Tag Archives: liberal arts

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Is Shakespeare Dead?

So did Mark Twain entitle his famous essay that is a sharp, satirical look at Shakespearean authorship. In it he calls attention to the fact that most of the things we “know” about Shakespeare’s life are based on conjecture, the kind of conjecture that is itself, as so often happens with historical authors, back-formed from various details in his corpus. Hilariously, at the opening of the second chapter, Twain writes, “When I was a Sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about him,” and he goes on to show how Satan’s reputation is built largely on conjecture, not clear facts. That, of course, is what he compares our knowledge of Shakespeare’s life to.

Twain’s satirical piece is meant to show us that the historical “Shakespeare,” himself largely a theory anyway, is not likely to be the true author of the Shakespearean corpus. He is, rather, likely to be a construct based on bits and pieces of that corpus. What we envision to be his physical body is reconstituted from the body of his work, causing his actual corpse to roll over in the grave. All amusing, all satiric, all well worth a few minutes of your time to read.[1]

I wish that the peevish students of the University of Pennsylvania, where I myself studied literature at one point, had read Twain before they demanded the removal of the picture of Shakespeare from the foyer of the building of the English Department. The painting was replaced with a picture of Audre Lorde, the well-known Lesbian feminist poet who passed away in 1992.

But returning to Shakespeare, I want to stress that while the physical human being, the man who was called Shakespeare is, like Audre Lorde, quite dead—whether he actually wrote any of the Shakespearean corpus or not—the one we call Shakespeare is in fact a tome, a ponderous tome, filled with marvelous plays that come alive for the reader and even more alive for the viewer and hearer of them, the person who goes to the theater to view the spectacle. I can remember my great professor, Philip Ambrose at the University of Vermont, stressing this very point with me in a Greek tragedy class. We were reading the Trojan Women, and he did not want us ever to lose sight of the fact that that play was a sight, a spectacle, visceral, real, meant to be performed, not just read. That is Euripides, and that is Shakespeare. Note the present tense. Euripides, like Shakespeare, is alive today. We can perform them both, we can pick them up. They have become their text and when we read them, when we perform them, we bring them back to life.

But we must, of course, read them, we must, of course, have access to them, and most importantly be encouraged to read them, perhaps in our teen years, especially at college or university. I don’t think most folks will just pick up a volume of Euripides in translation on their own and read him. I don’t think most folks would even think about learning ancient Greek to do so. Indeed, even the headiest college student is not inclined to take a language on his or her own, not inclined to study an ancient language without some reason to do so. Maybe the college will require at least some courses in literature. But the trend is going the other direction, of course, as colleges and universities are increasingly adopting a more practical approach, in some cases becoming more trade-schools.[2] I took a language in college because it was required. I took Latin because I had heard the professor was one of the best that Dickinson had. I only added Greek because that same professor, Philip Lockhart, encouraged me to do so. Years later, at Vermont, reading Greek with yet another Philip, this time with the saintly name of Ambrose, I was so glad I had added Greek those four years prior.

My point is this: if you send your child off to college, I hope you encourage her to go there to get an education, not a job. Of course, you want your child to be employed and to find a vocation that will make him happy, if indeed it is even possible “to find” a vocation. Rather, it is only possible to harken unto it, for the very word “vocation” implies that the job “calls” you, rather than you “find” it. Add to this that true happiness cannot be found in one’s job. It can only be found in one’s heart. You could have a rather unhappy job and still be happy. You could have the perfect job, and be quite unhappy. I know many college professors who fall into this latter category.

No, I’m not advocating that everyone study Greek. But I am suggesting that everyone who has the chance to read Shakespeare do so. He’s alive, even if he is no longer regularly required reading. The same goes for Homer, whether read more quickly in translation or more painstakingly in the original. And Euripides, yes, him too, and Virgil, and Dante, and Milton. Read them precisely because they are alive, and they will tell you something that will last you not one day but a lifetime. And if you’re listening carefully, they may, by the time you’re done reading, have whispered to you the very words that will provide you with happiness, the happiness that can’t come from “job satisfaction” or “finding the right vocation,” but can only come from within, from the heart.

Well, then, is Shakespeare dead? Only if we let him die.

[1][1] Easily found at pagebypagebooks.com.

[2] Alas, the university that I spoke about in last week’s blog did, in the end, decide to produce a rather slender core, cutting out, with a single vote, Shakespeare, Homer and Virgil.

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: “The sword over my head”

I found myself confused by his reference to the “sword over his head.” There I was, at a gathering of some of the brightest stars of any university, enjoying a glass of red under the shade of a pavilion just a few miles from a major university’s campus, discussing, of all things, their core curriculum changes. I found it surprising that I, a mere novelist, should be invited. “Perhaps I have been summoned to this elegant wine-and-cheese gathering,” I ruminated, “because they know I care about liberal education. Or perhaps because I blog regularly?” I wasn’t sure.

It did not matter to me, as I knew that I should relish my conversations with them all—historians (for there was more than one there), a physicist, an art historian and, best of all, literature professors, for again there was more than one professor of literature. They were there to consider how the changes to their new core proposal would be implemented.

I was skeptical, of course, about trimming too much out of their core, and some of them at least seemed to value my opinion. I cautioned them about removing history courses—as our country’s recent leaders, for example, seem to have forgotten to heed the lessons of history—and non-English language study as we live in a world where understanding other cultures through the way they think (i.e. their languages) is becoming more and more important. (Perhaps you will recall from previous blogs that I have a close friend who is a philologist and I often accompany him to conferences on literature, art or even linguistics.) I suppose that association alone has biased me a bit, since many of those conferences are in Europe. Fortunately, as do I, my friend can speak Italian, French, and German, so he gets around there pretty well. But to return to the wine-and-cheese affair, one conversation jumped out at me, and one phrase in it alone, to my mind, made the case all by itself for a robust liberal education.

That conversation was with a particular professor, whose department I don’t recall, and the phrase, or rather its particularly strange, in this case, application was “the sword over my head.” He said, specifically, “Well, when it comes to education these days, I really have the sword over my head.” The context did not in and of itself clarify the reference. He was speaking about how difficult it is to deal with students, and how parents complain. And he seemed to mean he was getting sick of dealing with virtually every aspect of the non-research bits of his job, i.e. teaching and all that involves, from disgruntled students to parents whose angry telephone calls he regularly receives to the occasional late homework or make-up test. It would all be easier, he seemed to say, if there were just less onerous requirements, a trimmer core that would give students more choice about what they were taking. The sword, he said, was over his head. And he seemed to say this last bit rather fiercely.

You just can’t escape when you are joined at the hip with a Samarai warrior.

I wandered off to another part of the pavilion, sipping on my Merlot. “What did this man mean?” I thought to myself. He seemed a reasonable chap, friendly and smiling, but then he closed his soliloquy on how a trimmer core would benefit most professors and students with that strange turn of phrase. Did he mean he had the sword poised over his head aggressively, like a Samurai warrior or Luke Skywalker fighting with Darth Vader?Or perhaps he meant he was holding it high, like Vuchetich and Nikitin’s grand statue of the Russian motherland perched above Volgograd, the city formally known as Stalingrad.

Well, I thought, he couldn’t possibly mean he was like Luke Skywalker. That was simply too aggressive for dealing with a parent, however disgruntled he or she might be. No, that simply wouldn’t work. But the image of the Russian motherland, perhaps that’s all he meant. Perhaps he just meant that he held aloft, via his PhD or his publication record or his status within his department, a symbol of power, a symbol that he was in control and that the parent or student or even disgruntled colleague or telemarketer who happened to call his work extension (for that, too, had come up in another conversation) would have to recognize that he, like the Russian troops who had boldly fought for Stalingrad, would not give up. He held the sword above his head, he was indeed on par with the Родина-мать!

“The Motherland Calls,” (Родина-мать зовёт!) unveiled in 1967 by artist/engineer duo Yevgeny Vuchetich and Nikolai Nikitin.

 

But surely, I thought, as I helped myself to a second (plastic) glass of Merlot, this is not what he meant. And then it donned on me, perhaps because I was thinking of my philological friend and his conferences, that this professor of whatever it was, must have meant, for all his bravado, the sword of Damocles. Yet he had forgotten or perhaps had never known the name of Damocles. Had he read Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, I wondered, in whose fifth book the story is featured?[1] Surely that’s what he meant. He knew of the story, but he didn’t know the story. He knew there was some story about a sword being over somebody’s head, but he didn’t know whose, he didn’t know how it happened, or even from what culture this marvelous story comes. “Did he even know who Cicero was or when he lived?” I mused.

Or did I in fact muse? Rather, I think, I was brooding. And that’s when one more thing donned on me. He was living proof of why preserving a robust liberal education is paramount. Yes, he had a PhD; yes, he was a college professor; but had he been liberally educated? He was his own counter-example. No, of course, a liberal education won’t enable everyone to cite every story correctly or catch all and any reference to each and every allusion. But it enables us to ask questions, formulate them better and more pointedly. It won’t remove the sword of Damocles from above any of our heads, but it might just teach us how to speak better, write better and to comport ourselves better. It might just prepare us to converse better, whether over wine-and-cheese or in a courtroom or at business meeting in France. It might just prepare us for life, to handle its pressure, how to deal gently and deftly with our fellow human beings. It won’t solve any of life’s problems, but it equips us to deal with them better. How I hope those folks decide to keep the most vital of their core requirements in place, lest they unwittingly take a seat beneath Damocles’ sword.

The Sword of Damocles, Richard Westall (1812)

 

[1] Cicero, TD 5.61: Certainly this very tyrant [Dionysius of Syracuse] made clear his opinion about how fortunate he had been. When one of his sycophantic followers, a certain Damocles, in conversation touched upon Dionysius’ prosperity, the majesty of his rule, the plentitude of his possessions, and his palace’s splendor, suggesting that there never had had been anyone more fortunate, Dionysius replied, “Well, Damocles, inasmuch as this life titillates you, do you wish to taste and experience my life and fortune? After Damocles indicated that he so desired, Dionysius ordered that the man be placed on a golden couch bedecked with a very beautiful woven tapestry, embellished with impressive works. … Yet Dionysius also ordered that amidst such luxury a gleaming sword, fastened by a horse’s hair from the ceiling, be lowered so that it dangled over that “lucky” man’s neck… Ultimately Damocles begged that tyrant to be allowed to depart as he no longer wished to be so fortunate. (My translation.)

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Cake

When I was in college, the word “cake” was used to describe an easy course or an easy test. It was “cake,” meaning of course, “a piece of cake.” That’s why, when a close college-professor friend used the word “cake” (oddly over coffee) to describe how the liberal arts core of his university was being gutted, I was surprised. (Now his university is a large, private university in Texas, which for the sake of my friend’s anonymity I won’t mention by name, as he indicated he had some qualms about anyone knowing just who was criticizing the power move by a committee hand-picked by the dean himself.) That said, that word, cake, really jumped out at me as I sat there sipping from my favorite mug, the one with Axel Munthe on it.

“What do you mean?” I queried.

“Well, it seems that students and parents alike,” he said, “don’t find the traditional core valuable enough to want to be bothered to stick with it.” Now I knew, of course, from my own liberal education at Dickinson College years ago what this meant. The core requirements are the traditional courses—some mathematics, at least one (usually two) science class(es) with time in the laboratory, a history course, a philosophy course, at least a couple of English classes, four semesters or the equivalent of a non-English language—at the best colleges and universities about half of the classes a student will take are core classes.

“What do the parents and students have to do with the core?” I asked, though I anticipated the very answer he gave.

“Well, it seems that many colleges are moving to a consumer model—if the customer demands a different product, we have to adapt. And that’s what I mean by there is confusion on the dean’s part about the cake.”

“Cake?”

“Indeed,” he continued. “In caving into the consumer model which is driven by rankings generated by a magazine [sic!], the dean has clearly confused the icing and the cake. He is treading the core of what we are doing as if it were just icing on some pre-professional/job training cake, not the cake itself, upon which the job training and pre-professional job fairs are added like sweet floral decorations on an otherwise finely baked cake. Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, and Homer are seen as mere icing, and job security as the cake. It’s upside down, man, it’s all wrong. And it seems quite clear that the dean wants it served that way, and he won’t listen to anyone telling him how inverted (and perverse) such a baking process is.”

Now I admit here that his analogy, sweet as it might be, is far from perfect. But it got me thinking. The fact is, when I look back on my own education at Dickinson the courses that shaped me the most were not simply those in my major—okay, as an Ancient Greek major, Homer’s Odyssey had, needless to say, a major impact on me and informed at least the spirit of the Curious Autobiography. But I shall never forget Milton—indeed, to this day I hold many sonnets of Milton in my mind, memorized and there to help me when I need them like Scripture—or Shakespeare or even my physics class or one of even greater impact, an anthropology class that considered South American urban poor. I studied art history, history, archery (for yes, physical education was also required) and drama, too. The core, not my individual major, was the center of my education. My major was, as my dear friend said, the icing on the cake. My education was the cake.

But it was far from “cake.” It was hard. Yet in those days my mother, Elaine, whose story I will here shamelessly put in a plug for you to buy and read, would never have thought to call and complain because I didn’t do so well in my Calculus class—it’s true, I did not. Yet not doing well in that class was actually good for me. The teacher was not a good one, yet I learned great deal from him about how not to teach, and it was amply worth the D+ that I got in that class. I am truly grateful for my broad, liberal education—an education that has stayed with me my entire life and made me into a writer, a blogger, a father, a husband, and even an amateur athlete (to the extent that I am one). Yes, archery and racquetball and a few other physical education classes shaped me (pun intended), as well.

So, where does that leave my friend—I’m afraid it leaves him about to bake a cake upside down, or rather to turn into a confectioner not the baker he signed up to be. He will be in charge of icing only. His Homer class (for he teaches Homer pretty regularly) will be under-enrolled—indeed it will probably cease to exist in a few years. And who will read Shakespeare or Milton, since the class that they were required in will also be out of the core? And many students will know no mathematics now, as it, too, has been removed. I suspect that donors may be less excited about giving to the university, as well. (I have given quite a bit to that university in the past, but now I think my money shall go to my alma mater, Dickinson, where a liberal arts education, I am glad to say, remains intact.) I hope for my friend he can prevail upon the dean to save those classic (if not classical) authors; but he doubts he can. Still, let me close this blog with a “Viva Shakespeare!” if only just for old-times’ sake (or should I say old-times’ cake?).

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Taking Chances

I had a longish, sc. longer than short but shorter than long, talk with a friend this week about taking chances. He was on the verge of taking a chance—doing something entirely out of the ordinary for him here in Italy—meeting up with a relatively famous person and having an extended conversation with the person, a well-known doctor, about the practice of medicine in Italy. He wanted to do so because he will be practicing medicine very soon in the U.S. So it was a chance for him to compare notes, as it were, with this doctor, a neurologist, about neurology back home in America and neurology here in Italy. But he was, naturally enough, a bit concerned. For one, he didn’t speak Italian. Second, he wasn’t yet familiar with the Italian train system, particularly the not-always-easy-to-use local trains that too often run “in ritardo.”

But he took the chance anyway. Not that he needed my encouragement, for we talked about this only as we were both, coincidentally, already walking to the train station at 4:30 a.m. Little did he know that he would meet up with a doctor who, though quite famous, couldn’t have been any kinder and that that same doctor would have called upon his niece, a college student majoring in English, to serve as an interpreter. On the train, as I dozed in and out of conscientiousness, I thought about how often I have taken similar chances, and how often they have worked out. I will here relay one anecdote as a kind of synecdochic exemplum.

Well over a quarter of a century now, I decided to study archaeology in Rome. I was in college, green, excited about liberal studies—for I had chosen them over the practical arts—and pretty certain that I was pretty good at these liberal studies. I could read ancient Greek, at any rate, which to me was the litmus test of anyone’s dedication to the liberal arts. (I have since then broadened my view, though Greek remains, as Winston Churchill once said, “a treat,” and Latin, “an honour.”)

There I was in Italy with only high-school French, some ancient Greek and Latin but no Italian, no iPhone (of course), no way of getting around the town save an incredibly-difficult-to-read bus map; and no knowledge of the Italian bus system. But, as I said, I took a chance, and within 12 hours of arriving, I had found my way to the center of study where I would be based for the fall semester and—and this is the amazing part—I had met the woman whom I would some day marry, though then I knew it not. All because I took chances.

You won’t be surprised to read that getting to know her required more chance taking. She had no romantic interest in me and, in fact, thought of me as rather uncouth. Some days I think I even seemed to her a ne’re-do-well scallywag in comparison to the other students; (she has since confirmed that this was her initial assessment of me). Such an impression may have arisen because of the overly casual way I dressed or my cavalier (at least when it came to grades) attitude; or maybe it was just because I tended to sit in the position furthest from the professor in class—always against the back wall; never was I the smiling student on the front row. Of all this, I am not sure. In any case, I recognized that the chances of us ever dating were not good, and to change that I had to take even more chances.

After slightly improving my attire—tasteful shoes and a new shirt can do a lot for a 20 year old—evening by evening I walked her home, as her residence was off campus. We chatted about topics from God to the stars in the sky to poetry, art and even joy of family life. Did these things win her over? Well, not any one by itself, I’m sure, but after many a walk home I think they collectively had some effect. Within two years, we did, after all, get married and wound up having that family we (at least I, at the time) had dreamt about so many years before. All because of a willingness to take chances.

And that one story, I think, can stand in for many others. I won’t tell how eventually I asked her out for dinner, or how I once brought her a rose, even though we were just friends, as we stood next to Bramante’s Tempietto on the Gianicolo, or how those “friends” finally kissed, right there by that selfsame Tempietto, just a few days before the program ended. She would stay on in Rome for another seven months until, after what seemed to me an eternity, even though I wrote her a letter every day, I would see her again. No, those things I leave aside in the name of good taste. But, although I won’t mention them, I will say this: none of them would have happened unless I, and she too, had been willing to take some chances.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Cut to the Core

liberal-arts
A Young Man Being Introduced to the Liberal Arts by Sandro Boticelli, c. 1484.

A few weeks ago, in a blog perhaps uninspiringly entitled, “The Difficult Road,” I wrote about how valuable my college education has proved to be, how life-changing a course in anthropology was, how moving a course in history was, how challenging a course in Latin or Greek turned out to be. Hearing, if only imperfectly, the voice of Homer, considering the ways that party politics have stayed constant from antiquity to today, reflecting on the crisis of urban poverty and crime—these are just a few of the core issues that I was privileged to consider at Dickinson College, where I studied so many years ago.

Photo by Doug Kerr

Coincidentally I have a friend who teaches in a college here in Texas which is undergoing deep reflection on what constitutes a liberal education. They are looking at their own core issues. I say core issues because my friend’s institution is, in fact, reexamining what some call distribution requirements but others, more metaphorically, call the core, for those studies do in fact form the very core of what constitutes a liberal arts degree. At his institution there are a number of folks who want to trim that core significantly, chiefly for practical reasons. Some want to see the mathematics requirement eliminated (me genoito, St. Paul once wrote—“God forbid!”), as some students don’t like it; others, the science requirement curtailed, still others, literature and art removed from the core (nefas! [Latin for “an abomination”]) —after all, they say, literature isn’t everyone’s cup of tea—and finally, the study of non-English language done away with (double nefas!). Everyone speaks English nowadays, they argue. Besides, they add, students can simply elect to take those things on their own. And, they add pragmatically, the parents are wont to complain when their children find this or that course distasteful, uninteresting, and—and this is the big one—too time-consuming, too hard. There is no need to impose language or literature or art or even math on anyone. Those who have interest in math, can simply choose to study it; those with interest in language, can do the same. One of their more vocal proponents, so I heard, spoke at a town hall meeting, citing, a la ancient Greek rhetoric, the case of his own children: they simply hate, he stated contentiously, taking “superfluous” courses that are not in their area of study. His children, he apparently argued, would do much better (or at least be much happier) were they allowed simply to take courses in which they had genuine interest. Their grades would be better, their attitude better, their experience of college, much better overall.welcome

Now on the surface of it, that argument might seem to make sense. It is at least in part, right. No doubt the grades of the students—and I don’t mean just one person’s children but all students—would be higher. No doubt the students would seem happier, as they could simply take whatever they wanted. And, at any rate, if they were unhappy, they would have no one to blame but themselves. All true.

But the rationale for core requirements isn’t to make college enjoyable for students. College is, for many people, a very enjoyable and even “fun” time in their lives; but it is fun in spite of, in most cases, not because of the core requirements. I remember signing up for classes that I didn’t really want to take but I was required to take. And I made the most of them. I learned to enjoy a class in something that I failed at first to appreciate because I knew that somehow it was ultimately beneficial. I didn’t know then, but that somehow was the result of a group of faculty members sitting around a table and determining for me what was good for me. Their authority for that assessment lay in their expertise, their study, their publications and, yes, their instincts. They did not consider the complaints of students. They did not consider the much more vociferous complaints of parents. They did not have a “target number” of credits that they were aiming for. Rather, they considered only what they sincerely believed was good for me, or at least me envisioned as the average Dickinson student. And though I didn’t then know precisely why I was thankful for their guidance, I was ultimately very thankful for it.

I say ultimately because at the time—like nearly everyone, I had fun in college in spite of the workload, not because of it—I would never have said that I was happy to have all those distribution requirements. But I understood the reason for them, even then. And perhaps, in some general way, I was grateful for them, even then. I am more grateful for them now because I know what they did for me: they forced me to learn. To learn mathematics, science, art and even Latin. But I would never have been able to say as much then or now, had the Dickinson core been cut to its core, been trimmed, been decimated in the name of some practical goal like the rate of graduation, appeasing overly concerned parents or making students’ college experience generally happier or more enjoyable. In fact, I would have been cut to my own core, for my intellectual and to some extent spiritual core was formed then and now is and will forever be indebted to that liberal arts education that I received so many years ago. I say it again: I would have been cut to what would ultimately form my own core.books-travel

So I wish my friend and his college well. Would that that institution come to its senses and hold fast to the core of its curriculum, of its very being, and preserve its character that it might vouchsafe that character to those whom it seeks to educate for a better life and a better future. What for each student might well become his or her very core is at stake.

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: The Difficult Road

I have a good and richly devout friend who says no one but God can really change anyone. All change, he insists, must come from on high. Well, at some deep, theological level, he may just be right. But in the world in which I live, I’ve seen a lot of things help one at least to see the need for change, and therefore, I think, it may be useful to look carefully at my friend’s formula. Maybe there are a lot of different ways that God changes people. Could he do so through other people, especially those involved in one’s life in certain key ways?

ancient-pathLong ago (in 1372, to be precise) Boccaccio wrote to Petrarch, suggesting that he had been put on the right path by none other than Petrarch himself. That path, Boccaccio states, is the “ancient path” that Petrarch had traced out with so much vigor and talent that “he could not be stopped by any obstacle or even by the difficult road.” Petrarch was, in fact, Boccaccio’s teacher. And what Boccaccio had learned from Petrarch was presumably the same thing that students of another teacher of rhetoric, a millennium earlier, had tried to teach his students: the path of virtue, a path opened by rhetoric and persuasion. That ancient teacher was named Cicero, the Roman statesman/philosopher par excellence. But more on him another time.

For now, I would prefer to return to my friend’s central premise, namely that God alone can transform someone. Again, that may be true in a theological sense, but in a practical sense, I think I agree with Boccaccio: education can, and in particular a great teacher—and that teacher need not be a Petrarch or a Cicero—has a peculiar role in that transformational work. Thus, what is known as a liberal arts education can produce some startling and quite valuable results. LucyJonesTeapot

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Indeed, I would say that the most valuable thing I own is not my great-great-grandmother Lucy Hughes Jones’ tea pot or her not-quite-Welsh (really Bavarian) cheese plate or even the old black trunk that transported them both, but my liberal education. At Dickinson I read Milton for the first time, and he taught me to understand what faith was long before I had faith to speak of. Plato led me to think about the best things—he called them forms—and he did so in his original Greek. Shakespeare taught me how to laugh, to care, to love and even to speak and write more dexterously. And Richard Wright made me at least a bit more aware of what it is like to be scared, make mistakes, and to understand such fear and error by looking through a poignantly pathetic character’s eyes.

And these were just the literature classes. I took an anthropology class, too, that educated me as to how poor so many folks in this world are. Subsequently, I would myself go to China and, later, Ethiopia and understand in person what I had read about and studied years before. And history, what can I say about that? I learned to love history from a great professor named Leon Fitts. He could bring Rome alive like no other. For another history class, I wrote a paper about my family’s history. 9781480814738_COVER.inddWas that the prototype of The Curious Autobiography? I’m not sure, but I think it may have had something ultimately to do with the scribbling down of that collection of tales. And Latin. Where do I start? Where do I end? If in the manner of the forty-third verse of Virgil’s second Georgic, I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths, could I ever truly explain?

What changed me the most? While I agree with my devout friend that encountering and wrestling with God is the most transformative moment one can have, one of the most important ways change has come to me is through the echoing ideas that found a permanent seat in my mind during my college years. In any case, I know the answer to a question a bit different from the one that opens this paragraph. That question is simply what the most valuable thing I own might be. I can say without hesitation that that most prized thing is my liberal arts education—not the degree itself but the degree to which it changed the way I think—for by it I learned to embark on Boccaccio’s (or was it Petrarch’s?) ancient path and to appreciate life’s journey along the difficult road.

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