HOMAGE TO JERRY

Jerry Fresia has written a simply lovely response to my exclamation that I love to teach, a response that warms my heart and fills my lungs with air. At the end of his marvelous comment, he writes “sounds to me that Fast Eddie is back”

 

The references of course is to the classic old movie The Hustler from 1961, starring Paul Newman, George C Scott, Jackie Gleason, and Piper Laurie. For those of you who have not seen it (if indeed there can possibly be anybody in this category), the movie concerns a smalltime pool hustler, Fast Eddie Felson, who goes up against the king of the hustlers, Minnesota Fats. In what is, at least for me, the greatest scene in the movie, Eddie takes on Fats in an epic all night match. At one point, Paul Newman runs off a long streak of successful shots, moving around the table like a great cat. He is “in the zone” as great basketball players describe it, and says he cannot miss.

 

That is, in my small way, how I feel sometimes when I am in the classroom explaining a complicated idea to the students, showing it to them in its power and beauty and simplicity. It is at those moments that I feel myself to be most fully and completely who I am. It has nothing to do with winning an argument or being right. It must be the way Yo-Yo Ma feels when he leans back in his chair and seems to be listening to his cello rather than playing it. 

 

The first time I felt that way was in the spring of 1960. I was teaching philosophy 130 at Harvard – CI Lewis’s great old course on the Critique of Pure Reason.  I had been working harder than I ever had before and ever would again to make absolutely clear and simple Kant’s central argument in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. The course met on Tuesdays and Thursdays but I had called a special Saturday extra meeting to finish my analysis and all the students had shown up! I spoke nonstop for an hour and a half, until finally I could write on the blackboard those magical letters Q. E. D. When I laid down the chalk and started to walk out of the room, the students burst into applause. I knew then that it was the greatest moment I would ever have in a classroom and reflected on the strangeness of the fact that it came at the beginning rather than at the end of my career.

 

I am 62 years older now and feeling the effects of age and Parkinson’s disease, not to speak of the general awfulness of the world, but last Monday, as I sat in front of my class wearing a mask and speaking of the thought of Karl Marx, there were moments when the look in a student’s eyes or the nod of her head told me that I had reached another mind and had shown the beauty of an idea.

 

 I couldn't miss.