This essay was written to my students who had asked me why I became an English teacher.
I am a teacher of English. Everyone I know has asked me, at least once, why I torture myself trying to teach the most indifferent, the least alive, the most yahoo-ish of people -- high school adolescents. A good question.
My answer begins with the inspiration of a man who taught English and drama in my high school. The whole complex matrix of who I am as a teacher can be traced to the simple patience and conscientiousness of one man.
John Pearson was about thirty, of middling height, with straight peach-sandy hair, an oval face, slender like an egg's shell and seined with wrinkles, and a goatee that jutted out sharply. He spoke best with his hands -- they tumbled the words over, set them up, partnered them -- so that what he said was etched indelibly on the eyes, after-images of sound. That was John's greatest talent: making people see long after they had observed. He was kind without sentiment and gentle without condescension. And he was brutally murdered on July 3, 1971.
I met him when I was in his production of West Side Story. He had strung a rag-tag group of lumpish adolescents into a pearl necklace of a show. He showed us how to take pride in our work, to see in ourselves resources that we either denied or ignored. Later, through a fluke of casting, I was chosen for the lead role of El Gallo in The Fantasticks. I refined my edges for him for six grueling weeks until I stood, as I then thought, as an icon of what he wanted. He was my only audience, my only critic. And he performed magnificently. When I was accepted to college, he staged a barbecue for me and my friends in celebration. As we stood together watching the sun set, he turned to me and said, "When I die, I hope to go to heaven and do the technical direction for sunsets." The remark was private and undistilled; I would have conquered the world for him then.
I think he knew well what seeds he'd planted in my soul, but he left me to grow on my own, never in the pale light of his self. And then he left me. Or so it seemed. In circumstances as bizarre as they were brutal, John was stabbed twenty-one times in the head and chest by a hitchhiker he'd picked up. For all of us who had sat around and listened, doors and windows had been shut. Slowly, we made accommodations for his absence. The rest of the world sewed up the gap, and he passed away like an erratic heartbeat.
At first his death so numbed me that I did not feel his death. Only later could I feel the full pain of his silence, like heating coming to a cold house. I then set for myself the goal of realizing in my life what had been unrealized in his. I could not accept a world where John did not live, and even though I could acquiesce in the pain of his death, I could not give my assent to his silence. I began to wrestle with a ghost.
By this time I was a freshman at Harvard. I had struggled with this ghost for almost a year. I had begun to do some volunteer teaching in the community. Caught up in the waning politics of the time, I stepped into the breach of the world with my John-model of teacher perfection, ready, like Joan of Arc, to burn for the faith. Looking back on it, I can't say this time of virtuous illusion was wrong. I certified much of myself to the world and I felt a certain authenticity which I had never had before. But it was at this point that my sense of savior began to wane and, with it, the iconic edifice I'd built to John.
Only that lag between his death and my understanding of it could have helped me judiciously sort out the John who really was from the John who was tinged with myth. I realized that my competition with John happened because of the struggle we all go through when we look back at the tangled lace of our lives and try to unthread a particular memory, a particular influence. I learned that there is no such thing as pure memories; they are tainted by wishful thinking, blindness, and deceit. I found that if we cannot look honestly at our memories, then we must look at them dishonestly. There is no middle path. Either we recognize our deceit and correct it or live a lie with a straight face. Through John, I had gained insight into my ways, had come to know my deceptions, and in knowing them, had come a little closer to knowing my own self.
I also learned that inspiration does not lie in what a person does for us but in what a person makes us do for ourselves. The memory of a special person is deadened when we rely on the memory as a substitute for active engagement with the world, when we spend too much time remembering and not enough time doing. This requires honesty and humility, to face squarely our limitations and yet work against them every minute. It means a look into the mirror, not back over the shoulder.
So now I teach English. I still try to communicate the vitality of literature, but, a little chastened, I also strive to make my students capable of surviving a vague and vicious world. I want them to perceive themselves in new lights through reading and writing. I want them to be able to pierce through artifice, their own no less than others', yet be sensitive enough to understand the need for illusion. I want them to know how fragile each individual human being is, and, at the same time, know the immense vaults of strength each human has. I want them to treasure their own innocence, yet not be trapped by their own naïveté. All of this indefinite, unproportional stream-of-thought answers the why of teaching. Like John, who showed me beyond his death, I want others to see long after they've observed. In life, there is no greater or more difficult enterprise; without it, then we truly die to the world. That is not what John taught; it is the reason I teach.