Gratitude for Jerry Schneewind

At a very lovely memorial gathering yesterday for the wonderful Jerry Schneewind, who died in January at ninety-three, many endearing stories were shared. (I shared some too.) But the one which seems to sum up the gift of his life, attested to by memory after memory, focused on a single syllable. It was part of a longer string of memories recounted by the daughter of his friend Richard Rorty. (The two families summered together for decades, their children growing up together.) One summer day, she saw him uncharacteristically without a book and passed her recently acquired Kindle to him, asking if he wanted to read any of the titles on it - she reckons there were about a thousand. He duly looked through them, then passed the Kindle back to her. "Nope!" he said, with a twinkle in his eye. 

I've heard that "Nope" before, as clearly had many others in the room, all of us beaming in recognition. The storyteller, now a therapist, took this as his reassurance that children need not take care of their parents, but I heard in it an echo of a line the philosopher Larry Krasnoff (he and I were the only past students of Jerry's there) had written in an online tribute, to which several people referred. After enumerating Jerry's manifold contributions to scholarship and the profession, Larry wrote: 

And he was happy, not in any sort of fake or impossibly aspirational way, but because he knew who he was and that he got to live a satisfying life, the one he wanted to live. 

Who wouldn't want to lead a life like that? (It inspired Larry to want to become a professor.) In other tributes there was a similar sense of the satisfying fullness of Jerry's life, full of professional achievements, yes, but even more of long-standing relationships familial and collegial and in friendship. As person after person mentioned his bread baking (I was the one to mention that some of it was with ancient grains, before that was even a thing) we heard of meal after meal in the world of unstinting generosity which he and his lovely wife Elizabeth (she died in in 2021) offered to all. 

How moving was it to hear from two people about their younger brother Timmy. Jerry had agreed to be his godfather when a philosopher colleague asked him ("but I don't do the god thing!" he said, to which the father said, "that's why I'm asking you"), and when the father suddenly died, the Schneewinds took Timmy in as one of theirs, for the rest of his life. He's passed since, too, we learned, but the testimonials from his surviving siblings had us all in tears. 

Another philosopher, whose career Jerry had saved, hiring her as the first woman in Johns Hopkins' philosophy department, described him as the most "quietly extraordinary" person she'd ever met. Big of heart and great of soul, not so much modest about his rich and overflowing life as content with it. That's what I heard in the "Nope"! He had plenty. Who could ask for anything more? 

Clear throughout was the centrality of the lamented Elizabeth (or Elsie) to all of this; all who loved and had been loved by him had also loved and been loved by her. In the same register as the joyful Schneewindian "Nope" were the words Jerry apparently said at the each of his daughters' weddings: he could wish them "no more than what he had: true love and happiness."

The gathering ended with chamber music, a shared love of Jerry and Elsie's. In characteristic generosity they had taken up viola and cello later in life, knowing that the world was full of frustrated violinists desperate to play quartets. The piece Jerry had suggested, if it suited, for an occasion such as this was a quintet. We cleared the center of the room and five young people, including Jerry and Elise's grandson (a cellist!), played the last two mevements of Mozart's 4th string quintet. The gathering was complete.