For just over a week now I have been studying Claussen’s new book on Adorno (Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius; Belknap Press, 2008) and it has been giving me more than a singular pause. This not being the place for literary criticism, I shall skip right over that to other aspects the reading has called up for me, chief among which (before this evening) has been a gentle reminder of my own youth and years as an undergraduate philosophy student under the tutelage of an Angeleno who herself had first hand contact with TA.
It is always pleasant–and also always somewhat skewing of the present moment–to remember Immaculate Heart College, an institution by the my arrival to which was neither aligned with the Church nor a “girls’ school.” It was both quintessentially Old LA [Hollywood] and iconoclast in an unselfconscious way, almost as young and creative children push the boundaries without becoming angered (so much as surprised) by any push back (a Canadian term that, the “push back”). I had a marvelous professor, for 90% of my philosophy courses, who had, until about five years before my arrival on campus, been a nun, and who, in the 25 or so years of our acquaintance, became increasingly important to my own intellectual development. She introduced me to Adorno in my second course with her, one on Aesthetic Theory. Since then, I’ve read him frequently, if not often. He has his own California story, both too complex and too simple (in contrast with the other aspects of his 20th century German Jewish life) for me to justly recap here. But suffice it to say that I have been “living with” him and his contemporaries (for Claussen’s book veers toward a kind of biography of the group, rather than of any single individual) for days now–and, by extension, remembering IHC and Dorothy Dunn and…what a perfect bookend to that revery to come home to a Christmas card (delivered just today) from the former Dawn Beck-Meyer, former college roommate, soulmate, and current Carmelite Mother Superior? Synchronicity isn’t just an accident but a background harmony (only because Adorno’s “art” was music).
But all this reverie isn’t just about pleasantries. The jarring fact leaped out at me as I finished the book this evening (at Henry’s, of course): Hitler came to power a mere 75 years ago this month (30 January 1933). I am not prepared to feel so close to a moment, a date, an event as cataclysmic, which feeling in itself seems wholly appropriate to the project of living.
