Word: mumford
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LEWIS MUMFORD considers the view from his study at the top of Leverett towers one of the great advantages of the apartment he has occupied there since 1965. The scene unfolds up Dewolfe St.: first the insistent brick spire of a Catholic church, then the stubby red buildings of the Yard, and finally, William James, towering abrupt and white in the background. The church spire struggles for attention, but can't really match William James, which rises sleek, new and confident above the Cambridge sky-line. Beneath it, the quiet buildings of the Yard huddle together as if frightened...
...Mumford, a visiting scholar in Leverett for the last four years, says he likes the scene because he likes Cambridge generally. The tableau also seems to resonate with something deep in Mumford him-self. The tension between old and new, past and future weaves through almost all of Mumford's 50 years of prodigious writing on man and his social environment. Mumford remarks philosophically that he's a "rare bird." He may be rarer than he thinks: a kind of latter-day Thoreau, trying to make sense of the twentieth century and plan for the twenty-first...
...first meeting Mumford's manner recalls an era that is dead or rapidly dying. Stately in his prose and his bearing, his voice rises from his chest in low modulated tones, while his accent, though definitely American, contains a touch of the British. Seated in his brown-hued study in formal repose, his solid features, white hair, and bushy white eyebrows suggest languid discussions, pipes and open fires...
...Mumford is a scholar in the old-style as well--not the product of assembly line education, but a thinker without titles, whose formal education was night school at the City College of New York. Mumford calls himself a writer, but it's probably for lack of a better word. "The orthodox name is philosopher," he says, "but a philosopher today is a specialist. I loathe the very notion of expert...
...point. The M.L.A. editions are crammed with niggling notes on whether Herman Melville used the spelling "bananas" or "banannas" and whether Howells wrote "wrapt" or "wrapped." In an earlier review of the M.L.A. edition of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard University), Cultural Critic Lewis Mumford found the text so cut up by the "barbed wire" of notations and arcane diacritical symbols that it was virtually unreadable...