Musings

A passage I keep returning to — from an essay of mine called "Teaching at Fifty-Six." Written near the end of three decades of teaching inner-city kids, and never far from my desk.

It occurs to me that teaching is my salvation. There are wonderful moments, when things move so fluidly, and the pitch of our discussion seems just right — students are smiling, engaged, sharing feelings, excited. A palpable energy moves through all of us — a realness, an in-the-momentness that charges the air and electrifies our conversations. Connections are made. Questions are answered. We learn who we are. If we are fortunate, we intuit an answer to the question Why? Sometimes we discover what is really true. — From "Teaching at Fifty-Six"

People like to imagine that rare and delectable places lurk in some remote part of the universe or some distant epoch from the past, but right now, in my classroom, surrounded by students, I dwell in that delectable place, a most memorable season of any day. I feel intensely awake, most alive — renewed. This is communion, I think, and teaching will be the pond that I bathe in each morning, every new day.

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I keep coming back to this passage from Trevor's "The News from Ireland." It is the kind of sentence that teaches you, every time you read it, what the short story is for:

"There is, in his clerical opinion, no part of the world more forsaken by God, no part where charity is more thinly given, kindness more rarely shown." — William Trevor, "The News from Ireland"

What strikes me is the construction. Trevor begins with a tucked-in clause — in his clerical opinion — that identifies the speaker without naming him, and then keeps the sentence moving forward in two parallel halves whose rhythm mimics the very judgment they describe. The sentence becomes the clergyman's mind on the page.

We are taught to admire writers for what they say. We should also admire them for how they hold the reader in a single breath.

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I taught Dickinson for years. I am still teaching her, even now, by reading her in the morning before I write. This is the stanza I came back to this week:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise — Emily Dickinson

The instruction is to a poet, but I have come to think it is also an instruction to a novelist. The slant truth is the one the reader can bear; the head-on truth is the one the reader resists. Fiction's whole technology — point of view, scene, dialogue, metaphor, the careful arrangement of what is shown and what is withheld — is in service of telling it slant.

Dickinson knew at thirty what most of us are still working out at sixty.

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