And out of all that vast shroud of darkness there had always been one sunburst, but it was gone. I went away from the university that night feeling melancholy. They had a pile of books sitting on a desk and they looked at them with pride and said, “Rhetoric? We’ve changed that. We have so many students (units such as 100 ccs. of water) to a class and so many classes to a professor and . . .” Squads right, column left and to hell with it, we’ve got too many to educate.
Your own definition of teachers will forever stand out in my mind as something beautiful and almost as rare as radium. It takes a genius to teach. You are that genius. From your rhetoric class, large as it was, there have come men I have since met, men who are thinking. No matter that those things fell upon so much barren ground. That could not be helped and never can be. There are many of us, casting about in this world, who remember and revere you. I have heard them speak.
Do not allow this to upset you in any way. Put it down that I am a rebel, a nonconformist, anything. Some of these days I am going to set down these things in a book, and your rhetoric, very battered now, will be open on the desk beside me when I write it.
At twenty-five it might be dangerous to think such things, it might be better to leave these matters to more regimented minds than mine.
However and whatever . . . This letter was to be written to you this morning, hoping that you were well and telling you that you helped me in more ways than one . . . and here it is, some kind of a rabid essay on education and I’m certain you’ve had quite enough of that.
Anyway, here’s the best in the world to the best man I ever met.
|Related Sites |