My students will miss the Great Books culture when it's over. I'm sure of that; they'll be wrong to, but the ignorance of their children will stun them after they take a hatchet to the common core ideas of Lionel and Jacques.
But all one has to do is look at the students, only ten years my junior, to see a future when rock music is thought equal to Beethoven, science fiction equal to Shakespeare, while movies and television are what pass for great literature, past civilizations forgotten, history a structural chimera. In fifty years they will look at their children who view the world as an eternity of present and have nothing to talk with them about.
Such is the way of progress: there is no progress without regress, without trial and error, without millions dying for it and no progress if we keep going with this common core of Western books that refuses to include any writers east of Athens and Petersburg.
I look at my students, I see the coming terrible crisis, and I feel the only teacher in America who welcomes it. I don't just welcome it, I relish it. This Western-centric core deserves to die and it is precisely the populism of these students that will kill it: the long hair, the lack of hygiene, the long discursions on The Beatles and Who, the drugs, the willingness to be intoxicated in class, the resolute refusal to self-improve, the desire to see authoritarianism in every standard, this is the generation of nihilism the world desperately needs. It is a generation that will destroy the West for all time and endow the rest of the world a chance to become the elite class from which they're eternally excluded.
I teach the way I think any great teacher would: what else can I do? It is neither my job nor my ability to start the revolution for which I long, yet it will come, the readiness is all.
In a mere ten years I see the difference between my peers' quality and my students: my peers all seemed slum raised Jews or Jews' friends and neighbors, terrified of poverty, terrified of debt, terrified of return to the conditions of their parents, committed to achievement, committed to social mobility, committed to self-improvement and Bildung and Wissenschaft, seizing what was always theirs by right as whites, and their character was formidable enough to stretch to zenith any country shrewd enough to assimilate them. Today's students, Jew and gentile alike, are products of their parents GI bill and the suburbs, inevitably middle class at least, unaware of poverty's terrors, indolent, spoiled and rebellious yet completely unaware of that against which they rebel. What can this be but a trajectory that will continue my entire lifetime and long else besides?
Whispers are afoot that students are planning protests for something they've termed 'Gym Crow.' Columbia is building the gym that displaces... how many? A hundred? A thousand? Morningside Heights becomes yet another neighborhood to displace the indigenous of New York to margins so that whites can live unimpeded: the irony being that no whites will want to move in. Why distance yourself one mile from the urban element when you can put forty miles between you? Construction continues apace for neighborhoods nobody wants. Manhattan will eventually become a ghost city: a fourth house for the superclass: its skyscrapers occupied merely by corporations, Chinese food, black box theaters, highways and urban renewal projects that remain pristine because nobody lives in them.
Meanwhile the students: I know I should treat them as individuals, each with their own soul and journey, but who can look at these hundreds against hundreds and not see two undifferentiated masses. At least the pro-war demonstrators are open about their narcissism, the anti-war demonstrators clothe their carnal desire and quest for fame in a performance of care that shifts no attention to any but themselves. The anti-Vietnam demonstrations put not a single eye upon Vietnam, only upon the demonstrators. It ought go without saying that not a single one would show up to protest were there no danger of the draft. These great revolutionaries are the same spoiled American generation as any other: akin perhaps to the post-Napoleon romantics of Germany and England but with worse music and poetry. All the romantics did was provoke the reactionaries of 1848, all this generation will do is provoke Repub... need I really say it?
It will be a turbulent few years, but I simply can't imagine the edifice of civilization crumbling from the rocks of these gag revolutionaries. It can't crumble from them, it can simply atrophy as they lazily dismantle what their parents built, careless brick by brick until the edifice unintentionally falls in their dotage. Say what you will about Stalin and Lenin, they were committed to their praxis. These revolutionaries are the epitome of the white shelter, and after college they will return home to it: secure as or more than their parents that their cup in life runneth over.
Nevertheless, I fall somewhere between amused and delighted when one of the few students who deigns to notice me on the quads tells me that my kind is obsolete, that they will dispense with me, that I am r 'the establishment', proverbially called 'the man' to to be overthrown. Sadly, if they overthrow me it won't be until spring, when the gold-barred prison that is university grows uninterruptedly passionate from a schoolyear's momentum.
September 11, 1967:
Professor S: I bid you a formal and friendly welcome to Humanities A. The Columbia class in which a fortunate professor introduces you to the glories of Western Literature. My name is Professor Said, that is Sah-yeed, and I will be your guide. Many of you, I'm sure, need no further acquaintance to know how glorious it is but
(It used to be many of you)
Steven Goldenberg: Professor Suheed, I'm really sorry to interrupt but my girlfriend and I, we have to miss class on Thursday October 5th for Rosh Hashana. Is that OK?
Professor S: Of course! Why would you even need to ask such a thing?
Steve: Professor Bell doesn't allow it.
(Mr. Potato Head doesn't allow them to miss class. I suppose he won't allow babies to attend their own bris either)
Robert Silverstein: My friend in the other class will have to miss Friday the 6th too.
Professor S: Why would I object? Obligations are obligations.
(remember to fail them on a paper)
Bob: Thank you, Professor.
Professor S: You're welcome. Now I must warn you: there will be no quarter given for the syllabus we have. You see the intimidating reading list here: it is meant to be intimidating. You are students of Columbia University and were selected for your ability to become people of erudition. Any professor worth his cultivation can tell if you do the reading and tell if your writing is from any source other than yourself.
Linda Bronstein: Professor, can we ever get extensions?
Professor S: I will of course allow extensions for family and religious obligations, anyone who wouldn't is impractical, but no extensions given for any other reason. You are here to learn and you are here to read.
(She won't do the reading anyway)
You will have a new text for every class and will have a paper to write for each of them. We will introduce you to the entirety of literary civilisation from Homer to Goethe: 3000 years ago until the founding generation of the 19th century. You will also be expected to read relevant passages of literary criticism and critical texts of economics, philosophy and sociology to contemplate the conditions under which the books are written and under which you read them.
William Cavett: Excuse me Professor Sayood, but why do we need to contemplate the conditions under which the book was written?
(There's the problem kid)
Professor S: Because it affects how we read the book.
Bill: Why would it affect how we read the book?
Professor S: Because the book is not just a book, it's a text that was formed by history.
Bill: Why would we read a text formed by history? Why don't we just read history instead?
Professor S: Because this is a great way of understanding history.
Bill: I thought we were here to appreciate literature.
Professor S: Indeed, we are.
Bill: Then why are we learning about history?
Professor S: Because the two are not mutually exclusive. History makes the text, the text makes history.
Bill: I thought we were here to read great books because they're good, not because they make history.
Professor S: And that is an ongoing discussion we will have for the duration of the class.
(no it isn't you goyisher shit)
Bill: It just sounds like we're being force-fed a political agenda.
Professor S: I assure you, I did not make this curriculum, it is pre-determined by Professors Trilling and Barzun.
Bill: Even the sociology texts?
Professor S: This is not a political agenda. It's my specialty.
Bill: Is there any reason you made this your specialty?
(And Mariam wonders why I tape record everything at Columbia...)
Professor S: If you're going to be taught by people, you should let them teach you about the things they know.
Bill: Then why do you have to teach an assigned curriculum?
Judith Ginsberg: Just let the man talk!
(the man...)
Professor S: Many of you will go on to take classes with Professor Trilling, and he will tell you that the point of texts is not themselves but to elucidate the entire world of culture: a world that branches not only to places pre-approved by the orthodoxies of professors a half-century ago, but a mental journey to every place, time and field of endeavor the world yet contains: literature is just the beginning, the world of erudition is a world of intersection, it connects to paths in every other field of human endeavor: economics, sociology, history, science, even athletics and mathematics. The point of this class is a beginning, not an end. By the time you finish this class, it is my hope that you will be able to begin a mental journey that lasts your entire life and takes you each on a different, distinct path that provides a roadmap that increases the quality and meaningfulness of your lives.
(Fortunately it won't. God is great.)
Michael Kupferman: Professor Sahyuhd, does that mean that literature connects to current events too?
(Oh fuck.)
Professor S: Yes, it does, but I make it a strict policy to keep politics out of the classroom.
Mike: I don't think that's wise given the way things are today.
(a few students clap)
Professor S: Wisdom is exactly we are here to find, and the only way we can hear the wisdom of the past is if the concerns of the present are not honored at the past's expense.
Mike: But why read economics and sociology to understand what enabled these works' creation unless we apply their lessons to problems happening right now?
(more students clap, why indeed?)
Professor S: The problems of right now are not going anywhere anytime soon.
Barbara Melamed: But what if they are?
(These kids are even much bolder than the last few years'.)
Professor S: Well, I can answer that in two ways. The first is to say that even if current events subsume our lives, there are still the mundanities of everyday concerns: life and death, affairs of the heart, jealousy, guilt, shame, pride,
Daniel Kaufmann: But people are dying over there!
Professor S: Maybe so, but sir, you don't look like someone who ignores affairs of the heart.
(students laugh)
Professor S: So I would like to start this class by talking just a bit about Plato's Apology.
Carol Levy: Excuse me, Professor Sa-hed? I thought we were supposed to go in chronological order.
Professor S: Yes, and we will.
Jeffrey Rosenberg: So why are we starting with Plato?
Professor S: Because there's a Plato lesson I want to impart.
David Teitleman: I thought we were supposed to start to do Homer, Aeschylus and the books of the Torah first.
Professor S: We will get to them, but first we have to go through the class introduction.
Jeff: I'm sorry Professor Saw-heed but that's unfair. I read The Iliad already to prepare for this class.
Professor S: I'm very sorry to disappoint you, you didn't have to read anything before the first class. Today is just the introduction and I'm going to talk about the lessons in The Apology about commitment, devotion, ideals, martyrdom and political process. You see? We're not avoiding politics.
Susan Rabinowitz: I'm also sorry Professor Saw-yud, but I can't help noticing, to get to Plato you skipped over Homer, the Torah, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Herodotus.
Professor S: I suppose I have.
Sue: This is the first text on our syllabus that doesn't mention war.
(There's your star student. Ordinarily this one would be your friend, but this girl could be my worst nightmare.)
Richard Friedman: We have to talk about the war! It's the only thing that matters right now!
(everybody claps)
Sue: Please, Professor Said, can we start with the Iliad?
(you need this girl on your side, keep ignoring that she's pretty)
Professor S: Alright, yes, we'll start with The Iliad.
(nearly the whole class applauded)
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