BLIND TO GIBBON'S CHARMS

...In decreasing type size, down to that signifying 20/20, the placard reprinted the masterly cadences of Edward Gibbon’s opening in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—“The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor...

...But increasingly there have been complaints that he is too difficult, and indeed that our use of these sentences was Eurocentric . . .” Perhaps one of the Stanford undergraduates who marched with Jesse Jackson on campus in the 1980s, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go,” had reached middle management and convinced the timid CEO that he was disturbing the peace by retaining the English historian on the reading card...

...Only two years ago, during my last prescription adjustment, Gibbon was still enthroned, and I tested recall rather than vision to see if my long-ago memorization had withstood the ravages of years...

...I didn’t get far in my first foray after that into Gibbon, a Modern Library abridged version from a secondhand bookstore, as I recall...

...Over the years I’ve periodically vowed this time to read the entirety of Decline and Fall and as regularly have failed to reach even a secondary crest...

...Gibbon...

...Severus] promised only to betray, he flattered only to ruin...

...For decades, in the eyeglass stores I frequented, the placard on which one tested a new prescription—starting with a larger type face that indicated 20/100 acuity— began: “In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind...

...As it happened, some way into the first volume I encountered Septimius Severus, a general of ability and ambition, of political craft and cruelty...

...Edward Gibbon will not be diminished by having a few of his sentences excised from opticians’ placards...

...It was while being fitted for glasses as a teenager that in so unlikely a venue I first encountered Gibbon, and to an adolescent already snared in the web of words those sentences were stunning and grand...

...But, then, on this recent visit to the optician’s shop, I picked up the reading card—and discovered in horror that Edward Gibbon and decades of tradition, at least my tradition, had vanished...

...That fairly routine visit, however, produced a head-on cultural collision that left me shaken...

...in the other only a defect of power...

...Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times...

...The writing was unlike any I had experienced (though even in a middling public high school long ago, we still were half-nelsoned into a decent exposure to the classics of the West...

...and however he might occasionally bind himself by oaths and treaties, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation...

...But this sort of “dumbing down” diminishes the rest of us...

...It does not require a keen eye, does it, to find contemporary political flavor there?—one of the pleasures if not the principal purpose in reading Decline and Fall...

...I left dispirited...

...An optician’s is not the place, you would think, for that sort of jolt, but daily there are fewer sanctuaries for the traditional...

...And if vanished from this shop, from all, now or eventually...

...I can, however, read the boxscores again...

...BLIND TO GIBBON’S CHARMS by Woody West IDROPPED BY THE OPTICIAN’S the other day to have my glasses powered up since it seemed the newspaper had begun using a much smaller type to print the boxscores...

...It always has been reassuring, though, to find the familiar sentences there on the ophthalmologist’s counter, as if suggesting that there were many of us who intended one of these days to make it well beyond that opening paragraph, and that there were firms that appreciated the treasure of Gibbon...

...He was emperor for 18 years before his death in 211 A.D...

...The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces . . . ,” and on...

...The antidote was to pull Gibbon off the shelf and renew my vow to complete the classic before I was called to “the long account,” as a countryman of the historian put it...

...The new sentences on the placard were of a literacy level just a jot above Dick and Jane—cloying, flat, graceless...

...Gone without even a line from the manufacturer of the placard, which might have read: “We apologize to customers who were expecting their customary short delight with Mr...

...Gibbon writes: Falsehood and insincerity, unsuitable as they seem to the dignity of public transactions, offend us with a less degrading idea of meanness, than when they are found in the intercourse of private life...

...In the latter they discover a want of courage...