Sub Specie Aeternitatis

In 1632 a longheaded Jewish baby was born in Amsterdam. His life, which remained in him until 1677, was as uneventful as it was contemplative. Others strove, he mused. He was fond of saying he viewed things sub specie aeternitatis (from the viewpoint of eternity). Last week Holland began a seven-day demonstration of the 250th anniversary of his death. They unveiled and wreathed a tombstone at the Hague. Queen Wilhelmina sent a representative. Though their hero had refused to teach in any university, 60 institutions sent emissaries. Curator Oko of the world's largest library of the dead man's works, went all the way from Cincinnati. An international congress sat to philosophize in his name.

His name, as 100,000 readers of Author Will Durant's Story of Philosophy might now guess, was Baruch de Espinosa--Spinoza, for short. "With the judgment of the angels and the sentence of the saints" he was anathematized, execrated, cursed, cast out and cut off by the exiled people of Israel. His studies, once the pride of the synagogue, had led him to a mechanistic philosophy of life. He was not the first original thinker Jewry had disowned. Spinoza secluded himself and set up as an optometrist, a grinder of fine lenses. At his leisure he smoked a pipe of tobacco. His sport was spider-fighting. Hunting out two aggressive spiders, he would embattle them and watch with glee through a magnifying glass. Or, feeling more domestic, he would catch flies, throw them into the web of his first-string fighter and relish the savage banquet. Drawing was his polite accomplishment, an amateur skilled in cartooning his friends' oddities with a pencil. Struck by the refractory habits of light, he composed "A Treatise on the Rainbow."

His grinding gained him his necessary bread; no more. When his writings attracted attention, he declined offers of aid, indifferent to whether men called him "this famous atheist" or "the God-intoxicated man." After he died, "people talked of Spinoza as if he were a dead dog.'' But lenses found in his cabinet paid all his mortuary expenses.

Wine & Coal

All through the streets of Oxford town, late one night last week, loud-voiced roisterers lurched and reeled in gold-buttoned blue dinner jackets. It was the Bullingdon Club, in high fettle after an annual dinner, its first in a new hall on the outskirts of town. Before the members reached their beds they had run up a score of 500 broken windows (by hasty count of righteous newsgatherers). Oxford proctors frowned ominously, and went into conference.

Discriminating Oxonians were less vexed than bored by the outburst. Bullingdon, a drink-hearty organization composed mostly of sporting huntsmen, has a roster too exclusive to be amusing. Peers, even Edward of Wales, have matched their blood with its blue uniform. That the blooded Bullingdons, incapable in the past of anything more sprightly than throaty singing and waving neckless bottles, should have attempted a public spectacle with hockey sticks, copper kettles and chunks of coal, was inexcusably dull.

Besides being an incubator of fashions, first novels, potential potentates and U. S. esthetes, Oxford and Cambridge too, serve as an arena for the display of spirits, animal and otherwise. Such displays are called "rags,"* and are counted successful so far as they excite laughter.

Of all Oxford "rags" none was ever more successful than the occasion upon which an expert undergraduate steeplejack poised, upon the topmost pinnacle of a memorial spire, far beyond the reach of troglodytic municipal navvies, a common porcelain toilet article.

Another time, workmen roped off a main London thoroughfare, spat on their palms, swung picks all morning, sat on the edge of the gaping asphalt to eat their lunches, continued their havoc until sundown, then returned to their colleges and usual clothes. Weeks of traffic congestion failed to reveal the hoax.

A fake Sultan of Zanzibar, since become a British painter famed for his mild demeanor, was once accorded thunderous salutes and every other courtesy when he inspected the British fleet.

Cambridge police still scratch their heads and wonder what they should have done the day the entire university--or so it seemed--issued into the streets and instead of disturbing the peace, added to it by reclining amiably on the pavements.

At the time of Tutankhamen's exhumation in Egypt, striking versions of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter, together with emissaries from the Powers--not omitting the heavenly, for an angel descended blithely by pulley and wire from a third-story window, entered the Cambridge market square and there, from the subterranean public mictuary, resurrected a cigar store Indian, one Phineas.

Bread & Butter

Has U. S. prosperity reached a point where bread-&-butter education is decreasingly in demand? The Department of the Interior published a survey of private business and commercial schools. Enrollments had fallen off from 32% to 61% in five years. Classes in bookkeeping, stenography, accounting and salesmanship were particularly diminished. Wireless telegraphy showed the greatest decrease, 67%. . . . Partial explanation: public high schools have opened courses in many a commercial subject.

Pepper Pot

One day last week the cadets of Urban Military Academy (Hollywood), rose as usual from dinner, began to march out. Jackie Coogan, 12, cinema boy, now a cadet, seized a pepper pot, threw pepper at one Brin of Bjorkman. For this, he was demoted from rank of corporal to private.

Housemother

Dr. Scott Holland Goodnight, benevolent dean of men at the University of Wisconsin, lately said: "I believe that resident housemothers in fraternity houses would represent a real improvement in fraternity life. . . ." (TIME, Jan. 3). He-men at other universities laughed largely. Last week a Mrs. K. M. Burrus of Louisville, Ky., mother of Jefferson Burrus, Wisconsin '26, Rhodes-scholar-prom-chairman-football-and-crew luminary, took up her residence in the Sigma Chi house at Madison. "I expect," she said, "to be called upon for any problems the boys might bring to their own mothers. . . ."

Equivocal Idyll

Into Civita Vecchia steamed the S. S. Ryndam. Off trouped the undergraduate body of the University Afloat, 500 strong. In nearby Rome, Pope Pius XI prepared himself to receive an itinerant band of which he had heard: how it had sailed from Manhattan, via Panama, to Los Angeles, Yokohama, Shanghai, Siam, Egypt, Constantinople, Venice; how its members had studied manfully between excursions and receptions on shore; how its full-size college faculty had imparted learning, not only by lectures but by object and project lessons in the countries visited; how a daily newspaper was published aboard ship, edited by a onetime Governor of Kansas, Henry J. Allen, (TIME, Sept. 27). There was something pedagogically idyllic about the scene of 500 world-circling U. S. scholars kneeling and being blessed in the Vatican; bowing and being scrutinized and handshaken, later, by swart Benito Mussolini. After jotting down their notes on Rome's more important institutions, the students re-embarked for Nice, Paris, Brussels, Rotterdam, Oslo, London, home. . . .

But before the Ryndam left Rome, the Pope learned something more about circummundane education, which in this instance was coeducation. Editor Allen of the ship's Binnacle unburdened himself of a secret. Taking 100 girls to sea with 400 boys had not been eminently successful, for three reasons which the Associated Press adroitly paraphrased for Editor Allen: "1) The presence of companionable young women distracted the young men from their studies to a disturbing extent. 2) Contiguity of youth of both sexes started many courtships of varying degrees of intensity. 3) Residents in foreign ports at which the ship touched, not having reached the American ideas of the emancipation of women, misinterpreted the meaning of the venture, with resultant complications."

In the U. S., reactions to this statement were equivocal. President Emeritus Charles Franklin Thwing of Western Reserve University, who, as president of the Floating University, was to have rejoined it in the Mediterranean after leaving it at Panama, but who did not rejoin it, stated vaguely: "I had a personal and altruistic purpose in starting the university, and everything so far has worked out beautifully." Yet the University Travel Association announced that its next cruise would be for men only, and would be "more effective from an educational standpoint." And within the University Travel Association appeared a rift, a split. One A. J. Mclntosh, who helped organize the Ryndam's cruise, lamented Editor Allen's statement and announced that a new organization, to be called The International University Cruise, Inc., would conduct another co-educational globe-trot next autumn on the Cunarder Aurania. "We are going to allow parents or other relatives to accompany the students," said he.

*The word connotes, in addition to sublimation of mass energy, an effort to disturb the serenity of others.