On June 8, 2023, friends, colleagues, and admirers gathered to share remembrances and celebrate the life of Cara De Silva, who passed suddenly in December 2022. Some shed tears over the gnawing hole that Cara’s absence leaves, but she enriched the lives of all who experienced Cara’s passions for scholarship, the arts, the under-told story, and the joys of the everyday.
Leading the collective remembrance were long-time friends Jane Dystel, Fred Plotkin, Peggy Katalinich, Lynne Rosetto Kasper, and Anne Mendelson, hosted by Andy Smith. The Zoom recording will be posted shortly, and includes memories and tributes from many other participants. In the meanwhile, we have the transcript of Anne Mendelson’s remarks that touch on some aspects of Cara’s remarkable, renaissance personality:
Cara – I called her “Carissima” — studied English literature in graduate school, and told me more than once that she wished she could have gone on being a graduate student forever. Maybe, in a way, she did. She was a learner and seeker in a way that many people stop being after they’ve finished academic studies – a lifelong learner and seeker.
Since she left us, I’ve found a lot of Cara in two poems by Matthew Arnold that I know she would have recognized just from hearing the titles: “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis.” In memory, I will always connect her with both of them. I hope you’ll see why as I get into the details.
When Matthew Arnold studied at Oxford, his dearest friend was a fellow-student named Arthur Hugh Clough. They shared all kinds of thoughts. They shared youthful ambitions of someday being poets. They shared an intense love of the beautiful country districts around Oxford, where they would spend long, long hours walking and talking and thinking. And on their wanderings they shared what you might call an imaginary companion — who became a kind of inner beacon for both of them, and about whom Arnold later wrote the two poems I mentioned, two very close to his own heart.
Arnold and Clough as students came across a centuries-older account of a promising Oxford scholar who suddenly abandoned the university to join a band of gypsies and seek some hidden, all-illuminating knowledge they possessed. A rumor hung on at Oxford that he could sometimes be glimpsed roaming the local countryside, still following the never-abandoned quest. Arnold and Clough became haunted by this story. They made up a story of their own about a solitary elm-tree crowning one of their favorite hills – “We prized it dearly; while it stood, we said,/Our friend, the Gipsy-Scholar, was not dead;/While the tree lived, he in these fields lived on.”
Years later, in 1853, Arnold wrote the poem “The Scholar-Gipsy,” imagining the elusive figure unwearied in his search, roaming hillsides and fields around Oxford through every season of glorious wildflowers and harvested crops, while “still waiting for the spark from heaven to fall” – still untouched by the noise and futility of the current century. Clough died in 1861 aged only forty-two, after a not awfully well-appreciated life of questioning conformist dogmas and holding fast to stubborn convictions about things like social justice or accepted Christian pieties.
Arnold didn’t immediately try to speak of this friend’s place in his heart. But five years later he published “Thyrsis,” in which he returned to the Oxford setting and their joint fascination with the legend of the Scholar-Gipsy – who was, like Clough, a seeker.
“Thyrsis” belongs to a tradition that Cara knew well. She would have recognized it as a sort of companion-poem to Milton’s “Lycidas” – a pastoral elegy commemorating a departed fellow-spirit within the conventions of classical Greek and Latin pastoral poetry. This time Arnold pictures himself coming back to the Oxfordshire countryside toward the end of a winter day, musing on the loss of Thyrsis – his fictional name for Clough – and hoping to reach the lone elm tree that for the two of them signified their imaginary friend’s undying quest. The landscape is so changed since their time that he has trouble finding the path. But just as he’s losing hope, there it is – “Back’d by the sunset, which doth glorify/The orange and pale violet evening-sky,/ Bare on its lonely ridge, the Tree! the Tree!” – telling him that the Scholar-Gipsy lives on, still roaming in quest of an unforgotten goal.
If nobody else gets this, you will, Carissima:
A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,
Shy to illumine; and I seek it too.
This does not come with houses or with gold,
With place, with honour, and a flattering crew;
‘Tis not in the world’s market bought and sold –
But the smooth-slipping weeks
Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired;
Out of the heed of mortals he is gone,
He wends unfollowed, he must house alone;
Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired.
Like the Scholar-Gipsy, so did Thyrsis, or Clough the restlessly independent searcher, keep faith with his own lifelong quest. — And just at the very end, Arnold summons up the thought of his friend speaking to him in a voice “to chase fatigue and fear”:
Why faintest thou? I wander’d till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side.
Hail and Farewell to our Scholar-Gipsy — who never tired of seeking and learning, learning and seeking. Of roaming on, by her own heart inspired. All of us in tonight’s meeting are the richer for our extraordinarily diverse encounters with this woman and her life’s journey.
I said I wasn’t going to talk about Cara’s many accomplishments – but probably the biggest one was everything that she inspired in the hearts of others.