14th century

The fourteenth century serves as a historical counterpoint to William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s reflections on middle age, academic life, and mortality. In a jail cell in Railton at two in the morning, he imagines the life of Occam, measuring his own prospects against a world in which intellectual disputes, institutional exile, and sudden death followed a different course.

Occam as a historical comparison

Devereaux considers what Occam had experienced by the age of fifty, the age Devereaux has reached himself. Occam had been excommunicated, was effectively on the run from a hostile pope, and continued to challenge papal authority in inflammatory pamphlets. Banished from the university, he had a scholarly mission Devereaux imagines as unlike his own at West Central Pennsylvania University. The comparison makes the fourteenth century less a distant backdrop than a measure against which Devereaux tests his own academic circumstances.

Occam’s imagined intellectual world also differs in audience and scale. Devereaux notes that there was no middle class for Occam to address, and likens the readership of his pamphlets to something smaller than that of the Railton Rear View. He speculates that Occam might have felt greater kinship with William Henry Devereaux, Sr., who imagined himself addressing a select company of colleagues and graduate students as bearers of learning and arbiters of secular taste. The resemblance rests on an ideal of scholarship directed toward a small, learned audience, even as the men belong to very different academic worlds.

Age, lifespan, and the Black Death

At fifty, Devereaux calculates, Occam still had fourteen years to live; sixty-four was a ripe old age in the fourteenth century. That arithmetic turns historical distance into a personal reckoning. Devereaux’s own life seems to be leaking away gradually, while Occam’s ended through the Black Death, an unforeseen and indiscriminate force that arrived before he could anticipate it.

In Devereaux’s reflection, the plague defeats the philosopher’s reason with a force that no elegant argument can master. Its swift violence brings together, in death, the conflicting impulses of reason and faith that had shaped Occam’s life. The episode places intellectual confidence beside bodily vulnerability: a thinker may question authority and reason with precision, but cannot reason his way out of mortality.

The medieval past beside modern middle age

The historical comparison sharpens the novel’s treatment of time as accumulated opportunity and loss. Devereaux’s colleagues have spent years at West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton, while many of them once imagined themselves destined for better things. Finny did not finish his dissertation; June Barnes turned down the prospect of moving to another university after Teddy Barnes received tenure; and Teddy later abandoned an opportunity to enter administration. The group’s present resentment toward one another, Devereaux observes, can distract them from the possibility that their own choices helped shape their disappointments.

Other scenes make age visible through changes in capacity and expectation. At fifty, Devereaux loses to Julie Devereaux in a two-set tennis match lasting just under an hour, after years in which he could still unsettle her play. He also gives up his place in left field for first base, a position he can perform competently but finds less exhilarating. Tony Coniglia describes this stage of life through the image of a warrior who no longer has his best strength. Against these modern measures of diminishing possibility, the fourteenth-century story offers no comforting escape: Occam’s death was sudden rather than gradual, but both histories place human ambition under the pressure of time.