THE TEACHER

THE TEACHER: "From The Colorado Quarterly, Summer 1969"

   If I were a menial clerk, to whose gloom a Dostoevski or a Melville could give cosmic importance, then readily would I win your understanding. We are in an age the sensibilities of which are riveted to the absurd and what, after all, is more absurd than filling a ledger book with numerals, sorting out dead letters, filing away last year's purchase orders or pulling a lever in a factory? If I made my livelihood in so dreary a fashion, you would accept my gloom as being inevitable, deem it significant, and find in it an occasional metaphor for your own misgivings, whatever your employment; you would offer me understanding, empathy, sympathy, at least something more meaningful than what you now offer me, which is flattering but undue praise, or what usually is called "a good press." Were my life filled with physical danger and pain, were mine the life of a hunter, a mountain climber or a boxer, I then would be judged to be a kind of existential hero, for my temperament is naturally introspective. Would that I were a revolutionary, for Christ's sake! But in fact I am a high school teacher, a teacher of the physical sciences, and though compliments, even admiration, periodically come my way, they are presented not with understanding nor with respect but out of social necessity, in precisely the way one might admire the wife of an alcoholic: what she puts up with -- it's heroic!


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