There is no way a single morning’s writing session will do Jean justice. Yet, when Erik Hoel posted on the lack of wisdom in today’s society, it was a sign that I needed to follow through on an impulse I had this week to write about her.
The last time I saw Jean was in 2003, over 20 years ago. As her husband Ronald and she grew into their nineties, they withdrew from society more and more, and ultimately left a kind of void in lieu of a goodbye. At some point, my mother found Ronald’s obituary, and noted that Jean couldn’t have been far behind. But my memories of them go back to my earliest childhood days. While both were very dear family friends, there was something about Jean that gave her the edge in terms of how fondly I remember them. An incident that reveals how much she meant and means to me is from back in my seminary days. At an All-Saint’s Day service in chapel, we were given pebbles or the like, and were asked to think of a particular saint in our lives and then deposit the pebble at a certain point in the service. There was no question that Jean was the person I’d think of. Afterwards, a friend said, “I could tell that you were thinking of someone very special.”
But what made Jean special?
My mother made friends with Ron and Jean back in the 1970s, when Jean and my mothers were both volunteers with a local museum. They were a fixture of my childhood. When I was very, very young, my bond was strongest with Jean’s mother, Grandma Kay, who lived in a basement room in their house. When we went to visit, I’d go downstairs to play with Grandma Kay. We’d spend hours playing - I remember a magnifying glass Grandma Kay had that we could look through. It was a triangular column and you could turn it this way and that. My mother and Jean would go on with their visit, but wonder “what in the world are they doing to keep busy for so many hours?” Grandma Kay died when I was in third or fourth grade. I was visiting my grandparents in Germany, and my grandmother insisted on commandeering a letter my mother had written me and reading it out loud at the lunch table and when she got to news of Grandma Kay’s passing, I grabbed the letter and ran upstairs to cry. When I was in junior high, Jean took me to see a play another mutual friend had written, which dealt with Alzheimer’s. As a child, I hadn’t noticed that Grandma Kay did things like put salad in the oven, so Jean and I were able to share the moment my perception of Grandma Kay shifted.
I suppose one gift both Ron and Jean gave me was a strong sense that science and religion are two complementary ways of experiencing the world. They were raised Seventh Day Adventist but ended up having a rift with the church. Ronald did pioneering scientific research on cholesterol. So, they had a scientific approach that wouldn’t have sat well with the biblical literalism that is foundational for Adventism. But they retained a lot of their Adventist cultural formation, particularly in diet, and I suppose Adventism taught them a fair amount about how structures can facilitate things as well as constrain them. They didn’t throw out spirituality, but they did end up with a very broad view of it. Once when we were driving in the car and sunbeams were piercing a cloud cover, Jean said “that’s God’s grace.” Jean subscribed to Parabola magazine, a Jungian publication that publishes on themes that it solicits insights from various religious traditions on. I liked going through her issues, and in my first year of college when we were assigned to bring a piece of writing on music to English class, I brought a review of A Feather on the Breath of God, a recording of Hildegard of Bingen’s chants, I found in Parabola. But at one point when I was really throwing myself into religion, Jean reminded me that I needed to pay more attention to science and ground myself better in the workings of the world. I didn’t realize until much later in life how Adventism is firmly rooted in hostility to evolution, but the fact that I grew up around a scientist and his wife, both of whom neither completely rejected nor completely played along with their religious heritage is one of the reasons I always experienced religion as something more flexible than a box one has to cram oneself into.
When I first thought about what Jean meant to me, her aesthetic sense is what came to mind. Ron and Jean were wealthy - Ron was paid handsomely for his scientific work - but my mother had to point it out to me. They didn’t “dress rich” - they retained a basic vibe of their Western, rural upbringing. But they lived in a very large house that they had commissioned an architect to design and had a cabin in the San Jacinto mountains. Both the house and the cabin emphasized natural materials, lots of wood especially. When they moved into an apartment for a while, it still felt very much defined by their sensibility. Their house was on the beach. It’s been sold, and it’s always strange to walk by it and feel how a central place of my childhood is now off limits and inhabited by very different people. If I had more time than a Saturday morning, I’d stretch my descriptive abilities to get at what made their house unique.
I remember sharing my aesthetic preferences with her when I lent her my cassette of Leos Janacek’s Glagolictic Mass, which is still among my favorite musical pieces. She found it difficult to listen to the first time, but on subsequent listenings she was able to get into the flow of it and really liked it.
Over the years, Jean gave me some books. When I was young, she gave me a picture book of a medieval feast that I had in my hands recently. I spent some time looking for it this morning, but I’ve misplaced it. She included an inscription, noting that she gave it to me because I am someone who “likes old things and new ideas.” I feel like I’ve evolved into someone who prefers old ideas as well as old things, but at the time it was a kind of moment of recognition that someone had caught a key element of my personality I hadn’t put together. Later, as I got more into music, she and Ron gave me The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, which I would pore over in my free time. The entry on “art rock” eventually led me to the music of Yes, which became the subject of my first publication, an essay in Progressive Rock Reconsidered. In college, when I got heavily into the blend of politics and religion that’s expressed in liberation theology, she gave me Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, a study of ancient Greek ethics. Where the other books were a basic reflection of where I was at, Jean wanted to stretch me into new directions with the Nussbaum book. I made some faltering attempts to get into it, but she was trying to stretch me in directions I wasn’t quite ready to go.
She gave me the Nussbaum book after a visit I paid her in college. I was very excited to go see her, but she ended up being very displeased with how I was living my life at the time. She had no time for the jargon with which I was exploring the world. I was at a phase where therapy had already made clear to me that I wanted to make a change from pursuing a career as a musician to going into religion, and Jean reminded me that my mother had made enormous sacrifices to further my musical career. She deemed me very immature. I didn’t quite know exactly what to do with that information, but she was someone I took seriously, so I wasn’t about to get defensive. A few years later, she came to see/hear me play a Shostakovich string quartet, and when we ended the performance, she was beaming. She said there was a kind of confidence in my playing she hadn’t seen before. When I was in seminary, she and Ron joined us for a New Year’s celebration, and she seemed to think I’d found my groove. I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint exactly how I grew in ways that satisfied her, but I think her shining a beam on a place where I needed to grow did in fact help me grow. In the uncomfortable conversation we had, she reminded me that getting to know oneself is the most important and most difficult task anyone has, and I suppose that task never stops.
But Jean didn’t simply get to know herself. Her involvement and observation of the world she lived in was always intense and keen. It’s this way of getting to know oneself through getting to know one’s world that is perhaps Jean’s greatest gift to me. I sometimes feel that my students split these things off from each other, and in Southern California one finds plenty of self-involvement that cuts off the world, and in activism one can find an involvement with the world that drowns out self-reflection, but it’s really only in finding one through the other that wisdom can grow.
Update: I found the book I was looking for this morning.
The inscription reads:
January 1984 (almost)
To Dirk -
I had to give this book to someone and because I know you appreciate old things and new ideas, I thought of you. I know it’s a child’s book and you’re almost not a child anymore but still for the child that will always be in you, and for the fun and beauty in their books - I give it to you. Enjoy - think of when you can eat wonderful things again and get out of the hospital soon. Love, Jean Sylvester.
P.S. It’s also from Ron but he doesn’t know it.
This was lovely.