looking up from the screen.
“Sure. Here. After class.” And she kept staring at the screen.
Student? If Courtney Carlyle the doctor’s date was Karen Carlyle the undergraduate we had to get that information to help the investigation into her death. My curiosity was so strong I had to force myself out of Adelaide’s office and hurry down the hall to the seminar room.
# # # #
I slowed down as I reached the classroom door. I could hear voices and I didn’t want to interrupt the discussion more than my tardy entrance would already do. I entered quietly and navigated around the backpacks littering the floor by the students’ seats around the seminar table. I took a chair next to Hercules.
He had stopped speaking as soon as he’d seen me enter, however. Naturally he did. He was far too polite to keep talking while I entered.
Hercules was over 80, but you’d never know it. He was small and wiry, a French Jew who, as a young child during World War II, had been hidden from the Nazis in a small town in France with his mother. He taught Jewish studies and was a well-known scholar of the Talmud. He had approached me with the idea for this course, and even though we were understaffed this spring (I’d moved to part-time, we’d had one resignation plus the death of our department chair and another colleague, Donald Willie, the Religion and Psychology guy, was on sabbatical), Adelaide had agreed. She said it would be good for both of us. I didn’t know what it was doing for Hercules to teach with me, but I know it was helping me in ways I didn’t even know I needed. Plus, I adored him.
Hercules spoke gently as I wrestled my tablet out of my backpack.
“My dear—you take a moment. The time is only just at the 9. Begin when you are ready.”
Since it was already more like a quarter past, I appreciated the sentiment. I opened the tablet and scrolled to the lecture notes I’d prepared last week. That was pretty much a record for me as a new teacher. Usually I was just hours ahead of the students in terms of class prep. But I loved the current topic and the book we were using, a modern interpretation of Aristotle called The Fragility of Goodness. Well, that was right. Goodness was fragile and a big part of that was the fragility of human life. I glanced down at my carefully prepared notes and shut the tablet.
“Last night I had the misfortune to watch someone young die.”
Coffee cups were put down abruptly, hands stilled over notebooks and laptops. There was one soft exhalation from a young woman on my right. Fair-haired and slight, her name was Karen. The name jarred me. The other Karen who liked to be called Courtney might have sat in this room just last year.
Several of the students wouldn’t meet my eyes. I could hear their silent protests. This was philosophy, for Pete’s sake. Why all this reality so early in the morning? This course met a distribution requirement for the Humanities Division, so we were blessed with the appearance of several science majors who clearly conveyed they were going through the motions. Well, no ‘going through the motions’ would work this morning.
“You felt pain when I said that, didn’t you?” I looked at each person around the table, one at a time, waiting until she or he made eye contact. It took a while, but it was worth the time. No holding back here.
“So feeling that pain also makes it possible for you to know that love, commitment, and, in fact, being in a relationship are good things. You know that’s good because you also feel bad about loss, maybe even the loss of someone young whom you didn’t know. But it’s loss, it’s real.”
One hand rose slowly. Isabelle Oliveira, an international student from Brazil. Second year science major.
“I didn’t understand this reading on Aristotle at all. I thought after last week that we’d said pain and loss were the definition of evil from that other reading. Now we’re supposed to think they’re part of good?”
Her voice gained in strength as she voiced her grievance. Science majors thought definitions should hold up, not be offered one week and then unsettled again the next week.
Beside me Hercules lowered his chin to let his mustache hide his smile. Unsettled questions and ambiguity were his philosophy of life.
I glanced around the room, still trying to hold eye contact. It was heavy going.
“Anybody care to take a crack at answering Isabelle’s question? The reading we had last week from Nel Noddings did say pain and loss define evil. So how can they also be part of good according to Aristotle? Do these thinkers disagree or is there a way these ideas can go together?”
I primed the pump a little by giving them the name of the author of last week’s reading. Smart they might be, but in a school where the sciences and economics held supreme, philosophy came way down the list of things that needed to get read. They looked at their computer screens, or down at their backpacks contemplating whether they’d even brought that book from last week along (probably not) or they just took a sip of coffee. One student blew his nose in a wad of tissue.
They weren’t going for it. Teaching can be threatening to one’s self-esteem. I felt like a feminist stand-up comedian trying to get a bunch of Christian fundamentalists to laugh at her jokes about patriarchy.
The key is to wait.
Finally a large hand went up at the far end of the seminar table. Edwin Porterman, African American, six and a half feet tall, a brilliant economist. Edwin had one of the few athletic scholarships at this school, playing football to keep himself debt free. I’d met him in the fall. Playing on our Division III football team seemed not to tax him at all, and he was a straight A student in this university’s challenging economics department. He must also have a campus job to earn extra money. I suddenly remembered he’d been one of the student workers helping to pass the canapés at the reception last night.
This class filled no distribution requirement for Edwin. He’d signed up at the beginning of this term as an audit. Edwin and I had a history. I’d been useful in preventing him from being accused of murder. But there was more about ‘Good and Evil’ that he was clearly working out in his own mind from the events of the fall. As I saw his serious brown eyes fixed steadily on me and Hercules each week, I wondered how he was doing with that self-imposed task. Edwin did nothing without deliberation.
I nodded at him and his measured voice rumbled out over the class.
“Aristotle and Noddings aren’t disagreeing. They’re saying that good is connected to evil and vice versa. The Stoics in Aristotle’s time were saying you had to avoid all attachments to achieve happiness, because attachments bring pain. Aristotle said, ‘right,’ but attachments are also how you can know happiness. There’s no ducking it.”
He placed his large hands with their long, graceful fingers on top of the Fragility of Goodness book.
“This here is a philosophy of what life is really like—damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” His hands moved to grip the book as he ground out these words.
The other students stared. Not only pain but passion in the classroom. This was going from bad to worse. Physics did not normally include a punch to the solar plexus. And Edwin was the only African American in the class. Most of them tried to disguise it, but they were afraid of him, well indoctrinated by the drumbeat of white supremacy in this country. But they were also intimidated by his brilliance. Some of them probably secretly wanted to see his birth certificate.
The
