From
Time to TimeTruman State University
It's a little short of four o'clock on a cold spring morning. At some point, several hours from now, an invisible boundary will appear to approach, pass without a bump, go hurtling into the darkness behind, and I will be thirty-nine years old. Hardly elderly, even by American standards, but nobody's idea of a kid, either. I'm up at this ungodly hour because our puppy was barking an ultimatum about what would happen to the new rug if I didn't roll out of the rack and put her out forthwith. And having done so, I find myself too thoroughly alert to go back to sleep. I imagine readers have done some similar early morning stocktaking. It's like dropping a cassette into the VCR, and surfing among the images and events according to the order one discovers by advancing, rewinding, slowing and speeding.
Power ON.
PLAY.
Twenty years ago, when I first met Tom Garbáty, my current situation would have seemed to me exceedingly unlikely. In fact, right now my situation strikes me as pretty unlikely. It's very hard to summon up again the way I looked at things then, but insofar as I considered the future at all, it didn't include the considerable prosperity that now surrounds me. I think I was in some vague way ambitious. I didn't dwell on anything as abstract or crass as money, fame and power, at least as they are usually understood. I may even at that point have been so comfortable as to imagine myself superior to these things. My desires were modest: I just wanted to know it all.
Money, fame and power? I have in fact known people who genuinely lusted for these things. They are strange characters, and much rarer than books and movies would suggest. I have I think a fairly sound estimate of my own accomplishments, and I am aware that I have accrued a certain amount of these things, and in a way that leaves my conscience more or less at ease: they arrived unbidden, unsought, at the direct expense of no one else, and as the byproducts of other, and I hope more worthy pursuits. My portion of these things has of course been pretty paltry by almost anybody's standards (it might be more apt to call them "security," "reputation," and "access") -- but enough to get a sense of what they're like. And these aren't the things I most value.
The twenty years I now mark, quite arbitrarily, as ending, have taken away the three generations of my ancestors that I had known face to face, and provided me with a brace of descendants (how did that happen?). These are the sorrowful and joyful instabilities that belong to every life. That sharp young woman from Vienna who took up so much of my time and attention way back then? She's still around. The relationship shows signs of lasting. Another thing that endures from those dear dead days are my student loans. I believe I still have about three years to go until those are paid off. Michigan wasn't cheap, even back then, and the amount I borrowed would have bought a brand new Corvette with the works. The car would have been nothing more than a greasy spot on the garage floor a decade or more ago, but I still have the things I bought with the money I might so have spent, and with considerable interest.
In sum, time has been very kind indeed. But the one thing I desired all those years ago, that has eluded me. I really don't know it all. A writer I don't much admire had a meanspirited bestseller some years back, in which he observed -- with justice, I grudgingly admit - "It took Socrates an entire lifetime to discover that he knew nothing. Today every high school student knows that. Has the human soul become so simple?" The answer is, of course, no. In matters of the human soul - whatever that is - hope for progress through cumulative research, of the kind we can track in the exponential increase in the speed with which we travel, the amount of data we shove back and forth at one another, is not to be hoped for. But something has in fact changed by imperceptible degrees that in aggregate amount to an event -- not yet, but in the offing, like the signpost I mentioned earlier, that marks some arbitrary but nonetheless important division between things as they were and things as they will be. My own students, as a population, are in a substantial way different from the students with whom I identified myself. They do not know it all, they know they do not know it all, and I am fairly sure they are uninterested in knowing it all -- and their condition does not seem to them the least bit tragic. The tricky task before me is to account for that change without letting my reflections be driven by the duelling mythologies of decay or progress.
REWIND.
PLAY.
I won't swear it was the famous Ed Sullivan broadcast -- I doubt I could remember anything that early. Maybe an excerpt from it, rebroadcast years later. But I do recall seeing the Beatles on TV, looking up to my father and saying "That's what I want to do when I grow up." And just as clearly I recall the unmistakable though silent reply on his face: "I don't think so, m'boy. No, I do not think so."
Dad got that part of it right. I did not grow up to be a Beatle. Not that my father interfered with the development of my musical gifts, except insofar as there were no such gifts attached to the Y-chromosome he gave me. He was actually quite patient as I honked, tweaked, squawked and screeched through flute, trumpet, tuba, organ and guitar. I can't recall that he ever complained about the certainly unpleasant noise I made as I discovered for myself the very near horizon of my musical future. Now recorded music was a different story, in particular the Beatles. "Lovely Rita Meter Maid" was not a great favorite. That heavy breathing at the end was usually good for a "What the hell is that? Turn that garbage down. No, off. Off!"
PAUSE.
My father is a big, fairly quiet man, certainly not without humor, certainly not an adherent of the false stoicism that denies or hides emotion, but just as certainly not given to demonstrative behavior, and not a great fan of expression for expression's sake. He was trained to be a professional soldier, and had largely educated himself as a writer, with the result that he was raising me to be a soldier and a writer as well, without ever saying or probably even intending as much. He did not teach by precept so much as by example, coupled with fairly understated indications of his approval or disapproval of certain things I was doing and ways I was doing them. I recall transgressions he responded to with a puzzled look, and the question, "Why did you decide to do that?" I think it's a familiar experience -- a lot of kids would much rather have been slapped sideways than undergo that inquiry. And it was a genuine inquiry -- he would make me give an account of why I had chosen to do a particular thing, forcing me to understand, clearly and for myself, that action was choice, not an event beyond my control.
Since I was not, after all, to be a Beatle, and I had to do something with my life, I rather unimaginatively attempted to enlist in the military. I don't know how things are now, but in those days, Uncle Sam was under no particular obligation to account for how he had come to the conclusion that you were not, in fact, among the few, the proud. That left college. No one in my family had ever graduated from college before. Finishing high school was still a novelty. Come to think of it, so was wearing shoes and reading without moving your lips. Just one generation out of the Ozarks, the family had really done quite well for itself, and I had spent my teenage years in an affluent suburb as a scholarship boy in a school where the class rosters were lists of national brand-names. But I had the bluecollar certainty that education was about upward mobility and income optimization. I enrolled as a business major.
FAST FORWARD.
Calculus, Accounting I and II, Econ, Macro- and Micro-, Stat 402. I had accumulated enough AP credit to do away with what were then called "distribution" requirements, and what practical, business-oriented types called "finishing school." Not that we sold it short: it couldn't prosper you to show up at a cocktail party without the wherewithal at least to hold your own in casual blather about art, film, literature, all that. But we knew which side it was buttered on, thank you. Or at least, the rest of them did.
I do not recall anything specific about those courses. I have the vague impression I did all right. Nothing to be thrilled about, nothing to be ashamed over, either. Well, Calculus -- I had to take that twice, but mainly because it met at 7:30 am that first semester, and I wasn't conscious for much of it. I had been enrolled, on the basis of high school GPA, in the Honors College, and the Great Books course came with that territory. Great. Charm school prepackaged for me, in easy, efficient doses. No decisions to make.
Except I do remember a good deal of those inessential classes. In fact, I recall them in vivid detail.
SLOW.
As I said, I wanted to know it all. In that sense, I was ambitious. I would brag about my parents if I thought this were the proper place and time. Enough to say that they had the virtues their time called for, some that appear at best naïve and limited, at worst mercenary and shortsighted to many of us born after the Depression and the War. In light of what we now know about the distribution of opportunity and rewards, they probably gave themselves too much credit for their own prosperity. But their capacity for delayed gratification, tedious thankless work, and commitment to a future they knew they would not see nonetheless contributed mightily. By nineteen, I knew and understood a great many things my parents did not, but I could also see, even then, that it was mere information, not meaning. They had known a radical instability that the social upheavals of my own day could not match - our struggles - we liked to call them that - were, by comparison, mere indulgence. I recall challenging my father on the subject: "Look, I have to worry about getting drafted, shipped over to get killed by the Viet Cong - what did you ever have to worry about?" He raised an eyebrow and said simply, "World War II."
Oh. Sort of took the wind out of my sails. And a war that in its ten-year course took fewer American lives than our highways do in any two-year period ended well before I came of age to worry in any really concrete way about it anyhow. None of this is to trivialize that deeply troubling time, the events that took many thousands of lives and definitively shaped millions more - only to expose the posturings of middle class white boys who were eighteen years old in 1979 for what they were. We were sure there was something epic about us, and I, quite the representative of my time, was prepared to trouble my parents' house over the course and purpose of my education.
I was to be a business major. While I was obliviously slurping formula and soiling diapers, my self-educated parents had come through storms that would make a worthwhile book in its own right to what they hoped was real stability, something bordering on wealth, and like many of their contemporaries, wanted their children to benefit from that success. A college education was seen as a means to an end - continued and improved material prosperity. I, on the other hand, wanted to know it all, was sure that knowledge was an end in itself. Well, I took those business courses, the accounting, the micro- and macro, statistics, and so forth. Launched right into them from my freshman year. I was bored, and thought the fact that I failed to see anything of merit here indicated my superiority. I no longer think that.
I was not bored with the Great Books courses required of all Honors frosh. (and I am amazed by complaints I hear from my students who do find this reading dull -- the only explanation that occurs is, they don't have the caliber of teachers I did).
Here was the important stuff - I had already had a taste, but now I was allowed, encouraged, to immerse myself in it. And by golly, I became a poet. Yesirreebob, the real thing. I was quite taken with the fact that I now understood Plato, Aristotle, knew my way around Homer and Aeschylus, could quote Euripides (in translation) with the best of them, could deal a hand of Virgil, kick a Dante stanza through the goalposts, played a good game of Rabelais, and shot a round of Milton under eighty. I went around in a battered leather jacket and an idiotic sailor's cap I picked up somewhere in my travels, and after six months had raised a pathetic but undeniably real beard.
I grew more solitary, though I don't think I was moody or difficult to get along with when forced to associate with people. I was just jealous of the time needed to think my own precious thoughts. As will happen to people who spend too much time alone, the thoughts grew ever more bizarre, and of course in some rare cases that can be quite a good thing, can bring progress along the mystical path, but far more often just turns you into a weirdo, as I bid fair to do. I took long walks through the autumn mists of Ann Arbor nights, graveyards a specialty. I stayed up most of every night devouring books, pretty uncritically reading whatever struck me as interesting - or, truth to tell, the things that it seemed to me a poet like myself ought to have read. For all the wrong reasons, I got a pretty good education that way. Yep, God looks after drunks, children and ijits. I slept little, drank enormous amounts of coffee in order to waste still less time sleeping, skipped my business classes (but somehow maintained passing grades in all), and prepared myself for the coming showdown with my father. I'm not ashamed of that; filial piety is a good thing, but so is the perfectly normal impulse to get a rise out of your parents. Something's seriously wrong with a kid who never rebels.
PLAY.
When the day arrived, I stood in his study and told him I had no intention of becoming a business major. I don't think I actually used the words "filthy lucre," but that was the tendency of the script. And he said "OK."
Well hell, that wasn't what was supposed to happen. There was supposed to be this knock-down drag-out that would end with him seeing the necessity of my following my own gleam. In his businesslike way, he made it clear that, while eating regularly and living indoors were good things, past a certain point of material well-being, money took its place in a scheme of priorities. I was disappointed. I prodded, provoked, tried to get him to declare the importance of practical considerations, following in the father's footsteps, etc. Much to my surprise, he didn't see that it was in the script for him to mistake my choice of a path different from his own for a judgment upon him. The events don't fit neatly into any storyline I'm familiar with, and that was part of my trouble, I think: if I was to find my way, it would be without a single, simple model to react towards or against. Life showed signs of becoming complicated.
I would later read a quote from John Adams that could as well have been my father at that moment: "I study war and politics so that my sons can study science and engineering, so that their sons may study music and poetry." That was the end of a certain kind of mythology for me, and of course, the beginning of a future that would always be, in Graham Greene's phrase, "a journey without maps."
STOP.
FAST FORWARD.
STOP.
PLAY.
A brutally hot and moist day, of the type only to be found on the banks of the Mississippi in July. For reasons I can't recall, I was walking down an alley behind a Chinese restaurant in Hannibal just after a heavy rain, when I saw a book peeking out of a dumpster. I've often embarassed family and friends by my unwillingness to go along with other people's ideas of what is and isn't garbage, so I fished it out. Pretty well soaked, but a wet gem: Select Cases of the King's Bench Under Edward III, beautifully printed, Latin verso and English recto. Years into the future, I would peer into this thick volume for insight into what the high middle ages were really about: my students would hear Chaucer's pilgrims pleading their own interests, unaware of eavesdroppers six hundred years unborn -- sordid tales of theft, betrayal, rape, sad stories of disappointment, misplaced trust, lusty accounts of seduction, intrigue and counterplot -- all the workings of the human machine as it balances and counterbalances itself, rocking from one foot to the other, maintaining by a magical momentum the controlled forward fall which walking into the future has always been.
REWIND.
PLAY.
There were more people in my freshman Great Books lecture than there had been in my entire high school, and that was a kind of anonymity that suited me very well at that point. I sat among perhaps four hundred people, and listened as Ted Buttrey, Ralph Williams, Gerald Else and others talked in familiar ways about the names that had always been just names - that list I began above. That was pretty cool, I thought, and a low-rent ambition began to form in my mind - someday, I could be on such easy terms with Socrates, talk knowingly of how Xantippe poured the pisspot over his head, recall the last words of Villon as if I'd stood beside my old fellow roisterer while they put the rope around his neck (if that's in fact what happened).
It was not a wholly admirable impulse - at some level, I wanted to join the charmed circle I'd imagined, of people who spent leisurely hours reading and chatting about worthwhile books, moved by the sense of exclusion scholarship kids always feel, and which often drives them to real accomplishments. But something quite good was cognate with that essentially self-seeking desire: it was not mere familiarity with what might be seen as one's betters that I was observing on display in Angell A, but a process of forging what Commager called "a useable past." I was dumfounded by Ralph Williams' erudition. I simply would not have thought it possible that anyone could know so much. After one of his lectures on Dante, I quietly approached the podium to sneak a look at the materials he had been working with, and saw that he had been lecturing - rapping, riffing, really - sight-translating from Latin, Greek, and as God is my witness, Hebrew. I was ambitious, but I had some sense of limits, and I knew that I would never know that much, not by half. And since Dr. Williams had made it clear - and I judged him to be sincere about it - that he didn't think he knew it all, no, not by a long stretch - well, that sort of bolluxed my own ideas about encyclopedic knowledge, didn't it?
PAUSE.
So, if I was to become a poet, it wouldn't be with the support of a lot of family expectations to kick against. That in fact made it harder -- I couldn't chart a course just by contrariness and cussedness. But lacking anything to react against, I was at liberty to proceed with my unguided, omnivorous reading, and to go ever deeper into my scruffy ways. Not a slave to fashion, or to an alarm clock. Dr. Garbáty's class was one of the few I actually enjoyed, and deeply regretted missing, but staying up till four o'clock every morning reading Martin Buber, Martial, C.S. Lewis, Jorge Luis Borges, Becket and a lot of pulp which, understandably, no author would own up to, was having its consequences. Like, I was missing a lot of 8:30 classes. A lot of them. One frozen morning, having sworn (once again) the night before to mend my ways, at least as regarded showing up for class, and having once again read until I passed out with some book tented over my face, I sat bolt upright, and seeing the doom on the clock, nonetheless managed to get out the door and off to Haven Hall in two minutes flat (this is an gift peculiar to postadolescent males).
PLAY.
I paused outside the classroom door. Dr. Garbáty was lecturing on King Horn. I waited until he had begun to read a passage aloud, and thinking that would provide me with sufficient cover, I shot through the opening and slunk for the back of the room, like a coyote headed for the brush with somebody's chicken in its mouth.
"The sea began to flow, and Horne Childe to row . . ." Dr. Garbáty stopped in mid-formula. I stopped too, and turned to face the music. With that surprising agility of his, he set his book down on the table at the front of the room, strode quickly to me, laying his left hand on my shoulder while pumping my arm with the right, and enthusing, in a solicitous stage whisper that could probably be have been heard out on the Diag -- "Adam! It's so nice to see you again. We've missed you! We've really been quite concerned! We do hope you'll be dropping in to visit us more frequently!"
To the best of my recollection, I never missed another class. Wasn't even tardy. I don't know what Dr. Garbáty guessed was going on. I suppose in his position (and I am in his position now) I'd assume the young feller was out all night drinking and rutting. But I hadn't the time, money or inclination for drinking in those days, and my usual glibness deserted me, left me sitting naked on a cake of ice in the presence of women. Nope. It was books. Honest.
Now that I was showing up with enough regularity to get a clearer sense of what pedagogy might mean, I began to understand a couple of important things: first, while Dr. Garbáty, like the other professors I admired, knew a great deal, he did not know everything, and was entirely comfortable with that fact. Revelation one. Further, what made attending his class worthwhile was not the information he could impart -- there was a lot of it, but really, it could be had from books, and more efficiently. Nor was it the entertainment value, though he was and is an electrifying lecturer (and I deeply resented the anti-lecture animus of the 'active learning' fad current at the time I entered the profession). Rather, it was what he did with information, and, by slow degrees, what he showed me and a great many other students we could do with mere information. Revelation two.
PAUSE.
I've spoken more of myself in these few pages than I have in a very, very long time, and the only warrant for doing so is to demonstrate the effects of a teacher of power. I had many more classes with Dr. Garbáty. I would have to order a transcript from the Michigan registrar to be able to say which ones. They all run together in my memory, because while they were organized according to some rational plan -- chronology, author -- that wasn't what I was learning there. I was learning how to teach (though I would not come to understand that fact until much later).
A peculiar thing: given the amount of time I spent in Dr. Garbáty's presence, I came to feel I knew him well -- though I could relate virtually no facts about him. He revealed next to nothing of his personal life.
PLAY.
We students did not know if he were married or not, when and where he was born -- although a stray reference, here and there, to a son, to the Berlin of his childhood, obiter dicta on marriage that indicated first-hand experience of the thing, we gleaned these items, though none of it amounted to a narrative. I learned more about him from the vita he sent me as I began preparations for this volume than I learned in six years of regular association. It's too much to say that gut-spilling from the lectern has become the norm these days, but certainly personal reticence is less often assumed -- both for good (a growing understanding of the public importance of the personal) and ill (mere self-absorption). Nonetheless, I would affirm, attentive students came to know a good deal about Dr. Garbáty, and it was worth knowing.
We knew that he was not a mere repository of ancient text, but was actively thinking, focussing the events of the present day through the lens of an inherited literature: we thought about what was claimed for the invasion of Grenada by the powers behind it in light of the patent love for order expressed by Chaucer's parfit, gentil knight -- a professional killer, not to put too fine a point on it. We saw Professor Garbáty daring as well to reverse the process: asking us -- and we gathered, sincerely asking himself -- what new understanding of the behavior of Argives and Trojans could be had from reflection on what we were then learning of post-traumatic stress syndrome, or from the depiction of courage which has really, really counted its own cost, as depicted in that new Mel Gibson film.
We knew that he watched movies -- some much less demanding than Gallipoli, but he spoke of them in such a way as to show us that nothing is so empty a strong mind can't make knowledge of it. We were gratified to learn that our time hadn't been entirely wasted in watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and he took the opportunity to point out that the troupe's Terry Jones had just written a book on Chaucer that cut pretty sharply into received opinion and was worth our attention. Rarely would he mention current politics -- the time was coming when many scholars would insist on a duty to use the lectern as a weapon in our collective struggle against the ruling hegemony -- but enough would come through, in perhaps unguarded moments, to let us know that this too was part of the literary life, and that its relative absence from Tom's classroom did not signal lack of engagement so much as the traditional ethical conviction of the profession that the teacher's first duty is to protect students from her or his own influence.
We knew, finally, that he had a history -- and it was not altogether sunny. He was in some sense an exile, and had his ghosts. He shuddered -- visibly -- as he made a passing reference to Mussolini on the Piazza Venezia, and again as he was trying to get us to understand the Viking terror, and cooly noted, by way of illustration, his own irrational response to the mention, the thought, of the S.S., an image that reduced him, he said, to a quivering child. We were comfortable young people, and took this in stride. God help us, we may even have felt superior, and we voted for Ronald Reagan in droves. I have lost touch with my fellow students of those days, but I'm willing to guess that many of them have known, as I have known, enough horror since to understand rather better what Tom was shrinking from in those moments. If we rebelled against whatever we understood Dr. Garbaty's generation of scholars to represent, it was a shabby insurrection, ill-understood from within.
FAST FORWARD.
Towards the end of my degree program, I had married,
run up too many loans, and was staying up all night -- not reading now,
but working three dismal part-time jobs in order to stay in school. I do
know that in the last course I had with Tom, during the final exam, I was
asked to write about the Pearl Poet's sources, an area I was in
fact pretty solidly informed on, but even the very young and highly caffeinated
have their limits. I wrote a single very long and confused paragraph and
left. A week later, it was returned to me with a (barely) passing grade,
and the note "Adam, what happened here?" He did not have to do that --
I knew then that he had gone to the limits, no, certainly gone beyond the
limits -- of what ethics allows, even in the face of the most generous
impulse. The exam question was a good one, and stuck with me. "Any fool
can ask a question no philosopher could answer," he once said, but to compose
an exam question students will still be thinking about later . . . About
six years later, in fact, I was able to send an offprint of an elaborate
response to that question, my first professional article, published in
a juried journal. It was an act of restitution, a squaring of accounts.
PAUSE.
Those things stuck. Oh yes, he explained to us who John of Gaunt was, but I still have to look up the dates and the various alliances afresh each time I teach that course. I never had insight enough into the man to know for certain what he thought he was teaching, but I was clear enough about what I was learning. I have some reason to think I'm a fairly skilful teacher, and it was this trade, this craft, this profession I was learning.
PLAY.
I ventured, shortly before my graduation, to thank him for his guidance, and particularly for his having encouraged me to enter the profession. From the look of absolute horror and revulsion that rolled over his ever-mobile face, you might have thought I'd congratulated him on having got away with yet another diabolical crime. "I never, never did any such thing!" he affirmed.
Well, I'd mispoken myself; he had given me encouragement, not encouraged me -- a subtle but substantial difference. I understand now what a terrible responsibility that statement would have laid upon him. There are more people making their living in professional sports or in the movies than there are tenure-line professors of English, and there's a broken heart for every panel-session at the annual MLA goat-rodeo. Now, when a promising student wants a letter of recommendation to a Ph.D. program, I require as the price of that letter that s/he read the recent issues of Profession, understand what the prospects are, and what kind of thankless drudgery comes with the joys -- and they are neither small nor few -- of this path. I get the applicant to affirm that s/he would pursue this study because it is in and of itself worth doing, even if there is no job on the other side of the hooding ceremony.
POWER OFF.
Six-oh-five a.m.
Here I sit, now having passed, without noticing, that invisible boundary between my thirty-ninth and fortieth years, just as at some point I ceased to be a student and became a teacher. Somewhere along the line I was awarded a diploma, and at some later date, a contract, but these moments are as arbitrary as the whims of the clock. There must have been a moment in which I ceased to think of myself as the son of certain people, and began to understand myself as the father of certain others, and the great joke is, I cannot recall any intervening period when I was aware of myself except in relation to my obligations to the past and to posterity. That's not a complaint. I wouldn't do that to myself or to readers. The only thing more tedious than wallowing in one's own solipsism is enduring somebody else's.
A ways back, I quoted Bloom's sneer, from The
Closing of the American Mind: "has the human soul become that simple?"
I feel the pressure of mythologies on me, urging a kind of literary closure
-- maybe something from InThis House of Brede: coming to see the
passage of years not in terms of seasons and pages of the calendar, but
in the taking of veils, the progression of students. There's something
to that -- some of my earliest and brightest are now themselves approaching
tenure-decisions. But there are, as the current jargon has it, radical
discontinuities, irrevocable alterations in the basic relations of things.
The Internet will not transform consciousness in the way Gutenberg did,
and the hinged codex, the Book, will probably not disappear altogether.
But tomorrow I will sit on the defense of a thesis written in hypertext,
by means of a computer program that refuses to commit itself to, and frustrates
any attempt by the reader/user to find, any single, linear argument. The
cyber-thesis consists of hundreds of small "lexia," with a byzantine system
of cross-linkages, references, loops and returns, through quotations, reflections,
fragments of narrative, deliberate irrelevancies, all to demonstrate that
meaning does not inhere in text, but is constructed by the reader.
I know the candidate, and think well of her and of her abilities. The fragility of meaning seemed to me too like something to celebrate when I was her age, and defeating sense seemed liberating. I like her playfulness, and I know that when you begin to resent young people in their playfulness, you are far along towards becoming an old fart. At the center of the teacher's art is the habit of keeping a finger on one's own pulse, constantly noting one's own reactions, and suspiciously. Does this thesis alarm me, and if so, why? Does it make my hard-won learning appear obsolete and useless? And if so, is the best response to exercise the authority the institution and profession have given me to quash the rebellion? Would Tom have done that? Would my father? No. They'd have understood that any generation worth its salt thumbs its nose at its predecesors -- it has to, if it is to come to its own mature self-understanding. And in an enactment, perhaps, of Freud's "family romance," or the soap-opera that begins in Eden and ends with the Beatific Vision, we all come to see the dignity of our elders -- imperfections and all -- and the dignity of our own youth, silly as we may have been.
Garbáty's sympathy with youth was always clear, though he never pandered to them, and it gave him an air of youthfulness, though I suppose he must have been around fifty at the time I first met him. His talks evidenced an acquaintance with popular culture -- the occasional reference to a TV commercial or a particularly odious top-40 song (and he knew which ones were odious). I can't recall that he made reference to organized sports or the crude video games then appearing (Prof. Buttrey was a notorious Asteroids-fiend), but he did evidence familiarity with Battleship and Hangman.
What has changed, and Bloom didn't understand it, is not that young people know nothing -- they know a great many things I do not; nor is it that they do not value knowledge -- they do indeed, and not merely in the rather crudely utilitarian ways that dominated the thinking of my generation, perhaps the most self-consciously, joylessly and unrepentantly rapacious people this planet has yet produced. Not everything desired by youth -- either by a given young person or the abstraction of a generation -- is of value. But I have no patience with the presumptive superiority of mere age, and I learned this from Dr. Garbáty, who quoted from Aristotle: "Experience is only half of experience." The fact is, young people today do not think they especially need to know any particular things, and that will take considerable adjustment from people like myself, who came of age in a world where the illusion that things were knowable, and that we had some agreement as to the greater desirability of some kinds of knowledge, could still be maintained.
My great-grandfather -- otherwise lucid to the end -- spent the last ten years of his life confidently denying the fact that men had walked on the moon. Well here was a man who had known electricity, indoor plumbing, telephones and automobiles as innovations, marvels, incomprehensibilities. Unless I want to end up like that, I must make my peace with the end of knowledge as I thought I knew it. It's a whole new world, and I am here to see it a-borning. I hope I can go into it with the same green vision as my mentor, who represented high standards that the best of his students would struggle to live up to, all the while conceding -- explicitly, at points, with equal measures of ruefulness and respect, but never resentment -- that our paths to knowledge would differ substantially from his own. It's a trick to find the intersection of these curves -- the assurance that permits self-understanding and action, the self-criticism that makes a future possible.
Some very substantial changes are in fact underway
-- and I'm equipped for these changes, by someone who showed me how to
surf the centuries, and prepared me to understand that it wasn't about
me. I hope I will be able to avoid the trap of mythologizing my own struggles
at the expense of the value of my predecessors' trials, and my students'
challenges. We are, ourselves, pretty trivial. But we're part of something
mighty, even if we can only glimpse parts of it, from time to time.
copyright ©2000 by Adam Brooke Davis
about the author:
Adam Brooke Davis (b. 1961) has published scholarship, criticism, poetry, fiction and translations. He has been the recipient of major awards in the Hopwood competition and from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, under whose auspices he taught at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg. Specializing in medieval and oral-traditional literature, he teaches these subjects as well as linguistics and writing as Associate Professor of English at Truman State University. He is also webmaster for the Missouri Folklore Society.