Let's listen to madcap prankster Oliver Wendell Holmes sing the praises of "more complex and intense intellectual efforts"

You said a mouthful, Ollie! Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935) served for 29 years (December 1902-January 1932) on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court.


"When Robert Moses received a copy of Death and Life from the publisher he replied, 'Dear Bennett [Cerf]: I am returning the book that you sent me. Aside from the fact that it is intemperate it is also libelous. . . .

Sell this junk to someone else.

Cordially, Robert Moses' "
-- the conclusion of Jason Epstein's Introduction
to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Jane Jacobs's
The Death and Life of Great American Cities

by Ken

It was bad enough to admit it once. Now I have to return to my embarrassing admission that, however inspired I have been by the vision of Jane Jacobs for a livable city, I have never actually read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, when Jane was 40. But, as I explained, I figured the time has come in anticipation of Francis Morrone's upcoming Municipal Art Society tour "Then and Now: Jane Jacobs and the West Village." In his tour description, after writing that The Death and Life "so sharply and logically articulated many people's inchoate misgivings about the city rebuilding of the preceding decade and the orthodox notions of city planners," Francis adds parenthetically: "The book, not least a literary masterpiece, is highly recommended reading for this tour."

(You can read the full tour description here, but it's too late to register; the tour sold out quickly. However, as I keep insisting, it's utterly possible to register for any of Francis's tours as long as you watch for the posting of each new MAS schedule, usually in the middle of the preceding month, and act accordingly. Francis, by the way, says -- making clear that he's not talking about his own tours -- that the September-November MAS schedule is the richest he's ever seen, that as he looked through the array of offerings, his eyes popped out. The tour schedule is here -- or just go to the ridiculously-easy-to-remember mas.org and click on "Tours.")

My copy of the 50th Anniversary Edition of The Death and Life arrived today, and in my excitement I jumped over Jason Epstein's 2011 introduction and even Jane's own 36-years-later "Foreword to the Modern Library Edition" of 1992 -- both of which I of course mean to return to in due course -- with the intention of diving right in. And in case you've forgotten, or like me have never read it, Jane's 1961 text begins with an Introduction that starts: "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." Whoa! No shilly-shallying here!

She quickly adds, though, that the book "is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines."

And in case we're not hearing her right, she goes on: "My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hairsplitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding." The alternative principles and aims she staked out have resonated so powerfully across those 50-plus years that the book has probably never been more widely read. Heck, even I'm finally reading it.

The thing is, before you get to that 1956 Introduction, there is a full-page inscription, in the form of a quote that, containing no ellipses, I take to be an unamended quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"Until lately the best thing that I was able to think of in favor of civilization, apart from blind acceptance of the order of the universe, was that it made possible the artist, the poet, the philosopher, and the man of science. But think that is not the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said that we are too much occupied with the means of living to live, I answer that the chief worth of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether you have enough of it.

"I will add but a word. We are all very near despair. The sheathing that floats us over its waves is compounded of hope, faith in the unexplainable worth and sure issue of effort, and the deep, sub-conscious content which comes from the exercise of our powers."

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

Whoa again! If you close your eyes, can't you just see Texas Sen. Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz or Iowa Rep. Steve "Nuts I Am" King making -- or debating -- the case that "more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life"?

Holmes's Wikipedia bio notes that in the summer of 1864 (when he was 23), following a three-year military enlistment, "Holmes returned to the family home in Boston, wrote poetry and debated philosophy with his friend William James, pursuing his debate with philosophic idealism, and considered reenlisting." (Both William and his brother Henry are described as "lifelong friends.") In my mind I imagine eavesdropping on a spirited philosophical debate between Justice Holmes and, say, Justice Sammy "The Hammer" Alito.

I don't imagine that this was everyday discourse in 1915, when Holmes spoke it (see below), but in today's savagely anti-intellectual climate can you imagine the response to a public officeholder announcing that he has come around to appreciating civilization because it "calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones"?


THE SOURCE OF THE QUOTE

So many people just quote this fizzy chunk of Holmesiana -- though nobody but Jane Jacobs seems to tack on the "but a word"  without troubling to source it that I was beginning to wonder whether like everything else it was actually written by Mark Twain. But no, on the Harper's blog in May 2009, Scott Horton provided a source: " 'Life as Joy, Duty, End,' speech delivered to the Bar Association of Boston, Mar. 7, 1900 in Speeches of Oliver Wendell Holmes pp. 85-86 (1915). Doesn't it sound like just the sort of speech Justice Nino Scalia or Chief Justice "Smirkin' John" Roberts or even "Slow Anthony" Kennedy would give at a bar association shindig?

By the way, of the numerous other rehashings of this quote I found -- all, no doubt coincidentally, post-Death and Life (after, all Internet citings are awfully likely to be post-1961) -- I didn't find any that included the "but a word" that Holmes added, about us all being "very near despair."

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