As summer settles in and I have a chance to do a good deal of reading, I’m noticing the degree of sarcasm that some novelists give their characters—usually young, hip characters who think they have something smart to say about the world around them. It’s not that I’m totally against the snark; a zinger of a line can be refreshing. What was it Dorothy Parker said? “If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” And Cole Porter? “He may have hair upon his chest but, sister, so has Lassie.” But let’s not forget Noel Coward who said, “Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.” Too much snark, as Coward makes plain, piles up and gets sluggish and starts to become annoying.

Which leads me to that classic snark, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. In a scene early in the novel, Holden is trying to read a book but keeps getting interrupted by another student, Ackley. Ackley asks him if the book is any good, and Holden says, “This sentence I’m reading is terrific.” Holden then admits that he can be very sarcastic when he wants to be. And yet, this same Holden is capable of compassion, sometimes even toward those that he derides. He is, most memorably, the person who fantasizes that he’s the protector of children. He tells his sister,

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch          everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look  where they’re going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d    do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only    thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

For all his sarcasm, all his cynicism, all his distrust of phony people, he’s genuinely worried about his little sister and by extension “thousands of little kids,” whom he wants to save. His compassion exists beneath the facade of his snark; the pressures of the plot make that facade crack from time to time, and the kinder, more genuine Holden is visible. The snark can’t hold, as it does in too many novels and stories these days. The sharp word, the sarcastic attitude, the cynical eye? Life has a way of breaking down the confidence it takes to put those tools to work, at least temporarily if not forever. The good fiction writer knows that. The good novelist is interested in the aspect of a character that’s hidden—the fear, perhaps, or the insecurity—that makes the construction of that snarky facade necessary and at the same time impossible to maintain.

What a blessing it was, then, to find a roadside cafe open for business with cold bottles of pop for sale. I remember sitting at the counter on a stool that swiveled and asking the waitress how much a bottle cost.

“A dime,” she said.

My heart sank. “I don’t have a dime,” I told her, and she was kind enough to bring me a free glass of ice water, which I drank while watching my friends guzzle Pepsi, Coke, orange Nehi, 7 Up.

When I got home and told my mother this story, she asked me why I hadn’t used my quarter to buy a bottle of pop.

“Because it wasn’t a dime,” I said. “I had to have a dime.”

“Son,” she said. “It’s time we had a talk about change.”

Now, when I look back on the boy I was, I find myself laughing at his ignorance. Then, in a tick, the laughter always dissolves, and I look a little closer, and I find myself wishing I could tell that kid what a quarter is. “You could have had a bottle of pop,” I want to say. “Heck, you could’ve had two bottles!”

That’s when I remember that glass of ice water. Even though I was glad for it on that hot day, I also felt how it marked me as the kid who didn’t have enough money to buy a bottle of pop. As I look back on that first-grader, drinking ice water and wanting so badly to have what his friends were having, I start to feel the yearning underneath the comedy. I start to feel the wanting and its frustration, which makes me a little sad, and that’s another important element of the comic in fiction. The funny and the sad are often contained within the same character, the same event.

I also think of my mother and how she never planned to have a child. Things happened, though, and I was born when she was forty-five. Nearly twice the age of my friends’ parents, she must have been sensitive to any imperfections in her own maternal skills. She was a grade school teacher. She taught kids about change all the time. How could it be that the lesson had never made its way to me? I also think about how my mother was such a timid woman. I inherited her shyness. I didn’t like standing out from the crowd the way I did that afternoon in the cafe. When my mother said we’d have to have a talk about change, I felt her own embarrassment.

On the surface, this is an amusing family anecdote that gets told for years and years, and everyone laughs. Beneath the surface, though, lies a more human story of a shy kid, an unused quarter, a desperate want, a deep embarrassment shared with his mother.

I’ll never forget that my mother and I were alone in our house that day. She poured Pepsi over ice in an aluminum drinking glass, and I sipped the foam the way I liked to do, and then I drank and drank while she got some coins from her purse—pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters—and started to teach me what was what. Each coin contained a certain number of the others. My quarter was made up of twenty-five pennies, five nickels, two dimes and a nickel. A whole was made up of its parts, just the way characters are in fiction.

A drowsy late afternoon in our farmhouse. My mother and I, connected somewhere deeper than anecdote because of what we shared: the wanting, the embarrassment. The context of our story—that timid kid who wanted a cold bottle of pop, my late-in-life mother who wanted to prove that she could indeed be a good mother at her age—gives the amusing story its weight and makes it something I can’t forget. Comedy in fiction should never exist for the sake of the joke alone. It should have something to show us about the human condition. It can be truly memorable if the writer doesn’t neglect the human beings at the heart of the humor.

I was on a panel yesterday about balancing work, life, and writing, and, as always, when I’m on a panel (surely this doesn’t just happen to me?), I heard myself saying things with a voice of certainty, when really I wasn’t certain at all. This is the way it usually goes for me. My Libra scales, seeking balance, cause me to see too many sides to the same question. I’m more of a person who wonders about certain things, hoping that the uncertainty of wondering might lead to considerations otherwise not possible, but I almost always fall victim to that panel persona of the one who knows exactly what he’s talking about. People in the audience are asking questions, after all, and we panel members are the ones who are supposed to know the answers.

The truth, though, is that sometimes I say something on a panel and later start to wonder exactly what I meant. I start to question whether I had any right to say what I did. I start to question, and I think audience members should do the same. They should interrogate the answers of the panelists, trying to see if those answers have any validity, knowing, of course that any answer from a panel member might make perfect sense for one person in the audience and still be bad advice for someone else.

So yesterday in the midst of a conversation about the importance of carving out blocks of time for writing and staying obsessed with a project so you can’t help but bring it to completion, I found myself saying that sometimes life gives us opportunities to rest and for the writer that can be a good thing because time away from a project can allow it to evolve in ways that it might not if we’re forcing ourselves to keep slogging along. Leaving the project alone for a while can give the unconscious parts of our minds a chance to do some work with the material in the same way that we work on our lives through our night dreams. The result, once we return to the writing, is usually something we’re more deeply attached to, moving through it now the way the dreamer does, by instinct, rather than woodenly trying to understand something through the logical parts of our brains. Simply put, we sometimes feel the material more deeply because we give ourselves permission to forget it.

Lordy Magordy! What kind of an enabler am I, telling people it’s okay not to write? The older I get, though, the slower I become with my writing projects. It’s not that I’ve lost my passion for the craft; it’s just that I’m more at ease with being patient, letting something steep, waiting longer for completion, hoping that the rests I take might in the end result create something thicker, more textured, more resonant. By the same token, I understand the importance of rest to make my writing seem fresh to me. Words, words, words: a lifetime of words. How easy it is to start to rely on the same tricks. When I was a younger writer, I could feel like everything I wrote was something I was making anew. Now, in what I’ll call my more mature years, I sometimes crave rest and silence. They help me see my material with new eyes. A good writing day can be spent daydreaming in my chair with no words put on the page.  I feel, then, the same way I feel when I wake from a dream in the morning, like I have one foot in my real life and one still in that dream world. That’s how writing feels to me when it’s going really well, a happy blend of the conscious and the unconscious. More and more, I’m starting to see the importance of rest for keeping me in that place from which my freshest writing comes.

Do I still have books I want to write? Absolutely. To write them the way they deserve to be written, though, I’m willing to wait, to give them time to deepen. I have a novel in progress now that I’ve barely touched since my stroke last September. I’ve worked on essays instead. But now the season seems right for that novel. I find myself waking up with thoughts of it on my mind. I hear it calling to me. I hear it telling me I’m ready.

I was first drawn to creative nonfiction by memoir. I was a fiction writer who decided to turn his skills with narrative into storytelling about the self. I quickly learned that I loved being able to dramatize moments from my life and arrange them in a narrative thread of cause and effect. I also loved being able to reflect upon those moments, interrogate them, use them to think more deeply about the person I was/am and the people around me. This is all to say that I’m very much looking forward to my trip to Oxford, and the conversation I’ll have about memoir with the folks in my workshop.

Here’s what I hope to give people when I teach at a writers’ conference:

1.         A clear sense of what they’re attempting in the project that they have underway. An idea of what first brought them to the page. I like to invite people to get in touch with what they don’t know when they begin to write. What are they trying to sort through, figure out? What single question might provide a guide through their material and also a way of judging what belongs and what doesn’t?

2.         A good idea of the narrative arc. What constitutes the beginning, middle, and end? Also a sense of how the writer’s emotional/intellectual arc responds to the pressures of the narrative arc. I was reading an article by Benjamin Percy in the May/June 2013 issue of Poets & Writers, called “Writing With Urgency.” He talks about Freytag’s Pyramid, that diagram that indicates the rising action of a narrative. Then he says, “But you must also imagine the emotional arc of your character inlaid in this pyramid. To create suspense, a story must have both: what is outside of the character (whatever is intruding on the character’s life) and inside of the character (whatever is desired that is just out of reach). When these two things come together, you build the potential for something to happen.” I’d like the people in my workshops to reach a better understanding of how the narrative arc and the emotional arc are inseparable.

3.         A sense of what they’re good at. I’ll usually read a few passages that demonstrate the writers’ strengths so they can hear where their work is what I’d call “white-hot.” In other words, those places where I’m most engaged as a reader. I like to use those passages to invite folks to think about the artistic choices that the writer has made in order to create memorable effects.

4.         Some questions about the material that the writers can use to produce more writing in an attempt to find some answers. In our first drafts, there are usually moments that need to be opened up. Sometimes our drafts suggest the questions, but sometimes readers can provide them by telling you what they’d love to know more about.

5.         A confidence in the shape of the project and the things to be investigated. A center for the piece and a feeling that the writer is in control.

Ultimately, I hope folks leave my workshops knowing that their talents have been appreciated. I also hope they’ll have a clear plan for further work with their projects as well as craft issues to consider in future work. If we can accomplish that in Oxford, we’ll know we’ve had a good day’s work.

That’s when I saw the man in the back of a pickup truck parked along the side of the street just past Perrott’s Grocery. I didn’t know if he was asleep, passed out, or dead. He was face-down on the bed of that truck, a checked shirt pulled out of his jeans, a cuff with snap buttons undone around his wrist, a pair of pointy-toed brown cowboy boots on his feet.

This was a time when I was close to losing myself, just another teenage boy rebelling against authority, going from an “A” student to one who was barely getting by in a number of classes, taking risks with shoplifting and drinking. Small potatoes compared to some, but still I was no one my parents would recognize. I’m certain I didn’t know who I was or what I was on my way to becoming.

Then I saw that man. I stopped awhile and took him in, this man who’d obviously spent a portion of his Saturday night on that truck bed in this drowsy town where the bells at the Christian Church were now ringing and where my mother, a gentle woman who loved me, was putting her hands into detergent so strong it left her with a wicked rash. My mother who’d taught grade school for thirty-eight years and was now sixty-two years old. My mother working the five-to-two shift and missing the church service she loved, while I walked uptown, went into Piper’s Sundries and stole a paperback biography of Janis Joplin, smoked a couple of Camel cigarettes, did everything I could to forget about that man in the truck, but he was always there. He still is. I can’t get him out of my head

I wanted to be someone my mother would be proud to call her son. She took me to church that evening. She did her best to save me, and I wanted her to. It would take a few more years. It would take my mother’s unshakeable faith.

She was a teacher all her life, even after she retired. She knew how to see the best in people. She knew how to wait until they saw it in themselves. I saw that man in the truck on a Sunday morning, and I wanted to be better. It took a lot of Sundays for that to happen, but eventually it did, and, when it did, my mother didn’t act surprised. She’d been convinced all along that one day I’d pass through the darkness into the light. I’d find my talents and I’d love them too much to toss them away.

So, to my students, I say, love your talents, love yourselves, love the journeys you’re on, love the people around you. You’re going places, marvelous places you might not dare imagine. Trust me. I’ve seen the best of you. I know.

I was a boy who didn’t understand the things my father loved. I had my sights set in a different direction. Each spring, before I graduated from the eighth grade, and my parents made the decision to move back to our downstate farm from Oak Forest, IL, where we’d been living the past six years, we’d often make the five-hour drive south after school was done on a Friday, so we could spend that night, and the next day, and Sunday morning on those eighty acres my parents still thought of as home.

On warm evenings, we’d drive with the windows down, and as we made our way into the country, I’d smell the clay soil being worked in the fields. I’d see the dust rolling up behind tractors that were pulling harrows or disks.

“They’re working that ground,” my father would say. Then for a good while, my mother and I would fall silent, letting him dream of summer when we’d be back for three months, and he could be what he was meant to be, a farmer, climbing on a tractor once more to help the tenant farmer with the wheat harvest, with cultivating beans and corn, with baling hay and straw. “Smell that dirt,” my father would finally say. “That’s home.”

Years later, after he was dead, my mother told me it was his idea for us to move to Oak Forest. She’d lost her teaching position downstate, and he insisted that we couldn’t do without her salary, so she took a job teaching third grade in that Chicago suburb, in spite, as she eventually told me, of her lesser insistence that they would do just fine. “Maybe he just wanted an adventure,” she said. “I don’t know.”

I still can’t make sense of it. That adventure cost him six years of what he loved the most. My father was most happy when he was working his farm. He was willing to swap that for a life of sitting around a one-bedroom apartment, watching quiz shows on television, loafing at an uptown diner, going to my basketball games and band concerts—a man separated from his passion and his land.

What a happy thing it is when our passions and the places we occupy match. To do the thing we love in a place we love? What more could we want?

Those spring evenings on the farm, we sometimes got there early enough to mow the yard, a chore we accomplished with two mowers, one manned by my father and one by me. Often, it was dusk when we finished, the last few swaths taking some guesswork. Then in a deep quiet, after the roar of the mowers, we let the world come back to us a little at a time: the call of a whippoorwill in our woods, the whistle from a distant train, my mother pumping water from our well, peepers trilling at our pond. Oak Forest seemed far, far away. We smelled the cut grass. We let the night settle around us, and without a word we knew, my father and I, that this was good work that we’d done in this place where we belonged.

“We’ll sleep good tonight,” he said, and I agreed, letting his pride become my own. Yes, we would I told him. We surely would.

I remember well my own thesis defense in which I was told all the things I’d done wrong in my slim collection of stories. Helpful? To the extent that it gave me things to pay attention to when I continued writing, thinking all along about what sort of writer I wanted to be, what world I wanted to inhabit, and how I wanted to represent it in my prose, yes. Encouraging? Not much.

What did it teach me? This writing business takes a thick skin, persistence, a willingness to fail, to listen to why I failed, to figure out a way to not fail again while at the same time accepting that I will. Developing as a writer takes an intelligence, an ability to look at one’s work as if you’re not the one who wrote it, an acceptance that there are other writers who know more than you do, who are more talented, who are farther along. Steal from them whenever you can.

At some point in the thesis process, I tell my students that there are two realities: the thesis reality and the reality of the marketplace. An MFA thesis is not always a manuscript on its way to publication, nor should it be. If it is, then great, but what both the student and the advisor should expect from a thesis is a manuscript that highlights the writer’s strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies. The thesis should also provide a means by which both the committee members and the student can begin to assess the material that matters most to the writer and the direction that writer seems to be moving when it comes to best expressing that which compels them. These are the things that can come out of a thesis defense that will send the newly-minted MFA out into the world with some degree of excitement about reworking the thesis or perhaps starting anew with another manuscript.

It took me six years to begin to answer these questions for myself:

1.         From what world do I wish to speak? (the small towns and farming communities of my native Midwest)

2.         What’s my material? What am I obsessed with? (issues of violence and redemption, the consequences of deceit and betrayal, the blending of the moral and the profane)

3.         How is the person, Lee Martin, connected to the writer, Lee Martin? (I spent my            adolescence balanced on the thin line between my mother’s compassion and my father’s          cruelty; it finally struck me that everything I wrote was in some way an attempt to       navigate that boundary)

The answers to these questions aren’t always the same. Depending on where I am in my life and the circumstances I’ve encountered, my answers may change, but these are the questions I needed to be aware of before I could write the stories that ended up in my first book, which was published twelve years after I received my MFA. After my thesis defense, I had to find a way of posing those questions for myself and then setting out to answer them so I could be better prepared to write something that would be worthy of the marketplace. A different thesis defense approach on the part of my committee might have saved me some time, or maybe I was just young and dense and unable to listen in the right way. Still, each time I participate in a thesis defense, I try to keep in mind the young writers upon whom we’ll soon confer a degree. I imagine those writers absent from our program the following autumn, out there somewhere still trying to find their way to the writers they can be. By the time of the defense, I’ve given my students all the answers that I can about their work via workshops and individual conferences. Here at the end, I want to make sure that I give them the right questions.

Now I teach at one of the largest universities in the country, and I still sometimes feel like that shy country kid who spent a lot of time sitting in his car between classes during that first term at the community college because I didn’t know how to convince myself that I belonged there. The college was in a town of 9,000 people. It was a small town, yes, but to me it was large enough to make me shy. I took note of all the city kids who knew one another. To them, the community college was merely an extension of their high school years. They had an instant community to which they belonged. Although I and a handful of other students from my high school only lived twelve miles away, those twelve miles were enough to make me feel excluded. I was intimidated until I found my own community within the community college. Classes in English and literature allowed me to tap into my natural talents, and I gradually found other people who shared my interests. I found folks who were writing poems and stories, and I finally began to feel at home.

It’s what we’re all looking for, I suppose, those groups that value our talents and will put out the effort to encourage us to find our skills and then to develop them. In the case of creative writing, we who teach it encounter students from various backgrounds, and we try to help them strengthen their craft. We shouldn’t forget that we’re also inviting our students to use their writing to become more confident about the people they’ll be in the world beyond our classrooms. We’re helping them become the people they’re meant to be.

With that in mind, I want to offer some thoughts on three things we can do to make all our students feel included in our workshops:

1.         We should be sensitive to any language around the workshop table that might make our students feel that their own experiences aren’t of value. When it comes to the rural poor, words like “white trash,” “trailer trash,” “redneck,” and “hillbilly” particularly get under my skin. I’m sure any ethnic group could come up with their own list of terms which make them grit their teeth, redden with embarrassment, make them wish they were invisible around the workshop table. We should be sensitive to the attitudes that our words suggest even if we think we’re speaking in a good-humored and harmless way.

2.         We should also encourage conversations about social class. We can provide exercises for the exchange of stories and facts from various backgrounds so students can begin to value their diverse experiences. Any exercise that invites students to describe their homes and families in direct terms should work as long as we make sure that there’s an atmosphere of mutual respect around the table when it comes time to read from these exercises. For years, I’ve led my students in a round of applause after one of them shares work with us. No matter what the students may be thinking, the act of clapping is one that thanks someone for sharing. It’s my hope that the applause shows the student that his or her experience matters.

3.         Finally, we can look for what makes our students’ work unique. We can praise them for taking us into worlds we wouldn’t have otherwise known. We can encourage them to keep writing from the worlds that they know most intimately. “Tell me about the mango trees in Trinidad,” I said once to a student, and she was off and running, recreating the world from which she came in a way that gave her the confidence she needed in order to keep writing about the place and the life she knew best.

Our students are like most people. They like having the chance to talk about what they know. They like being invited to tell stories that only they can tell, stories that come from the places and cultures that created them. So much of teaching is a matter of having good people skills. Like most writers, I get curious about people. I like to ask them questions. I like my students to tell me things I don’t know. The rural poor are accustomed to not having that chance. For a variety of reasons I won’t take the time to fully mention here, students who come from working class families often get the sense that their worlds don’t matter. Often, those worlds, when they appear on television or the movies, aren’t represented in an honorific way. The message is there in subtle and not-so-subtle ways: keep quiet, don’t call attention to yourself, hope that no one notices you. That’s what I felt those days at the community college when I sat in my car, afraid to speak to anyone, afraid that sooner or later someone would figure out that I was a fraud and ask me to leave. It was through creative writing that I finally found a way to speak from my working class world. Now I try to make that possible for all my students, no matter their cultural backgrounds. “Tell me your stories,” I say to them. “Tell me what you know.”

Ever since then, I’ve been conflicted when it comes to deciding how I feel about the rather earthy language that Famous Writer X used in his presentation—not the earthy language from the selections of his work that he read, but the language that he used when talking to the audience members or answering their questions during the q and a. One of those questions happened to be, “Why do you use so much profanity in your work?” Famous Writer X responded by saying, “I suppose you’re also wondering why I use so much profanity in my presentation.”

“Well, yes,” I might have said. “I’m curious about that myself.”

Famous Writer X gave an answer to why he used profanity in his work, an answer that I confess I’ve forgotten, but one that I found convincing at the time. Characters are characters, after all, and they speak from their worlds in stories and novels. I understand that. Famous Writer X never got around to addressing the question of why he used so much profanity in his presentation, something I would see repeated at an awards banquet later that evening, a banquet at which he delivered the keynote address. A more formal setting with student scholarship recipients and their families on hand. I was left, then, to try to figure out I felt about our famous guest using such language at these two events.

One part of me understands that such language, such swagger, is part of his persona and obviously an attempt to bond with undergraduate students whom he must assume will relate to his street-wise irreverence. Another part of me thinks, though, that we should all be careful not to assume too much.

I remember when I was an MFA student and just learning how to be a teacher. The professor in charge of teacher training was a wonderful person from whom to learn. He taught us about practical courtesies such as always remembering to erase your chalkboard after your class was done, and being sure not to linger too long into the ten-minute break between classes. “Five minutes belong to you,” he said, “and the other five belong to the instructor of the next class.” One thing he taught us that I’ve always tried to remember was that we should never alienate a student, and, if we thought we had through something we’d said or done, we should correct the matter in private with the student.

I’ve thought of this advice in the days following Famous Writer X’s visit. I’ve thought about how the language he used assumed that his audience used similar language. I should say here that I’m no prude, but I can’t stop thinking about those members of the audience whose vocabulary didn’t include those words that Famous Writer X used and how there may have been some students who felt excluded from the audience that he was assuming would welcome his kind of talk. I’ve also thought about an essay, “No Ears Have Heard,” that I published last year in The Sun Magazine. In that essay, I recall a time when I was a teenager and I came home to find my parents visiting with some friends from church. When my father asked me where I’d been, I said I’d just been out “screwing around.” Mild language compared to the words Famous Writer X favored, but provocative nonetheless. After my parents’ friends were gone, my mother told me I was better than language like that. She asked me whether that phrase was something that I thought those friends would use. I couldn’t answer; I was too ashamed. My mother was a timid, soft-spoken woman. “Then you shouldn’t use it around them,” she said. “Do you understand?”

I did, and I still do. I sometimes fall short of my mother’s lesson, but I try my best to remember not to offend by assuming something about my audience I have no right to assume.

So this is ultimately a lesson about teaching, which as I grow older seems to be more and more about how successfully I can make students comfortable, make them trust me, make them open themselves to what I have to share with them about the craft of writing, invite them to take chances, to try things they haven’t tried before, to push them forward in the development of their talents. To my way of thinking, this is a process that takes a good deal of humility and courtesy, but then again, I’m not Famous Writer X. I could be wrong about all of this. What do you think?

 Another School Year: Why?

Let me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher. It was January of 1940 and I was fresh out of graduate school starting my first semester at the University of Kansas City. Part of the reading for the freshman English course was Hamlet. Part of the student body was a beanpole with hair on top who came into my class, sat down, folded his arms, and looked at me as if to say: “All right, damn you, teach me something.” Two weeks later we started Hamlet. Three weeks later he came into my office with his hands on his hips. It is easy to put your hands on your hips if you are not carrying books, and this one was an unburdened soul. “Look,” he said, “I came here to be a pharmacist. Why do I have to read this stuff?” And not having a book of his own to point to, he pointed at mine which was lying on the desk.

New as I was to the faculty, I could have told this specimen a number of things. I could have pointed out that he had enrolled, not in a drugstore-mechanics school, but in a college, and that at the end of this course, he meant to reach for a scroll that read Bachelor of Science. It would not read: Qualified Pill-Grinding Technician. It would certify that he had specialized in pharmacy and had attained a certain minimum qualification, but it would further certify that he had been exposed to some of the ideas mankind has generated within its history. That is to say, he had not entered a technical training school, but a university, and that in universities students enroll for both training and education.

I could have told him all this, but it was fairly obvious he wasn’t going to be around long enough for it to matter: at the rate he was going, the first marking period might reasonably be expected to blow him toward the employment agency.

Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high sense of duty and I tried to put it this way: “For the rest of your life,” I said, “your days are going to average out to about twenty-four hours. They will be a little shorter when you are in love, and a little longer when you are out of love, but the average will tend to hold. For eight of those hours, more or less, you will be asleep, and I assume you need neither education nor training to manage to get through that third of your life.

“Then for about eight hours of each working day, you will, I hope, be usefully employed. Assume you have gone through pharmacy school—or engineering, or aggie, or law school, or whatever—during those eight hours you will be using your professional skills. You will see to it during this third of your life that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesn’t jump the fence, or that your client doesn’t go to the electric chair as a result of your incompetence. These are all useful pursuits, they involve skills every man must respect, and they can all bring you good basic satisfactions. Along with everything else, they will probably be what sets your table, supports your wife, and rears your children. They will be your income, and may it always suffice.

“But having finished the day’s work what do you do with those other eight hours—the other third of your life? Let’s say you go home to your family. What sort of family are you raising? Will the children ever be exposed to a reasonably penetrating idea at home? We all think of ourselves as citizens of a great democracy. Democracies can exist, however, only as long as they remain intellectually alive. Will you be presiding over a family that maintains some basic contact with the great continuity of democratic intellect? Or is your family going to be strictly penny-ante and beer on ice? Will there be a book in the house? Will there be a painting a reasonably sensitive man can look at without shuddering? Will your family be able to speak English and to talk about an idea? Will the kids ever get to hear Bach?”

That is about what I said, but this particular pest was not interested. “Look,” he said, “you professors raise your kids your way; I’ll take care of my own. Me, I’m out to make money.”

“I hope you make a lot of it,” I told him, “because you’re going to be badly stuck for something to do when you’re not signing checks.”

Fourteen years later, I am still teaching, and I am here to tell you that the business of the college is not only to train you, but to put you in touch with what the best ideas human minds have thought. If you have no time for Shakespeare, for a basic look at philosophy, for the community of the fine arts, for that lesson of man’s development we call history—then you have no business being in college. You are on your way to being that new species of mechanized savage, the Push-button Neanderthal. Our colleges inevitably graduate a number of such life forms, but it cannot be said that they went to college; rather, the college went through them—without making contact.

No one gets to be a human being unaided. There is not enough time in a single lifetime to invent for oneself everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human.

Assume, for example, that you want to be a physicist. You pass the great stone halls, of say, MIT, and there cut into stone are the names of the master scientists. The chances are that few of you will leave your names to be cut into those stones. Yet any one of you who managed to stay awake through part of a high school course in physics, knows more about physics than did many of those great makers of the past. You know more because they left you what they knew. The first course in any science is essentially a history course. You have to begin by learning what the past learned for you. Except as a man has entered the past of the race he has no function in civilization.

And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so is it true of mankind’s spiritual resources. Most of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books, the arts, and the techniques of science, are man’s peculiar accomplishment.

When you have read a book, you have added to your human experience. Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homer’s mind. Through books you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—the list is endless. For a great book is necessarily a gift: it offers you a life you have not time to live yourself, and it takes you into a world you have not time to travel in literal time. A civilized human mind is, in essence, one that contains many such lives and many such worlds. If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Sophocles, of Aristotle, of Chaucer—and right down the scale and down the ages to Yeats, Einstein, E.B. White, and Ogden Nash—then you may be protected by the laws governing manslaughter, and you may be a voting entity, but you are neither a developed human being nor a useful citizen of a democracy.

I think it was La Rochefoucauld who said that most people would never fall in love if they hadn’t read about it. He might have said that no one would ever manage to become a human if he hadn’t read about it.

I speak, I am sure, for the faculty of the liberal arts colleges and for the faculties of the specialized schools as well, when I say that a university has no real existence and no real purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in touch, both as specialists and as humans, with those human minds your human mind needs to include. The faculty, by its very existence, says implicitly: “We have been aided by many people, and by many books, and by the arts, in our attempt to make ourselves some sort of storehouse of human experience. We are here to make available to you, as best we can, that experience.”