Write a letter to your grandfather about online learning
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Dear Grandfather,
Not long after your death on October 25 of last year, friends and relatives wondered whether I might write something about you. They knew that we had corresponded and that I regularly visited you in San Antonio, so they felt I should put something on record. But when I tried my hand at it, I found it impossible to convey my thoughts or feelings. It then occurred to me that the best way to write about you would be to write to you, as I did for so many years.
Naturally, I wasn't about to discuss your many accomplishments—the positions you held, the books you wrote—the obituaries and eulogies for the great Jacques Barzun took care of all that. You were touted as one of the last true public intellectuals: a cultural historian, a philosopher of education, an authority on the English language, a prophet of Western decline. The newspapers relished the fact that you were nearly 105 years old when you passed away.
And yet somehow, for all the words spent on your achievements, I still felt as though the tributes had missed something. What they failed to capture was the way in which you used the written word not only to define and distill cultures past and present, but also to reach out, to lift up, and—for lack of a better phrase—to establish a human connection. This may sound odd, coming from your grandson, but the feeling of intense loss I experienced was the loss of a bond that had developed almost entirely through the letters we exchanged.
Long before we began to correspond, when I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Boston in the 1980s, I was dimly aware of your reputation. I knew that my friends' parents had heard of you, even though my friends had not. I knew that you lectured and wrote books and were a college professor, but I wasn't sure what you were a professor of. I knew that you grew up in France but that you spoke English as if you hadn't. All this I knew, yet I didn't really know you. Sure, on our occasional visits to see you in New York you would ask my siblings and me questions about school and listen intently to our responses. And on our birthdays, carefully chosen items—a finger-size rubber soldier, a small box to put the soldier in, a shoehorn—would arrive by mail along with a short note. But that was as far as it went.
That all began to change when I was 13. My mother sent you an essay that I'd written on slavery, and you wrote to congratulate me on a job well done: "It is well organized, logical in argument, and written with lucidity and force. I am proud of your performance, quite as if I had had something to do with it, which of course I haven't." I found myself not only thrilled by your praise, but also suddenly very curious about your professional life. What was it exactly that you wrote about? Why were you famous?
So I wrote to you, asking to see your books. You started me off with a collection of short essays, The Culture We Deserve, and by my junior year in high school you were sending me your earlier, longer works on intellectual and cultural history. I was mesmerized. You somehow made
otherwise abstract topics like "romanticism" and "materialism" seem pressingly important—so much so that in my senior year I wrote a paper entitled "A Stroll with Jacques Barzun." I sent it to you with no small amount of trepidation and was enormously relieved when you replied that you were pleased with how I'd characterized your "vision of the world."
Jacques Barzun's grandson continues their long conversion.
Unfortunately, your comments on my work were rarely ever again so favorable. As I grew older, you must have suspected—correctly, I suppose—that I required less coddling and more instruction. Your letters eventually assumed an air of egalitarian respect, which is not to say they lacked for affection. I took your corrections in stride because I knew that as a teacher, editor, and expert on both French and English grammar, you could not help but offer helpful syntactic suggestions. And later when I learned that you were famous among a distinguished coterie of authors and former students for your numerous and amazingly detailed marginal notes, I felt proud to be in their company.