Please let me explain. I want to explain because I feel profoundly honored, touched, and flattered to be invited by you to speak today. And as I struggled with what I wanted to say, I came to understand what lay at the bottom of this wish. It’s the wish to say something—corny and clichéd as it sounds—something that will change your lives.
That’s the confession part. What an incredible, what an arrogant wish it must seem: the wish to change somebody’s life. But you know, changing somebody’s life is the most ordinary objective in the world. It’s the implicit goal in every single class; it’s the exhortation written in invisible ink at the top of each and every lesson plan. If teachers really didn’t feel on some level that they wanted to change somebody’s life, they would be filling out applications to law school, making movies, driving racecars, doing ad campaigns for a cute dog and his favorite beer. Oh, sure, obviously torts, and shows, and fast cars, and slogans change people’s lives (in some cases much more quickly than others, and in many cases for the better), but I believe what goes on in the classroom is a little bit different.
I have been your English teacher, that is, someone who taught you some books. But I hope you won’t misunderstand when I say that I am simply an English teacher. When I say that I don’t believe I am being modest or self-effacing. Why start now?—you’re too polite to ask, thank you. So let’s talk about what you learned when you learned how to read literature.
What exactly happened to you when you read a great novel? What did you have when you finished a story? What could you keep, what could you use? And knowing stories, what is it that you know? Yourselves? The world? Yourselves in the world? The world in yourselves? Do you find that, along with me, you are getting a headache right now, too?
Hypothetically, there should be nothing easier to talk about. In the continental United States, this year alone, according to some very reliable statistics, which I have made up, 64 million class hours were devoted to the treatment of some 6,000 novels, 17 million hours devoted to some 365,000 poems (not counting “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost). And somewhere, every waking and sleeping moment of the school day, an average of 4.23 students accidentally, tragically land on “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”—a line from Romeo and Juliet, the Shakespeare play based on the far superior Franco Zeferelli movie. All this makes you think that somebody must know what’s going on, reading books, assigning papers, doesn’t it?
Here’s a parable. The reason I call it a parable is that I have no idea what it means, and because if I call it a parable, perhaps nobody will summon the cold nerve to ask for an explanation. Verily, I say unto you that it came to pass once in the land of Pacific Heights that a student of mine was accosted by one pilgrim named Louis Knight, my colleague, and asked, “If you could throw out one play by Shakespeare, what would it be?” Disgusted and courageous, she replied, “Hamlet.” “OK,” he kept after her (because he is Louis Knight, ladies and gentlemen). “If you could keep only one play by Shakespeare, what would it be?” She hesitated, but she was honest: “Hamlet,” she said. What is going on here?
It is well-known to educators and to everyone else that there are good books and bad books, profound books and boring books, inspiring books and deflating books. Of course, one person’s King Lear is another’s Nurse Cathy’s Revenge. And what one person thinks is essential reading, a great book, is nothing more than a dreary “classic” to somebody else. (If I had the time today, I could show the difference, but that will have to wait.) And if we took a survey of all the required reading that all your teachers think you should have completed by the time you graduate, you would be many years away from your commencement. Now, it is also well-known to sociologists, afternoon TV talk show hosts, bonehead evangelists, Supreme Court justices, and English teachers that literature bears some relation to what we too confidently refer to as “real life.” But what is that relation?
Furthermore, what does it mean to read literature in a world ravaged by the lethal mystery of AIDS, a world of Bangladeshes and Ethiopias, a world flirting with ecological disaster, a world in which students very much like you are massacred in the pursuit of democracy in China? Could there be anything more precious, more beside the point, more trivial than losing ourselves in a book?
And make no mistake about it, the twentieth century will be remembered as the age of totalitarianism. Isn’t it remarkable that every tyrant must burn books, must bomb schools, must murder writers and teachers and students? This point has been driven home this last week by the deplorable events in Beijing, and it was driven home to me in my travels last year to Cambodia, where I visited Tuol Sleng, the Belsen of the Khmer Rouge. Here is where they extracted false written confessions from their prisoners, and their prisoners included every student, teacher, and writer they could get their hands on. Here you can see in place the preferred instruments of torture, blood still stains the floors. If you listen too hard you make yourself believe you can hear the echoing voices of these victims, inextinguishable including in death. Tuol Sleng, it is spooky and essential to realize, was once upon a time a school.
The Pol Pots, the Chairman Maos, the Joseph Stalins, the Pinochets, do not think literature is trivial, but it isn’t my intention to grant them any sort of credit. Far from it. It’s just that suppressed people understand all too well the moral truth and the power of the imagination, which we in a free society may, at our cost, take for granted. Imagination is the enemy of authority and of brutality; it is the nemesis of injustice; it is the dream of freedom. And literature, writing it, reading it, discussing it, teaching it, constitutes an adversarial, subversive, critical act. Reading books is dangerous, because it encourages us to call into question the absolute certitude of power.
Beyond that, reading books brings with it kinds of responsibilities, and these are the kinds of responsibilities that help us understand we are human beings; they make us realize we are citizens in a democracy, residents of the planet Earth, creatures of history as well as creators of history.
Though it would be foolish to say that books constitute the whole of education, and though it would be cowardly to live in an ivory tower full of fabulations and fictions, action in the world is wiser action when fired by the imagination. That’s why I like so much what a student said in summary comment about a class: “I like that class,” she said, “because we talked about things I usually keep in the back of my mind.” For something amazing happens in the middle of a discussion of a great piece of writing. We sense that something matters beyond ourselves, that we need to take a stand. Sometimes it is very hard to know what this stand is, or means, and yet it is important to take. Something about reading this book means something crucial about living our lives. We find ourselves in the middle of a secret, and the secret is that we are all alive. We find ourselves in the middle of a surprise, and the surprise is that we have been here all along. The surprise is that we are not alone in our suffering or in our dreams.
In this regard, I wouldn’t want to leave you today without putting in a good word for unhappiness. I’m not talking about depression, which is a terrible clinical condition, or about sadness, which is an altogether reasonable response to mortality, but about unhappiness. There’s a lot to be said for good will, raucous and inappropriate humor, uplifted spirits, and you graduating seniors brought that mood all the time into the classroom. (And when friends ask me what I like about teaching at University High School, one of the things I say is that I can’t remember a day when I didn’t laugh, really laugh, about something that happened in school.) But anyway, literature is more than the pleasant expression of “profound sentiments.”
So a perennially happy student is one … who didn’t get the reading done. For literature is often written in despair and in rage, by the dispossessed and the marginalized. And education, I believe, should cultivate discontent, discontent with the world as it is, and it should nurture deep unease, unease with the l
ives we receive. A good student is, by definition, in some way inconsolable.
That’s where imagination storms in: to console the inconsolable. It enables us to ask better questions. Instead of: What’s in it for me? What can I get away with? Who cares? Am I my brother’s keeper? We ask: What makes someone a human being? What do we do now with this time we have together? What do we do now, faced with a bad king, a terrible and tragic war, sickness unto death, a universe racing to entropy? How do we confront evil? How do we pursue the good? Always a more beautiful answer, said the wiseguy poet e.e. cummings, to a more beautiful question. Always a more beautiful answer to a more beautiful question.
In Tim O’Brien’s great novel about the war in Vietnam, Going After Cacciato, the protagonist, Paul Berlin, imagines peace in the form of a stupid G.I., a soldier so stupid he believes he can leave the war, and who walks, it seems, all the way to Paris. Sarkin Aung Wan, the imaginary Vietnamese woman whom Paul Berlin loves, tells him: “You have come far… You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.” March proudly into your own dream. The world tells you to straighten up and fly right, to face reality. The imagination says, March proudly into your own dream. “In dreams,” said the great Irish political poet William Butler Yeats, “in dreams begin responsibilities.”
Now that I have tried to show you all that I think literature does, I am going to leave you with something that may seem to undercut my argument. It doesn’t, however. Most of you are familiar with the wonderful novel by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. Great expectations are rightfully on your mind today. And I want you to recall that novel for one minute. It is a story of education and disillusionment, love and money. Pip, the poor orphan, gets a glimpse of privilege and the upper class through something like awful good luck. Pip learns what really matters. One of his best teachers turns out to be the nearly illiterate, noble Joe Gargery, the poor honest man who raised him.
Joe never fails to remember the larks, the good times they shared. What larks, they continually remind themselves. Of course, Pip breaks Joe’s heart, and of course—this is Dickens—Joe forgives him. As it is time to say goodbye to you, then, I take solace in some exchanges between Pip and Joe, the blacksmith.
“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Divisions among such must come, and must be met as they come.” And so it is with you graduates today. Your parents and your teachers must meet this division, must articulate this goodbye.
Much later on, when Pip and Joe separate again, Pip says, “It has been a memorable time for me, Joe… We have had a time together, Joe, that I can never forget. There were days once, I know, that I did for a while forget, but I shall never forget these.”
“Pip,” said Joe, appearing a little hurried and troubled, “there has been larks. And…what has been betwixt us—have been.”
What larks.
What larks.
One Happy Birthday
You chew the aspirin because it works faster. Seconds count when it comes to addressing the blockages to your heart. Amazing, how much knowledge you can aquire flat on a gurney, looking up toward the ceiling tiles if not heaven.
Then the nitroglycerin tab was administered sublingually, and my head throbbed, right on schedule, a fair price to pay for desired vasodilation. Nitroglycerin has a bitter taste, but I was rolling around on my tongue sublingually, a sweet word. I was also thinking this was shaping up to be a strange birthday. I was hoping it wouldn’t be my last.
When I appeared at my doctor’s reception desk a few moments before, I was woozy, and I complained about a powerful pressure in my chest like I had never felt. The other details now blur. I was led to a seat and somebody called 911. Every twenty-five seconds somebody in America is having a coronary event. So far none of these Americans had been me.
The fire department arrived.
“What hospital do you prefer?”
I must have been disoriented because I said, “Someplace in Rome.”
“Good idea,” the fireman said. “I’ve never been.”
Come on, Rome may be my favorite city on earth, but I should have opted for exactly where I was, the Bay Area, Northern California. They did an EKG. There was reason. It was as if a python had wrapped itself around my chest; I was sweating and lightheaded. My arm tingled. My throat hurt. Blood pressure was through the roof.
“Do you have family?”
I scanned my memory bank for Zorba the Greek’s reply to that very question, “Wife, children, the full catastrophe,” but I came up blank.
“Is there somebody we should call?”
In the back of my mind, I was reasoning: if my wife or son showed up it would prove I was in big trouble. If they didn’t, maybe this wasn’t happening.
Three years earlier, the celebration of my birthday with a zero in the number took the form of a fake prom. It was held in a school gym, thematically decorated. One hundred fifty friends were attired as for their own big high school night. A portrait photographer immortalized images against a cheesy retro backdrop. The fabulous R&B band hired for the occasion let me sing lead for The Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.” My tux-wearing son, the consummate MC and roaster, got the laugh when he suggested it was past time for me to buy wine futures. Perfect night. Perfection was not my aspiration now. My current, pressing goal was tomorrow.
Once in the ER, a flurry of activity. Behind the drawn curtain I was attended to by what appeared to be a score of eerily professional and ethereally kind men and women, a diversity of age and race and ethnicity, a snapshot of California. More EKGs, a chest X-ray, two more nitroglycerin tabs, blood draws. The oxygen refreshed. The monitors beeped and chuffed, buzzed and hummed.
“What day is it?”
“Who is the president?”
“What is your name?”
“Where do you live?”
“What is the year?”
“What is your name?
“What is the year?”
The attending, who looked young enough to have once been a student of mine, gently but firmly broke the news. My ticket had been punched for the night. I was going to be admitted. The first furious round of blood test results and EKGs were encouraging, but we had a ways to go. I balked at the prospect of a hospital stay. “It’s my birthday,” I said. Patti and I had dinner reservations. The doc glanced at my hospital wristband identification to verify. “It is your birthday.” He returned two minutes later bearing a chocolate cupcake with swirled blue icing, a tongue depressor serving as a candle. “Happy birthday.”
On birthdays I usually try and summarily fail to write a poem. My attempts invariably lead to meaning-of-life dime store philosophy, which is the death knell of poetry. I long ago resigned myself. Never would I compose my version of Dylan Thomas’s great “Poem in October”: “It was my thirtieth year to heaven…”
The chest pressure by now had alleviated. Calm settled over me, the wait for resolution commenced. Alone inside my darkened, curtained-off space I felt the hours slowly pass, like boats approaching the horizon. Having nothing to do, I struggled to solve mentally a problem afflicting a new book I was working on. I got nowhere. I hoped the point would not become moot. I took a peek at what was downloaded onto my phone, read a mystery written in grade school Italian, then tried some Montaigne, my favorite, but nothing was filtering through.
Only then did I call my wife. She was distressed. I told her not to worry. Note to self: when has that move ever worked? She wanted to come to the hospital. Let’s wait, I insisted, irrationally confident I would be discharged soon. She reluctantly complied. Was denial a virus going around today?
I may have dozed. A w
onderful nurse appeared. I don’t believe I hallucinated her. In four hours they would draw more blood. They were on the trail of an enzyme called troponin. It is a reliable marker of a cardiac event, and they needed a retest. She looked optimistic. The ER may be a strange location to promote social intimacy, but it could be the opposite. She wanted to know if I was Italian. She once had an Italian boyfriend, she confided. She said every woman needed at least one Italian bad boy boyfriend. I couldn’t validate that point, but this did not prevent her from throwing out some idiomatic expressions, including “Ti voglio bene,” the charmingly indirect Italian way of saying “I love you.” She wasn’t addressing me, but it was nice to hear the sentiment anyway.
Afterward I couldn’t help but listen to the disembodied voices bouncing off the walls. The abject moaning, as of a suffering animal, from a far-off corner. The demented but eloquent articulations of an elderly woman one bed over, invisible behind the curtain. The rich baritone of docs examining one patient after another. “Where did you get these bruises?” “How many times did you fall?” “Do you remember if you ate today?” “Take a deep breath.”
As lightning bolts go, here’s one I should have seen coming. Where else would I prefer to be on my birthday if not here? It was good to be reminded, as if I needed to be, how brief life is, how tenuous the hold we have on our loved ones. The makings of a poem? No, at least not for me. And the dime store philosophy seemed anything but.
My doctor eventually informed me test results had all gone my way. “It’s probably a negligible risk being discharged, but you need to see the cardiologist right away, do a treadmill test ASAP. Happy birthday.”
So this was a fake heart attack?
“It’s a good thing you came in,” said the doctor.
The Pope of Brooklyn Page 18
