William Mullen (1946–2017)
All at Bard mourn the unexpected loss of one of the College’s most beloved professors, William Mullen (1946-2017), professor of classics, who had been teaching at Bard since 1985.
Bill came to Bard as associate professor of classics in 1985, and was promoted to full professor in 1989. He served as chair of the Presidential Commission on the Curriculum from 1990 to 1993. During his tenure, he introduced Rhetoric and Public Speaking to the Bard curriculum and was instrumental in the development of the Classics Program and First-Year Seminar, which he directed from 1987 to 1990. He started what is now known as the West Point–Bard Exchange, which began as an educational seminar between West Point and Bard. He introduced the teaching of rhetoric to the Bard Prison Initiative and brought The Readers of Homer (a nonprofit organization that provides a method for reading Homer’s epics aloud in a continuous audience-participation format) to Bard. In 2013–14, he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the United States Air Force Academy, an honor of which he was particularly proud.
Bill earned his BA degree from Harvard College, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He earned the PhD from the University of Texas at Austin; his doctoral dissertation was titled “Pindar’s Aeginetans,” a study of the odes for Aeginetan victors. Bill published a book on Pindar, titled Choreia: Pindar and Dance, with the Princeton University Press. He brought to Bard his special interest in Greek and Latin epic and lyric poetry and the classical tradition in Western civilization.
Bill Mullen was an exemplar of the commitment to liberal education. Perhaps because he came to Bard directly from St. John’s College in Annapolis he cherished the inherent interdisciplinary character of the classics and believed deeply in the proposition that all students should avail themselves of a wide-ranging curriculum. Bill mirrored the nobility and honor of the vocation of scholar and teacher.
REMEMBRANCES
Frederick Hammond, HarpsichordistTwenty-five year ago Bill sent me some poems, encouraged by James Merrill, in the hope (unrealized) of finding a publisher. They consist of "Ghazal," "Equinox," and two longer cycles, "Summers away" and "Spring Canyon": finely observed, deeply felt, permeated with love and nostalgia. This is the last stanza of "Equinox" (the geography is roughly that of the Commedia): Here is the Lethe the adorer drinks, / this mountain at the center, / the light upon these rocks. / Whose is the bright of winter, / spirit's, or clean death's? / The balance passes as the thinker thinks.
Pax manibus suis.
Matthew Deady, Professor and Director of the Physics Program
I would like to add my own voice of admiration for Bill Mullen. He exemplified the curious Bard professor who inspired students and colleagues to pursue interests wherever they lead, guided by a rigorous criteria of intellectual integrity that gave us all the strength to think hard about hard things. We are all better for having had the chance to interact with him.
I would like to offer one of many instances I could cite. In 2002, Steve Wolfram published a book trying to kick off "A New Kind of Science", motivated by insights from computer science and chaotic system theory. Bill read Wolfram's book over a summer, and as he was about to go through it a second time, we scheduled a standing bi-weekly time to meet to discuss its ideas and its potential consequences. Needless to say, I learned more from Bill than he did from me. Bill's desire to understand by grappling was evident in everything he did, and we can preserve his legacy by following his example.
Bryan Billings, Director of Global Outreach Bard Center for Civic Engagement & Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program
I wanted to share the message below from Tatiana Boborykina at Smolny College. For my part I knew Bill to be a fascinating conversationalist, kind and engaging, a man who left a lasting impression on all who met him.
Thank you for sharing this letter with me, although it is so sad. I knew Bill and meeting him was a marking point in my life. Together we traveled to Valaam by boat, and as this voyage lasted several days we talked a lot discussing and preparing our team course on Rhetoric and Public Speaking. Later I visited him at Bard to continue working on that course. We were teaching Rhetoric in Russian and American groups via video conference and it was extremely successful. Professor Mullen possessed not only deep knowledge and vast cultural background but also such rare qualities as benevolence, kindness amiability, and a brilliant sense of humor. As we corresponded a lot during the course and after, I was privileged of not only sharing ides with him, but also of having an example of highly intelligent, witty and musically beautiful written speech. He was a fantastic personalty, a true Teacher and someone very dear to my heart. It impossible to imagine he is no longer with us, and impossible to forget him.
—Tatiana Boborykina, Smolny College
Peter Filkins, Visiting Professor of Literature
I was stunned to open my email and learn of Bill Mullen's passing. It so happened that I was at the lunch table with him just this past Tuesday. In a conversation that sprang up about Hölderlin, with the casual erudition that was his trademark, Bill recited a line in German from "Die Wanderung": "Schwer verlässt was nahe dem Ursprung wohnet, den Ort," which Bill then translated loosely as "If you live near the source, it is hard to quit the place." Obviously those words resonate in an altogether different way now, but how fitting that even in passing Bill would reveal something supple and nuanced and illuminating through a line of poetry. He was, as others have said, a curious man in both senses of the word, but there was always something to be gleaned from his ranging and questioning conversation if one listed closely. The "source" for him was teaching and literature and good conversation. He has indeed quit it all too suddenly, but not without a memorable last flourish.
Thomas Bartscherer, Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Literature Program and Director of the Language and Thinking Program
A chorus in his honor. Bill Mullen was a curious man, and his curiosity was a pearl of great price. Though a lover of the ancient world and an ardent student of cultural traditions, his hunger for the new was voracious. Never in my hearing did he utter a dull remark. And he had an unfailing ear for the interesting bit in whatever was said to him, which he’d then elaborate and celebrate. His was a generous brilliance, illuminating, not outshining, those who stood in his vicinity. We are all smarter for having had him among us. What I particularly cherished was the uncanny mix of irony and earnestness. He loved the world, to the point of tears, and laughed with kindness at the human comedy. To borrow words Bill himself might have invoked on such an occasion: "He was a man. Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”
Roger Berkowitz, Associate Professor of Political Studies, Philosophy, and Human Rights; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities
Bill Mullen always had something interesting to say. He came at the world on a slant and sought out the paths not taken. He was erudite but common, and thus wore his erudition gaudily in a disarming manner.. And Bill took risks. It was Bill who first gave me the terrifying book by Ray Kurzweil The Singularity is Near that led to the Arendt Center’s inviting Kurzweil to speak in 2010. I never knew what nugget Bill would have for me when he tapped me on the shoulder and offered his sly mile, but I always expected the curious and the different, even the odd. He relished turning an argument inside out and seeking to think from unthought perspectives. He was also a passionate advocate for public speaking and was this year working on a class on the Courage of Public Speaking that was to be part of the Courage To Be Seminar Series. He and I often dreamed of resurrecting a recitation prize for Bard students. I hope we can still make that happen, in his honor. But I always expected that Bill would be around to be the judge. I can’t think of anyone more worthy to have done so. Bill is someone whose presence the campus cannot but miss. I know I miss him already.
Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature
Mullen. His greatness lay in his difference. Mild in manner, articulate, calm, unfailingly polite, he was a passionate apologist for difference of all kinds. The intensity of his personal relationships was matched by an equivalent, and I suspect deeply rooted, passion for learning. More than learning: for discovery. Skilled and active in a profession that often seems to reward convention, and in a branch of scholarship famously intolerant of radical inquiry, Bill was able to startle, enlighten — and sometimes even convince — colleagues with the freshness of his investigations. So in his magisterial study of Pindar, he could find the poet not just a clever mythographer and encomiast, but someone who could read the dance of the body into the dance of words, words that should set us moving again. Bill’s yearning for discovery led him into a sympathetic reading of some of the recent chronological revisionists, and most dramatically to the theory of ‘Baltic Homer’& — the slowly accumulating body of evidence and inference that leads us to think that the Iliad originally was a chronicle of war in the Baltic, where Troy was Finland — and our familiar island Greeks were their actual ancestors on the coasts of Sweden and Pomerania — where Bill duly went, to trace the likelihood of that surmise. Mullen was an exciting man, a vivid teacher, I’m told, whose students responded to his excitement with eagerness and fidelity. I loved talking with the man, and am bitterly unhappy that I shall do so no more.
Andrew McCarron '98
Bill Mullen was a close friend for two decades—from my time as an undergraduate until the day before his death, which was the last time I heard from him. Although I never took one of his classes while at Bard, I was a regular visitor to the rectory where he lived, and we stayed in frequent touch over the years. Bill burned with life. In addition to teaching classes on everything from athletics and poetry to Egyptology, he pursued Odysseus through the Baltic Sea, was a tireless traveler, and zoomed back and forth between Bard and New York City in search of culture, adventure, and meaning. There was nothing quaint or predicable about his relationship to literature and learning. Intellectual whims engendered periods of voracious reading that culminated in seminars; a poem could lead him halfway around the world in search of the poet’s homeland and sources of inspiration; an art show might move him to spend a season composing a new series of original poems. In addition to a being a classicist, he wielded a dizzying array of monikers: catastrophist, poet, art collector, sinologist, dramaturge, athlete, warrior, humanist, and cultural critic. But above all else, Bill Mullen was a loyal friend and mentor, a fatherly figure, who relished opportunities to care for a wayward flock of students and alums. His bountiful table was always prepared with a second glass of wine or cup of tea. He was always up for a stroll at Poet’s Walk or late night visit to Blithewood. And an invitation to dinner punctuated almost every conversation. As the old folk standard puts it, “He was a friend of mine.” Alongside the erudition and logos were such gentleness and warmth. Perhaps my most emblematic memory with Bill occurred a few summers ago after a long, meandering conversation under the Barrytown stars behind his apartment on River Road. Summer was coming to an end and we could feel an early autumnal coolness in the air. After catching up on our various accomplishments and future plans, we sighed and moved on to our regrets and apprehensions. The center of Bill’s life was teaching and learning. Like many teachers approaching retirement, he was concerned about what lay ahead. We sat there silently listening to the pulse of late cicadas and agreed that the solution to most problems was for friends to find a way to be together in the spaces between victory and defeat, between knowing and unknowing, on the cusp of the ever-changing season of each and every moment. I will also remember the time Bill joined my family for New Year’s and read my three-year-old daughter her bedtime story with heartfelt kindness and joy. Bill Mullen embodied the promise of teaching, learning, and solidarity that drew me to Bard at the age of eighteen, and that has kept me coming back. It’s challenging to imagine my small world without my good friend Bill in it.
Bradley Powles '07
Since I found out Bill passed away four days ago, I’ve been at a loss for how to sufficiently express my feelings of regret that he’s gone. Many small and unexpected things have triggered memories of him. I don’t know how to give such a great-souled man tribute, but I’ve tried below.
What can I say about Bill?
Bill was brilliant. He had a quote, anecdote, or connection for just about any topic, which made him a wonderful person to talk to if you were trying to work out an idea. He gave Len, Jake, and I a private Nietzsche & the Classic seminar at his home one semester and the conversations would go on for hours---and then we’d finish and still stick around for a glass of wine or listen to Beethoven’s 9th.
Bill loved language. He taught himself several, including German, and he had a story he liked to recall of being in a bookstore in Germany when he’d asked a clerk to bring him The History of Philosophy and he was instead given The Philosophy of History. He caught the difference and got the clerk to bring the correct work. He was proud of that.
Bill was creative. He once wrote me, “I'm doing well by my highest standard, namely, I'm writing poems again...” His poem “Enchanted Rock” got him in Best American Poetry of 1998. He told me, “it opens and closes on a June day, sitting on the Battery Park City esplanade, so maybe you'll want to try reading it there. There's a long quotation from Walt Whitman in the railing on the main plaza when you step outside of that Winter Garden space in the central building.”
Bill was generous with his friends. He loved connecting the people he cared about. I think of people he introduced me to or who he talked about frequently. “You should come see Sandy Berkowitz’s Odysseus in America”; “You have to be in this production of Aristophanes’ Clouds because Peter Criswell is directing”; “My oldest friend, Newton Kershaw, is staying with me in my UES sublet and he’s a lawyer so he’ll have good advice”; “My sister is in town. Come for dinner.”... And of course he talked about his family and his friends who he traveled with (Aram). Bill had a rich social circle of people whom he loved and who loved him and I feel blessed that I got to be a part of it.
Bill was a good cook. I was unprepared before our first dinner when he asked me what my favorite type of food was. I said Italian and then he asked for clarification, rattling off six regional varieties of Italian cuisine, all of which he’d happily make. Truly, I never had a bad meal with Bill.
Bill was nurturing. He cared for his students and not just in an academic sense, he tried to be emotionally there for them. He’s encourage their passions and help them through tough times.
I could keep going on but I won’t. I’ll leave things here with some anecdotes of my times with Bill below.. He’ll be sorely missed.
November 2005: Bill is excited for the debut of “Rome” on HBO and he wants his students to share his enthusiasm, so every sunday night he comes to dingy couches of Tewksbury’s common room to host a viewing party. There’s typically 8-12 of of us in the room and during the episodes, we get the benefit of Bill’s real-time erudite commentary (e.g., “Rome really was covered in graffiti” and “Leather phalloi were a common part of Roman theatre”). After the episodes, it’s the students’ turn to discuss takeaways and impress our professor by connecting what we’ve just seen with recent classwork. Of course, we mostly we fail in this regard, but Bill is a good sport and typically sticks around for an hour or so to hear us out. One time, I’m going long on a point, but I see Bill is nodding from the end of the couch and smiling, so I go on. I finish. Bill sits up very straight and his head goes jauntily from side-to-side. “Brad...” (he always says my name so grandly) “I just realized from seeing you in that t-shirt, that your name is Bard metathesized.” He is genuinely pleased with this.
Spring 2006: There’s a gay potluck in the Hudson Valley called “ValleyBois” and I persuade Bill we should go. I got him to come to the opening of the LGBT center in Kingston a few months earlier, so maybe we’ll see some of the same people. I’ll drive, but we’ll take his pale blue boxy mid-90s car. This car is in rough shape, but that doesn’t bother Bill, who is content that it works for his normal short commute from the rectory to campus. Now we’re on a longer drive though, and I don’t realize until I’m already on the highway that the brakes are loose and the speedometer is broken. The needle wobbles back-and-forth over a 15 MPH range that you could be traveling at, before it drops to 0 for minutes at a time. Bill is still unworried. Just keep up with traffic. On the way south, I tell Bill a little about Newburgh, where we’re going, and how it used to be rough before recent improvements. It was actually ranked in the top 10 American Cities in murders per capita for years. Now Bill *is* worried. With true concern, he asks “Brad, where in the world are you taking me?” We arrive at a nice old townhouse for the potluck. There are people milling about in the living room where there’s going to be a classic movie played after dinner. In the yard in back people are grilling burgers and hotdogs. Bill (an excellent cook) has brought a dish that’s fancier than a bbq warrants, but no one minds. We have a few drinks -- Bill having his seltzer between glasses of wine because he insists it fights hangovers and that the carbonation aids alcohol absorption. But this is not Bill’s crowd. The folks at the party are more affected and camp than Bill likes and they’re certainly not into talking ancient (or current) affairs. Bill comes over to me and says we’ll leave in the next hour or so and then the movie for the day is announced: “Lust in the Dust.” “Brad - Let’s go.” “Yeah, Bill. Way ahead of you.”
November 2006: It’s Bill’s birthday and it’s a milestone -- He’s turning 60. Between classes, I run to the computer lab print out a sign for him, “Salve Magister… felix natalis” or something like that. On the printout, I put a picture of a bust of Vespasian because it *really* looks like Bill. I take this message to his office under the eaves of Aspinwall and tape it to the door. Hours later, I drop in on him. He’s in great spirits. He likes the picture of Cicero I put on his door. Do I know what Cicero says of old age? [RECITES QUOTE]. “Oh, uh, I think that was actually a photo of Vespasian. I chose it because...” He deflates. This is not happy news. “...I chose it because I actually thought it was Cicero. It’s fitting since we’ve read so much of him in class and because you teach rhetoric.” He’s in glad again. He has more quotes and explains how HBO got the casting for Cicero all wrong -- it shouldn’t have been someone so wimpy.
Fall 2005 & Fall 2006: I’m at a pretty low point in my life after a “coming out” talk was forced on me by my parents. Lots of terrible things were said and I just took it because I’d received the bad advice to just “let them get it all out of their system”. Among the ideas thrown around is maybe we should stop paying for Bard because the college is what made me gay. I’m feeling pretty heartbroken, so I email my advisor, Bill and explain the situation. He says classes are about to start. Bard offers aid. He’ll help me get things sorted with financial aid if it comes to that. Can I come to dinner? I show up to the rectory for dinner -- I haven’t been here before so I don’t know to swap my shoes for the faded slippers at the door. Bill is making lemon chicken which he says he makes for his students who are going through a tough time (“It’s comfort food.”) We sit and have a dinner and talk about parents, kids, being gay, etc. I probably cry a lot, but don’t remember it all. Then Bill jars me with a really frank question. “Did your parents love you before you came out?” I answer pitifully, “Uh, yeah. I guess they used to.” He replies, “Then they’re going to love you after you’ve come out too.” Bill will make that meal for me again (and for my first boyfriend).
For the next three years he’s more than an academic advisor, he’s a close friend. When I do graduate, I get a gleeful email from “never-again-Professor-Mullen--always-just-good-ol'-Bill” inviting me to hang out in NYC. And we do hang out every other month or so for a couple years. There are good times I recall making dinners at his place, reading Dylan Thomas in White Horse Tavern, sipping vodka in PJ Clarke’s (a fondness Bill developed after his trip to Smolny), etc.
One time in 2008, I sent Bill an email after I’d been accosted by a very angry homophobe on the D Train. I wrote him just generally seeing when he’d be around in the next few weeks and explaining I’d had a bad night. Not six hours went by and I woke up to a message, “Just wanted to follow up on my voicemail and urge you to call me today and tell me your bad story. ‘Nothing is too terrible to bear as long as men can make a story of it.’ … Hope things look better today. Talk to me.”
Well, I wish I could talk to Bill now. But I am comforted that I have a lot of stories of our time together and I’m glad to read so many other tributes from other people whose lives he touched.
Paul Newell '97
Bill Mullen was one of the best professors I ever had. 20 years later I can still recall the joy in face when he recited Hesiod's Theogony to the class in Attic Greek. The man was brilliant and noble.
Michael Anzuoni '13
I am absolutely devastated by the news of the death of Professor Mullen. Bill was my FYSEM teacher in my first semester and introduced me to the beauty and mystery of the classics in a way that has forever changed my life. He was a dear friend of mine throughout my years at Bard and his erudition of all things esoteric left me in constant awe. I will never forget translating Sappho with him at his lovely abode where he would cook us the most splendid delicious meals (he once asked me my ancestry and I replied Italian and his face lit up - ah!, he said, the Italians have a favorite saying of mine: "In America, one lives as a king and eats like a peasant. But in Italy we are peasants who eat like kings!") nor will his wild theories about the ancient plasmic skies and their relations to the myths deign to leave my mind. I will be thinking of him tonight as I look up into the winedark night that settle over us this eve.
Gregory McLean '10
Unfortunately, I did not get to know Bill until my very last semester at Bard when I took his Rhetoric and Public Speaking. Of course, I had seen Bill at the gym and around campus where he never missed an opportunity to enthusiastically strike up a conversation with new and old faces. My last semester at Bard was also when I decided to enlist in the U.S. Army and apply for Officer Candidate School, an atypical post-Bard career choice to say the least, and one that I was hesitant to share with many around campus who I feared would not be overly supportive of my decision. But Bill encouraged us to use our in-class speeches to discuss personal and complicated topics such as these, so I followed his advice and spoke to our small class about my decision to serve in the military. Bill was ecstatic, inviting me to his office on multiple occasions to discuss a military career. He went out of his way to connect me with the only other few Bard alumni who pursued similar paths, as well as other professors at Bard and West Point who could help guide me in the process. Bill's welcoming and supportive response was incredibly meaningful to me at the time, and made me proud to be part of the Bard community. Over the course of the semester and after graduation, Bill proved to be an invaluable mentor and friend as I prepared for my next years as an Army officer and beyond. I will miss his never ending enthusiasm and optimism in every exchange we had together.
Felice Vinci, author of The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales
In Summer 2006 Bill Mullen set sail on the Baltic Sea: “We seek to retrace the Achaean voyage to Troy, as described in the Iliad, given Vinci’s theory. Along the way we will re-read the Homeric textual landscape that existed in the ancient Baltic via modern day observation. The goal is to expand and improve our understandings of historic identities and the ways in which they intersect with our own experience of places and people" (https://sites.google.com/site/vteam06/). Bill was the first enthusiastic supporter of my theory on the original Nordic setting of the Iliad and the Odyssey. His intellectual curiosity, together with his love for Beauty, was the main feature of his nature: In the search for the past he sought the sense of the present. Right now, on his cloud in the sky, he must be chatting with Homer, Pindar, Virgil and all his beloved poets of the antiquity about their poems as well as the news coming from this lower world.
Ernest Metzger, Professor of Civil (Roman) Law, University of Glasgow
I was an undergraduate in Classics at Boston University in 1979/80, and attended Prof Mullen's course in Vergil. From that course my career in Classics was settled. We became friends; I often visited his office to chat, and I gave him fencing lessons in return for help in reading Tacitus. He would have helped anyway, but we both thought it was a fun thing to do. He enjoyed inviting students for seminars at his apartment: he said that in Classics, wine helps the understanding. One perfect evening I had his invitation, as the sole student, to come to his home for a recitation of Oedipus the King. He and Donald Carne-Ross spoke the most beautiful Ancient Greek I have ever heard. The tape recording of that evening perhaps still exists.
Jesse Abbot '90
My undergraduate professor of Greek and one-time academic adviser in classics, William Mullen, died very suddenly earlier this month, and his passing sent me reeling toward greater urgency in the work I do every day guiding students in philosophy, literature and writing.
I say that without exaggeration or hyperbole.
Although my eventual scholarship ended up being broader than classics per se, from my sophomore year through the first half of my fall semester as a senior, my concentration in ancient Greek language and texts shoved me out of bed at 4 a.m. to vie with homework made up of the original periodic sentences of Demosthenes, punning and incantatory and keening piles of half-lines that form Homer’s epics, and the cadences and ideas of Sappho, and Meleager, and Herodotus, and Thucydides. And Plato and Aristotle, and many more. Bill was an endlessly thoughtful and purposeful coach, mentor and guide to this stuff.
One autumn morning at Bard College in upstate New York in 1988, 29 years ago this month, I was mentally sawing through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the dining commons with a lexicon, grammar and a little half-forbidden decoder book of ancient verbs, Tutti Verbi Greci, between mouthfuls of granola. Arriving at class mostly prepared, the vexing, militant discipline I needed to get through the course pushed out of me almost involuntarily the kind of question my own students ask me today: “What makes Aristotle so important?” Mullen – who was known for dressing conservatively out of respect for both his subject matter and his students – replied with hardly a pause, “I think he’s the most intelligent human being who ever lived.”
I’ll never forget that statement. It struck me about as hard as news of Bill’s death did a few weeks ago. A life-changing sentence. A challenge, blessing, curse and invitation all at once.
Shortly after this news I found myself telling my own students in the Western philosophy survey course I teach that as the years go by, I am increasingly amazed at how much Aristotle’s appraisal that true virtue is the middle way (Mesótēs estín hē aretē) between the extremes of excess (áriston) and lack (phaulótēs) steers many of my decisions throughout the day. I think this is something that came from poring over these writings with students year in and out. For his own part, Aristotle was humble about his framework for ethics, calling it a “rough sketch” that would “hold for the most part.”
Bard College, my undergraduate alma mater, preserves the Oxbridge tutorial model, in which students are mentored by professors, one-on-one or in small groups of no more than five or six at most, in just under half its courses. Bill came to Bard (where he turned the classics department into a flourishing one) in the mid-1980s after previously teaching at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland – a school which, like Bard, is rooted in both the tutorial model and the Great Books approach, in which students encounter the entirety of classic texts as the core of their education. This close mentoring combined with lecture-discussion has proven itself to me to be a good way to help students navigate the relationship between a personal and individualized path through life and a shared community unfolding in real time that demands well-tuned psychosocial skills.
Another decisive moment for me working with Mullen was a conversation in which he challenged my perception of myself as someone resigned to the idea that his writing far outpaced an ability in public speaking.
“Why do you accept that status quo? Any strong writer can be a strong speaker, too.
Why don’t you aim for both?” Judging from how insistent I am these days on including public speaking as a key piece of each of my courses, I can’t help but conclude that it was Bill Mullen’s living example as a model mentor and enthusiastic orator in a polis –the ancient Greek model of a community both metaphysical and social-political in nature – that shaped this ever-growing priority. My goal each day is to hold a candle, at least, to the example provided by Bill and my other mentors.
The best teaching, one could argue, is a sort of time release capsule. It may pack its medicinal punch days, months, or years after a lecture or discussion. I realize now, nearly three decades after leaving Bard, that Bill shaped much of the core of my thinking – as both a person and teacher – in ways I never realized. At Bard, historically a place where largely left-wing thought has held sway (this is somewhat less true today), Bill was the exception. Over the years he fostered a fruitful teaching exchange with the United States Military Academy at West Point, and four years ago, it was his great honor to serve for two semesters as a distinguished visiting professor at the United States Air Force Academy.
I come from a family with elements of both Sixties activism and the military, and only very recently has it dawned on me how Aristotle’s middle way has helped me sort out all of these disparate threads. And Bill’s – Bill’s middle way.
The puzzle pieces come together. Because Mullen never hit students over the head with his own politics, I remember being surprised several years ago to see Bill defend in writing from multiple attacks an op-ed piece penned by Prof. Donald Kagan of Yale – a fellow classicist but also one of the central figures of the neoconservative movement – whose stance it was that America had little in common with the corrupt democracy-turned-tyranny that Athens devolved into during the Peloponnesian War.
I’ve since gathered that historically minded scholars with backgrounds in classics are more likely to have a conservative political outlook – conscious of how rarely the light of democracy makes an appearance in the more often dark and oppressive sweep of human centuries. I have recently learned that Bill was also a rare resource at Bard for those few students there reluctant to disclose out loud their desire to pursue a career in the military.
Mullen, an expert in, among other things, the poet Pindar (who was famous for his odes celebrating hero-victors in the Olympics), embodied and celebrated in his own modern life the classical ideal of “mens sana in corpore sano” (a healthy mind in a healthy body), and in fact excitedly had buttons printed up with that Latin slogan when a new gymnasium opened on the campus. His own athleticism could not be separated from his devotion to all things beautiful and the branch of philosophy that centers on that, aesthetics.
His study of Pindar inferred from the meter of the bard’s odes the movements of choreia, “the singing and dancing of citizens in a chorus,” and his dedication to the good life extended to the fine meals he served up guests from his kitchen. The Greek intuition linking truth and beauty was something Bill stood for and lived.
As Bill noted many years ago, Aristotle closely linked ethics as a broader field to political thinking. The twentieth century German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss called political philosophy the “rightful queen of the social sciences.” As the world moves into cascading and frightening uncertain times, we need an activated humanities – what I am calling these days an “activist moderationism” – to help bring a balanced perspective to conflict in the service of diplomatic relations and stability worldwide.
Strauss located the poles of Western thought in the cities of Jerusalem and Athens.
In a famous treatise named for these two cities, he stated, “Confronted by the incompatible claims of Jerusalem and Athens, we are open to both and willing to listen to each.”
“Tikkun Olam,” the commandment for Jews to repair the world, need not be lost in a mishmash of undiscerning pluralism, a malady Strauss warns against. I am moved that Bill’s death has prompted me to revisit Strauss, since Mullen’s own dedication to promoting study of the guiding ideas from Greek, Hebrew, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian and Chinese sources which made up the so-called Axial Age (about 800-200 BCE) never once decayed into a facile equation of what are very distinct views.
The two original inscriptions at the oracle of Delphi, “know thyself” and “be moderate” are useless as mere ideas and only meaningful if internalized and set in motion. The spirit of my teacher exhorts me to be an activist for balance and moderation. I hope many others will join in this.
Ernest Metzger
I was an undergraduate in Classics at Boston University in 1979/80, and attended Prof Mullen's course in Vergil. From that course my career in Classics was settled. We became friends; I often visited his office to chat, and I gave him fencing lessons in return for help in reading Tacitus. He would have helped anyway, but we both thought it was a fun thing to do. He enjoyed inviting students for seminars at his apartment: he said that in Classics, wine helps the understanding. One perfect evening I had his invitation, as the sole student, to come to his home for a recitation of Oedipus the King. He and Donald Carne-Ross spoke the most beautiful Ancient Greek I have ever heard. The tape recording of that evening perhaps still exists. [Ernest Metzer is now the Douglas Professor of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow.]
Li-hua Ying, Associate Professor of Chinese
Bill touched so many lives, mine included. I cannot comprehend his passing. It was too sudden, too shocking. I recall years ago when Bill directed the FLCL’s capstone course: Friends and Lovers in Poetry. I taught a section on Chinese poetry. To celebrate the end of the semester, the whole class, both faculty and students, gathered in his apartment right next to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Barrytown. There was a scroll hanging on his living-room wall, with a poem by Li Po written in cursive calligraphy. I read it out aloud. Eyes sparkling and mouth repeating the impromptu translation I offered, Bill was overjoyed that finally someone could tell him what these beautiful but impossible squiggles meant. That was the beginning of our friendship. Ever since then, every time we saw each other, our conversations were inevitably drawn to Chinese poetry and philosophy. We talked about the courses he was teaching: Confucius and Socrates; Aristotle and Xunzi, about the Tang dynasty poets he loved. He showed me his poem on China’s Three Gorges Dam and asked whether I would be willing to translate it into Chinese. Of course, I said. I remember a chilly autumn day when I was walking out of Ludlow, there was Bill coming out of Aspinwall. I said to him that the autumn chill often drove ancient Chinese poets to sorrow and melancholy and I could identify with them right here and now. “Wait,” he quickly reminded me, “but autumn inspires the best poetry.” I had to agree and our conversation moved to Du Fu, Meng Jiao, and others. He then mentioned a poem he had written in imitation of Du Fu’s “Eight Autumn Meditations.” It was composed in one autumn day when he was standing on Enchanted Rock, a spot both of us frequented during our graduate days. We reminisced nostalgically about Austin, about the hill country of Texas. That evening, he emailed the poem to me, with a note saying that it constituted his “fifteen minutes of fame” for its appearance in the 1998 Best American Poems of the Year. See below “Enchanted Rock” he shared with me, in fond of memory of Bill Mullen, a man who had an insatiable appetite for learning and for life.
ENCHANTED ROCK
1
I could sit all day on this esplanade--
always come back here when my trips are done.
Sit with their nectar, claim it for heart's calm,
make it into phrases all afternoon.
Fountain ledges braided by fluted granite,
comforting hexagons of civic stone.
Harbor like the beginningless and the endless.
Heart's calm like the colossal clouds of June.
2
Suppose there were steps down into the Hudson,
for sacred bathing, like a Banaras ghat.
Suppose I could have done with all the honey,
hived in a notebook, like a sacred writ.
June would become July, and mere immersion
make everything look sacred in the heat.
Immersion would become the liberation.
Triumph lie in the not phrasing it.
3
Like student hours, half a life ago,
cloud-watching through my carrel's tinted glass.<
There to please the fathers, ravel the texts,
come up with secrets no one else could guess.
In the book dust, the air-conditioning,
I can admit there was a kind of bliss.
The archives acquired by the Texas billions.
The boyish expectation of success.
4
But best was time off at Enchanted Rock,
two hours west of Austin, acres huge,
magma massed over the green steaming plain.
I would sit in full lotus on my ledge,
meditate some secret about Spirit,
how it rides it out, age after world age.
Soar with the heat waves and the thunderheads.
Then climb down to a chute at the Rock's edge,
5
Plunge in its torrent, roar, shiver in silence
on the warm granite, by a tamarisk.
All the time in the world to amaze the fathers
by absolute acquittal of each task.
In the meantime, sitting in princely ease,
my thoughts like riffles, and my flesh like musk,
I had disappeared into a spell of sweetness
about which they would never know to ask.
6
Now it is the fathers have disappeared.
Enfeebled. Disesteemed. Estranged. Or dead.
Their love, when all is summed, was never grudging,
nor the debt ever adequately paid.
A youth will seem ungrateful, or insouciant,
I shrug it off because he's just a kid.
And was there any secret about Spirit
I could have, even had I tried, betrayed?
7
Now the fathers are nowhere to be seen.
And so I see them in colossal clouds
tall all summer out over the harbor.
Their blessedness bestrides the esplanade's
serenity the livelong afternoon.
Ebbs and floods with the estuary's tides.
Floats in the limpid spaces between worlds,
undemanding as Epicurus' gods.
8
Would the clouds look different after immersion?
Back in the endless and the beginningless?
In the meantime I sit and think of the Rock,
that its sweetness was, that its spell took place.
It is like the sun sunk in these fountain ledges
(their film over the granite an abyss).
Now it is a disc under the cloud cover.
Now it is a dazzle I couldn't face.
Post Date: 11-02-2017