James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 11, 2019
In any case, I’ve removed all my personal pictures in my study that once blocked my view of these books, but to no avail. I still haven’t found this book.
It was in cleaning the shelves and re-depositing them that I came across two old friends, Will and Ariel Durant in their “The Story of Civilization.”
I first read Will Durant (1885 – 1981) when I was in high school. It was at the urging of my Uncle Leonard M. Ekland, a professor at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit University. I would visit him summers from the age of nine to fourteen, thereafter I was too involved in sports to have this respite.
My cousin, Robert, was like a brother to me only a little older. We would go to Higgins Lake in north central Michigan for my uncle’s vacations where he had a summer place. During lunch and dinners, he would talk about people and ideas throughout history. Will Durant was ancillary to one of these discussions with my uncle asking me to read Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy.”
The book wasn’t deep and quite readable for a boy of normal awareness. As is my nature, however, I wanted to know more about Will Durant. What a fascinating story that proved to be.
Will Durant was a small, quiet delicate man, pensive but unobtrusively so, who was teaching at a special New York City school, the Ferrer Modern School, designed for working class families, while giving lectures at night at the YMCA. This was during The Great Depression. He had a Ph.D. from Columbia University and was a bachelor.
One day he saw from his class window a slip of a girl with her classmates playing outside that put him in something of a trance. It disturbed him so much that he asked to be excused from his afternoon classes as he was certain she was one of his French students that he had never actually noticed before.
He learned that she was Jewish from an immigrant family from Russia while he was from Massachusetts the son of French Canadian Catholics who had emigrated from Montreal. He also knew that she was only 14 to his 27. For the next year, he lived in agony as he avoided her but she brazenly didn’t avoid him. It seemed every time he turned around she was there.
So, Ariel (1898 – 1981), only 15 and Durant, 28, her teacher asked her parents for her hand in marriage, which was granted. He resigned from the school and turned his attention to writing “The Story of Civilization” with wife Ariel Durant his primary researcher. Over several decades, this story would grow to eleven volumes winning Pulitzer Prizes and other awards while finding a much wider philosophical audience than normally associated with intellectuals and academics.
Ariel was Will Durant’s Pygmalion tutoring her into the scholar that she became. From Volume VII through XI, she was given credit as co-author.
I saw this couple on “The Dick Cavett” television show many years ago. Ariel did all the talking while her husband looked on her with loving eyes. Ariel chained smoked reminiscent of my own mother.
Will Durant died in 1981 at the age of 96. Ariel quit eating and died two weeks later at the age of 83.
THE REST OF THE STORY
In 1960, I purchased the ten volumes of “The Story of Civilization” (Volume XI was not yet published) and have been reading them, off and on, ever since. In 2005, I visited my cousin Robert in Denver. He was dying of a cancerous brain tumor. I found his son, Aaron, reading him Volume XI of “The Story of Civilization.”
“I can’t read anymore,” he confessed to me, “I would imagine you’ve read all of these (volumes), perhaps many times.”
“No, no,” I insisted, “not systematically like you’re doing.”
“Listen to him, Aaron, he forgets what a memory I have. He was always quoting from these works in letters to me. It is why I started to read them.” My cousin, Robert, would die a month later. His wife had died many years before and he had never remarried.
I thought afterword about what my cousin had said. I read the Durant’s in my most confused and impressionistic years, knowing, but only much later, that these authors were writing down to my level but mainly from their own inevitable perspectives of history.
Leafing through these volumes now, I have to smile to myself realizing how much a French Canadian Catholic and a Russian Jew have contributed to how I see the world. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I am enjoying the same May to December love story in my own marriage that was that of the Durant’s.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
Our Oriental Heritage - Volume I
The Life of Greece - Volume II
Caesar and Christ - Volume III
The Age of Faith - Volume IV
The Renaissance - Volume V
The Reformation - Volume VI
The Age of Reason Begins - Volume VII
The Age of Louis - Volume VIII
The Age of Voltaire - Volume IX
Rousseau and Revolution - Volume X
The Age of Napoleon – Volume XI
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