In memoriam: Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams

Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the real raw material of your being is, something quite uneducable, yet in any case accessible only with difficulty, bound, paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators. And that is the secret of all education: it does not lend artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacled eyes − rather, what can give these things is only the afterimage of education. But liberation is: the clearing away of all weeds, debris, vermin − that want to infringe upon the tender buds of the plant − an effusion of light and warmth, the gentle, quiet rustling of nocturnal rain, it is imitation and worship of nature, where nature is disposed to being motherly and merciful, it is the perfecting of nature when it prevents her cruel and merciless attacks and turns them to good…
F. Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” part III, Untimely Meditations (1874)

This past week, my undergraduate advisor at Southern Methodist University died too early, but all too befittingly: at his computer while emailing students – and a day after renewing his marital vows with his wife, an accomplished educator in her own right. As the published obits will attest, Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams taught at SMU for over 40 years after a briefer but just as successful stint at Yale (“The SMU of the east”), won numerous accolades both intramural and international, and published a number of works on medieval history and culture, mostly in the way he worked best: collaborating with colleagues to ensure numerous perspectives were brought to the documents and issues at hand. And ‘of course’ everyone who knew Jeremy knew his animated doppelgänger, Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D., from the animated trip, Yellow Submarine.

I was one of many hundreds fortunate enough not just to take a class (or four) with him, but I flattered myself then, and still do, by having cornering him to be my de facto advisor. Hardly the only one to procure that status, I tried to milk it for all I could: Honors History Major, Medieval Studies Minor, numerous requests for recommendation letters, numerous grateful acceptances for invitations at the home he made with his fellow medievalist and belle vivante, Professor Bonnie Wheeler.

“And so today I shall remember one of the teachers and taskmasters of whom I can boast: [Jeremy Adams].” He might have been uncomfortable with my using Nietzsche as an introit – He was the first to warn me that Nietzsche does not sit well with those who value the classical bent of the humanities, as Jeremy certainly did: He convinced me that those who knew Latin were not just smart, they were cool. But what I want to remember about him is how he brought an effusion of light and warmth to any who were at all sensitive to that effusion, even we undergraduates, and how he started to reveal to me the raw material of my own interests and ambitions.

Jeremy nurtured my earliest sense that a text or an image (moving or not) had a wealth of context that likely would not be gleaned from a single read or view. As we sophomores unpacked Augustine’s Confessions I felt my microverse expand ever so slightly each day our class met, and he opened up for us – for unsophisticated me, at any rate – the revelation that even one of the greatest minds of the late-Classical/early-Christian age struggled with the young-adult challenges of wine and women. And he encouraged us to read the text again once we believed we had settled down into our careers, which I have done more than once.

When I was a naive and ambitious undergraduate I wanted to be just like him: pocket watch, scruffy elegance (In the late 1980s, he combined a physical and intellectual cleanliness with a hippie’s head of flowing silver hair and a shirt that, maybe, had been napped in.), erudition appropriate to the moment that flowed from the facts at hand and his nimble mind, rather than from his want for attention.

Then, as a naive and ambitious graduate, I started to be rather like him but more like me. How successfully is a topic for another day, but I still keep all my primary sources in my classroom so that if a student asks a question, I can go to a Dhuoda or a diary of a soldier in the Great War to try to inspire students to ask the people who were there what they thought − just as Jeremy did for me from my Freshman Core Course “Medieval Thought” to upper-level seminars on the crusades and on European culture during the Hundred Years’ War.

But far more important than that, Jeremy – and here I must include his partner-in-rhyme Bonnie Wheeler – encouraged a love of ideas and beauty and conversation and humane debate that should shame the supermajority of the Republican Party and force the blushes of most Democrats as well. The dinners and discussions at their home, where undergrads were expected to mix with professors and any topic could be raised if one were prepared to defend its being raised, were a bright window into a broader social and intellectual life I have hoped to recreate ever since. While at SMU, as I look back now, I was a mere sycophant, longing to participate but mostly just hanging on. But if I deserve credit, I understood that I would have to work hard to participate. And so I did.

Over the many years since graduation, I visited them on a few occasions, and I am glad they met my two then pre-ten sons. I was at a challenging point at my career, having to feed two growing boys on a salary made teaching 4-5 classes across a couple of universities. I teased Jeremy for ruining my life by inspiring me to follow my unremunerated love of medieval culture. He did no such thing because he was a teacher who inspired so much more. Well into my late 30s I naively assumed everyone had a teacher or coach who had unlocked a door or cracked open a window for them. But now I better appreciate the slings and arrows of a motley career chasing an avocation, and I have witnessed the sturm und drang too many traverse without such a mentor or model. I am far luckier than I realized – a common experience for the middle aged in a wealthy and safe country like ours – when I assumed most everybody got to discuss medieval love songs, Thomas d’Aquinas, and the savings-and-loans bust with their peers and teachers over salmon and a sip of champagne from a magnolia blossom. We happy few.

I find it difficult to praise Jeremy without also praising Bonnie. They seemed mind mates and soul partners. That they renewed their marriage vows just a day before his death fits far too perfectly to what I imagined of them thirty years ago. If he helped me start to appreciate the riches of an intellectual life, she helped me start to appreciate the patience of the intellectual process. I was supposed to read the introduction to and the tale of the Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales my senior year of high school (with a wonderful English teacher, Mr. Higgins, who first tilled the plot that germinated with Bonnie’s and Jeremy’s tutelage). I didn’t (I was blessed with a good memory and could pass the essay having listened to Mr. Higgins and to those who actually read it). I was supposed to read that story, along with the General Prologue and both ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and ‘The Miller’s Tale’ as a sophomore in an English class. I kinda did. But it was hard and I had my own interests. Bonnie offered me the hono(u)r to join in her summer class at University College, Oxford, where they studied Arthurian literature and those tales of Chaucer that lauded or lampooned the genre, even though I had graduated that May. My parents had so generously allowed me to travel in England for a couple of weeks to celebrate, and the class gave me an extra two weeks of boarding to play the wandering scholar. Though I did not meet my Heloise that summer, I actually made an effort on The Tales, and, finally with Bonnie’s class, they started to reveal their treasures to me. My stiff brain began to understand that love often was, in fact, wondrously funny and that neither humor nor female sexual vitality were invented at Berkeley in 1967.

Bonnie didn’t ever know it, but I began to learn a critical lesson about education that undercuts the entire standardized-test-Department-of-Education industrial complex: teachers must patiently keep offering (and reassessing) what is important for human development, but students must keep plugging away at what is being offered or nothing worthwhile will grow. Not everything will be absorbed deeply, and few things will be absorbed as quickly as the teacher might like. Nevertheless,  teachers can not take any of this personally. The best teachers keep offering and encouraging because they know any absorption is better than none, and some of their students will indeed quaff deeply, though maybe not until months or even years after the Scantron has kicked back the assessments. “Patience is the companion of wisdom” (Augustine). It took three tries over four years to get started. But, thanks to her, I still occasionally dip into the Tales to be refreshed by life’s rich pageant, and I have even had the joy of introducing my own undergraduates to what the lusty and educated wife meant when she spoke of her quoniam, her bele chose…

They taught me more than how to converse with and argue against a text. Besides the excitement of being invited to the big kids’ table at their home, I loved to visit their downstairs bathroom. The walls were a rich blue reminiscent of images of the royal standard of France in Les tres riches heures du Duc de Berry, the appropriate color for the throne room. In the tub – a tub probably never used for its manufactured purpose – lay buckets of ice with soft drinks variously buried toward the drain and bottles of champagne impaling the crystals toward the headrest. Gatsby would have approved. Here I was on the fringes of adulthood and being presented with such a designedly casual cornucopia of bubblies only encouraged my devotion to “drinking the stars”. Bonnie and Jeremy showed how one could make even a drinks cooler a gem of generosity.

But still more: along the walls around the tub was a mosaic of photos of ancestors, family, and friends in various candids and poses you can’t get from Sears or the church phone directory. I often perused them as I raised a bottle from the ice (Excalibur! I am the once-and-future drinker of champagne!) or drained a glass from my bladder. I understood almost nothing, but the arrangement – again, designedly casual – and the humaneness of (probably) grandparents of the 1930s and (surely) trips of the 1960s and (most likely) Godchildren of the 1980s served as a reminder at least for me that the humane arts come from our fore-bearers and are to be preserved and enriched for our progeny. And that is what makes us human.

If all this mawkish praise is making you squeamish (rather than jealous), take comfort in the fact that the mawkishness is entirely my own. I was probably dangerously close to becoming Jeremy’s tribute band if I had landed an early tenured job. But Jeremy encouraged no acolytes and he expected no oblations. He did not encourage a following in a career that stirs many an ego to want to entice one. He and Bonnie always had private lives that I never wandered into any deeper than that ‘public’ bathroom. In fact, the last meal I had with them, when my boys got to swim in their new pool, Bonnie welcomed us warmly and we talked over the first course before she headed out to a meeting and an afternoon seminar: professionally engaged when many others could have (and many do) slip into an unchallenging role as academic gadfly. In their world, I was – rightly – just one of many students they had worked with, prepared, challenged, and pushed out into the real world to test their own mettle.

Bonnie survives Jeremy and will, I pray, continue to be inspired to inspire. It is the way of all flesh, but even the death of our oldest and sometimes illest loved ones still comes as a shock when it comes. He was neither, so deeper, harder, sadder, adjustments will have to be made by Bonnie, children, grandchildren, and peers than the ones I am making. Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams lived large, as the kids say today. May Bonnie continue to do the same. They helped me live a bit larger than I would otherwise have, and I know they did that for hundreds more. I have wasted twenty two hundred words here and still have not said ‘thank you’ enough. For all that he has done and she has done and will do, I have been writing this tribute through eyes wetted far more by joy than by sadness.