Teaching Life: Letters from a Life in Literature

A Sad Art

168 Dear Kelly, “Teaching is a sad art.” I imagine you are as surprised to read these words as I was to hear them from Jacques Barzun thirty-five years ago. After all, haven’t my letters emphasized the positive aspects of our chosen profession? Haven’t I celebrated the many ways that colleagues and students enrich our minds, our experience, our very being? Isn’t the most compelling aspect of our professional lives the fact that we are paid to do the work we love? What is so sad about any of that? Well, to use the word in this context is not an invitation to despair. I’m not implying, as some might, that over the years our profession loses any of its luster or charm or sparkle, or that our work in and out of the classroom necessarily leads to burnout and depression. Nor am I connecting sad with the gravity of some subjects we teach or the bleakness of some books or the failure of some students. No, it goes deeper than any of that. As a child living in Amherst, Massachusetts, I grew up hearing the poetry of Robert Frost. “Birches,” “Apple-picking,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” among others, spoke truthfully to me of a world that I knew and of a people that I was raised among. On occasion, Mr. Frost would visit the college, and so my father, an administrator at the nearby university, invited me one evening to a fireside chat arranged for a select number of students and faculty. In my mind’s eye I see myself as a ten-year-old sitting cross-legged in my bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers. The expression on my face is bemused. In the background sits the poet, with his big white head and hanging brows, smiling boyishly as he gazes at his audience. A Sad Art [ c h a p t e r 1 6 [ 169 a s a d a r t I remember none of his spoken words, of course, but I do remember his tone and the feeling it left with me. Here was a goodhumored , soft-spoken, larger-than-life figure in whom I sensed a peculiar sadness—a sadness, as I learned much later, that in an odd paradox grew more pronounced the more blessed he felt. “Nothing gold can stay,” says Frost in a poem by the same name, a reality he faced every day in his work as indeed we must face in ours. To step into the classroom and connect meaningfully with the students (as Frost himself did for many years) is to suffer some ache of separation when the term is over. To experience breakthroughs in the laboratory and advance in our field of inquiry is to lament the day when someone takes over and carries our work farther than we ever could have. To attach our devotion to any classic of literature or music or art is to invite a kind of inevitable humiliation, for the classic itself will far outlive both ourselves and our inadequate attempts to understand and appreciate it. Like Frost, who knew so well the short-lived satisfaction of the creative instinct, we discover how quickly the seasons appear to pass if we are immersed in what we love to do. When we find our true vocation, when we have learned to recognize a compelling purpose to teach, then we don’t want its challenges and considerable satisfaction to end. In part, this feeling is related of course to the passage of time—of which there is never enough for reading all the books or writing all the essays or teaching all the classes we would like. We grow older, but our students seem not to, and each year we see the image of our younger selves reflected in the faces of eighteen- and nineteen- and twenty-year-olds; and mixed with our delight in the work is a nostalgia for when we were in school—a less complicated, relatively free time, our lives filled with as yet untapped potential. The classroom becomes a kind of memento mori, therefore, and Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity” becomes our music, subtle yet insistent, as one year blends into another, and we indulge in the sensations of every possible moment lest that be the final opportunity to do so. And at commencement, as we watch the students walk by with their diplomas, we realize that most of these...