Page 39 - WTP Vol. VIII #4

ish elementary schools of the 1950s and 1960s, the authoritarianism, paternalism, priest-worship, above all the exploitation of shamefully underpaid nuns without pensions. The curricula invariably included religion, and memorization had its place as an accepted pedagogical technique, especially
in the early grades. But, for all their faults, those schools were far from madrasas. We had duck-and- cover drills to prepare for a nuclear attack, yet we prayed daily, not for the destruction of Russia, but rather for its conversion. It has taken me a lifetime to understand that, given the times and the insti- tutional constraints, most of the teachers did their best to overcome their own limitations and give us an education for the whole person.
After a third relocation, our last move as a family, I spent an unhappy year and a half in a public middle school in West Hartford, Connecticut, then entered a
in translation, over the course of the years. “And give up your thirst for books,” Marcus Aurelius counseled his son, “so that you do not die a grouch....” Bad advice. Cicero got it right in his quasi-fictional essay, On Old Age, where the elderly Cato tells his young friends, “And indeed if it has any provender, so to speak, of study and learning, nothing is more enjoy- able than a leisured old age.”
It’s also in high school that I had my first part in a play, a murder mystery with a dramatic death scene. I had a lot of lines to learn, but the part came naturally, I played a cad, died onstage protesting my innocence. Years later I would watch a black-and-white movie, released in 1957, with Tyrone Power in the same rôle. I remembered most of the lines, said them in unison with the great actor. I’m old now, hope to live out my days in peace, die naturally, in the warm shelter of
my house, with my wits about me and the grace of
an honest confession. But not soon, I’m not done, my heart and lungs are strong, I have things to say, if it’s grow or die, then I’m still growing.
One of the books we were assigned in a high school religion class was Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.
I still have it in my library, read it again, more than half a century later, for this piece; in retrospect, it was a sophisticated choice for a Catholic school, Fromm was unenthusiastic about the personal God of monotheism, retraced the negative way, saw the love of God as a sort of mystical union with the One, a spiritual analogue of erotic love—that is, romantic love—when it is not merely a result of vanity, for ex- ample, or the anxiety of aloneness. “Erotic love,” he wrote, “if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being—and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being.” But I had little interest in learning the art of loving, cared only about mastering the craft of seduction and the me- chanics of intercourse.
I might have been more open to Fromm’s sober ideas after I was undone. The notion that there’s one and only one person for everybody may well be delusion- al, as he suggests. All the same, a breakup is physical no less than emotional. There is a strange feeling of wooziness in the chest, an unaccustomed awareness of the heart, arrhythmia, shortness of breath, all of them, I now read, medical symptoms of “broken heart syndrome.” The corporal experience fades away, the spiritual damage may last decades, some lost souls cannot leave the past behind, they turn to work and
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"I
don’t know how to hold a pen; they don’t pray, either, would probably find memorizing a prayer or a poem pointless."
newly opened Catholic high school with sunlit class- rooms and splendid laboratories. Here, too, most
of the teachers were nuns, this time well-educated Dominicans in off-white habits with rope cinctures. They patiently taught us the hard business of read- ing, writing, thinking for ourselves.
I took four years of classical Latin in high school. There’s memorization in learning languages, too, gendered vocabulary words, irregular verbs, declen- sions, conjugations, idioms, which case follows a particular preposition. I didn’t study hard enough, squeaked by, more or less voluntarily went to Hart- ford High for a remedial course the summer between my junior and senior years. But I was fortunate, as a high school student, to have been exposed to some of the classics of Roman literature, and I’ve read more,
t should not surprise me
that my grandchildren
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