The Carnegie was the public library in our town, a square redbrick building, roofed by a rotunda. In the entrance area there was a mountain goat, “the beast the color of winter,” on display in a glass case, mounted climbing a rock face. I loved that goat, a wild and dramatic welcome ushering me into the world of books. Entering the library, I never passed that goat without stopping and admiring it for a couple minutes.
From an early age I loved learning but never cared much for school. The Carnegie was my school of choice. Schools were okay—I made friends and played games. But the Carnegie was where I found myself in a place of uninterrupted learning. I could lose myself there and indulge my curiosity in that magnificent world of books. I started early, soon after I could read. By the time I was in the seventh grade, I was riding my bike after school to the Carnegie and spending Saturday mornings there discovering novels and poems, captured by writers who led me into the way of words, the world of imagination.
One Saturday morning I pulled off the shelf a book with the title A Critique of Practical Reason. It was by a writer I had never heard of before, Immanuel Kant. Deep in the stacks, I sat on the floor to read. It was the first book of philosophy I had ever held in my hand. I read nonstop for a couple hours, fascinated, intrigued. I am sure now that I didn’t understand a thing I was reading, but I knew I was onto something that I wanted to know more about. Later, in the same section, I found Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy in which I understood maybe a third of what he wrote and picked up a smattering of what Kant was about.
But it didn’t take me long to realize that as far as philosophy was concerned I had dived into the deep end of the pool—belly flopped was more like it—and was just splashing around, not getting anywhere. So I gave up on it for the time being. But something penetrated my psyche on those Saturday mornings in the philosophy stacks at the Carnegie that germinated into a concentration in philosophy when I arrived at my university.
Meanwhile, for the next few years the novelists took over. My first enthusiasm was James Fenimore Cooper. I devoured the entire corpus. Then the Montana novels of A. B. Guthrie Jr. By the time I graduated from high school, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy were bosom companions. At that time I was sure I would be a novelist. Then the novelists were supplemented by Henry Thoreau and John Muir, who gave me eyes to see and ears to hear what was going on as I hiked in the hills and along the streams in our mountain valley.
The Carnegie supplied me with a faculty of great teachers. As I marched along the prescribed school itinerary from grade to grade, I acquired the rudiments of getting on in the world but my education took place in the Carnegie. That is where I learned to love learning for its own sake. The Carnegie is where I sat under the tutelage of Emily Dickinson. The Carnegie is where Melville and Hawthorne gave me the ballast of an imagination adequate to keep me steady in a culture that is naive regarding sin and evil.
I was twenty-four years old with diplomas from high school, university, and seminary before I finally set foot in a school that rivaled the Carnegie. I entered the Johns Hopkins University to do graduate work in Semitic studies and found myself in a world of learning that I never knew existed. My letter of acceptance was a postcard on which Professor William Albright had scribbled one line: “Glad to welcome you—look forward to meeting you in September.” I had been accepted on the strength of a recommendation by my seminary Hebrew professor.
That postcard set the tone for a way of schooling I had never experienced: informal and personal. I didn’t know that there was a place of learning that was able to function with so little institutional structure. No pretension. No hierarchy. No required courses. No grades. And no exams except for the final doctoral exams. And, of course, the formidable dissertation. Students who were serious about learning. There was a kind of relaxed camaraderie that suffused the place. Semitic studies was a small department, maybe sixteen students and two professors.
The centerpiece of the department, the world-famous William Foxwell Albright, had dominated the field of biblical archaeology and Semitic studies for thirty years. It was the first time I had been in the working presence of a world-class intellect. It was not so much that his knowledge was so wide ranging and integrative, but that being with and around him I experienced his mind in action—he was constantly thinking, reformulating, pushing the boundaries of ancient history, noticing the ways the several Semitic languages worked comparatively.
He entered the classroom one morning telling us that he had awakened having solved the meaning of Moriah while he slept. Both the meaning and location of Mount Moriah, where Abraham had bound Isaac for sacrifice, had always eluded scholars. Professor Albright went to the chalkboard and soon had it filled with words from Ugaritic, Arabic, Assyrian, Aramaic, and, of course, Hebrew. He continued, excited and intense, for twenty minutes, at which point Prescott Williams, an older student who had already spent four years with him, interrupted, “But Dr. Albright, what about this and this and this [he was making reference to items of grammar and etymology that I knew nothing about]. Do you think that holds up?” The Professor stopped, stepped back, and stared at the chalkboard for twenty seconds. And then he said, “Mr. Williams is right—forget everything I have said.”
It was an act of humility that I would soon learn was characteristic of Dr. Albright. Everyone in that room knew he was capable of dismissing Williams and bluffing his way and none of us would have known he was bluffing. We all knew he knew everything. But he knew he didn’t know everything and let us know he didn’t.
The world of the intellect came alive for me in those years in his presence. Knowledge wasn’t just storing up information in a mental warehouse. It was the disciplined practice of thinking, imagining, formulating, testing for the truth. And teaching wasn’t just getting information or data into students’ minds. There was something deeply dialogical involved, as words sparked into meaning and started truth fires that blazed with comprehension.
Every week, listening to Professor Albright lecture, sitting with him in his study with five other students reading the Hebrew Bible, drinking coffee with older students in the commons, getting a feel for the immense world of the mind, the aesthetics of the intellect, I began to inhabit a world I never knew existed, a world of learning embodied, vibrant with energy. This was the Carnegie plus.
I confess I was bewildered much of the time. The famous Dr. Albright was surpassingly brilliant, but he couldn’t comprehend the depths of ignorance in his students. But an interesting culture of learning had developed around him. The older students took us younger ones in tow and tutored us informally. For me it was Charles Fensham. He took my hand and became my Virgil. Dr. Albright showed me intelligence at work. Charles interpreted and explained that arcane intelligence in a language I could understand.
Charles was a professor of Old Testament from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He was already the recipient of two Ph.D.s and would pick up a third under Dr. Albright that single year—it took everybody else three or four years. We lived a few doors apart in the graduate-student dormitory and became good friends. He patiently untangled and sorted out the stream-of-consciousness commentary that left me bewildered in the lectures and seminars. Sample: in that day’s lecture in Egyptian history, Dr. Albright kept using the term hypocoristicon. I had never heard the word. I went to my dictionary and couldn’t find it. I went to Charles and he laughed, “It’s just a fancy term for a nickname—the old man is very fond of it and uses it every chance he gets.”
But after two months away from his family, Charles became severely lonely. He had left his wife, Yvonne, his five-year-old daughter, Marianthe, and three-year-old son, Charlsie, behind in Stellenbosch and missed them terribly. He called his wife and booked her and the children passage on a ship. She was scheduled to arrive in New York City in three weeks at a pier on the Hudson River. He made arrangements to meet her. I had worked the previous summer for the YMCA, meeting foreign students arriving by airplane and ship and helping them make airline or train connections to the college or university that was their destination. I knew the city well and routines at Kennedy Airport and the Hudson River piers. I offered to go with Charles to get his wife and family when they arrived. We borrowed a station wagon from another student and were there at the pier when his family arrived. That developed into a quite wonderful friendship for the next six months—picnics and visits to the zoo, strolling the Inner Harbor. I became their guide to all things American; in turn, they immersed me in the stories of the ugly politics and extravagant beauties of South Africa. And always in the background Charles was navigating me through the labyrinthine world of Semitic grammar and ancient Assyrian and Egyptian culture. This was the world I expected to inhabit for the rest of my life.