On Lecturing

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.