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On Lecturing

Chekhov’s “A Boring Story: From an Old Man’s Notes” does not have the most promising title.

The tale is about an elderly university professor, also not very promising.

But, then, in the middle of this “boring story,” the professor talks about lecturing at a college

The passage is quite literally stunning. It is without a doubt the single best description of what it is like for me to give a lecture (or a sermon) that I have ever read.

It’s a bit long for a blog post, but here it is in its entirety. If you want to know what I feel like in class, this is pretty much it.

(The translation, by the way, is by Pevear and Volokhonsky; always read their translations. Always.)

I know what I will lecture about, but I don’t know how I will lecture, what I will begin with and where I will end. There is not a single ready-made phrase in my head. But I have only to look over the auditorium (it is built as an amphitheater) and pronounce the stereotypical “In the last lecture we stopped at…” for a long string of phrases to come flying out of my soul and—there the province goes scrawling! I speak irrepressibly quickly, passionately, and it seems no power can stem the flow of my speech. To lecture well, that is, not boringly and with some profit for your listeners, you must have not only talent but a certain knack and experience, you must possess a very clear notion of your own powers, of those to whom you are lecturing, and what makes up the subject of your talk. Besides that, you must be self-possessed, keenly observant, and not lose your field of vision even for a second.

A good conductor, as he conveys a composer’s thought, does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, gestures now towards the drum, now towards the French horn, and so on. It is the same with me when I lecture. Before me are a hundred and fifty faces, no two alike, and three hundred eyes looking me straight in the face. My goal is to conquer this many-headed hydra. If, as I lecture, I have at every moment a clear notion of the degree of its attention and the power of its comprehension, then it is in my control. My other adversary sits inside myself. It is the infinite diversity of forms, phenomena, and laws, and the host of thoughts, my own and other people’s, that they call forth. At every moment I must be adroit enough to snatch what is most important and necessary from this vast material and, in pace with my speech, to clothe my thinking in such form as will be accessible to the hydra’s understanding and arouse its attention, and at the same time I must observe keenly that the thoughts are conveyed, not as they accumulate, but in a certain order necessary for the correct composition of the picture I wish to paint. Furthermore, I try to make my speech literary, my definitions brief and precise, my phrasing as simple and elegant as possible. At every moment I must rein myself in and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, it’s no little work. I have to figure at one and the same time as a scientist, a pedagogue, and an orator, and it’s a bad business if the orator in you overwhelms the pedagogue and scientist, or the other way around.

You lecture for a quarter, a half hour, and then you notice that the students have started looking up at the ceiling, at Pyotr Ignatievich, one feels for his handkerchief, another tries to settle more comfortably, a third smiles at his own thoughts…This means their attention is flagging. Measures must be taken. Availing myself of the first opportunity, I make some quip. All hundred and fifty faces smile broadly, eyes shine merrily, there is a momentary murmur of the sea…I, too, laugh. Attention has been refreshed, and I can go on.

No argument, no amusement or game ever gave me such pleasure as lecturing. Only while lecturing could I give myself entirely to passion and understand that inspiration is not an invention of poets but exists in reality. And I imagine that Hercules, after the most piquant of his great deeds, did not feel such sweet exhaustion as I experienced each time after a lecture

As I said, remarkably accurate. In so many ways.

I have the stock opening; mine as surely every student who has ever sat in my class could tell you is, “So. Where are we?” I think I start every single lecture with that rhetorical question.

Irresistible rapidity? Check. I simply can’t slow down even if I try. Constant attention to the audience while wandering through a reservoir of ideas and anecdotes and turns of phrase while trying to turn out sentences with some literary flair? Check. The well-timed pun or joke to reacquire attention? Check.

Even the exhaustion. Before reading this, the best description of lecturing I had seen wasn’t about lecturing at all. In the old Bob Seger song, “Turn the Page,” there are the lines: “Out there in the spotlight/ You’re a million miles away/ Every ounce of energy/ You try to give away/ As the sweat pours out your body/ Like the music that you play.” I think about that a lot at the end of a lecture, when I have tried as hard as I can to generate in the audience the same energy I feel when thinking about the subject at hand. (By the way, I really like the Metallica remake of that song; it may well be my favorite Metallica song.)

This week, summer ends and classes start here at Mount Holyoke. I am frequently asked if it is going to be hard to return to the classroom after not teaching all summer. I find that to be a very odd question. Why would it be hard? Lecturing is so natural.

I think that passage from Chekhov explains why; when a lecture is like that, it isn’t a time consuming chore to prepare. You spend some very pleasant time learning all about a subject, a little time sketching out a rough order of material, and then you show up and the lecture is there waiting for you.

But, I don’t think lecturing is like that for everyone.

So, yes, this Wednesday I am very much looking forward to walking into the lecture hall. There is a thrill in the lecture. Summer work has joys which are quite different. But, there is nothing in summer work quite like the never ending quest for the Perfect Lecture.

That lecture never quite comes.

I learned long ago, though, that part of the art of lecturing requires adopting the mantra of the Cornerback: never remember the last play.

Every time I walk into the room, it starts anew—it makes no difference if the last lecture was great or a disaster. This lecture is a new creation; this set of students on this day deserve the best lecture I can muster. There is no tomorrow, there is only the next 75 minutes. And it will be glorious.

Do You Know Your Own Mind?

Do you know your own mind? More interestingly, does anyone else know your mind? Now add the subgroup: do scientists know your mind? Does modern science provide an adequate understanding of the human mind?

Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind is a reflection on that topic.

First, though, it is worth noting the curiosity of this book and author combination. Robinson is best known as a novelist. (Gilead is a very good novel. Perhaps, fifty years from now, it will even be a Great Book. Serious praise, there.)

So, here we have a novelist giving a set of lectures which are published as a book on a subject other than Literature.

There are not many people who can write adeptly in both the fiction and non-fiction worlds.

Never has been if you think about it.

(Indeed, the more you think about it, the more you realize how shockingly rare the ability is. That list must exist somewhere: people who wrote both fiction and non-fiction books which are well worth reading. (To be on the list, both the fiction and the non-fiction have to be really good.) Could I make a list of 100 such people? I am not so sure. In fact, as I ponder it, I begin to doubt I could come up with 100 names.)

But, Robinson has pulled it off—this book is quite good.

The argument: modern science has completely obliterated the mind. We all know we have a mind, we all know our minds think things, but Science (with a capital S) has completely discounted the evidence of our mind.

Freud did this quite famously in Civilization and Its Discontents. Someone tells Freud about the Oceanic Feeling, the sense of eternity he has, which is a subjective fact for the person explaining the feeling. Freud notes that such a feeling is not confined to this one person, but is widespread. However, Freud does not have this sense. Thus, it does not exist. QED. Thus Spake Freud, setting the pattern of proof for much of 20^th Century Science.

But, as Robinson notes, 20^th century science has an underling problem when it comes to the human mind. Freud taught us how to think about the mind scientifically; no need for your introspection, just read Freud. Darwinists also taught us the science of the Mind. So did the Skinnerians. (So did the Marxists. So did the Nietzscheans.)

Yet, and this is the point which is rarely noticed, while we have at least 5 (and really even more) strains of 20^th century scientific thought which completely describe the Mind, these scientific theories are mutually contradictory. Robinson is right: there is simply no way to reconcile Freud and Darwin in the theory of the Mind.

More generally, the mind described in modern scientific treatises (of any school) does not bear a lot of resemblance to what I actually perceive as going on in my own head. Maybe I am deceived about my own mind. But, whence comes the confidence that it is me who is deceived; whence comes the confidence that Others, the Scientists, are not deceived when they posit theories about my Mind?

To take the example from Freud. If my mind can sense eternity, that oceanic feeling which convinces me of the existence of eternity, but modern science cannot detect eternity in my mind, which is right? Is there any reason to believe that Science can uncover the totality of what goes on in my mind? Is there any reason to distrust that portion of my thoughts which are not susceptible to scientific refutation?

Indeed, if we take Science seriously, there is little reason to Trust that our minds are capable of reasoning correctly. Consider, for example, a Darwinian multiverse in which there are infinitely many universes—a theory which is trotted out to explain why we don’t need a God to explain the Universe in which we find ourselves.

Now if there are infinitely many universes, then there is necessarily one like ours in every respect except for the fact that the human mind does not reason correctly, that what the human mind thinks is logically proven to be true is, in fact wrong. There is a universe out there somewhere with lots of people thinking they are really intelligent because they have figured out some neat things about the universe, but everything they know to be true is, in fact, false.

With infinitely many universes, that universe must exist somewhere. Right? How do we know it isn’t our universe?

We trust our minds to reason correctly. We trust them to develop science. Yet, there is a suicidal impulse in the modern mind—as we trusted it to come up with explanations about itself, the explanations have all tended to obliterate the mind, to destroy any reason to suspect that the theory being used is True. If all our thoughts are driven by X, then it necessarily follows that the minds of those who accept that theory are also driven by X, at which point it is useful to wonder why anyone would believe X to be.

Modern science requires the idea of a trustworthy mind, immune from simplistic, deterministic processes, able to sort through and evaluate the world in which it finds itself. Modern science requires a mind like the one most of us actually experience. But why then reduce that mind to something incapable of feeling and thinking all the things I feel and think?

All of this is much like the denigration of the idea that Faith is a means of having Knowledge. Yes, Reason is important and teaches us much. But at the end of the day, Faith also teaches us much.

That statement annoys many people to no end, and yet those same people get out of bed every morning with complete Faith that the world of today will function like the world of yesterday—a belief, as Hume pointed out centuries ago, for which there is not a shred of evidence. It is literally impossible to test the hypothesis that the future will be like the past. Yet, we all know it to be true. I have never met anyone who doubted it. And how do we know it? The Mind is a curious place, isn’t it?

Robinson’s book is well worth reading. It is the sort of book which sets the mind wandering into all sorts of avenues and alleys. A thoughtful book puncturing some of the Pieties of the Age. It would be nice if there were more books like that.

Related Books
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Fiction Posing as Nonfiction

“Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we’re in need of at the time we’re reading.”

Reality Hunger, by David Shields.

I liked the book for reasons that have nothing to do with the author’s main thesis, but that isn’t the sort of thing that would bother Shields in the least since part of his thesis is that I probably shouldn’t agree with his primary thesis.

The quotation at the outset is from his book, though he would frown on the fact that I put it in quotation marks and am noting the source.

Part of his thesis is that I should just steal everything I want to use—plagiarism is not a crime in Shields’ world—it is something to be done proudly.

(Students: Don’t try this at home. Really. Do not plagiarize. Shields is wrong.)

Shield’s primary thesis, for those who are interested, is that the rash of “memoirs,” some fake, some not, are the best thing going in literature—after all, all writing is fiction and so fake memoirs are fiction masquerading as reality because after all reality is nebulous anyway, but we all want more reality and…well, I could keep going, but his argument is deliberately opaque and wandering and probably self-contradictory and Shields likes it that way, thank you very much, so to start trying to carp about the idea that it is impossible to summarize a book which Shields would not want summarized in the first place is one of those things not to be done, especially since Shields would undoubtedly be quite happy that the book generated a tediously long “Sentence” (Shields is also not a fan of grammatical stricture) which just wanders all over in an attempt to capture a meditation, or dare I say compose an essay (essai) about something which may or may not be what Shields was discussing. Suffice it to say; Shields’ book was fun to read—nice style—all numbered paragraphs—he, like Nietzsche, likes apothegms.

Wandering, tangential ruminations about things. I liked it. (Hard to believe, I know.)

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.
Every man’s work—whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else—is always a portrait of himself.
Nothing is going to happen in this book.
I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

That is more David Shields. Or, really, more David Shields plagiarizing other people.

Maybe I agree with those things. Emphasis on maybe.

I recently read Wodehouse, Big Money. That is true. Does that mean that what I am about to write about it is also true?

It’s trivially easy to write in cryptic epigrams.

It’s even easier to read cryptic epigrams.

Maybe you learned something from reading that last paragraph. Maybe I just said something about myself. Is this paragraph an autobiography?

Big Money is about as formulaic a Wodehouse novel as there ever was. Then again, I suppose that could be written about every Wodehouse novel. You could write the entire plot by the end of the second chapter and you wouldn’t have missed a thing.

That is, of course, the beauty of Wodehouse. One part of me stands aside his books simply admiring his ability to take a perfectly predictable plot with perfectly predictable jokes and turn it into yet another masterpiece. The lack of variety is part of the very joke woven into the novel.

“The male mind did not appear to be able to grasp immediately that a woman doctor need not of necessity be a gargoyle with steel-rimmed spectacles and a washleather complexion.” I am not at all sure why that quotation was just put in at this point. Which is, in a nutshell, the problem with reading David Shields. If he is right, then it makes no difference what follows what and in what order it all comes and how it is all phrased. It doesn’t even matter if that is really a quotation from Big Money or a different Wodehouse novel. Shields is a literary nihilist. Wodehouse is not.

I enjoyed reading both Wodehouse and Shields. Yet, only one of them is saying something True. And it is the writer of fiction.

Big Money reminds us once again that life is a comedy; it is full of improbable events and the only proper reaction to living in this vale of tears is to laugh and laugh and laugh. Any other way leads to madness.

Shields, despite being funny, has forgotten to laugh. He takes this whole writing business far too seriously. He wants writing to dig deep and expose one’s soul in some sort of autobiographical auto-da-fe, all the while arguing that there is really no way to do so. Again, despite being funny, Shields has written a very grim book.

If my library was not ordered alphabetically, I would put Shields’ Reality Hunger next to Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in the hopes that the latter would somehow teach the former that a book with nary a joke in sight is both funnier and a better picture of the human soul than the funny book with the nihilistic view of life and literature.

Come to think of it—this idea of ordering the books in my office by determining which books really should get together for a talk over coffee has staggering implications. Where would Big Money go?

Isn’t It Enough Just To Be Charming?

“A priceless part of our literary heritage.”

Thus the blurb reads on the front cover of the book in question.

Now that is the sort of accolade which obviously applies to a Great Book. Yet, the book in question in not in the Library of America series.

The blurb writer of this particular accolade is also noteworthy; many blurbs are written by the friends of the author, some by luminaries who write in the same genre (once can sense an undertone of “I praise your book, you praise mine”). But, this blurbist (is that a word? It should be; sounds better than blurber) fits neither of those categories.

Instead, this is a well-known personage, very well-known, who is not known for his literary efforts (for good reason). The Blurbist: George Lucas. The George Lucas. (If you don’t know that name, you live under a rock.)

The volume was written by Carl Barks, which is a name completely unfamiliar to most people.

So, here we have a book which George Lucas called a Priceless (priceless!) part of our literary heritage written by an author almost completely unknown. How can this be? Well, it turns out that while the name Carl Barks is little known, the names of the characters about whom he writes are incredibly well known.

But, enough of this exercise in trivial pursuit. The Book: Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge: “Only a Poor Old Man.” This is one of a series of the work of Carl Barks, the author and illustrator of Donald Duck comic books in the mid-20^th century. And Donald Duck comic books are unquestionably a priceless part of our literary heritage.

But, are they worth reading?

If one is not obsessed with Donald Duck, it is possible to be glad that this work is being republished in beautifully done volumes, but it does not immediately follow that the volumes are the sort of thing which should be read by one and all.

Curiously, there is a certain insecurity about the whole enterprise exhibited by the editors of the volume. The books in this series have at the back short, scholarly (well, really, pseudo-scholarly) essays about each comic book, showing how Barks was really (really!) doing interesting work here and (insert foot stomp) you should really recognize how incredibly important (important!) this work is because you might be tempted (you philistine, you) to think this is mere kid’s stuff.

The earnestness and vacuousness of these mini-essays makes me pause. I mean, I liked reading the comic book; it was fun. So, why do you need to beat me over the head with how important it is? Insecurity indeed.

Truth be told, these Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books are cute and interesting and not much more than that.

Sure, I have no doubt that in the history of comic books, these are groundbreaking; comic books as art medium were just being developed in the mid-20^th century, so somebody had to break new ground. And there is no doubt at all, that these characters are now iconic, and we can thank Carl Barks for that. So, I am glad these volumes are being published; I enjoyed reading Uncle Scrooge’s tales.

Why can’t that be enough? Does volume need more justification that simply saying it is a pleasant thing to read? Isn’t there something amazing in the fact that a volume of comic books published over half a century ago still can stand on its own as a pleasant thing to read? Yes, I don’t know many people to whom I would recommend Donald Duck comic books for their philosophical insights, they are not Great Books, but there is a large area between Great Books and Childish Trash.

So, why the pseudo-intellectual commentary at the end? That commentary not only made me sad, but curiously moving from reading an enjoyable comic book showing that the quest for money is ultimately not satisfying (which is, after all the whole point of Uncle Scrooge’s existence as a character) to a brief moralizing essay saying the obvious, made the comic book seem not more scholarly and elevated, but rather made the whole thing seem smaller.

Uncle Scrooge and Donald and Gladstone and the Nephews, well they are truly characters worthy of Dickens (which is saying a lot). Seeing them muddle through their days makes these book not all that different from some sort of comic book version of The Pickwick Papers. Not as great as Dickens to be sure, but all in all, not terribly different.

And that is the reason to read them: a seemingly desultory journey actually containing some moral lessons accompanied by some highly memorable and wonderful characters. If that description isn’t enticing, then there is nothing to see here.

UBIKuitous Incoherence

The Library of America (that authoritative guide to all things Classic in American Letters) has a three volume set of Philip Dick, the science fiction author from the 1960s and 70s.

UBIK, the fourth novel in the first volume of that set. Having read all four, I must confess to a certain wonder why Dick deserves this All-Star treatment.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed UBIK. Reading it was a pleasant diversion. Dick writes in a style which is not particularly great, but makes it easy to just go along for the ride. Where is this ride going? That is surely a question worth asking before elevating a book to Great Book status, and it is here that Dick trades in cheap tricks as a substitute for substantive ideas.

UBIK offers up a bewildering array of science fiction tropes, but as it turns out most of them are the literary equivalent of the magician’s trick of waving a hand to divert attention from where the real action is happening. There is an entire story of people with psychic powers and an organization set up to stop people with psychic powers from using those powers. There is a plot of a woman with the ability to change the past, generating a new present—though how she knows what she has done in the new present is totally unexplained and likely internally incoherent. But neither the woman nor the whole psychic power thing matters in the end.

The real story is about half-life—a state which people enter after death in which their conscious self still lives on in a bizarre dream world. Living people have some odd ability to talk with those in half-life, but only at some sort of company which specializes in enabling contact between the living and those whom Miracle Max would call the Almost Dead.

Those Half-life people move along in some sort of odd time which seems to be shorted as they spend more time talking to the living, susceptible to interaction with other Half-life people whose bodies (corpses) are physically close, but sometimes the physically close corpse can take over half-life person’s world or even that person’s channel of communication with the living and if this is making any sense at all, then I am providing clarity where there really isn’t any in the book. And, all this is totally irrelevant to the real story too.

The real story. Our hero may be alive or he may be in half-life and he doesn’t know and we don’t know which either. Indeed, neither our hero nor we have any idea what is going on—until the penultimate scene in which we discover that our hero is, in fact, in half-life and, while there, he has to fight against nefarious evil plans of another half-lifer. Why the plans of an evil half-lifer to do evil things to dead people matters is a bit unclear.

And then we get the final scene in which—ready for mind-blowing conclusion?—we find out that the person who was revealed to still be among the living may be in half-life after all, so maybe that previous conclusion isn’t right after all. The most coherent conclusion would be that everyone is in odd parallel half-lives, but that conclusion isn’t really coherent. Indeed, I suspect there is no coherent storyline in this book.

So, where does that leave us? A pleasant, but totally incoherent story. If that was the aim, it would be one thing. But, I suspect the author has delusions of grandeur here. This book seems designed to make us question the nature of Reality. Are we too living in some sort of half-life state, just imagining we are still among living? It’s the old “How do you know you aren’t a brain in a vat somewhere imagining that all of this is real?” A trippy, unanswerable question? Or, like Samuel Johnson, when faced with an older incarnation of the idea, do we just kick a rock and say, “Philip Dick is refuted thus”?

So, UBIK takes an old philosophical question and converts it into an incoherent science fiction novel. Fine. Reading it is a decent enough way to spend an evening. But the Library of America treatment? There are two more volumes of Philip Dick to go; perhaps the answer lies there.

No Longer at Ease

The last time I read Things Fall Apart, I read the author bio at the back and was quite surprised to discover that the author, Chinua Achebe, had written a sequel.

Obviously I had never read the author bio before. I was intrigued by the idea of the sequel.

Then I noticed the title: No Longer at Ease. Shock. That book was on my bookshelf. I had picked it up at a library book sale years ago and filed it away for later reading. I had no idea it was a sequel. Nowhere on the cover of No Longer at Ease does it say it is a sequel. Odd.

Not surprisingly, I read it. The quick answer: it isn’t as good as Things Fall Apart. But it was worth reading; it is short, so that helps, but even on its own terms it is worth reading.

The hero of this tale (Obi Okonkwo) is the grandson of the hero of Things Fall Apart. The first novel is the African Tribe’s first encounter with the British. This novel traces what came after that encounter.

The tribe we met in the first novel has scraped together enough money to send one of its own, young Obi, to England for an education. Obi returns to his homeland, and this novel is the result of what follows.

The title tells it all. From Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi”:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

Obi doesn’t fit. He isn’t British, but he also is no longer truly at one with his tribe. He is bewildered by both the colonial culture and the tribal culture. Indeed, it is a society which is nearly impossible to navigate. Obi does not meet with a good end, which comes as no surprise, since the novel opens with his conviction in court for accepting a bribe. The rest of the novel is a flashback showing how Obi arrived at this point.

As a novel about the problems of Colonial Rule in Africa, it is pretty good. It’s not a good society; it would be hard to spin the situation as good for anyone, African or British. It would be a simple matter to spin this novel into a question about the merits, or lack thereof, of colonial rule. But, to do so reduces Obi to a prop.

Think about his plight, not the plight of Africa as a whole, but the plight of the individual, and it is suddenly obvious that there is a much deeper problem to ponder.

Obi returns from England. The hopes of his tribe are on him—they paid for his education and now they want a return on their investment. Obi is meant to get a job in the government, from which he can return favors to the tribe. There is a weight of expectation on Obi, not just to provide for his family and his tribe, but to keep up the appearance of being a success.

It is not long before Obi finds himself mired in debt. On top of that, he falls in love with a women, who it turns out is from an abhorrent caste. Now such things shouldn’t matter in a modern Westernized society, but tribal memories die hard and everyone in his tribe, his parents included, are adamant that Obi cannot have a relationship with a woman of this class.

Now put yourself in Obi’s situation. What do you do? Is there any way to live in that society without disappointing someone? Do you discard the expectations of your tribe, your family, or your employers?

And thus begins the slow slide into accepting bribes to square the circle, but of course that doesn’t work either. It isn’t at all clear that Achebe has given any way out for Obi.

And therein lies the deep matter of this novel; how do you live a life when there is absolutely no way to fit into the world in which you find oneself? Why are the magi in Eliot’s poem no longer at ease?

I had seen birth and death
But had thought they were different: this Birth was
Hard and Bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

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