by Mark R. DeLong
1.
Roger Ebert labeled it the one movie “entirely devoid of clichés.” “It should be unwatchable,” he said, “and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted.” It was My Dinner with André, which I watched with my wife and a couple of friends at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina, back in 1981 when the movie was released. Years later, I picked up a used VHS of the film and baffled my children with it.
One scene struck me from the first viewing, and my memory has returned to it especially in recent months. Toward the end of their dinner, Wally (Wallace Shawn) and André (André Gregory) discuss matters of preserving culture—or perhaps, more accurately, André steers the conversation through his wild and impossible adventures in new age-y communities, recounting events that would defy the laws of physics or at least stretch our imaginations.1For instance, a community, “Findhorn,” that built “a hall of meditation” seating hundreds of people with a “roof that would stay on the building and yet at the same time be able to fly up at night to meet the flying saucers.” Findhorn actually exists, though the architecture that André describes was fanciful, to say the least. The fascination with flying saucers was real, though, in the 1960s, when a leader of the Findhorn community felt that extraterrestrials could be contacted via telepathy and the community built a landing strip for the saucers.
One of the leaders of such a group, André says, was “Gustav Björnstrand”—a fictional character, not a real “Swedish physicist” as André claims—who is trying to create
a new kind of school or a new kind of monastery … islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function, in order to maintain the species through a Dark Age. In other words, we’re talking about an underground, which did exist during the Dark Ages in a different way, among the mystical orders of the church. And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture. How to keep things living.
Wally listens, entranced but not convinced that André’s unhinged stories make sense. He’s “just trying to survive,” he says, and takes pleasure in small comforts: dinner with his girlfriend, reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, sleeping under a warm electric blanket on cold New York nights. “Even if I did feel the way you do—you know, that there’s no possibility for happiness now,” an exasperated Wally replies to André, “then, frankly, I still couldn’t accept the idea that the way to make life wonderful would be to totally reject Western civilization and to fall back to a kind of belief in some kind of weird something.”
2.
W. H. Auden said the poem “was infected with an incurable dishonesty—and must be scrapped.” His readers disagreed. The poem, “September 1, 1939,” was written shortly after Hitler’s Blitzkrieg into Poland. That day, of course, was a breaking point, clear and sharp—and traumatizing. The poem captures the uncertainty and fear of the time—fears that cycle through history. Even ancient Thucydides told the stories: “… what dictators do, / The elderly rubbish they talk.” Old stories of “The enlightenment driven away, / The habit-forming pain, / Mismanagement and grief”: these, Thucydides tells us, “We must suffer them all again.”
Auden might have been embarrassed by his sentiment he displayed in the poem, but that sentiment and a youthful energy that underlies it add life. Auden’s poem found a renewed audience after September 11, 2001, too. Maybe humans need sentiment to name fears and shape a response to chaos, though as with all poetry it’s probably good to mistrust the oversimplifications of verse.
The last of the nine stanzas might be put beside André’s account of “islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function.” Amidst the uncertainty and fear and the “world in stupor,” that last stanza brings some hope: “Yet, dotted everywhere, / Ironic points of light / Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages.” Justice and perhaps hope are dispersed but habitable, like islands of safety.
And the poet resolves to flash his light as well:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
3.
Justin Smith-Ruiu wrote on the state of the humanities at the university:
There is so much empty talk, in a language consisting primarily of cryptic abbreviations, so much form-filling, so much make-work: and all to hide a fundamental absence of mission, to keep everyone just busy enough not to have to face up to the total collapse that is obviously on its way. But if the European university is the Soviet Union in 1988, the American university now seems to be something more like Iraq in late 2003, and my American academic colleagues seem to be behaving somewhat like the Baathist dead-enders.
Grim but not inaccurate, and not something that can be entirely laid at the feet of the current US administration, though its assaults have had huge impact.
Smith-Ruiu isn’t without hope. He thinks that “the humanities are going to survive, yes, but for the next good long while they are going to be stewarded into an uncertain future in a deinstitutionalized virtual space” (his emphasis). I get the uncertain future bit, but I’m less optimistic about “virtual space” for education … or, really, much of anything anymore. “There comes a point when it makes much more sense to head for the hills and to regroup,” he writes, “This would not be the first time such a retreat from the academy has happened in the history of the life of the mind.” In “part two” on the topic, he writes, “And at least everyone else with an academic career who is halfway honest with themselves, must, in the present moment, be prepared not just to cling to the august institutional columns that used to give us such a sense of pride and mission, but also to begin to make out the rough form of what an intellectual life might look like in the post-universitarian years ahead.”2Part three of the series, “Creative Humanities” appeared on April 13. I should say that I am among the legions of The Hinternet readers who are freeloaders, so my grasp of JSR’s whole argument is, um, sketchy—a mere glimpse, since I’m not a paying member of the newsletter. I finger my debit card when I read the newsletter, but I am often too strapped or just generally too cheap to do the deed of becoming a full card-carrying subscriber.
M. Gessen sees hope, too, and has lived through another such crisis. Though Gessen may believe that the current crisis of the university is largely due to attacks from the current administration, the effects that Smith-Ruiu attributes to long-term rot require some strong and doubtlessly uncomfortable response:
There is a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than refusing to bend to Trump’s will, and it requires more than forming a united front. They must abandon all the concerns—rankings, donors, campus amenities—that preoccupy and distract them, and focus on their core mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. Intellectuals have adopted this strategy to fight against autocrats in other countries. It works.
Gessen cites the “flying university” of Poland in the 1970s and 1980s as an example. “Polish dissidents operated what they called a flying university in apartments across the country. Run by the country’s leading intellectuals, this university wasn’t selective and didn’t charge tuition; its only goal was to get knowledge to as many people as possible.” And Gessen points to Bard College’s expansions into communities, including prisons and micro-colleges in libraries—education offered broadly and drawing their strength from the core missions of the college.
This seemingly ephemeral and fleeting institution holding classes in boarded-up storefronts and in private apartments has history that spans back to the nineteenth century, always in response to institutional duress and hardship, often from censorship and political oppression. A flying university is currently aloft for Ukrainian students, too, though classes are held online, not in safe houses or abandoned properties.
The proposals from Smith-Ruiu, Gessen, and others may make up new flying species of humanities. What kinds of islands of safety, what kinds of flashing ironic lights make sense?
4.
Robin Sloan’s monthly newsletter seems to carry my attention breathlessly from point-to-point, leaping sometimes but usually relating—or evoking connection—to larger themes of slower tech and human scaled business (think: regular paper-and-stamp post and printed books and zines). Sloan’s April newsletter drew from Lisa Cheng Smith, importer of his favorite soy sauce. She considered what she needs to do to keep her business running. Sloan lifts a whole paragraph from her newsletter:
Divesting from tech and advertising platforms as much as possible. Affiliate marketing, performance marketing, payment gateways, social media management platforms, and collaborative cloud-based tools all cost money and add up to a big percentage of the pie. I’m looking at how working manually and in a more lo-fi way could be just as effective while saving cost. We’ve been sold the American technopreneur success story, enabled by big data and scaling tech, but we aren’t even capable of utilizing it all. Our customers already give us everything we need when they sign up for this newsletter and express interest in our store — we just need to dialogue with you all. Even outside of threatened tariffs, I’m ready to move in this direction. It better reflects my values.
In a way, Cheng Smith’s plan scales down to refocus on the things that most matter. She’s ready to find harbor in the island of safety that is her customers, forsaking the costly seas of tech platforms.
Sloan, by the way, pointed me to Auden’s final stanza. Sloan comments, “Apparently, Auden grew to hate the poem. Too bad for him.” I agree.
I wrote this piece with the hope that a bit of writerly meditation might lighten a burden that has grown heavily on me and on so many of us. I know I feel torn by witnessing the constant stream of outrages than have piled up and that seem to gather intensity, one act trumping the previous one.
You want to look away; you know as well that you can’t and shouldn’t.
Frank Bruni put it well in early February: “I scroll through the news in the morning, feel the circuits of my brain frying and dying and find myself staring into space for the next 10 minutes.”
What use is an island of safety if it only isolates itself from a world in stupor? And can the scattered dotted lights of poets, community builders, teachers, scholars, and entrepreneurs shine brightly enough to preserve remembrance of history, justice, human flourishing, the reverence and joyful play of the arts and humanities, or (more humbly) Robin Sloan’s favorite soy sauce?
I don’t see a happy resolution or some magical balance that makes being responsible in a time like ours easier or clearer. Thucycides was right when he said that we must suffer again, but it is good to know we can choose to flash lights into the greedy, quenching darkness.
There is hope for ironic points of light, whatever their source.
For the bibliographically curious: The screenplay for My Dinner with André is available on the Internet Archive. You can check it out for free. https://archive.org/details/mydinnerwithandr00shaw. The movie is also on streaming services. Justin Smith-Ruiu’s (currently) three-part series on the state of the university and specifically the humanities. these are “paid” posts, but you can get something from the “trailers”: part one: “Can the Humanities Survive?” The Hinternet, March 29, 2025. https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/can-the-humanities-survive; part two:“The Death of the University.” The Hinternet, April 6, 2025. https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-death-of-the-university; part three: “Creative Humanities.” The Hinternet, April 13, 2025. https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/creative-humanities. Also on The Hinternet (unencumbered by a paywall) and a very good read: Deresiewicz, William. “Here Come the Allodidacts.” The Hinternet, February 9, 2025. https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/here-come-the-allodidacts. Gessen, M. “This Is How Universities Can Escape Trump’s Trap, If They Dare.” The New York Times, April 14, 2025, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/trump-higher-education.html.
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Footnotes
- 1For instance, a community, “Findhorn,” that built “a hall of meditation” seating hundreds of people with a “roof that would stay on the building and yet at the same time be able to fly up at night to meet the flying saucers.” Findhorn actually exists, though the architecture that André describes was fanciful, to say the least. The fascination with flying saucers was real, though, in the 1960s, when a leader of the Findhorn community felt that extraterrestrials could be contacted via telepathy and the community built a landing strip for the saucers.
- 2Part three of the series, “Creative Humanities” appeared on April 13. I should say that I am among the legions of The Hinternet readers who are freeloaders, so my grasp of JSR’s whole argument is, um, sketchy—a mere glimpse, since I’m not a paying member of the newsletter. I finger my debit card when I read the newsletter, but I am often too strapped or just generally too cheap to do the deed of becoming a full card-carrying subscriber.