The Conservative’s Promise
ATHENS, GA –
Eighteen years ago, I strolled, midmorning, through the windowed door at 147 College Avenue, in the shadow of what would eventually become my alma mater. Looking back on it, it seems as though I should have tripped a shopkeeper’s bell, but I don’t really have a vivid memory of any such jingling. What I do have a vivid memory of from that day is the news rack on the outside of the building, as well as the sign next to the door which read Barnett’s News Stand in lettering which always reminded me of an old Strand Magazine cover, an evocation having something to do with its appealing illustration of two tobacco pipes crossed at the stem.
On the particular day in question, although I was literally standing in Barnett’s quaint little confines, I was likewise standing somewhere else – on the cusp of a great and wonderful chapter which too many children pursue and for which I, myself, was dreadfully unprepared. That day, you see, marked the end of the last week before my freshman year at the University of Georgia. I had popped into Barnett’s to buy a cigar on my way to North Campus where I intended to locate my fall classes. In retrospect, this was one of the few examples of vigilance and preparedness I can remember in an undergraduate career otherwise marked by procrastination and sloth…
Sloth. A deadly sin, that. And one which St. Peter may one day press against me. I shudder at the waste and neglect of my undergraduate days, so many of which I have locked away in shadowy grey vaults because of the nastiness and the knavishness which they represent.
That long-ago day at Barnett’s has also been locked away somewhere, at least until recently. It snuck through a bourgeoning crack a few months or so ago when I found myself again walking down College Avenue where Barnett’s once stood. But it wasn’t my surroundings which caused this bit of nostalgia. Something else – a series of things, in fact – had had me reencountering my yesterdays for quite some time. Granted, this is nothing to write home about. Conservatives are always and forever thinking about the past, some of us with more thoughtfulness than others. Lincoln – infamously not a conservative – once derogated conservativism’s veneration for the past as merely an “adherence to the old and tried.” Santayana showed a little more breadth and width. “I defended the past,” he once wrote, “because once it had been victorious and had brought something beautiful to light; but I had no clear expectation of better things in the future.” Well, I too have no expectation of better things in the future. Why would I?
Eighteen years ago, as I strolled North Campus, smoking a Punch amidst the late-summer greenery, I felt an excitement which stemmed from finally getting to let out on my own, an unknown and unwritten future before me. An unknown future, though, isn’t quite the same thing as an entirely undiscovered country, upon which I knew I was not embarking. This was because I had been bequeathed certain landmarks for my journey, as well as a starting point which oriented me. Hence, whatever unknown adventures were to find me, and whatever tragedies were to befall me, I at least knew the larger story into which my own drama would be woven. Forgotten, perhaps. But woven all the same.
These landmarks which I had been bequeathed have since been razed for future generations. And unfortunately, there’s nothing I can really do about it. Writing about it certainly won’t save them – it didn’t save Barnett’s, for example, which was a literal landmark now forgotten. But it won’t save the other landmarks either, the ones which barely remain in my mind, as grainy remembrances of things which might as well be as distant as Somme and which, though they may not all be locked away in shadowy grey vaults, are increasingly difficult to access.
A few months ago, after reminiscing about Barnett’s, I proceeded to retrieve a pair of resoled boots from Marvin’s Shoe Repair. As it happens, Marvin’s is relevant to this story in more ways than one. Athens, you see, was once home to half a score of shoe repair shops. As far as I know, there are now only two. As I understand it, the eponymous Marvin Eberhart, who I never knew, taught his cherished craft to his son, Frank, who has been repairing my loafers and boots since right about the time I smoked that Punch on North Campus, some eighteen summers ago. Then, as now, he only took cash. And then, just as now, he ran his little business in a shotgun nook directly across from Barnett’s once-prime perch. I don’t know what will happen once Frank Eberhart quits cobbling, but a great comfort of mine will have vanished along with his shop – a comfort not just in knowing that my Weejuns can be reheeled in lieu of being discarded, but a comfort – assuredly a latent one – in the beauty of passing down legacies, which is just another way of describing those aforementioned landmarks. Legacies – macro and micro – orient us as we venture along life’s trails, often toward parts unknown, our journeys at least partly illuminated by clearly understanding from whence we came.
After I picked up my boots on that recent day in Athens and quit Marvin’s – along with those wonderfully odorous leathers and oils which fill the shop – I gave thought of strolling once again through North Campus. But I refrained. For various reasons, even apart from football games, I have occasion to frequent campus, so it wasn’t as though I hadn’t visited the beautiful greenery in a while. Every time I do happen to visit campus, at least in recent years, I tend to think of an interesting passage from Brideshead Revisited. I confess to not having the passage memorized, but bits and pieces of it return to me here and there whenever I stroll adjacent to Herty Field or enter the main library to fetch a book. Admittedly, Athens may not be Oxford, but it is still full of knowledge and wonder and history and is no less for me the subject of pride, just as Oxford must have been for any of Charles Snyder’s compatriots.
Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.
I have already said that my own contribution to “centuries of youth” is something that I often try not to revisit. But that is not the same thing as saying that the friendships I made back then, as well as the lessons I learned, don’t remain steadfast and with me, at all times. There are, indeed, great and blessed things about modern times, and one of them is that one never has to lose touch with old friends.
Many such friends of mine – certainly not all – were, at some time or another, present during my college days among the premises at 990 South Milledge Avenue. The white-columned, red-bricked house which still stands there is significant to the alumni of Lambda Chi Alpha’s Nu Zeta chapter. I, myself, lived there for three rather hazy years. Hence, it should come as no surprise that a preponderance of my foretold knavishness occurred there. But despite the ignorance and corruption of my youth, my fraternity has always been a source of good in my life. Had it not been for Lambda Chi– and, more importantly, for the people who comprised it, and comprise it still – I would have never grown up. The fraternity was where I joined my first Bible study, which sowed the necessary seeds for shedding the religious defiance of my rebellious years. The fraternity was also a place where I was taken down a peg – many pegs in fact – by an antiquated practice – i.e., hazing – which is today felonious in many jurisdictions and misunderstood by multitudes. The fraternity, in other words, was a place where I was made small. And small we must be if one day we are to be big.
Much like Barnett’s News Stand eighteen years ago, Greek life at college campuses is on its way out. Hence, on a brilliantly green August day, many years from now, my future children, if they should be so lucky as to attend the Good University, will not be able to scout out their fall classes and then return to nap on a couch at 990 South Milledge, mainly because the house probably won’t be there. It will have been razed. College fraternities – Lambda Chi included – have been scandalized more often than not in recent years, and Nu Zeta is once again on the brink of being shuttered. This, even though the brothers of Nu Zeta are by no means the only Georgia students going through life “fat, stupid, and drunk.” Still, they are nevertheless the target of a world which, irrespective of pandemics and Black Lives Matter marches and a resurgent Jacobinism, fails to understand things like station and hierarchy – it’s a world which fails to understand that sometimes you have to be made small to one day be big.
__________
The conservative’s promise, I once thought, was to pass something down, something inherited – the funded wisdom of the ages. But much like the eddying smoke from one of my cigars, this isn’t how the real world works. Great nations and states and universities and newsstands and crafts like cobbling – these things eventually dissipate into the atmosphere; and the conservative’s promise, I now know, is to learn to let them, free of resentment. The conservative’s promise is also to take pride in these things of the past – the things which time won’t let us successfully preserve – for no other reason than because they were once there. Known. Orienting. Illuminating. And perhaps this particular conservative’s promise is to write about it, not in order to save it, but to make what was once known a little less grainy, even as we rightfully leave the rest of our yesteryears down among the floors of shadowy grey cellars.
