SLPAD 9 - wandering scholars

[Michael Bailey]

“A collateral effect, for me anyway, was that of Helen Waddell’s The
Wandering Scholars, reprinted in the early ’50’s, an account of the young
poets of the Middle Ages who left the monasteries in large numbers and took
to the roads of Europe, celebrating in song the wider range of life to be
found outside their academic walls.”

Helen Waddell was an Irish poet, playwright, & translator who accompanied a
volume of translations of medieval Latin lyric poetry with another book
containing an account of its wandering scholarly authors, the “goliards.”


The full paragraph devoted to the wandering scholars & their spiritual
heirs in the 1950s & ‘60s seems to be the capstone of Pynchon’s list of

“alternative lowlife data that kept filtering insidiously* through the ivy”
& drawing intelligent & creative young people away from academia.

A strange attractor, if you will?

“Some of us couldn’t resist the temptation to go out and see what was
happening. Enough of us then came back inside with firsthand news to
encourage
others to try it too—a preview of the mass college dropouts of the ’60’s.”


He then turns his attention to the Beats.


* “insidiously” - is this used facetiously, or is there a touch of regret
for the costs of such an exodus from the Groves of Academe? (Hitchhikers
getting beaten up, degrees abandoned with concomitant reduction of lifetime
earning potential, drug abuse, so forth)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insidious

Insidious comes from a Latin word for “ambush” (insidiae), which is
fitting, as this word often carries the meanings “deceitful,” “stealthy,”
or “harmful in an imperceptible fashion.” The first two meanings may be
applied to people or things (“an insidious enemy,” “an insidious plot”),
while the last is usually applied to things (“insidious problems,”
“insidious sexism”), in particular to the gradual progress of a disease
(“an insidious malignancy”).