Why are first things so interesting to us? I had no idea that hack was a 1920’s invention at MIT for a gag or prank or that, as we learn in page 41 of the 9 June 2003 New Yorker, that hip-hoppy scratchity records was invented in 1975 by a guy, perhaps only later called Grandmaster Lester, trying to not listen to his mom. I have been both attracted to these firsts of information but, then, suspicious of them, too. Blame book learning. In Gogol’s Dead Souls, one Russian’s Dante’s Inferno, the first layer of human vanity we encounter is in the person of Manilov, the personification of the superficial, of whom Gogol writes:
…never did these projects pass beyond the stage of debate. Likewise there lay in his study a book with the fourteenth page permanently turned down. It was a book which he had been reading for the past two years! In general, something seemed to be wanting in the establishment.
That danged 14th page. I haven’t read that passage for 20 years and that is to me that has always been the little, dangerous knowledge. I learned about Gogol from Yuri Glazov who, along with George Grant, were the first really bright old guys I ever met. Both taught me a few courses at Kings and Dal in the early 1980’s and, for all their depth of understanding, could still spare the time: laughing with the ideas of a far too drunk kid over a cheese tray, Glazov holding his night’s one Ten Penny in his slavic mitt, me holding eight in my gut; Grant stopping when walking the dog to ask about a cold fall soccer practice, ciggie ash trailing down his sweatered belly.
They were too bright to be interested in any kind of heated discussion with me – they were happy to listen to kids who get B’s, make small talk at the Capital Store. I recall each man laughing a lot, which was good. Not only as they really weren’t part of the mild, shallow elitism there at King’s then, though some fawned, but as each had suffered to some real degree personally and professionally for their thoughts – Glazov in the Soviet Union when rejecting his faith in Communism, Grant for standing by his deep but somewhat homey understanding conservativism and Christian faith devoid of what we would call conservative Christianity today.