Preamble

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Education is a playing with fire, not a taxidermist’s stuffing of dead animals, and until we choose to acknowledge the difference between the two pedagogical techniques, we do ourselves no favors. Awaken the student to the light in his or her own mind, and the rest of it doesn’t matter—neither the curriculum nor the number of seats in the football stadium, neither the names of the American presidents nor the list of English kings. In college commencement speeches, as with the handing out of prizes for trendsetting journalism, I often hear it said that the truth shall make men free, but I notice that relatively few people know what the phrase means. The truth isn’t about the receipt of the diploma or acceptance into law school, not even about the thievery in Washington or the late-breaking scandal in Hollywood. It’s synonymous with the courage derived from the habit of not running a con game on the unique and specific temper of one’s own mind. What makes men and women free is learning to trust their own thought, possess their own history, speak in their own voices. It doesn’t matter how or when the mind achieves the spark of ignition—in an old book or a new video game, from a teacher encountered by accident in graduate or grammar school, in the course of dissecting a frog or pruning an apple tree, while looking at a painting by Jan Vermeer or listening to the Beatles sing “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Neuroscientists remark on the sensation of joy produced by the chemicals in the brain when the mind is being put to creative and imaginative use, a phenomenon they associate both with the pleasure of sexual orgasm and with the endorphin high experienced by athletes in the zones of effortless performance. The observation supports Plutarch’s hypothesis at the head of this essay, stands confirmed by the experiments of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, page 142): “When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.” Many other voices in this volume of Lapham’s Quarterly speak of a similar discovery—Frederick Douglass (Baltimore, page 77), Mary McCarthy (Seattle, page 79), Helen Keller (Alabama, page 136)—and if I think I know what they’re talking about, I owe my good fortune to Mr. Charles Mulholland’s tendency to fool around with matches. In my mind’s eye I can still see him as clearly as the paper on which I’m writing this sentence, a heavyset man, red-faced and Irish, given to sudden and excitable gestures, in front of the blackboard in a seventh-grade classroom in San Francisco, drawing the line of Hannibal’s elephants through the valleys of Cisalpine Gaul. The chalk squeaks, and the annals of Ancient Rome come as vividly to life as the sound of the ball game in progress under the windows of the Town School. Mr. Mulholland spends a week on the Carthaginian descent into Italy, a month on the Punic Wars, six months on the destruction of the Roman Republic and the contrived divinity of Caesar Augustus. Never once does his voice tire or his enthusiasms fail. He tells the story as if it happened yesterday in Golden Gate Park, stringing together a coherent narrative from different realms of meaning, different kingdoms of fact: a military expedition in Scythia reminds him of something Pliny said about jackals at a dinner party in Pompeii; discussing the logistics of the Egyptian grain trade, he remembers how bitterly Juvenal resented arriviste Egyptian barbers translated into Roman senators; before the hour ends he has improvised a philippic against Cleopatra and her gilded barge. On Monday he compares and contrasts the deaths of Cicero and Seneca; Tuesday he devotes to the menu at Trimalchio’s banquet and the conditions of Ovid’s exile on the Black Sea; on Wednesday he draws the moral about how hard it was to tell the truth in imperial Rome and still dine on plover eggs.

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