Three Places, Three Memories

This is the last piece in a three-part series.

Pleasant Beach

(South Thomaston, Maine)

Sometimes a place seems to come to you, as though the world has tilted and you find yourself sliding towards it through no effort of your own. It happened to me this way at Pleasant Beach, a little scoop of a cove between Rockland and South Thomaston along Maine’s midcoast, a short paddle from the mouth of the Weskeag River. There on a thin lip of rock stands a small yellow cottage that has been in my wife’s family for well over a century, and my convergence with it twenty-four years ago has made an inestimable difference in my life. Without this place, undoubtedly, most things would be very different for me today, and I would be a very different man. Of course, I can only speculate as to what those differences might be, but I can say for certain that I would not…

- know very much about the high, roaring tides of the North Atlantic

- know very much about the habits of lobsters and lobstermen

- from a distance, be able to distinguish a loon from a cormorant (visually, that 

  is; the loon’s cry is unmistakable)

- know how to drive in fog so blinding you wonder if it is not inside your own skull

- know how to drive in heavy snow and ice

- etc.

You see, after ten summers as “rusticators” here, we became full-time residents of Maine in 2006. Nearly fourteen years later, it still seems that first Strawberry Moon is just now emerging from the sea.

After all of this time, even under winter’s blanket, the magic of Pleasant Beach in the summer asserts itself. Where do I begin to tell of its charms? In the morning, if I am up early enough, I can walk out to the porch of the yellow cottage and witness the beginning of the day. If the weather is clear, the sun makes a king’s entrance, glittering across the Gulf of Maine wearing a golden and bejeweled crown, as the birds begin their songs of worshipful ecstasy. And if it is low tide, when the shiny mud reaches out toward the channel like fleshy hands, the seagulls begin their aerial ballet, an artful ritual of coldblooded killing and savage feasting. The gull knifes downward and plucks a crab or a snail from the exposed seabed, then wheels up and in toward the shore, hovering there, and then airdrops his prey thirty or forty feet to the big rocks below, where it explodes with a meaty crack, and the seagull plunges down to enjoy its breakfast. Imagine all of this from the point of view of the unsuspecting crab, though: is he terrified in his own juices, or does he simply accept death-by-smashing as a vocational hazard?

When the carnage is over and the sun lolls in the vast blue air, the fishermen come out with the tide, some of them solitary, purposeful, each one a lonely traveler in the old quest to haul from the mystery below a living, a livelihood, a life; still others roar past us indifferently, commanders concerned with more important matters, radios cranked up, the better to blast above the big engines their country music and classic rock. They don’t gaze over at us, but the posture of each crew member clearly says to us, “Fuck all you shore people.”

But we don’t care. For a while, we have the sun and the breeze, and the slow but extraordinary shifts in the light and the cloud-shadows as the day makes its journey. There is no regret in this, for the day lives its life fully - proud, sorrowful, coming, going, briefly crowning the western treetops in homage to itself and then fading off down the Weskeag River, bidding “Goodbye!” to us and to the sea and moving on into the valleys and the hills beyond, as the lobstermen return to their home ports, trailing their gouache wakes. We will miss you, Day, but welcome unto you, Night; let us see what you have in store.

Someday, when I am a very old man, I hope, that full moon that rises over the gulf (and especially over our little cove) will be at the beginning of my very last book; or maybe it will be the ending of it, but either way, it will be as prominent a marker there as it has been in my own life. I have looked upon it and seen the sad furrow in the brow of the woman I love, and I have seen my children’s eyes. So many nights we have built our fires on the edge of the world, giving shape to the wildness of the sea and the uninhabited islands that rise black and humped against the burnished pewter of the sky. This is where all sound begins, in an audible perfection that no recording studio can ever reproduce because one is in the midst of it: the cracking of the flaming wood, bright and round against the rolling cymbal of the tide upon cretaceous bedrock. So deeply did the glaciers etch the record of their journey that the dark eyes of the crevasses watch us hungrily, like the fissures in our dreams, into which we dare not step.

Above is the same sky that Adam saw and wondered at, and our hearts find the old lines, the old zeniths…but only for a few minutes. Aside from the brave passage of a satellite every so often, it is a drama of absolute stillness, a cloudburst of lights frozen by the breath of God. Down here we are small, wandering seeds, grateful to be in the world at all - the only world we are certain of, at least. Finally, though, our gazes must come back to the horizon, and to the things that perhaps lie within our ability to comprehend: the dark slab and glowing green points of a tanker passing out in the channel; the racing silver sliver thrown by a lighthouse against a far-off fog bank; and something that looks like a coffin seeping along on the current just beyond the wharf.

Now our beds begin to call to us, but they must wait as one last beer puts its fine sheen on the evening. Be careful on the short path up to the cottage - there are loose rocks there. Take a last chestful of that air that was nowhere else so precisely contrived to bring us the yearning we will feel in February, when summer will be someplace between a forgotten dream and a melody we cannot quite hear yet but whose strains we know well. So to bed, finally, to fresh sheets and warm quilts, having opened the windows to the cool July night and to the gnashing of the tide. The water comes so hard, we will wonder, in the morning, that all has not been washed away.

Soon, though, it doesn’t matter, for I am not here anyway. I am out there, in that little white dinghy that is always moored beside the wharf, the one no one ever uses. I lie snugly along its bottom, arms folded, marveling that a mere two inches of weathered wood separates me from the cold Atlantic water, and staring upward into the sky once again, wherein I can now plainly see the unending story of a billion years. I am not even a snail dropped from the beak of a seagull. Then, slowly at first and now faster, I am moving, for the dinghy has somehow slipped its moorings and I am simply drifting, headed for who knows where. 

Three Places, Three Memories

This is the second installment in a three-part series.

Bathampton

(Somerset, UK)

I am not certain of the moment I felt it, that sense that I was going home rather than traveling to a country where I’d never been before. Maybe it came over me as I was looking down from the plane’s window as it descended, watching the patchwork quilt of farmers’ fields growing larger, and then seeing the great city unfold itself, agleam and white, with the dark river gashing its way through.

Or maybe it was seeing the face of my friend Chris, whom I had met through a mutual friend when I was in grad school, as he stood there waiting at the gate. With that smile, crooked though it was, all of England seemed to say to me, “Welcome back. How long we have been waiting for you.” And just as I had suspected would happen, upon Chris’s recommendation, our very first stop was the airport pub for two pints of John Smith’s Yorkshire Bitter.

Maybe that was it: the feeling of the pound coins in my palm and then the sound of them as I plunked them onto the wooden bar, and then the barman’s voice uttering the phrase: “Thanks, mate.” In the ensuing days and weeks, how many times I would hear those words as I stood in some pub or other, looking up at the stout beams that had sustained the same roof for centuries,  then gazing at the rows of pewter mugs, many of which had hung patiently on their pegs since their owners had died long beforehand; and then there was the taste of the beer, stinging a bit if it was lager, dark and earthy if it was bitter.

In any case, the feeling that I was returning to England instead of visiting for the first time never left me. I would go back numerous times over the years, and it was always the same, with my heart and gut saying to me, “You are home again at last.” And each time, after the plane and the bus and the train ride into Bath Spa station, my steps would lead me along the Kennet and Avon Canal to Holcombe Vale in the small village of Bathampton. 

Forever frozen in my mind, that village is: the crisply-attired postman coming up the walk and opening each little iron gate to approach each door’s brass mail slot; the red and white and pink roses, so big you would need two hands to hold one (if you dared to pick it); the gravel alley that leads down past the primary school and then spills out onto the little bridge that spans the canal; and just beyond that is St Nicholas Church with its mossy graveyard (where my friend is now buried); and then you arrive at the George Inn.

The George Inn in Bathampton

These days the George is a chain pub, or so I am told, but I do not believe that was true in 1985 when I first drank there. I doubt it matters much - a British chain pub is not like an Applebee’s, where the food and drinks are just as bad in Miami as they are in Omaha. In the British Isles, the local charm and character of every pub is ineradicable. There remains some debate as to whether the George was established in the 12th or 17th Century, but either way, it has obviously long outlived its most faithful patrons, and I daresay it will also outlive those who might be sitting there at this very moment, quaffing an ale or a cider and laughing over a good story. As in most pubs, conversation is the primary source of entertainment; in general, there is no loud music or TV to upstage a punchline or quip. The stones, the timbers, the old, comfortable furnishings, the bright glow of lamps and hearths - all things here lend themselves to social gathering. On warm afternoons, the outdoor tables by the canal, with their colorful umbrellas against the pub’s gray stone facade, are always full, as the day demands that we stop here for a drink and a chat. The world will wait for us.

Of course, that would occur only when my friend was not in a state of exile. Sometimes when I visited Bathampton, Chris had been banished from the George by the management, though it was never a permanent condition. He was not a bad sort at all, so I’m not sure exactly why this would happen to him. Granted, he could become excited and animated, but I swear that he had no malice in him whatsoever. In truth, he was a fabulous conversationalist, with that wonderful working-class temperament, at peace with himself, with strong opinions, but as bighearted a host as one might ever wish for. He and I were “best mates,” as he put it. Maybe the publican at the George was an arsehole, or maybe it was just some sort of game he and Chris played with one another. Anyway, I would say,

“So, shall we go to the George tonight?”

And Chris would say, “No. I’ve been banned.”

And I would say, “Again? Why?”

He would say, “I’m not sure. May’ve been something I said.”

In such cases, we would spend a few evenings at the Wagon and Horses in Bristol or at the Saracen’s Head in Bath (fine alternatives, both) until Chris was allowed to return to the George.

Often his sister, Jill, would join us. Both of them were still living at home with their parents, a lovely white-haired couple who, from the moment I met them, contributed greatly to my sense that I had come home. For example, on the day I arrived, his mother had drawn a warm bath for me, something my own mother hadn’t done since I was about five. Mrs. Banbury was an English matriarch straight out of a storybook - quiet, with a soft, lilting laugh, but clearly the final authority on all family goings-on. She also happened to be an excellent chef and baker, and the first time I experienced a real British afternoon tea with fresh biscuits, in her back garden, I understood why it has been such an enduring tradition. His father, Ken, a grand old guy with a stunning hank of hair falling just above quick, intelligent eyes, had been a flier in the Royal Air Force during World War 2 (his decommission, signed by the queen, hung over the fireplace mantle). He was well-read and possessed a whiplash wit, and he immediately took me as a second son, showing me around town the next day, since Chris had to go to work. He suggested that I spend my afternoon hiking into the hills above the village, just to get the lay of things.

“See that? Just up there?” he asked, pointing. “If you look closely, you can make out a stone structure. It’s a sham castle.”

He explained that this was an old facade with turrets on either end, designed to trick passersby into believing it was a medieval fortress, when in actuality it was merely a single wall, built long ago by a wealthy landowner “to improve the view.” 

“It’s all about appearances, you see,” Ken said. “In any case, if you do go up there, look for my name on the wall. I etched it there with a pen-knife when I was just a lad.”

I did go, and I did find his name: ‘Ken Banbury, 1927.’ There were many other names carved into the stone, too. Just above his, I saw ‘David Worthington, 1770.’ Perhaps it wasn’t a medieval castle, but it was still older than almost anything one might see on an afternoon’s hike in the U.S.

This led me to the startling realization, in fact, that nearly everything around me, all that I saw and touched, was somehow both an artifact of the past but also very much a useful piece of the present-day world. It was very odd. In America we are quite used to seeing buildings demolished, with new ones hastily put up in their places, and to abruptly tossing out cheap furniture, say, when it is no longer trendy, but in England, old things are not valued simply because they are old: they are well-made and well-kept and used for their original purposes for years and years, even for centuries. For instance, in most pubs and parish churches - the two essential gathering places in every English village - you must finally understand that the floorboards on which you stand, the bar upon which you rest your elbows, and the altar at which you kneel have known many thousands of feet, elbows, and knees over hundreds of years. In this way, you are eerily but solidly adhered to the inhabitants of the past through the things they used.

The structures and their tables and pews and beams may survive the ages, through wars and pestilence, storms and revolutions, but alas, the people do not. When I went to Bathampton again a few years later with my young son, Chris’s mother had died during the winter. This time his father did not squire me around the town. Instead he wandered about the house, watched television, and pruned his magnificent roses. Oh, he was still friendly enough and full of humor, but he had changed markedly overall: he was tired, stooped by the wearying weight of age and loss. When two more years had passed and I visited again (with my new wife this time), Ken had gone from this life as well. Even in that unchanging, lovely village in which so many things are preserved, where the postman continues to come along daily and carefully to open each little iron gate, and where the pewter mugs still hang in neat rows at the George, death must have his share.

One evening in the spring of 2016, my wife and I were reminiscing about England and about the possibility of going back to Bathampton to see Chris again. I had fallen out of touch with him for several months, but that was typical of our long-distance friendship. He had always sent us postcards from his trips to Spain and Thailand and Amsterdam (he had also come to see us in Florida several times over the years), and he never failed to send a card at Christmastime. Now I could not recall whether we had heard from him during the previous holiday, and then my spouse, who seems to have an uncanny talent for such things, had a sudden intuition. Very soon, a search of the Internet turned up this simple obituary in the Bath Chronicle:

BANBURY, Christopher, passed away peacefully on the 23rd October, 2015, aged 62. Much loved brother to Jill. 

There was no chance of wishing it away. It was not some other Chris Banbury who also happened to have a sister named Jill. It was my friend, as certain as the tolling of a clock, but those few printed words did not seem to be enough for me somehow. I attempted a number of times to contact Jill, simply to try and cauterize something in my own mind, as though talking to her and learning exactly what had happened might help me to stash all the memories where they could be taken out, looked at, handled, and then put away again. But I was unsuccessful, and unlikely as it seemed, I wondered if she had sold the house and moved someplace else, maybe Bath, maybe London… I considered flying across the ocean once more and taking the old path along the canal, just to knock on the door at Holcombe Vale and see who might answer. Or perhaps I could go into the George Inn for a pint, and if I found him not, I could smile and ask the barman if Chris had been banned again. However, the school year was at full tilt and my duties as a teacher were clamoring and hectic, and I simply couldn’t get away just then. Or so I told myself.

In any case, it has taken me this long to understand why Bathampton, for me, remains an unresolved story, an unfinished memoir: I was not as good a friend as I ought to have been. This is the bitter truth. Had I been as good a friend as I ought to, somehow I would have known, and I would have been there. I might even have been at his side when the moment came. Still, we travel on, we people with good intentions, bound for God knows where.

Three Places, Three Memories

As the title suggests, this post is the first of a three-part series about places I have known and loved well. To truly be in a place means that one’s senses are alert to the present moment. In turn, this means we can later - perhaps many years later - appreciate the gifts that specific places have given us only by recalling them well, vividly, and with the perspective that time affords. This is what I have tried to do here.

The Plaza of the Americas

(Gainesville, Florida)

I enrolled at the University of Florida as a sophomore in the spring of 1978. It was my first time on a big college campus in a real college town, and in my mind and memory, the Plaza of the Americas - a large, grassy area that fronted the main library - was the heart of the university. I saw many things there, some of them inspiring and others quite ugly, and still others just plain weird, but in all, it seemed the headwaters of the wild currents that flowed outward and through the veins of the entire community of scholars, hippies, park-bench evangelists, musicians, vagabonds, political firebrands, doomsayers, and through my own veins as well.

I confess that as a young man of twenty, inexperienced, awkward, and with raw and un-sanitized thinking, the girls were the first attraction that drew my gaze in that wonderful and vibrant world. Now, I will say that in those days I was still extraordinarily idealistic in all things, so I was not necessarily “on the hunt” for pretty faces and tanned, lithe bodies (though they were plentiful). After having come fresh from small, private school campuses with their wool-skirted and collared coteries, I was seeking to know many kinds of people; I was more interested in the human character and in encountering different views of the world than I have been at any other time in my life, but naturally, that is what a university should be. If I happened to meet a free-spirited and intelligent woman who was also beautiful, so much the better, but it didn’t really matter that much. I did meet a few, in fact, but suffice it to say that those intrigues were not often mutual.

The Plaza of the Americas was a people-watcher’s paradise, and I knew of nothing quite so satisfying as lying on the grass on a warm and breezy April afternoon, watching the human parade. Aside from the eager young academics bustling to class in their shorts and sleeveless tee shirts, gripping the straps of their backpacks as though they were stuffed with gold, and aside from the rumpled, often wild-haired professors ambling along the walkways, there was an odd cast of characters about whose connections to the university I was unclear. Were they homeless? Were they exiled radicals? Escapees from the local psyche ward? Were they art students? In any case, they were on the Plaza every day, these stringy, bare-chested, barefooted insurgents who danced and sang the day away, seemingly without a care in the world.

There was one fellow in particular, perhaps in his mid-thirties, whose only opportunities for bathing seemed to be those spring and early-summer afternoons when the skies would fill with bulbous purple clouds and then dump steady troughs of water over the plaza, where he would stand in his shorts with his face upturned. Much to his credit, he was a decent guitar player (yes, he would even play in the rain) and seemed to know the words to every song Bob Dylan had written up to that point in his career. I never knew his name, but I heard rumors (possibly started by himself) that he had once been a nuclear physicist but had experimented a bit too daringly with hard drugs.

Then there were the true revolutionaries, those bearded, intrepid political extremists who were not kidding around. They railed against the system and against convention, handing out socialist pamphlets, harassing the frat boys in their Izod shirts, expensive sandals, and crew cuts, and seeking to lure the most naive girls into their outlaws’ clan with pot and quaaludes and wine. But aside from these kinds of annoyances, they were harmless; they were peace-niks, really, and we knew them by nicknames such as Reprobate and Radical Joe. None of them ever bothered me, except for one or two of them who would routinely ask me if I would give them half of whatever I had just bought from the vending machine under the library archway, in the interest of brotherly love, they said. Usually I would comply.

When an evangelical Christian preacher named Jed Smock would show up on the plaza, the stage was set for some grand entertainment. He and the socialists were meant for each other, as they played into one another’s hands like well-rehearsed professional wrestlers, and their arguments, while not always eloquent, were vehement and laced with insults, and they would typically attract a crowd of fifty to a hundred or so onlookers, kids on their way to class who could not resist an old-fashioned knockdown between a crowd of atheists and a hardline, grim-faced character straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story. It was not just fire and brimstone versus cold unbelief: it was the sulfurous furies of hell and damnation thrashing in the smoldering ditches and rank waters with the blunt trauma of death as master. It was some of the finest showmanship you were likely to see anyplace.

Jed was a sweaty, hyped-up version of those horribly mean, judgmental, accusatory “Christians” you run across once in a while, especially in the south, and he had a gift for looking you in the eye, probing your soul, and then loudly identifying your most shameful sin:

“SO, you like those freshman girls, I see. You will rot in hell with your genitals in your mouth.”

Or…

“I can spot a masturbator from a mile away, young man. Go wash yourself and ask God for forgiveness.”

Despite that, good old Reprobate was a fair match for Jed, circling him like a hungry wolf waiting for a chance at the bare haunches, distracting him with barbs from Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and daring him to call down the thunderous wrath of God upon him at that very instant, at which Jed would simply laugh and say, “Oh, it won’t be God you’ll be meeting at the end. The Devil is preparing a special rotisserie just for you.”

Perhaps ironically, Jed eventually married a UF coed, Cindy Lasseter, a skeletal, self-proclaimed disco queen whom he had called out in the crowd as a “wicked woman.” Then the two of them would double-team their audience of skeptics and cynics, Cindy pacing about and waving the Good Book on high as Jed unlocked his word hoard. 

When summer came on and the second semester would draw to a close, Jed and Cindy would pack up their Bibles and head off to scout out other colleges, promising all of us that he would return in the fall, seeing as how Gainesville and the University of Florida was the most sinful place he’d ever been called upon to minister to.

If you had seen what I saw on Halloween nights on the Plaza of the Americas, you might be inclined to agree with Jed. In 1970, the university began hosting the infamous Halloween Ball, little suspecting the sort of debauchery that would ensue, and finally nixing the party in 1983 because of ongoing illicit behavior by student participants. I was attending UF in the ball’s heyday, and I can attest to the unfettered wildness of the occasion. The costumes themselves were provocative enough: for instance, 1978 was “the year of three popes” because of the untimely deaths of Paul VI and John Paul I and the resulting election of John Paul II, and one group of merry pranksters commemorated those events by dressing as bishops carrying a dead pope atop a funeral bier for all to see. I’ll never know where they found such authentic-looking costumes. In consideration of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a friend of mine dressed as “an abortion,” wearing a hospital gown with a huge blood stain on its lower half (I know - very poor taste no matter what your opinions are). Of course, there were giant penis and breast costumes, and the obligatory werewolves and vampires with blood draining from their fangs, but as for me, I went as Hawkeye Pierce from the TV show MASH, which meant that all I had to do was don a bathrobe and a cowboy hat and carry a martini around.

Drugs were by no means in short supply at the Halloween Ball. It was open carry season for marijuana, and I suspect that far more dangerous substances were also being ingested. I remember seeing one young man taken away on a gurney from the first aid station; it was very frightening, he was pale and absolutely unconscious, unmoving, eyes open and glazed over, and I recall someone saying, “Whoa, that guy’s dead.” Another year - maybe it was ’79, when I was living in the area near campus called the Student Ghetto (no explanation necessary) - I was sitting with some neighbors in the apartment building’s courtyard when a slim young woman wandered in from the street. I had to look twice - she was completely naked but had spray-painted herself from her neck to her toes with neon-green paint, and she was…well, let’s just say she was not at all sober. She stood there silently for a few minutes listening to our beer-stoked conversation, and then someone gave her a couple of pills, and she toddled off into the night.

There was usually good music, too, to soothe or further stimulate the crowd, surging from stacks of amps and speakers on a stage erected in front of the library. My favorite was the high-energy band the Dixie Dregs, with guitarist Steve Morris’s note-crammed solos and technical fluidity. It all made for a surreal experience - the air thick with marijuana smoke and electric guitars, the kids writhing weirdly in their weird costumes, all surrounded by the stately academic buildings where, during the day, none of this had even been conceivable. 

Alas, with ever-spiraling madness and reports of spontaneous sexual orgies (none of which I ever witnessed) and heavy drug use, UF wisely decided bring an end to the Halloween Ball, probably more to avoid the inevitable lawsuit than to protect student safety. I really cannot imagine what administrators thought would happen when they originally allowed the event to be held on campus, but for the anarchists, it had been a great success. I think the fact that in 2016 the university began offering round-the-clock counseling for any student offended by another’s halloween costume tells us everything we need to know about recent changes in our public education system.

In sharp contrast, one of the most peaceful groups ever to set up camp on the Plaza of the Americas has been the Hare Krishnas. The Hindu devotees have been serving a cheap lunch on campus since 1971, and when I was there, they still wore chiffon robes and shaved their heads, and they intoned their hypnotic chant with percussive accompaniment. The chant continues, apparently, but I’m told that the Krishnas now dress conventionally. I admit that when I was a UF student, I thought they were simply another sideshow in the Plaza Carnival, and their food did not appeal to me, but it seems they have stood the test of time, feeding millions of broke young people over the decades. Besides, given the ever-loudening media bombardments and distractions that students contend with today, meditation seems like a pretty good idea.

Of the many noteworthy, quirky individuals who frequented the Plaza in those days, perhaps the quirkiest was Gator Man. His real name was Curtis Read, and he possessed two very unusual talents: he could commune with the alligators in their natural habitat at Lake Alice, on campus near the agricultural complex, even getting in the water, cavorting with them, and riding on their leathery backs. On the Plaza of the Americas, he had a meager income as a live mannequin. He would often stand near the library’s entrance, or perhaps with one foot up on a bench along the sidewalk, utterly still, reputedly not even blinking for as long as three hours at a time. It may seem odd that passersby would lay coins and dollar bills at his feet for doing absolutely nothing at all, but I suppose that given the typically frenetic pace of life on campus, total inertia was deemed a genuine gift.

In summary, I find that I cannot say that the Plaza was a microcosm, or any of that kind of nonsense, but I will say that it was (and to a great extent still is, I’m sure) a very real place whose faces live in full color in my memory. I hear the voices of youth there, and the smells of marijuana and of the Krishnas’ Indian dishes return to me sometimes, and I long to go back there and do it all over again, paying more attention to everything this time. I often wonder what I might have missed, but I do not wonder what happened to them all. I prefer them just as they are - as sharp as glass figures in the living museum of my brain.

In the Classroom Today

Dispatches from the Trenches

This will be my last dispatch on education - for a while, anyway. After this post, my aim is to get back to some lighter subject matter, as many of my commentaries on schools these days seem to devolve into complaints. Valid as I believe those complaints may be…it is simply time for a breather.

The two pieces below originally appeared in the 2011, Vol. 3, edition of the online literary journal, The Christendom Review. The first one was also excerpted by the well-regarded publication First Things (but without attribution!).

Molding the Future of a King: A Rationale for Using T.H. White’s Classic Novel in the High School Classroom

In one of the prep schools where I taught in the southern U.S., we were asked every year to identify students whom we believed possessed “leadership qualities.” Such qualities were never specified, but I had the general impression that these promising young people were to be culled from the ranks of the over-achievers, those at the top of the academic heap, the team captains, or those gregarious souls who could hold their peers rapt with natural charm. The quiet, bookish sorts who never volunteered for anything became invisible when I scanned my classroom for the potential leaders of the school.

Of course, as with so many other aspects of modern education, this method of identification was not merely wrong—it directly contradicted all that history has had to show us regarding true leaders. I could make a fairly long list of great men and women whose early lives were unremarkable; it would include Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, if I were to pose a question to anyone who works with young people – “What happens when you tell a child that he or she is inherently privileged and will someday lead his peers?”—the answer would invariably come back: “You’ll end up with a spoiled brat.” On the grandest scale, these brats would grow up to be tyrants, and all failed civilizations and systems of rule have been sunk by them.

T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is an adaptation of Arthurian legend, but it is also one of the best treatises I know of on what really makes a leader. The boy who is destined to become the king, whose birthright is given not only by his Anglo-Norman father and his Gaelic mother but by God as well, is not aware until the very end of Book One that he is the rightful heir to the throne, and he is every bit as surprised as his foster-brother Kay, who is anticipating his own knighthood. Up until this moment, however, the Wart, as he has been scornfully nicknamed, has been an unwitting trainee, exposed to personal dangers and terrifying systems of government through a series of transmogrifications in keeping with Merlyn’s assertion that experience is the only real education. Any instruction the boy does receive is rendered by those who are themselves immersed in their various arts and who speak in the rich languages of tilting, falconry, practical mathematics, and so on; there is no such thing as an Education Major. The Wart is so caught up in the intensity and excitement of his journey that he has little time to ponder his own future, and in any case, he believes he will be a servant and squire to Kay:

“‘Well, I am a Cinderella now,’ he said to himself. ‘Even if I have had the best of it for some mysterious reason, up to the present time – in our education – now I must pay for my past pleasures and for seeing all those delightful dragons, witches, fishes, cameleopards, pismires, wild geese and such like, by being a second-rate squire and holding Kay’s extra spears for him…’ ”

Of course, he has forgotten how things turn out for Cinderella, but it is this innate humility and the absence of preconceptions that will shape the man who can ultimately make the right decisions both in the heat of battle and at the table of diplomacy.

In great part, the book is about this sort of looking backward in order to discern cause and effect, action and consequence. Even such seemingly arbitrary events as the escape of a hunting hawk in the forest or a punch to the nose in a moment of confrontation are later perceived as critical episodes in the shaping of a king whose own destiny is integral to that of a nation. Re-reading and teaching this book always put me in mind of Churchill’s remark in The Gathering Storm regarding the day he truly understood the eminence of his own role in the early days of World War II: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” From a boy whose father had sent him to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst only because he believed him unfit for Oxford, this tells us much about his belief in the meaning of his own failures as well as his successes. Similarly, in The Once and Future King, the young Arthur often cannot see the real value in his lessons until the appropriate time arrives.

Another intriguing aspect of White’s telling of the old tale is the manner in which he endows his character with a natural inclination to self-sacrifice. In this sense, he is rather un-kingly:

“ ‘If I were to be made a knight,’ said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, ‘I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.’ ”

It’s an extraordinary remark for a child to make, and Merlyn immediately warns him not to be presumptuous. The uncomfortable irony about any king, president, or premiere who would unhesitatingly pay the ultimate price for his cause is that, in such an event, we will have lost our leader. In older times, the death of a commander on the battlefield meant the demise of his army, and so it is that in any proper telling of the Arthurian myth, we must never have the death of the hero. He does, indeed, go out on the appointed day to meet his destiny, but the circumstances of his end—and more significantly, of his return—remain mysterious. Just as the boy Arthur who turned the big roasting spits in the kitchen and who innocently vowed to be the best squire who ever lived could not have benefited from knowing his own future, the seasoned warrior-king goes out to meet his last great enemy with a single-minded sense of purpose.

Therein, I believe, lies the best reason for having this book in a high-school curriculum: for once a young person realizes that he or she, too, has a purpose, once he or she begins to emerge from the mists of childhood and to see the path clearly, once the look in the eyes which wonders “Why am I here?” is replaced by the one which says, “There it is! That is what I’ve been missing”… why, then the real excitement starts for both student and teacher, because the best teacher is also a student, and the best leader is also a follower, and the best king is also a servant. Granted, there is only one who can remove the sword, but what fun to stand up at last and see that everything you’ve done, every little thing, and even the things you forgot to do or deliberately avoided doing, have all played a part in bringing you to the realization of your own role in the unfolding myth. 

What I Learned by Teaching Hamlet

When I was a younger man, and a novice but ambitious teacher of literature, I thought I knew two essential truths concerning the play which has been called the centerpiece of Shakespeare’s tragedies: one, that no teenager could possibly hope to understand this complex, cerebral work; and two, that it is a secular play.

The latter idea seemed marvelous to me, given that Shakespeare was writing in a time when—although it might have been dangerous to proclaim oneself a Roman Catholic in early 17th-century England—there was certainly no recourse, no system of belief at all, in fact, beyond the old Catholic church and the newer brand of Christianity sanctioned by the Anglican Church. In short, I thought that Prince Hamlet’s existentialist ideas and his ultimate obsession with the body’s dissolution, as well as his startling lack of spirituality by the time we arrive at the graveyard scene, were further marks of the playwright’s genius. After all, he also anticipated theories about the relativity of time and space (see Jakes’ speech in Act 2, scene 7, of As You Like It) and the cultural stereotypes that would in part define modern racial conflict (see Othello). This is what writers of vision do, I thought: they tell us not only who we are, but who we will become.

I was mistaken, however. Hamlet is not a secular work.

But before I recount the shift in my attitude on this second point, let me dispense with the first—the idea that a high-school student cannot fully grasp the play’s themes—for I have changed my mind on that one, too. I had a student a few years back, one Theo. He was not a particularly brilliant or motivated boy, but he seemed riveted by our study of Hamlet from the get-go. I find the odds that the average 17 year-old should find himself caught up in such a play (except for the bloody events at the end, perhaps) seem to grow ever more remote, for here is a work which requires intense concentration on every page, perhaps on every line. The “multi-tasking” approach in education does not really suit a close study of this play. In any case, Theo practically hung on every beat of blank verse, he extensively researched Elizabethan vocabulary and history, and he enthusiastically volunteered to read aloud from day to day, and ended by handing in a very strong analytical essay. I was in a perpetual state of amazement until a colleague informed me that Theo’s father had died the previous summer, and at last the pieces of the puzzle tumbled into place.

My own father passed away in July of 2008. When my seniors took up their study of Hamlet the following winter, I realized that I was seeing the tragedy in a new light. The lens of grief, which is alternately blurry or painfully sharp, had altered my regard for the play, and I suddenly realized that the fuller comprehension of it has little to do with one’s age but very much to do with what one has endured—and in particular with what, or whom, one has lost. Someone familiar with Hamlet might say that the murder mystery and the accomplishment of a son’s vengeance are the real draw here, but I say that the deeper mystery comes in seeking to reconcile this life to the next, in sustaining our faith that there are “more things in heaven and earth,” and that the search for a father goes on and may even take us through invisible doorways. To apply purely secular reasoning to this possibility moves us ever further away from God, stealthily, steadily, and with deadly consequences.

This brings me to the second revision in my thinking about Hamlet: for all his visionary genius, Shakespeare is not, in fact, exposing us to some of the first tentative mumblings of atheism (indeed, his short-lived contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, was inclined to atheist speculation); rather, he is showing us what happens when a man steps apart from God. Granted, there is no worthy friar in the play, and the prince has grown up surrounded by power-hungry people who apparently seek no one’s counsel anyway. Even Hamlet’s father, although he is the victim of a murder, expresses through his death a sort of misconnection with God, having died unconfessed, with all his sins upon his head. We see in the prince’s first soliloquy the seeds of the same sort of distorted thinking:

O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter…
                                            (1:2)

The difficulty here is that God’s law against suicide really has little to do with our regard for our own flesh. It is not designed to prevent one destroying an offending body, but rather, in part, from destroying the world which one perceives through the senses. The other principle that Hamlet seems to miss is that we are not the real owners of our bodies, after all. To say that I would kill myself if God had not forbidden me to do so puts me at roughly the same level as a small child who says, “I would steal this candy, but my mother has told me I will get in trouble for taking things.” We shouldn’t destroy our own bodies for the same reason we should oppose abortion and the death penalty—because a design is being perpetuated upon our conception, and we are here to see it through, using free will wherever we can to do our part in the knitting of the pattern. To willfully eliminate one’s part is to toss another unraveled thread into the trash bin of misery, that misery whereby we remain separated from God.

Hamlet’s first encounter with his father’s ghost brings him into vivid contact with another reality, and he is both thrilled and terrified by it, as any of us would be. And as it would likely be for any of us, the vividness begins to fade, and Hamlet falters in his determination to avenge his father’s “foul and most unnatural death.” No rational man would rush out and kill his own uncle because a ghost has urged him to do so; even in his state of depression, delusion, and paranoia, reason prevails for a time, and Hamlet hesitates.

But Christianity is reasonable, too. It tells us that just as we have thirst, and water is the solution, there must ultimately be answers to all of our most troublesome inquiries (and Hamlet is a play inundated with questions). The old world of vengeance and violent retribution really means self-obliteration, when we pursue it to its final outcome, and so we might conclude that the dead king is suffering in purgatory not merely because he died unabsolved but perhaps also because in life he could never move beyond ambition and the power of his own station and ascend to an understanding of forgiveness, or at the very least to munificence. Or, as both the prince and his friend Horatio speculate, he could well be a demon, and not at all the curly-haired Hyperion who lives in Hamlet’s memory—an idea which would have been quite credible to Shakespeare’s audience and which would still be feasible to many Christians today.

Thus the true identity of his father seems to elude Hamlet for much of the play. It is the most masterful illustration I know of the search that we all undertake for our lost fathers. Sometimes, the men we pursue in our longing are mere ghosts, and some of them may be demons of one sort or another. Hamlet, perhaps unwittingly, actually answers the question of his father early on, in Act 1: 

He was a man. Take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
                                            (1:3)

He intends this characterization as an homage, but really he ought to say that his father was merely a man; he shall not look upon his like because he was himself, in fact, merely an imperfect likeness of the Father, the one for whom we thirst as though for water, and although he briefly breaks the silence of the grave, he is a king who cannot return.

In the end, the horror of that same silence descends on Prince Hamlet like a mound of heavy dirt. He has failed to realize that all of his words, and all those of Claudius and Polonius and Horatio and Osric and all the others who have so much to say in this play, and all of the words on all of the pages in all of the books in Elsinore’s library, ultimately bring us nowhere. In the end, there is only the Word. And I believe that this is where my understanding of the play may come in line with the author’s intent, on some level, for solid flesh does melt, just as our words evaporate and turn to silence; the playwright’s own words are the grandest in the English language, and yet they can take us only up to the threshold of the next world. The real manner in which we cross it is determined by Faith.

In the Classroom Today

Dispatches from the Trenches

In Defense of Non-secular Schools

“I have no religion.”

I hear this assertion from time to time, most recently from a colleague who sees himself as progressive (and please note that I have not placed the word in quotation marks, since I genuinely respect his intellect). My objection to the claim is not that it offends me; it is simply that I don’t believe it.

If we take “religion” to be a system of beliefs held with ardor and faith, a particular conscientiousness, then any adult with a reasonably functioning brain certainly observes some sort of religion, even if its tenets include the steadfast denial of belief. For instance, a scientist who thinks that science will someday have answered all of the great questions about purpose and meaning is a profoundly religious person. Religion provides a framework of thought, in essence, and some things fall within that frame and other things do not.

Religion makes the world intelligible to us, and that is crucial to education. In my experience as a teacher of literature and of writing, I perceive recurring ideas, images, narratives, and so on that reveal recurring truths, and all of these bring intelligibility and meaning to the noise of human interaction. Any teacher who comes into the classroom hoping to get something done, to finish the day really feeling like something has happened, and who believes that his or her subject is far more than simply a collection of information to be dispensed, is by nature a religious being.

Of course, we know that when most people refer to a “religious” school, they mean an institution that is affiliated with a particular church, a parochial school. Typically such a school is meant to advance the tenets of the church, but it also provides instruction in math, science, and so on - secular subjects, one might say, but even those may be approached within the framework of belief (e.g., the study of life science is also the study of the created world). These ideas are not necessarily at odds; as Pope John Paul said in 1985, “Rightly comprehended, faith in creation or a correctly understood teaching of evolution does not create obstacles: evolution in fact presupposes creation…” (Symposium on Evolution).

No doubt some would argue that a Jewish girls school, for example, is an insular environment which breeds homogeneity, and in some ways that may be true; but those sorts of flaws are only connected to the specific culture of the school and the people who are there, and not to the universalist viewpoint the institution hopes to convey. The real school, the palace of ideas, wants to give the student a singular, cohesive method by which she can approach a corrupt world and somehow contribute to its healing, guided by the values which have been part of her education. A number of different writers - sociologists, philosophers theologians - have used the term “everythingism” to describe the condition in which one may be too intensely drawn to too many things - books, ideas, hobbies, belief systems, and so on - to understand any of them particularly well. The danger is that everythingism can lead to the mistaken belief that all things are equal in value, and in turn we wind up in a world without morals (since morals, after all, must be those principles that stand salient against the great jumble). Good nonsecular schools, by contrast, seem keenly interested in sussing out the greater or lesser worth in certain ideas.

Please bear in mind that I am not necessarily thinking of the 1960s-era Brothers school, for example, which a good friend of mine loves to look back on and loathe so passionately - and understandably so, since his memories are comprised mostly of corporal punishment and humiliation, a mental photo album of welts. Nor am I speaking of the small-town Baptist “academy” where another friend spent hours on his knees in the dean’s office, reading aloud from the book of Job. I mean fully accredited schools founded by men and women of both intellect and faith who believe that academic rigor and a spiritual life do not exclude one another.

Before entering the public school system, I taught for ten years in a private Episcopalian school. I now realize how freeing it was to hear accomplished and in some cases brilliant colleagues discussing their own beliefs and spiritual struggles with intelligent students, many of whom, though they may not have “bought in to the program” entirely, were at least openminded, academically ambitious, and from varying ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. In fact, one of the main reasons I joined the church myself was that in those days, I hung around a lot with men and women whom I admired, who also happened to be Christians. I was fortunate to have come under their influence.

Certainly there are those who associate private education with elitism. My only response might be to note that in the nonsecular school where I worked, the admissions committee was quite fair in awarding financial aid to low-income parents who desired to have their kids in a focused academic environment; and generally, the kids themselves possessed the will to put in the effort and sacrifices required for any worthwhile journey. I would not say that the students I knew there were any more talented than their public-school counterparts, but they had a framework, a lens, if you like, that allowed them to see clearly what was really at stake for them. Not only that, they knew why they were there. I am sad to report that in public-school hallways, I see many students, every day, who appear to be lost; believe it or not, they do not know what their purpose is in this place. It is not simply that they hate school and wish to be someplace else; they truly do not know why their presence is required here.

I think the reason for this is simple: there is no joy in it for them. They view it as a building with a set of unreasonable rules (NO HATS! NO TALKING! SIT DOWN! STAND UP! GET IN LINE! WAIT FOR THE BELL!). Oh, we all have good intentions, and schools are fraught with teachers, coaches, counselors, and administrators who love kids, want the best for them, hope to inspire them…but the weight of the system inevitably descends upon them. For example, true creativity (a quality we ought to encourage) is often unbridled, particularly in a young person, and yet that impulse is frequently met with brute force and then summarily smothered. This has been true for some time. Even the affable populist Bruce Springsteen - now seventy, if you can swallow that one - has declared, “I hated school. That’s rock ’n’ roll 101.” For who should the pupils find in authority when they enter these institutional walls but a bunch of rule enforcement officials, many of whom seem as disillusioned, deflated, and miserable as themselves?

I am generalizing, obviously, but my point is that there is joy in realizing one has a purpose, after all, or at least in beginning to seek for it, and in being among others who are up to the same thing. It means that this day, this place, is just a piece of a road, a greater journey. A life of purpose means that the best days and places always lie ahead, but in order to get there we must also pay attention to what is happening now; it is a curiosity of the human brain that at some point, it becomes capable of holding both of these thoughts - of the moment and of the future - and that together they have significance and meaning. It is my opinion overall that private nonsecular schools are more apt to provide this essential framework.