Socrates ended his teaching career by drinking hemlock. Nietzsche wandered away from his and then fell into delirium. Bad company. But I don't seem to be hounded, particularly, by demons external or internal. The tide went out on my subversive radicalism years ago; I haven't been a threat to anybody. And self-doubt is endemic to the profession, my case being no more terminal than the next bloke's. So the drama of the last year of my 31-year teaching career will have to lie in something less than an apocalypse.
I'm 61, teaching philosophy and humanities at Columbia College in the California mountains. One of my best students last year asked me why I was considering quitting when I was "at the top of my game." I mentioned my sadness watching Muhammad Ali fight Leon Spinks, and he said, reasonably, that there are no punks waiting in the shadows for teachers. True, but maybe 31 years of anything, even something as sublime as teaching, is enough. Besides, I might not be down on one knee from an undeflected jab to the face, but my inability to counterpunch fast enough leads to its own modest form of humiliation in the classroom.
The year begins next Monday, and my stomach rumbles tonight and my throat aches as I swallow. The distant future, what to do with an extraordinary amount of unscheduled time, is very clear. But how to perform this last year, whether to make it a celebratory summing up or a gentle, anonymous fading out, isn't. To coast or not to coast, that is the question. But no, that is not really the question. As always, the question is what to teach, which means, what to bother to teach out of all there is. And, does any of it make any difference?
I packed a book to the mandatory pre-school meeting that took place today in a jammed little windowless bunkerlike room under the basketball dome, knowing that I would not be paying attention to the speeches. I've avoided these rituals for three years, using up various "personal necessity" days. I should have avoided this one. Capt. Smedes of the Modesto Police Department presented a workshop for the entire faculty and staff on violence, complete with a demonstration of self-defense techniques. The kicker was his illustrated lecture on "key things to remember," with an overhead projector, which he presented like a salesman trying to cinch a deal. Capt. Smedes was pushing "Relaxed Awareness," something he described as being "quite different from paranoia." He was not very relaxed in his presentation, though he was probably very aware. Some guy in the back said he couldn't see the screen, so Smedes cranked up the picture until all there was on the screen was AXED AWA, until he backed it off. Nobody in the audience laughed.
Jesus, I thought. The police are teaching Buddhism. I can
leave that out of the course outline. One of my buddies on the
faculty, a physicist, nudged me and gestured toward the door, so we
crept out into the morning light. My friend, a fervent student of
abstract theory, immediately began summarizing "The
Elegant Universe,"
Oh my. I got rid of Dennis and walked up the hill to my office, fighting nausea and dizzyness. Along the way I ran into Rod, the jazz teacher, and what appeared to be his latest paramour, a tall, gorgeous brunet. She was hanging onto every nuance of his being, worshipfully, as usual. He must blow a lot more than his sax, I thought, with the same mixture of resentment and awe I always have around the guy.
When I got to my office, I dusted the cobwebs off the chair, pushed a stack of ancient papers toward the wastebasket and picked up the book I had been carrying around all morning. It was "Genesis: The Beginning of Desire" by Avivah Zornberg, the Israeli scholar. I opened it up. I had underlined a passage toward the end of the book. It said something about the inevitability of human beings needing to balance "meaning and mystery." We have to know things and we have to not know things. That's just great. But what the hell do we have to know and what do we have to not know?
I shut my office, drove home, took a long bike ride. At night, a bunch of friends and family members sat outside on the deck of my niece's house staring up at the August sky waiting for the meteor shower. None of us knew the names of the constellations.
What does it mean to begin the last year of a decades-long career? What happened to those thousands of students? I even married one, and yet I don't know what happened to her either. And what happened to me? Suddenly my throat constricts as I feel tears come. Is this all ineffable, a complete mystery? Well, the guy said "relaxed awareness." Maybe I'll try it. Maybe it'll work.
