以前学英语时读到的一篇文章，The Achievement of Desire
2013-12-04 12:13阅读：
前言：
昨晚散步时突然想起了以前读到的这篇文章。这篇文章节选自作者Richard Rodriguez的自传《Hunger of
Memory》。作者出身于一个来自墨西哥的美国移民家庭。作者在文中回忆总结了自己这的人生是如何一路走过来的。因为作者的家庭背景，他在成长过程中遭遇了文化认同的困难，并自己试图寻找解决之道——成为一名'scholarship
boy'。抱着融入主流社会的想法，渴求学业上的成功，非常努力，最后却发现所掌握的不过是某种apparent
learning。后来他沿着这条道一路走到黑，成了一位文艺复兴文学领域的杰出学者，但是从始自终情感上都觉得挺苦逼的。
这篇文章对我的影响蛮大的。一方面，这篇文章首次向我展示了英文非虚构写作的魅力。文章能够把自己的故事讲得那么动人，情感表述的那么准确，这是我在所读的中文书籍与杂志中不曾见过的。另一方面，作者自述的'scholarship
boy'也让我觉得有同感。就比如文中讲到作者中学时读柏拉图的《理想国》，虽然完全看不懂但是还是死啃，只是为了刷完全书后可以把它从书单上划掉。类似的傻事我也做过。
正文：
I stand in the
ghetto classroom - 'the guest
speaker' - attempting to lecture
on the mystery
of the sounds of our
words to rows of diffident
students. 'Don't you hear it?
Listen! The music of our
words. ‘Sumer is
i-cumen in. .
. .’ And songs on the
car radio. We need Aretha
Franklin's voice to fill plain
words with music - her
life.' In the face of
their empty stares, I try
to create an enthusiasm. But
the girls in the back row
turn to watch some boy
passing outside. There are
flutters of smiles, waves. And
someone's mouth elongates heavy,
silent words through the barrier
of glass. Silent words -
the lips straining to shape
each voiceless syllable:
'Meet meee late errr.
' By the door, the
instructor smiles at me,
apparently hoping that I will
be able to spark some
enthusiasm in the class. But
only one student seems to
be listening. A girl, maybe
fourteen. In this gray room
her eyes shine with
ambition. She keeps
nodding and nodding at all
that I say; she even
takes notes. And each time
I ask a question, she
jerks up and down in her
desk like a marionette, while
her hand waves over the
bowed heads of her classmates.
It is myself (as a boy)
I see as she faces me
now (a man in my
thirties).
The boy who first entered
a classroom barely able to
speak English, twenty years
later concluded his studies in
the stately quiet of the
reading room in the British
Museum. Thus with one sentence
I can summarize my academic
career. It will be harder
to summarize what sort of
life connects the boy to
the man.
With every award, each graduation
from one level of education
to the next, people I'd
meet would congratulate me.
Their refrain always the same:
'Your parents must be very
proud.' Sometimes then they'd
ask me how I managed it
- my 'success.' (How?) After
a while, I had several
quick answers to give in
reply. I'd admit, for one
thing, that I went to an
excellent grammar school. (My
earliest teachers, the nuns,
made my success their ambition.)
And my brother and both
my sisters were very good
students. (They often brought
home the shiny school trophies
I came to want.) And my
mother and father always
encouraged me. (At every
graduation they were behind the
stunning flash of the camera
when I turned to look at
the crowd.)
As important as these factors
were, however, they account
inadequately for my academic
advance. Nor do they suggest
what an odd success I
managed. For although I was
a very good student, I
was also a very bad
student. I was a 'scholarship
boy,' a certain kind of
scholarship boy. Always successful,
I was always unconfident.
Exhilarated by my progress. Sad.
I became the prized student
- anxious and eager to
learn. Too eager, too anxious
- an imitative and unoriginal
pupil. My brother and two
sisters enjoyed the advantages I
did, and they grew to be
as successful as I, but
none of them ever seemed
so anxious about their
schooling. A second-grade student,
I was the one who came
home and corrected the 'simple'
grammatical mistakes of our
parents. ('Two negatives make a
positive.') Proudly I announced
- to my family's startled
silence - that a teacher
had said I was losing all
trace of a Spanish accent.
I was oddly annoyed when
I was unable to get
parental help with a homework
assignment. The night my father
tried to help me with an
arithmetic exercise, he kept
reading the instructions, each
time more deliberately, until I
pried the textbook out of
his hands, saying, 'I'll try
to figure it out some
more by myself.'
When I reached the third
grade, I outgrew such behavior.
I became more tactful, careful
to keep separate the two
very different worlds of my
day. But then, with
ever-increasing intensity, I devoted
myself to my studies. I
became bookish, puzzling to all
my family. Ambition set me
apart. When my brother saw
me struggling home with stacks
of library books, he would
laugh, shouting: 'Hey, Four
Eyes!' My father opened a
closet one day and was
startled to find me inside,
reading a novel. My mother
would find me reading when
I was supposed to be
asleep or helping around the
house or playing outside. In
a voice angry or worried
or just curious, she'd ask:
'What do you see in your
books?' It became the family's
joke. When I was called
and wouldn't reply, someone
would say I must be
hiding under my bed with
a book.
(How did I manage my
success?)
What I am about to say
to you has taken me more
than twenty years to admit:
A primary reason for
my success in the classroom
was that I
couldn't forget that
schooling was changing me and
separating me from the life
I enjoyed before
becoming a student. That
simple realization! For years I
never spoke to anyone about
it. Never mentioned a thing
to my family or my
teachers or classmates. From a
very early age, I understood
enough, just enough about my
classroom experiences to keep
what I knew repressed, hidden
beneath layers of embarrassment.
Not until my last months
as a graduate student, nearly
thirty years old, was it
possible for me to think
much about the reasons for
my academic success. Only then.
At the end of my
schooling, I needed to determine
how far I had moved from
my past. The adult finally
confronted, and now must
publicly say, what the child
shuddered from knowing and could
never admit to himself or
to those many faces that
smiled at his every success.
('Your parents must be very
proud. . . .')
At the end, in the British
Museum (too distracted to finish
my dissertation) for weeks I
read, speed-read, books by
modern educational
theorists, only to find
infrequent and slight mention of
students like me. (Much more
is written about the more
typical case, the lower-class
student who barely is helped
by his schooling.) Then one
day, leafing through Richard
Hoggart's The Uses of
Literacy, I found, in
his description of the
scholarship boy, myself. For the
first time I realized that
there were other students like
me, and so I was able
to frame the meaning of
my academic success, its
consequent price - the
loss.
Hoggart's description is distinguished,
at least initially, by deep
understanding. What he grasps
very well is that the
scholarship boy must move
between environments,
his home and the classroom,
which are at cultural extremes,
opposed. With his family, the
boy has the intense pleasure
of intimacy, the family's
consolation in feeling public
alienation. Lavish emotions texture
home life. Then,
at school, the instruction
bids him to trust lonely
reason primarily. Immediate needs
set the pace of his
parents' lives. From his mother
and father the boy learns
to trust spontaneity and
nonrational ways of knowing.
Then, at school,
there is mental calm. Teachers
emphasize the value of a
reflectiveness that opens a
space between thinking and
immediate action.
Years of schooling must pass
before the boy will be
able to sketch the cultural
differences in his day as
abstractly as this. But he
senses those differences early.
Perhaps as early as the
night he brings home an
assignment from school and finds
the house too noisy for
study.
He has to be more and
more alone, if he is
going to 'get on.' He
will have, probably unconsciously,
to oppose the ethos of
the heart, the intense
gregariousness of the working-class
family group. Since everything
centres upon the living-room,
there is unlikely to be a
room of his own; the
bedrooms are cold and
inhospitable, and to warm them
or the front room, if
there is one, would not
only be expensive, but would
require an imaginative leap -
out of the tradition -
which most families are not
capable of making. There is
a comer of the living-room
table. On the other side
Mother is ironing, the wireless
is on, someone is singing
a snatch of song or
Father says intermittently whatever
comes into his head. The
boy has to cut himself
off mentally, so as to do
his homework, as well as
he can.
The next day, the lesson
is as apparent at school.
There are even rows of
desks. Discussion is ordered.
The boy must rehearse his
thoughts and raise his hand
before speaking out in a
loud voice to an audience
of classmates. And there is
time enough, and silence, to
think about ideas (big ideas)
never considered at home by
his parents.
Not for the working-class child
alone is adjustment to the
classroom difficult. Good schooling
requires that any student alter
early childhood
habits. But the
working-class child is usually
least prepared for the change.
And, unlike many middle-class
children, he goes home and
sees in his parents a way
of life not only different
but starkly opposed to that
of the classroom. (He enters
the house and hears his
parents talking in ways his
teachers discourage.)
Without extraordinary determination and
the great assistance of others
at home and at school-
there is little chance for
success. Typically most working-class
children are barely changed by
the classroom. The exception
succeeds. The relative few
become scholarship students. Of
these, Richard Hoggart estimates,
most manage a fairly graceful
transition. Somehow they learn
to live in the two very
different worlds of their day.
There are some others, however,
those Hoggart pejoratively terms
'scholarship boys,' for whom
success comes with special
anxiety. Scholarship boy: good
student, troubled son. The child
is 'moderately endowed,' intellectually
mediocre, Hoggart supposes -
though it may be more
pertinent to note the special
qualities of temperament in the
child. High-strung child. Brooding.
Sensitive. Haunted by the
knowledge that one chooses
to become a student.
(Education is not an inevitable
or natural step in growing
up.) Here is a child who
cannot forget that his academic
success distances him from a
life he loved, even from
his own memory of
himself.
Initially, he wavers, balances
allegiance. ('The boy is himself
[until he reaches, say, the
upper forms] very much of
hath the worlds
of home and school. He is
enormously obedient to the
dictates of the world of
school, but emotionally still
strongly wants to continue as
part of the family circle.')
Gradually, necessarily, the balance
is lost. The boy needs to
spend more and more time
studying, each night enclosing
himself in the silence permitted
and required by intense
concentration. He takes his
first step toward academic
success, away from his
family.
From the very first days,
through the years following, it
will be with his parents
- the figures of lost
authority, the persons toward
whom he feels deepest love
- that the change will be
most powerfully measured. A
separation will unravel between
them. Advancing in his studies,
the boy notices that his
mother and father have not
changed as much as he.
Rather, when he sees them,
they often remind him of
the person he once was
and the life he earlier
shared with them. He realizes
what some Romantics also know
when they praise the working
class for the capacity for
human closeness, qualities of
passion and spontaneity, that
the rest of us experience
in like measure only in
the earliest part of our
youth. For the Romantic, this
doesn't make working-class life
childish. Working-class life challenges
precisely because it is an
adult way of
life.
The scholarship boy reaches a
different conclusion. He cannot
afford to admire his parents.
(How could he and still
pursue such a contrary life?)
He permits himself embarrassment
at their lack of education.
And to evade nostalgia for
the life he has lost, he
concentrates on the benefits
education will bestow upon him.
He becomes especially ambitious.
Without the support of old
certainties and consolations, almost
mechanically, he assumes the
procedures and doctrines of the
classroom. The kind of
allegiance the young student
might have given his mother
and father only days earlier,
he transfers to the teacher,
the new figure of authority.
'[The scholarship boy] tends to
make a father-figure of his
[teacher],' Hoggart observes.
But Hoggart's calm prose only
makes me recall the urgency
with which I came to
idolize my grammar school
teachers. I began by imitating
their accents, using their
diction, trusting their every
direction. The very first facts
they dispensed, I grasped with
awe. Any book they told
me to read, I read -
then waited for them to
tell me which books I
enjoyed. Their every casual
opinion I came to adopt
and to trumpet when I
returned home. I stayed after
school 'to help' -to get
my teacher's undivided attention.
It was the nun's encouragement
that mattered most to me.
(She understood exactly what -
my parents never seemed to
appraise so well- all my
achievements entailed.) Memory gently
caressed each word of praise
bestowed in the classroom so
that compliments teachers paid
me years ago come quickly
to mind even today.
The enthusiasm I felt in
second-grade classes I flaunted
before both my parents. The
docile, obedient student came
home a shrill and precocious
son who insisted on correcting
and teaching his parents with
the remark: 'My teacher told
us. . . .'
I intended to hurt my
mother and father. I was
still angry at them for
having encouraged me toward
classroom English. But gradually
this anger was exhausted,
replaced by guilt as school
grew more and more attractive
to me. I grew increasingly
successful, a talkative student.
My hand was raised in the
classroom; I yearned to answer
any question. At home, life
was less noisy than it
had been. (I spoke to
classmates and teachers more
often each day than to
family members.) Quiet at home,
I sat with my papers for
hours each night. I never
forgot that schooling had
irretrievably changed my family's
life. That knowledge, however,
did not weaken ambition.
Instead, it strengthened resolve.
Those times I remembered the
loss of my past with
regret, I quickly reminded
myself of all the things
my teachers could give me.
(They could make me an
educated man.) I tightened my
grip on pencil and books.
I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard
to forget. But one does
not forget by trying to
forget. One only remembers. I
remembered too well that
education had changed my
family's life. I would not
have become a scholarship boy
had I not so often
remembered.
Once she was sure that her
children knew English, my mother
would tell us, 'You should
keep up your Spanish.' Voices
playfully groaned in response.
'Pochos!,” my mother
would tease. I listened
silently.
After a while, I grew more
calm at home. I developed
tact. A fourth-grade student, I
was no longer the show-off
in front of my parents. I
became a conventionally dutiful
son, politely affectionate, cheerful
enough, even - for reasons
beyond choosing - my father's
favorite. And much about my
family life was easy then,
comfortable, happy in the rhythm
of our living together: hearing
my father getting ready for
work; eating the breakfast my
mother had made me; looking
up from a novel to hear
my brother or one of my
sisters playing with friends in
the backyard; in winter, coming
upon the house all lighted
up after dark.
But withheld from my mother
and father was any mention
of what most mattered to
me: the extraordinary experience
of first-learning. Late afternoon:
in the midst of preparing
dinner, my mother would come
up behind me while I was
trying to read. Her head
just over mine, her breath
warmly scented with food. 'What
are you reading?' Or, 'Tell
me about your new courses.'
I would barely respond, 'Just
the usual things, nothing
special.' (A half smile, then
silence. Her head moving back
in the silence. Silence! Instead
of the flood of intimate
sounds that had once flowed
smoothly between us, there was
this silence.) After dinner, I
would rush to a bedroom
with papers and books. As
often as possible, I resisted
parental pleas to 'save lights'
by coming to the kitchen
to work. I kept so much,
so often, to myself. Sad.
Enthusiastic. Troubled by the
excitement of coming upon new
ideas. Eager. Fascinated by the
promising texture of a brand-new
book. I hoarded the pleasures
of learning. Alone for hours.
Enthralled. Nervous. I rarely
looked away from my books
- or back on my memories.
Nights when relatives visited
and the front rooms were
warmed by Spanish sounds, I
slipped quietly out of the
house.
It mattered that education was
changing me. It never ceased
to matter. My brother and
sisters would giggle at our
mother's mispronounced words. They'd
correct her gently. My mother
laughed girlishly one night,
trying not to pronounce
sheep as
ship. From a
distance I listened sullenly.
From that distance, pretending
not to notice on another
occasion, I saw my father
looking at the title pages
of my library books. That
was the scene on my mind
when I walked home with a
fourth-grade companion and heard
him say that his parents
read to him every night.
(A strange-sounding book -
Winnie the Pooh.)
Immediately, I wanted to
know, 'What is it like?'
My companion, however, thought I
wanted to know about the
plot of the book. Another
day, my mother surprised me
by asking for a 'nice'
book to read. 'Something not
too hard you think I
might like.' Carefully I chose
one, Willa Cather's My
Antonia. But when, several
weeks later, I happened to
see it next to her bed
unread except for the first
few pages, I was furious
and suddenly wanted to cry.
I grabbed up the book and
took it back to my room
and placed it in its
place, alphabetically on my
shelf.
'Your parents must be very
proud of you.' People began
to say that to me about
the time I was in sixth
grade. To answer affirmatively,
I'd smile. Shyly I'd
smile, never betraying my sense
of the irony: I was not
proud of my mother and
father. I was embarrassed by
their lack of education. It
was not that I ever
thought they were stupid, though
stupidly I took for granted
their enormous native intelligence.
Simply, what mattered to me
was that they were not
like my teachers.
But, 'Why didn't you tell
us about the award?' my
mother demanded, her frown
weakened by pride. At the
grammar school ceremony several
weeks after, her eyes were
brighter than the trophy I'd
won. Pushing back the hair
from my forehead, she whispered
that I had 'shown' the
gringos. A
few minutes later, I heard
my father speak to my
teacher and felt ashamed of
his labored, accented words.
Then guilty for the shame.
I felt such contrary feelings.
(There is no simple roadmap
through the heart of the
scholarship boy.) My teacher was
so soft-spoken and her words
were edged sharp and clean.
I admired her until it
seemed to me that she
spoke too carefully. Sensing
that she was condescending to
them, I became nervous.
Resentful. Protective. I tried
to move my parents away.
'You both must be very
proud of Richard,' the nun
said. They responded quickly.
(They were proud.) 'We are
proud of all our children.'
Then this afterthought: 'They
sure didn't get their brains
from us.' They all laughed.
I smiled.
In fourth grade I embarked
upon a grandiose reading
program. 'Give me the names
of important books,' I would
say to startled teachers. They
soon found out that I had
in mind 'adult books.' I
ignored their suggestion of
anything I suspected was written
for children. (Not until I
was in college, as a
result, did I read
Huckleberry Finn or
Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland.) Instead, I
read The Scarlet Letter
and Franklin's
Autobiography. And
whatever I read I read
for extra credit. Each time
I finished a book, I
reported the achievement to a
teacher and basked in the
praise my effort earned. Despite
my best efforts, however, there
seemed to be more and
more books I needed to
read. At the library I
would literally tremble as I
came upon whole shelves of
books I hadn't read. So I
read and I read and I
read: Great Expectations;
all the short stories
of Kipling; The Babe
Ruth Story; the entire
first volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(A-ANSTEY); the
Iliad; Moby Dick; Gone
with the Wind; The Good
Earth; Ramona; Forever Amber;
The Lives of the Saints;
Crime and Punishment; The Pearl.
. . . Librarians
who initially frowned when I
checked out the maximum ten
books at a time started
saving books they thought I
might like. Teachers would say
to the rest of the class,
'I only wish the rest of
you took reading as seriously
as Richard obviously
does.'
But at home I would hear
my mother wondering, 'What do
you see in your books?'
(Was reading a hobby like
her knitting? Was so much
reading even healthy for a
boy? Was it the sign of
'brains'? Or was it just
a convenient excuse for not
helping around the house on
Saturday mornings?) Always, 'What
do you see. . .
?'
What did I see
in my books? I had the
idea that they were crucial
for my academic success, though
I couldn't have said exactly
how or why. In the sixth
grade I simply concluded that
what gave a book its
value was some major idea
or theme it contained. If
that core essence could be
mined and memorized, I would
become learned like my teachers.
I decided to record in a
notebook the themes of the
books that I read. After
reading Robinson Crusoe,
I wrote that its
theme was 'the value of
learning to live by oneself.'
When I completed Wuthering
Heights, I noted the
danger of 'letting emotions get
out of control.' Rereading these
brief moralistic appraisals usually
left me disheartened. I couldn't
believe that they were really
the source of reading's value.
But for many more years,
they constituted the only means
I had of describing to
myself the educational value of
books.
I entered high school having
read hundreds of books. My
habit of reading made me
a confident speaker and writer
of English. Reading also enabled
me to sense something of
the shape, the major concerns,
of Western thought. (I was
able to say something about
Dante and Descartes and Engels
and James Baldwin in my
high school term papers.) In
these various ways, books
brought me academic success as
I hoped that they would.
But I was not a good
reader. Merely bookish, I lacked
a point of view when I
read. Rather, I read in
order to acquire a point
of view. I vacuumed books
for epigrams, scraps of
information, ideas, themes -
anything to fill the hollow
within me and make me
feel educated. When one of
my teachers suggested to his
drowsy tenth-grade English class
that a person could not
have a 'complicated idea' until
he had read at least two
thousand books, I heard the
remark without detecting either
its irony or its very
complicated truth. I merely
determined to compile a list
of all the books I had
ever read. Harsh with myself,
I included only once a
title I might have read
several times. (How, after all,
could one read a book
more than once?) And I
included only those books over
a hundred pages in length.
(Could anything shorter be a
book?)
There was yet another high
school list I compiled. One
day I came across a
newspaper article about the
retirement of an English
professor at a nearby state
college. The article was
accompanied by a list of
the 'hundred most important
books of Western Civilization.'
'More than anything else in
my life,' the professor told
the reporter with finality,
'these books have made me
all that I am.' That was
the kind of remark I
couldn't ignore. I clipped out
the list and kept it for
the several months it took
me to read all of the
titles. Most books, of course,
I barely understood. While
reading Plato's Republic,
for instance, I needed
to keep looking at the
book jacket comments to remind
myself what the text was
about. Nevertheless, with the
special patience and superstition
of a scholarship boy, I
looked at every word of
the text. And by the time
I reached the last word,
relieved, I convinced myself
that I had read The
Republic. In a ceremony
of great pride, I solemnly
crossed Plato off my
list.
. . . The scholarship boy
does not straddle, cannot
reconcile, the two great
opposing cultures of his life.
His success is unromantic and
plain. He sits in the
classroom and offers those
sitting beside him no calming
reassurance about their own
lives. He sits in the
seminar room - a man with
brown skin, the son of
working-class Mexican immigrant
parents. (Addressing the professor
at the head of the table,
his voice catches with
nervousness.) There is no trace
of his parents' accent in
his speech. Instead he
approximates the accents of
teachers and classmates. Coming
from him those
sounds seem suddenly odd. Odd
too is the effect produced
when he uses
academic jargon - bubbles at
the tip of his tongue:
'Tapas. . .
negative capability. . .
vegetation imagery in Shakespearean
comedy.' He lifts an opinion
from Coleridge, takes something
else from Frye or Empson
or Leavis. He even repeats
exactly his professor's earlier
comment. All his ideas are
clearly borrowed. He seems to
have no thought of his
own. He chatters while his
listeners smile - their look
one of disdain.
When he is older and thus
when so little of the
person he was survives, the
scholarship boy makes only too
apparent his profound lack of
self-confidence. This
is the conventional assessment
that even Richard Hoggart
repeats:
[The scholarship boy] tends to
over-stress the importance of
examinations, of the piling-up
of knowledge and of received
opinions. He discovers a
technique of apparent learning,
of the acquiring of facts
rather than of the handling
and use of facts. He
learns how to receive a
purely literate education, one
using only a small part
of the personality and
challenging only a limited area
of his being. He begins
to see life as a ladder,
as a permanent examination with
some praise and some further
exhortation at each stage. He
becomes an expert imbiber and
dolerout; his competence will
vary, but will rarely be
accompanied by genuine enthusiasms.
He rarely feels the reality
of knowledge, of other men's
thoughts and imaginings, on his
own pulses. . . . He
has something of the blinkered
pony about him. . .
.
But this is criticism more
accurate than fair. The
scholarship boy is a very
bad student. He is the
great mimic; a collector of
thoughts, not a thinker; the
very last person in class
who ever feels obliged to
have an opinion of his
own. In large part, however,
the reason he is such a
bad student is because he
realizes more often and more
acutely than most other students
- than Hoggart himself-that
education requires radical
self-reformation. As a very
young boy, regarding his
parents, as he struggles with
an early homework assignment, he
knows this too well. That
is why he lacks self-assurance.
He does not forget that
the classroom is responsible for
remaking him. He relies on
his teacher, depends on all
that he hears in the
classroom and reads in his
books. He becomes in every
obvious way the worst student,
a dummy mouthing the opinions
of others. But he would
not be so bad - nor
would he become so successful,
a scholarship boy
- if he did not
accurately perceive that the
best synonym for primary'
education' is 'imitation.'
Like me, Hoggart's imagined
scholarship boy spends most of
his years in the classroom
afraid to long for his
past. Only at the very
end of his schooling does
the boy-man become nostalgic. In
this sudden change of heart,
Richard Hoggart notes:
He longs for the membership
he lost, 'he pines for
some Nameless Eden where he
never was.' The nostalgia is
the stronger and the more
ambiguous because he is really
'in quest of his own
absconded self yet scared to
find it.' He both wants
to go back and yet thinks
he has gone beyond his
class, feels himself weighted
with knowledge of his own
and their situation, which
hereafter forbids him the
simpler pleasures of his father
and mother. . . .
According to Hoggart, the
scholarship boy grows nostalgic
because he remains the uncertain
scholar, bright enough to have
moved from his past, yet
unable to feel easy, a
part of a community of
academics.
This analysis, however, only
partially suggests what happened
to me in my last years
as a graduate student. When
I traveled to London to
write a dissertation on English
Renaissance literature, I was
finally confident of membership
in a 'community of scholars.'
But the pleasure that confidence
gave me faded rapidly. After
only two or three months
in the reading room of
the British Museum, it became
clear that I had joined a
lonely community. Around me each
day were dour faces eclipsed
by large piles of books.
There were the regulars, like
the old couple who arrived
every morning, each holding a
loop of the shopping bag
which contained all their notes.
And there was the historian
who chattered madly to herself.
('Oh dear! Oh! Now, what's
this? What? Oh, my!') There
were also the faces of
young men and women worn
by long study. And everywhere
eyes turned away the moment
our glance accidentally met.
Some persons I sat beside
day after day, yet we
passed silently at the end
of the day, strangers. Still,
we were united by a
common respect for the written
word and for scholarship. We
did form a union, though
one in which we remained
distant from one another.
More profound and unsettling was
the bond I recognized with
those writers whose books I
consulted. Whenever I opened a
text that hadn't been used
for years, I realized that
my special interests and skills
united me to
a mere handful of academics.
We formed an exclusive -
eccentric! - society, separated
from others who would never
care or be able to share
our concerns. (The pages I
turned were stiff like layers
of dead skin.) I began to
wonder: Who, beside my
dissertation director and a few
faculty members, would ever read
what I wrote? and: Was my
dissertation much more than an
act of social withdrawal? These
questions went unanswered in the
silence of the Museum reading
room. They remained to trouble
me after I'd leave the
library each afternoon and feel
myself shy - unsteady, speaking
simple sentences at the grocer's
or the butcher's on my
way back to my
[apartment].
Meanwhile my file cards
accumulated. A professional, I
knew exactly how to search
a book for pertinent
information. I could quickly
assess and summarize the
usability of the many books
I consulted. But whenever I
started to write, I knew
too much (and not enough)
to be able to write
anything but sentences that were
overly cautious, timid, strained
brittle under the heavy weight
of footnotes and qualifications.
I seemed unable to dare a
passionate statement. I felt
drawn by professionalism to the
edge of sterility, capable of
no more than pedantic, lifeless,
unassailable prose.
Then nostalgia began.
After years spent unwilling to
admit its attractions, I
gestured nostalgically toward the
past. I yearned for that
time when I had not been
so alone. I became impatient
with books. I wanted experience
more immediate. I feared the
library's silence. I silently
scorned the gray, timid faces
around me. I grew to hate
the growing pages of my
dissertation on genre17 and
Renaissance literature. (In my
mind I heard relatives laughing
as they tried to make
sense of its title.) I
wanted something - I couldn't
say exactly what. I told
myself that I wanted a
more passionate life. And a
life less thoughtful. And above
all, I wanted to be less
alone. One day I heard
some Spanish academics whispering
back and forth to each
other, and their sounds seemed
ghostly voices recalling my
life. Yearning became preoccupation
then. Boyhood memories beckoned,
flooded my mind. (Laughing
intimate voices. Bounding up the
front steps of the porch.
A sudden embrace inside the
door.)
For weeks after, I turned
to books by educational experts.
I needed to learn how far
I had moved from my past
- to determine how fast I
would be able to recover
something of it once again.
But I found little. Only
a chapter in a book by
Richard Hoggart . . . I
left the reading room and
the circle of faces.
I came home. After the
year in England, I spent
three summer months living with
my mother and father, relieved
by how easy it was to
be home. It no longer
seemed very important to me
that we had little to
say. I felt easy sitting
and eating and walking with
them. I watched them,
nevertheless, looking for evidence
of those elastic, sturdy strands
that bind generations in a
web of inheritance. I thought
as I watched my mother
OIie night: of course a
friend had been right when
she told me that I
gestured and laughed just like
my mother. Another time I
saw for myself: my father's
eyes were much like my
own, constantly watchful.
But after the early relief,
this return, came suspicion,
nagging until I realized that
I had not neatly sidestepped
the impact of schooling. My
desire to do so was
precisely the measure of how
much I remained an academic.
Negatively (for that
is how this idea first
occurred to me): my need
to think so much and so
abstractly about my parents and
our relationship was in itself
an indication of my long
education. My father and mother
did not pass their time
thinking about the cultural
meanings of their experience. It
was I who described their
daily lives with airy ideas.
And yet, positively:
the ability to consider
experience so abstractly allowed
me to shape into desire
what would otherwise have
remained indefinite, meaningless
longing in the British Museum.
If, because of my schooling,
I had grown culturally separated
from my parents, my education
finally had given me ways
of speaking and caring about
that fact.
My best teachers in college
and graduate school, years
before, had tried to prepare
me for this conclusion, I
think, when they discussed texts
of aristocratic pastoral literature.
Faithfully, I wrote down all
that they said. I memorized
it: 'The praise of the
unlettered by the highly
educated is one of the
primary themes of 'elitist'
literature.' But, 'the importance
of the praise given the
unsolitary, richly passionate and
spontaneous life is that it
simultaneously reflects the value
of a reflective life.' I
heard it all. But there
was no way for any of
it to mean very much to
me. I was a scholarship
boy at the time, busily
laddering my way up the
rungs of education. To pass
an examination, I copied down
exactly what my teachers told
me. It would require many
more years of schooling (an
inevitable miseducation) in which
I came to trust the
silence of reading and the
habit of abstracting from
immediate experience - moving
away from a life of
closeness and immediacy I
remembered with my parents,
growing older - before I
turned unafraid to desire the
past, and thereby achieved what
had eluded me for so long
- the end of
education.
