John Cole and Atsuko Hirai, colleagues in the Bates history department since 1986, photographed by Phyllis Graber Jensen as they sit together at Hirai’s home on July 10, 2014, four days before her passing. John Cole and Atsuko Hirai, colleagues in the Bates history department since 1986, photographed by Phyllis Graber Jensen as they sat together in Hirai’s home on July 10, 2014, four days before her passing.
In their 28 years in the same department, Cole as an expert on ancient Greece and the French Revolution, and Hirai on Japanese history, Cole wants much less the two shared the stage as scholars just once. light shined on his help. That was in 1999, He does note that in 2012 when each presented he was surprised to see Hirai, despite her cancer, at a panel discussion in full academic regalia at celebrating the opening the inauguration of Presi- of Pettengill Hall. Hirai discussed the project that dent Spencer. Maybe, he thought, he could help in would become Government by Mourning. “I some way. Professor John Cole. He combed the copyedited pages of my manuscript with astonishing speed and inexhaustible wit to meet the deadline of my life.
loved the idea then and still do,” Cole says, “not least for its attentiveness to the enlistment of human emotions to serve political interests.” Cole, too, looked at death that day, in a way. He spoke about the 16th-century writer Michel de Montaigne and his fatherhood of six daughters, five of whom died in infancy or early childhood. “In several notorious passages of
his Essays, he seems to minimize or even to discount these multiple losses, especially the phrase ‘I have lost two or three....’ ” Cole argued that Montaigne’s failure to grieve publicly hardly meant that he did not grieve. “I said that the emotional impact of his daughters’ deaths had been profound, and that his retirement to his tower library to compose the great work was provoked by the first such loss.” In Cole’s words, a certain amount of “inescapable individualism” defines being a scholar, and Hirai had a lot of it, her colleagues have noted, using the words “contrarian” and “strident” to describe her. But there is a counterforce: Bates community. Cole, who retired from the Bates faculty in 2012, has seen the idea of Bates community become manifest many, many times in his 45 years on the faculty. And he saw it once more in the “attention and affection shown by others to our colleague in the course of her long illness.” In the postscript to her acknowledgements, Hirai acknowledged her caregivers. Most were Bates people, and she used just their first names — many of which will be familiar to readers. To them she rededicated her final book. Thanks Aslaug, Bill, Bruce, Carol, Caroline, Dave, Dennis, Don, Elizabeth, Emily, Gene, Hong, Jean, Jim, Joanne, Joe, Judy, Karen, Kati, Margaret, Lisa, Maggie, Marty, Mary, Michael, Perrin, Phyllis, Sharon, Sheila, Sylvia.... n Fall 2014
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