Making Moments, Monumental

But right right from the start, I want to make clear that this isn't just about Royce - this is about Royce's passion, as he  described in his The Hope of the Great Community:

"I should confess to the charge of having been, during my German period of study, a good deal under the influence of the Romantic School, whose philosophy of poetry I read and expounded with a good deal of diligence. But I early cherished a strong interest in logic, and long desired to get a fair knowledge of mathematics. When I review this whole process, I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness. This was what I was intensely feeling, in the days when my sisters and I looked across the Sacramento Valley, and wondered about the great world beyond our mountains. "

 - I've volunteered to speak, with some other Grass Valley Royce enthusiasts,  at the West Coast meeting of the American Philosophical Society.  Ahem.   

It's not my intellectual erudition, that anybody will be seeking, but a general flavor of the kind of citizens abounding in and about Royce's birthplace, today.  Does a place have a meaning for the person?  Do like-minded people, congregate?  I'd say yes.  So what we are now, in Nevada County, CA, flows from our historical past and the persons who were born here, always remember her fondly ...

Royce remembered Grass Valley.  When he was receiving the "grand lesson" that the community teaches, (when you're "red-haired, freckled and countrified") when the family relocated to San Francisco, I'm sure his recollection then of the familial foothill home was fond and intense.  Who wouldn't miss  the pure country air, the peace and growth of nature as opposed to the mean city of coal-fired confusion?    No wonder then, that the memory of Grass Valley was imprinted upon Josie's soul so that in his later years he identified himself with the small country town in which he was born:

"The wide prospects when one looked across the Sacramento Valley were impressive, and had long interested the people of whose love for my country I heard much. What was there then in this place that ought to be called new, or for that matter, crude? I wondered, and gradually came to feel that part of my life's business was to find out what all this wonder meant."
 
If my thesis is chosen, amongst those to be presented at the apa meeting,  it will be upon the communal need for monument.  And the monument I have in mind is the one I conceived so many years ago, in Gary Graham's mural art class - a mural to Royce, and the community of Grass Valley.  A mural that would put Royce's image in the center, and an array of  livlihood styles in a great circle.  The circle would be divided into quadrants - representing the four main peoples who made this particular Gold Country  Community what it is, the Nisenan, the Hispanic, the Cornish and the Chinese -- these were the ethnic groups that made up the evolving communal arrangements at this particular piece of geography.

 The Civic Monument

A phenomenon we're all familiar with -   The Town Square  Cannon,  tank or statue of a great leader, commemorating.... what?   Usually our warriors - the heroes of conflict, but also our pioneers and those who deserve recognition for what they've accomplished.   It was such a monumental naming, in 2005, that renamed the downtown Grass Valley Library to the Royce Branch.   If you note the original resolution, you'll find that the library was NOT named the Josiah Royce Library, but the Royce library, so as to include Sarah Royce and at the original naming, a skit with an actor portraying Sarah Royce was performed in honor of the occasion.   A gender-sensitive move that I'm sure Royce himself would have approved.  Nobody is a feminist like the guy with three  older sisters.   But interesting trivia aside, it is the association of Royce's name with a civic monument, that made me aware of him.  None of my teachers at college had ever mentioned him, and I was a philosophy major for goodness sake.  I'd been actively involved in a discussion group that studied William James a great deal,  but nobody had ever mentioned James' great debating partner and friend Royce!   It's a puzzling thing, really.   Bruce Kuklick, whose intellectual history of Royce  was my introduction to Royce's philosophy, commented in his preface upon his wife's antipathy toward Royce (That Theist!)  and gives her credit for the impetus to finish the book when she went away for a visit!   A humorous look into the homelife of the intellectual.   Thanks to my wife, for leaving me, so I could get this work done.

One of the things about Royce that makes his name magical -  amongst those who appreciate him - is that he comes out of nowhere.  Stories of "How I found out about Royce" abound amongst academic enthusiasts and they always are told with a delight that comes from finding something unexpectedly good, unlooked-for.  It creates a certain camaraderie amongst us enthusiasts that I relish,  but overall, is this  a good thing?  Surprise implies a hiddeness.  And why is our good, hidden?  What is it that makes men choose to follow after selfish expediency, rather than the good of the commons?  For that's what the hidden-ness of Royce comes down to.

So my proposal to create a public monument to Royce, and Royce's Community, comes down to an ongoing process that he himself saw, and devoted his life to fostering - the idea of the Great Community.   It may be hidden at first, but it grows.  It grows and it acts as leaven in bread, unseen, but all-powerful and in this Community, I trust.  I'll have to talk to Iven about the business end of things.  Monuments take money and I'm not a money person, but I know in this age of internet fund-raising and open-source financing, anything is possible.  The community has power now,  in information sharing, beyond the dreams of when men were creating right here in the gold fields, the world's first internet. 

Anything is possible to an idealist.