very obvious indeed when one leaves the sacred precinct of Most High Jove.  I did.  And what I found was a life rather quiet yet still quite logical.  Not so much in a philosophical logic sort of way, but in a common sense logic sort of way.  The world Outside is a place not where literature is lobotomized and autopsied, but where it lives and functions as a reflection of life, if not life itself.  Instead of chunks of gold, I discovered what I had been all up in arms about was really beautiful clods of earth, and that I was not a demigod of literary analysis, but actually a man of the field, what one of my Latin profs had called, as we sat reading Cicero's defense of Milo, uomo della gleba.  Applying high flung ways of thought within a context extra muros I've come to realize is about as effective as attempting to use a German hairdryer in the United States.  The plug just doesn't fit, and even if it did, there wouldn't be enough juice in the line to make the thing operate.  It's been a while since I've been from under the yoke, so to speak, but old habits die hard.  Now and then, I still find myself wanting to chase butterflies, letting my mind wander into wacky hypotheses and the various means of proving them -- not so much now in hopes of winning a laurel, but just to exercise that part of the brain that's often about as useful as the Windsors of Buckingham House.  And that's the sort of thing that can get me into trouble.  In the Ivory Tower, when a misstep happens in the logic department, you usually find a colleague who still thinks like you do, so you both haul off to a coffee house to hash things out, and at the end of the day, the theories should point to the fact that you were right all along.  The tail, as it were, can be shown to wag the dog, after the consumption of just the right amount of black coffee.  If any concept can be described in words, a creative mind can, and with enough motivation, demonstrate that even a circle is square if certain conditions are favorable.  On the Outside, instead of coffee and rhetoric, there's a special confection that's bitter to eat, but sweet when you learn the lessons that constitute the goopy filling.  It's called humble pie.   I'll take another piece, please.  It tastes especially earthy this week.