After my high-rolling blackjack career bounced into the ravine of busted, I worked as a general manager of Italian restaurants and later as a wine consultant. The so-called hospitality industry would not ultimately be for me, and I was no oenological genius like Robert Parker, all of which must be apparent by now. Nobody else ever asked me where I saw myself in five years, and neither did I, so don’t get any ideas, wise guy.
Finally I accepted reality. I was tap city. Well, I remember having exactly thrity-five dollars in the checking account, the proud possessor of a maxed-out credit card, and gradually inured to the daily hectoring of collection agencies. I had a child to support. It’s the worst, most hopeless feeling. This also feels a little like death. Only expiration with ongoing consciousness and guilt and unpaid bills piling up.
My graduate fellowship at Berkeley had run out long ago, and academic job prospects looked bleaker and bleaker by the day for somebody like me. I interviewed at colleges here and there, but insofar as transplanting thousands of miles away constituted a nonstarter (as I could not tolerate living so far away from my son), my professorial ambitions were DOA.
Then in the fall of 1986 a renowned little independent high school in San Francisco hired me. In absolute terms, a professional comedown, perhaps, but I was grateful and set aside my pride. I went cold turkey: no drugs, no alcohol. I would come to realize quickly that my students were sophisticated and hilarious, complicated and joyous, demanding and generous, the quality of their thinking and writing rivaling the University of California undergraduates I had taught. Was adolescence my natural habitat? It might have been, because three years into my tenure the seniors elected me to give their commencement speech, representing the faculty—the first of two occasions I would be chosen to speak at the school graduation. In June 1989, Tiananmen Square and the political crackdown in China were on everybody’s mind that gray overcast morning in Julius Kahn Park. As I look over the remarks I made, I see things I would nowadays frame somewhat differently, but it’s folly to rewrite the past. I found myself saying things that mattered to me, about teaching and learning and growing up. The words feel dated here and there—crushing on Kathleen Turner and all—but that’s also all right, so am I.
My students turned me around, bestowed me with purpose and clarity, and my work gave me some essential stability. Despite their gift to me, that graduation speech day, I was a nervous wreck. You know, speaking in public is very different from teaching a class. A class is intimate, anything but public; I always felt at home in a classroom, as a student or instructor. In 1989, I was as yet unaccustomed to presenting before large groups. Also on my mind was that my son, due to enter this high school in the fall on financial aid, without which he could not have attended, had a championship Little League baseball game that day. I was crestfallen to miss it. When I returned home I discovered that he had pitched a no-hitter—and took the loss. Doesn’t that say it all about growing up? Also that day, something else of great significance happened to me. I met the woman who would before long become my wife. She was attending the ceremonies because her goddaughter was graduating. Who can plan for anything?
This is what I said, over twenty-five years ago, on that cloudy San Francisco morning:
•
Let me begin with a confession. No need to scramble, it’s not going to be that kind of confession.
Recently I have sensed burgeoning within me, like the mysterious monster that plays pop-goes-the-weasel in the Alien movies, a dark fantasy. The fantasy has nothing to do with time travel, or with pitching in the World Series, or with climbing in the Himalayas, or with doing lunch in Florence with Kathleen Turner—intriguing as all these fantasies may indeed be—especially that one about lunch.
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 lives 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.