And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand.
The Bondsman, after a multi-year contest with a particularly tenacious cancer and its many damnable attending afflictions, is dead. The University of Chicago–educated, West Ham–supporting, Pepsi-swigging medievalist in Lawrence University’s English department has passed in his early fifties, and mankind and the liberal arts are impoverished as a consequence.
Professor Bond was a gentleman in every respect I knew him, utterly fascinated with his subject and able to inculcate that spirit in the serially cold-blooded college student’s imagination. One could not read through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf or Chaucer and not depart with at least a hatful of appreciation for the form and period in which Bond traveled. But more than that, he taught humility, that rarest and most precious mineral an academic (or journalist) can acquire.
At first, I found it irritating that when queried about a passage, Bond would share possibilities of what the millennia-dead writers may have meant but conclude with “I don’t know.” But the more time I spent with him, the more I understood the lack of certainty to be thrilling. Why continue to read these works if one’s mind is already made up? And what hubris is it to think that we can divine with certainty what the men of ages past had to say? The Old and Middle Englishes are, paradoxically, young in that we have only begun to unearth and study them, with so many stories either fractured or lost. Unalloyed gratitude for remaining possibilities and one’s dust-delving predecessors was Bond’s trademark.
Beyond that, Bond forced me to accept that there is hope for the humanities and the liberal arts, and that, whatever my ideological skepticism about higher education, one cannot dismiss it outright. Bond wouldn’t love a political label, but I think a left-leaning libertarian is close enough to the truth for our purposes. His lessons on how the economic systems of any story’s day, the interactions between participants in the economy, and the incentives of the time, conspired to increase the odds of certain outcomes and diminish the probabilities of others. An economics student could learn much about the art and self-conception of a period, while an English major was forced to contend with the artless realities of supply and demand and pricing mechanisms. At their best, the liberal arts demand a student look at any one event with multiple lenses and extract from it more than he ever could with the spectacles of his preference.
I’ll conclude with an anecdote that captures Professor Bond’s character better than my limited powers of description:
Lawrence requires its seniors to produce a capstone in their concentration of choice. For me, that would be English. During the summer before senior year, I wrote to Professor Bond to see if he had time to provide some counsel, as I was not only weighing the merits of several theses but also how they might be applied to entering a doctorate program. Bond was of course willing to meet, and I suggested a local coffee shop. On arrival, I realized they would close in only a few minutes so I bought us coffees and sheepishly waiting outside to inform the professor that his student couldn’t comprehend time. He was, of course, immediate in waving away my apology. I suggested a nearby park about half a mile away. He assented, though with some reservation, and it was only when we started walking that I realized how limited his reserves of strength were. Feeling like the grade-A jerk that I was, I suggested we stop at the picnic table outside the OSHA offices. So there the campus conservative and his libertarian instructor sat and chatted, within a reflective-vest’s toss from the federal government’s work-sanction colony.
We talked for several hours there, Bond in no rush to leave and me grateful for his thorough feedback on what would become my Melville capstone. While he was supportive of my going for a doctorate if it was what I desperately desired, he was kind enough to speak the truth of the long, destitute road that would very likely be for a guy whose interests were not in vogue and were being replaced by languages, regional canon, and voices for which I had little to no passion. It was then I asked about his concentration, and he admitted that it was unlikely that a medievalist would be replaced by another, those monies more likely apportioned to support a modern- or ethnicity-focused academic or hire a generalist who would cover almost two millennia of literature. The rug was rolling up behind the medievalists — as it was for entire liberal arts departments — and it looked to him that there were few apologists for their field or administrations who valued training in Old and Middle English. He didn’t speak with reproach or vehemence about the development — it simply was the way of things. We spent the remaining time together discussing the Premier League and whether his West Ham had any chance of success in the new world of obscene foreign investment in what had been a very local affair.
Garth Bond’s family has lost a loving father and husband, Lawrence has lost a great teacher, and education has lost a promoter of liberal arts best understood. I’ve lost a counselor and friend.
God bless and keep him and those who knew him.
R.I.P.
