Your Past Ablaze: On the Sacrament of Memory

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. — Pericles 

A year ago, I took one of those trips that hover eternally just below the top of your list, the sojourns you’ll thoroughly enjoy and learn a great deal from, but which somehow get superseded by flashy items of the moment, glittery but often transitory. Instead of Paris (for example), the family headed to the Canadian Rockies, goaded by the surefire combo of trains, furry animals, and boys under six years old. The rail trip up from Vancouver was a wild success, as was the cross country set of national park roads down the east slopes to Calgary for the Stampede (yee-hah, eh?). The transition point was a sprawling rustic lodge in the immense park just outside Jasper, the picturesque little mountain burg where the train let us off.

A large chunk of Jasper isn’t there anymore. On the night of July 22, the entire town was evacuated as the fearsome Canadian wildfires of the last two years found the local area for the first time, raging through to destroy structures and natural beauty. Now, I’ve been in Jasper for two nights in my entire life, I don’t know anybody there, and due to heroic efforts, almost no one was hurt (although I hate to think of the wildlife). So I wasn’t really prepared for the sense of personal loss that enveloped me as I watched video of the destructive waves of fire run amok to decimate lives and livelihoods. The recency of the visit, the uniqueness of the area, and the pleasure vividly recalled all had something to do with it. But the real point is, human emotion attaches itself to external symbols, many peculiar (from teddy bears to Miles Davis albums to rally caps to ankle bracelets) which often reemerge at surprising times to refocus our lives for a moment, or perhaps much longer.

When a beloved professor retires or dies, there are ways in which you intriguingly become a different person, with more past and less present. It is fascinating that this extends to physical experience as well. In relation to our college days, we’ve spoken before about the waves of self-re-evaluation when they tear down your dorm, or perhaps worse, when they even tear down the dorm your class donated. Sixty years later, I remember accompanying my dad on a pilgrimage to his old college rooming house in Urbana, Illinois, only to stand in silent terror as we stared only at a beige Illinois Bell Telephone blockhouse. The highly accomplished Princeton softball program is getting ready for its fourth different home field within a lifetime. And we’ve spoken repeatedly about the massive Palmer Stadium, location of many thousands of unique experiences for so many Princetonians, unavoidably replaced by a beautiful new facility, but still popping up in many dreams 26 years after its demise.

There once was another Dickinson Hall, sited where the reading room of Firestone Library is today. The first new building under President James McCosh’s administration in 1870, it provided eight new sunny classrooms and a huge exam room (more on that later) for his expansive academic options and enrollment vision. It also kicked off a Beaux-Arts frenzy (actually, in Beaux-Arts, one building can amount to a frenzy …), followed by the adjacent and even larger John C. Green School of Science on Washington Road three years later. Gothic arches, Romanesque decoration, tiger-striped roof tiling, garish gables, functionless towers — all was fair game. Then in 1882, McCosh’s success led to the need for a new chapel, not for chapelizing, but simply to hold the student body for baccalaureate and so forth. Henry Marquand, the rich father of Princeton’s art history paterfamilias Allan Marquand 1874, brought out the checkbook, and a similar structure near Dickinson and the Science School became the Henry Marquand Chapel. Holding 1,000 people in its high central nave, the new chapel was a riot of styles, precisely skewered by the New York Sun as combining the “rounded apse of the Roman basilica, the transept of the Gothic cathedral, the minaret of a Turkish mosque, and Romanesque arched windows.” There was large money sunk in the details, with ornate stained glass (including some from Louis Comfort Tiffany) and beautiful carvings throughout. Later, fancy plaques commemorating events and people accumulated there, and the Class of 1879 even commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to do an ornate bas-relief of McCosh, which instantly became one of the college’s most notable artworks. With the addition of the 900-seat Alexander Hall (a pretty serious Romanesque riot in itself) to the campus in 1894 for convocations, concerts, and the like, Princeton had two large spaces where the community could gather for almost any occasion you could conjure up. They functioned well in that capacity through the Patton and Wilson years, including the sesquicentennial celebrations. As the 20^th century Gothic transcendence arose, it concentrated on dorms and academic buildings such as Palmer Lab, Guyot, 1879, Blair, and so forth.

In particular relation to our tale, McCosh Hall, with its 44 rooms and large lecture halls to serve the new precept system, was completed in 1907, close to the Marquand Chapel. McCosh was designed to extend further north in an “L” along Washington Road toward the Green School, but lack of funding halted it for the moment at McCosh 50. This brought the incongruities of the architectural styles into jarring contrast, and the northeast corner of campus (the colonial Dean’s House, now the Joseph Henry House, was then located smack in the middle of the battling Beaux-Arts and Gothic cacophony) resembled something of an immense chessboard with two, three, or four combatants, depending on your design tolerances. And also in 1907, Ralph Adams Cram became the University architect, and his love for collegiate Gothic buildings became the rule of the road. Most of the rest he referred to as “the aesthetic indiscretions of a munificent but misguided ancestry.”

Dickinson became home to the history and politics department, with the notable exception that the huge exam hall continued to serve all the large courses; under the new serious academics of Wilson and then Hibben, this made it something of a dark symbol, the Mount Doom of many student careers. These teaching trends were slowed, along with most activity on campus, by the advent and tragedy of American involvement in World War I, initiated by Wilson after pledging not to in the 1916 election, and supported enthusiastically by the trustees and especially president Hibben, with much of the campus overtaken by the military for the first time since 1777. As the names of young dead alumni began to filter back to Princeton in 1917, Reunions were cancelled for two years, and even the threat of the Spanish flu erupted. The grimness was unavoidable and the campus essentially cut off from the world.

So the memorial service for the war dead in the Marquand Chapel on Dec. 15, 1918 — a brief five weeks after the cessation of hostilities and six days prior to the death in Europe of Hobey Baker 1914 — was filled both with Princetonians and raw emotions. Hibben rose to his pastoral challenge in his message, describing the occasion as a “sacrament of memory” in the spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas. The emotion built later through the announcement of a new memorial hall for the Princeton dead of all wars by the trustees in May 1919 following lightning-fast deliberation, then even further during the great Victory Reunion the following month. Marquand Chapel with its quirky beauty was booked around the clock for memorial services of those classes who had lost mates. It was again for Reunions 1920, but those never happened.

On May 19, the first evening of 1920 Houseparties, Dickinson Hall caught fire. Not spotted until it was well underway, with flames bursting throughout the second-floor windows, campus paranoia for years afterward held the blaze was started by student casualties taking revenge for indignities suffered in the exam hall. In any case, as formally dressed undergrads from the clubs tried to help on the windy night, water was poured on the Dean’s House, which miraculously survived; the stone chapel, with its tile roof, was not thought in serious danger. But one crucial standpipe was dead for some reason, embers from Dickinson snuck under the eaves of the chapel and lit fires inside the roof, and the entire structure died in a collapse of stone, glass, and steel as much of the town helplessly watched.

Cram’s presence essentially ensured that rebuilding it would never be seriously considered. A new gothic Dickinson, the planned extension of McCosh, was built to replace the classroom space, and the inexorable planning between Hibben and Cram began on the new $2 million University Chapel we all now revere, completing the quad that features the Mather sundial. The St. Gaudens sculpture, whose mold had been preserved, was recreated in the wistfully named Marquand transept of the huge new edifice, and that was the end of that.

Except. I always wonder about the alums who attended chapel memorial services for their recently dead friends at the Victory Reunion (dead friends? ... some victory ...) in 1919, then returned a year later to gaze at the smoldering ruins. Their past had arisen to overtake their present, that’s for sure, but deep down, how does one really cope? I suppose that’s why we teach both philosophy and psychology.