I’ve not quite finished Philosopher’s Holiday, but wanted to share this.
First, because first sentence in the passage took me right back to many conversations I’ve had with Dorian Speed.
But more broadly, the section touches, not only on the matter of education, in which I am always interested, but in a more general sense on the mediation of wisdom and even truth. Of course, I could not help but consider Edman’s words in another context: that of religion and its expression. For as I’ve said many times, and will say again, amid all the discussions of how the “modern” Christian faith, both Catholic and otherwise, differs from most of the past, it is, it seems to me, a great deal about its elevation of personality and the experience of that personality as the mark of authenticity and truth, and that being a goal of the spiritual journey and spiritual expression.
Look and listen to me – and our community – to share in God’s presence in my witness and words is different than We trust in God’s presence in our weak lives and flawed community. Perhaps in this mystery, you can meet the Truth, but not in our strength…in our weakness.
There are times when, if one thought about former students too much, one could not go on teaching.
For the teacher meeting his former students is reminded of the fact that Plato long ago pointed out in the Republic. It is not what the teacher but what the world teaches them that will in the long run count, and what they can learn from the latter comes from habits fixed soon after birth and temperaments fixed long before it.
There are just a few things a teacher can do, and that only for the sensitive and the spirited.
He can initiate enthusiasms, clear paths, and inculcate discipline.
He can communicate a passion and a method; no more.
His most serious triumph as a teacher is the paradoxical one of having his students, while he is teaching them and perhaps afterwards, forget him in the absorption of the tradition or the inquiry of which he is the transient voice. Lucky for him if later his students feel his voice was just. As in the playing of music, it is the music, not the musician, that is ultimate. And in the art of teaching, it is what is taught that counts, not the teacher.
It is a great tribute to an artist to say that he plays Beethoven or Bach, and puts nothing between them and his audience. But in so doing he becomes one with both the composer and the listener. In the listener’s memory he anonymously shares the composer’s immortality. The teacher, too, is best remembered who is thus forgotten. He lives in what has happened to the minds of his students, and in what they remember of things infinitely greater than themselves or than himself.
They will remember, perhaps, that once in a way, in the midst of the routine of the classroom, it was something not himself that spoke, something not themselves that listened.
Charlotte was Both 