I thank Robert’s family for the opportunity to speak, although I find this a most difficult task. Robert’s and my relationship took the form of a forty-year conversation. We never traveled together, joined a club or participated in some other organized activity. When I lived here in Southern California Robert, Justin and I visited museums, parks, galleries, and urban centers. Robert and I were particularly adept at haunting bookstores. We liked being out, and imagined ourselves as part of cafe society, without the cafe’s and absent the society. Not living in Paris, we settled for the grand boulevards of Westwood or the esplanade of some garish mall. We had fun though.
What complicates this occasion is the fact that our friendship was private.
Conversely, a eulogy performs a public act. But not only was our relationship private, the man about whom I am speaking luxuriated in his personal privacy. How then to honor Robert’s decision to refrain from a full public life while fulfilling my obligation to praise it? I fear that I will not say enough, yet more than I should.
Robert never compartmentalized his life, but he managed the roles and responsibilities in such a way as to create a distance between them. However, to each part he gave his whole person. Still, even as my friend he could keep maddeningly to himself.
Furthermore, I am apprehensive about giving this address. I have too much respect for Robert to mar his sending off. My consolation here is that Robert held such low expectations for this sort of ceremony that it is nearly impossible not to step over the bar he would have set.
My challenge, frankly, is to avoid violating his private trust. Moreover, how do I explore with you Robert’s interior life, an interior life of such richness that it beggars our imagination?
A final complication with this talk is that each of us has a Robert, or a Bob, or a Mr. Cotton we admire. My words shall not trespass on your attachment. Whatever I say will be personal to me, and must not compete with your memory and your bond. I shall try to raise a few general qualities and characteristics to jog your memory or revive a feeling. So, although I cannot speak for you, I might serve as your prompter. In this, no one of you should feel that your experience with Robert is diminished by my failure to recall what you would have preferred. Your relationship is as dear as mine.
And surely, if I had the talent to play a Bach cello suite, I would do so instead of speaking. Robert would have preferred that. My hope, consequently, is that my words will be heard as notes invoking recollections of moments you shared with Robert.
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"For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,
The comfort that you made?"
I read these words of the Irish poet Yeats the night Robert died. They made me think: What do I owe him?
Gratitude surely is the right response to the gifts Robert offered me through his mentoring and friendship.
My bond with him was––is––as friend and continual conversationalist. Robert remains with me. He is my reading companion. From his example and from our engagement I first learned to read. Having taught me to read, Robert coaxed me to know the world. Consequently, whenever I encounter words, Robert guides me.
My first impression of him has not left me these forty years. Here, I mean an Aristotelian word, areté, translated as “excellence,” which also can mean virtue. One simply knew from talking a short while with him that the standards had been raised. However, that did not mean in the slightest that the exchanges with him were any less pleasant. Robert could cut you down a size, and all the while you enjoyed it; importantly, you accepted it as best-intentioned, as a gift to make you better.
Robert taught us excellence by example and through patient dialogue. He showed no interest in the strictures of a heavy moral didacticism. Instead, his way of engaging us was always encouraging, a welcoming to new ways of thinking and seeing the world, an invitation to the spirited life of the mind.
His professional excellence was well-noted, even lauded, by his students both before and upon his retirement. The tee-shirt his last class awarded him with his portrait and the label “Cotton Rules” emblematically testifies to their appreciation for his excellence. His unassuming but confident presence dominated the classroom––not as figure of intimidation but as interlocutor.
Robert’s excellence showed itself especially in the area of thinking. The Scot philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says, “We continue until the end of our lives to need others to sustain us in our practical reasoning.” Robert was our sustainer. He disdained jargon as well as cute locutions. Instead, he modeled a use of language and a reflective rationality that promoted careful evaluation. And, we benefited through our interactions with him by becoming stronger practical reasoners, despite ourselves. He taught us how to think much more than what to think.
Teachers should possess the intellectual and moral skills they wish to inculcate in their students. They also need other virtues that depend upon the “type of learning intended.” Robert’s devotion to the English language as a means for truthfulness as well as beauty enlivened and then trained our imaginations; this excellence had both ethical and aesthetic consequences. He taught others of us to be care-givers, by which we learned how to be sensitive to the needs of others and provide for them. In effect the quality of a teacher is commensurate with the care given the learner, whether the learner be a student, a friend, or a relative. For us Robert was an excellent teacher.
Moreover, “friendship and collegiality” protect us from mistakes of mind and of character. Robert’s personal philosophy, for example, combined virtues and skills associated with the common good. This is another reason to be grateful to Robert. His excellence called us to be better persons, not just more accomplished reasoners––although the two are undeniably related. We know that Robert served others, and, thankfully, was in turn sustained by care-givers and family members right up to the moment of his death.
Robert’s effectiveness stemmed from, in part, his patience, which grew from his near-Stoical appreciation for the human condition, including his own. Robert’s body was a lifelong frustration; it circumscribed his activities and limited his range. Yet, instead of submitting to bitterness or self-pity, Robert tended quietly and patiently to us ––his own vulnerable body a testimony to the needs of others.
His social and political philosophies, I believe, derive, in part, from this sympathy as a positing of human need over human want, as an ordering of political power to address needs, never wants. Although an arch realist, Robert espoused a social hopefulness.
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In gratitude: “"For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,
The comfort that you made?"
Robert taught English for most of his career but there was a period when he moved to religion. His mastery of the content was always apparent, but I think his most lasting accomplishment with his students, indeed with his colleagues, was as a teacher of independent practical reasoning. He taught others how to think! And, in this he better understood than most the purpose of high school as preparation for more in-depth serious study at the college level. Unfortunately, he felt more often than not that the colleges had so lowered their standards of thinking, especially in the humanities, that further study was an embarrassment to the great writers and thinkers college students were supposedly studying. This was a source of almost daily disappointment.
He surely held higher expectations of us than we were comfortable with, but he never prodded or made us feel less cared for because we failed to get over the bar. In fact, our infidelities and failures were accepted with equanimity and a certain sly humor, as if to say, “yes, I expected that. Now let’s try again, shall we.”
I don’t want to mythologize the man. He could be brutally honest. But is not honesty the primary intellectual virtue of self-knowledge? How can we know ourselves unless someone, our friend or mentor, speaks the truth about us to ourselves?
He frequently and with devilish humor deflated my pretensions to understanding certain philosophers. I had brought the most well known American philosopher to speak to students at my school, and I was quite proud of this achievement. Robert listened to my recounting of this proud moment, and choked out at me “That horrible man?” As chagrined as I was to hear this, the core truth of his criticism was apt. I had done it more for myself than for the students. How valuable to have friend who keeps you tethered to the ground.
The honesty that binds friends challenged us the afternoon he called to tell me of the original diagnosis of the brain tumor. The news stunned me; and the manner in which he delivered it was unusually clinical, not his normal mindfulness. That not being our way of talking together, we chose a silence to settle between us. Then, inexplicably, as if two well-traveled dancing partners, we struck on the allusive language of Shakespeare. We began to talk of the prognosis and of the impending complications through a poetic prism.
A few days later I sent him music and poetry. I could not imagine anything else, as words had left me. In return he sent one line on a blank card: “I knew you would understand.” I was consoled.
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In gratitude: "For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,
The comfort that you made?"
We humans are to no small degree defined by how we treat others and how they respond to us. Sartre understood a version of this as a sort of threat to our freedom. We would like to imagine ourselves as insular beings, able to define ourselves through sheer will. But in the end it comes back, inevitably if often unpleasantly, to simple human social relations.
Robert maintained a deep commitment to his family. The bonds of familial love were unassailably important to him. He often recounted to me the events of family gatherings, especially when it involved politics. And he was tremendously proud of the younger generations, of their accomplishments and ambitions. But the privacy rule restrains me here. Fortunately, the family knows well his deepest affection and hopes for them.
Robert was Mr. Cotton to my five children, still is, even though the oldest is now forty. They grew up with him, virtually every Friday night for several years. Justin chased the kids around the house playing a game they called monster, stirring the kids up so that their mother could not calm them before bed. Robert, Monica (my wife), and I ate pizza, watched television, and talked while Justin cavorted.
When their mother sent them word of his death, they recalled Mr. Cotton as they knew him when they children. To them, and I quote, “he was a kind and gentle man,” with a “smile and a demeanor” “of kindness;” a man with a “calm and soothing voice” who was “always kind and warm.” He was a “humble man.” Those are the impressions of children.
I am touched by the simplicity of these words and by their accuracy. Children usually know, especially when they are forming their earliest impressions of the world, what is right with that world and not. Robert was a very complex man, to be sure: more complicated than most of us. But his character, his person, shown openly and naturally. Goodness requires no adornment.
As a private person, Robert shared himself with us in a completely present way; he was never “on” as they say today, making pretensions; thus, we can each, now, remember him as he was with us, fully engaging us in that quiet, seemingly unassuming but keenly observant manner. He was attuned to the world, wondrously open to its revelations.
In the eighties Robert became enamored by one German philosopher’s ideas of humans as language beings. He read widely and deeply on this subject, and that study informed the two great projects he undertook until last week: Shakespeare and Catholicism. Of the two he was far more sanguine about the former. Indeed, he had taken up grappling with Cardinal Ratzinger’s (née Pope Benedict XVI) writings, contrasting them with those of the early Church Fathers. I was not betting on the Cardinal’s measuring up under Robert’s analysis.
His studiousness, however, should not be overplayed. Robert was neither a puritan nor a dull boy. He enjoyed life in all its diverse expressions. He appreciated the excesses of DH Lawrence and bawdiness of the Bard. He was as amused by low comedy as he was moved by high tragedy. He admired the spy novel and was entranced by “Dallas” the soap opera.
Failure to recognize how complete was Robert’s life, especially his interior life, is a failure of vision on our part and an injustice to him.
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In gratitude: "For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,
The comfort that you made?"
The purpose of a life, suggested Aristotle, is to flourish. Robert lived such a rich and varied life of mind and of spirit that we must be grateful for his having shared himself with us. In the privacy of our relationships we experienced an intensity of feeling and a concentration of thought that spurs us to repeat this with and for others. It is our duty to recall him everyday through our devotions to one another so that others may flourish, as we have, for knowing this wise man. The Greek’s called this quality phronesis: a practical wisdom.
This morning we do not recall Robert’s life to memorialize him, but, on the contrary, to re-call him as a presence to us.
His counsel to us is a farewell: A fare you well. Not in the sense of a good bye but as a call to flourish: to be good to ourselves and to others––to pursue excellence and practical wisdom so that we fare well as persons.
My farewell will be in the lines Robert and I alluded to one another as we talked that stunning day about his illness.
Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finish'd joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.No exerciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing will come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!
(Cymbeline, IV, 2)
God bless you dear friend.
