A friend had mentioned Psalm 121 to me, hearing of my time up in Amherst, taking my poorman's vacation, a trip by train, staying on campus for a Reunion Weekend, a trip to pay my respects for retiring English Department faculty.  I spent a good amount of time sitting on benches outdoors, looking over the Holyoke Range, taking it in, the light breeze on a hot day, the birds, the sudden swoop of a young hawk, writing in my notebook.

     I will lift up mine eyes un-
     to the hills, from whence
     cometh my help.

I'd written a long piece set there, making mention of something my father, a professor, would talk about from time to time, which he expanded upon from a book written by a Julian Benda, a French scholar, writing between the wars.  An educator, in the long lens of truth, is a cleric, a keeper of knowledge.  Certain interests can infringe upon the work of an educator, such as Nationalism, the intrusion of politics, even the needs of industry, as industry makes its conquests, makes for Superpowers.  Is the fundamental purpose of teaching geology to a kid to make him a good oil-finder for Halliburton?  No.  The student is learning about the fundamental realities that make up the Universe and all reality and which refer back to him or her, including that student.

And so, prowling around, musing over the worn stone steps of the old chapel and iron railings of a kind never to be made again the same way, looking out aged windows at clear and austere old Yankee lines, it began to sink in.  The place was founded on the idea, the concept of the spiritual education.  Students of Amherst College followed a roadmap, often enough, of going of to Union Theological Seminary or other divinity schools, obtaining a thoughtful and overarching mastery, if you will, then coming back to teach, subjects like geology and math, and then maybe soon enough more metaphysical fields, if they didn't go off on mission somewhere or go found other institutions of higher learning.  It's in the groundwater, the dirt and rocks, in its history, its people, trembling in the leaves of its quadrangled trees.

The presence of the spiritual as the deep background of an Amherst education is not just in the dusty history of the Nineteenth Century either.  Essays dating well into the Twentieth reveal the same thoughtfulness, even as the concepts of God may have subtly changed.  G. Armour Craig, a teacher of ours, writes an essay concerning the place of the teacher, considering the need for a scholar's knowledge of self, found after great periods of struggle, to bring back to enlighten whatever subject matter he, or she, teaches.  DeMott's later essays seem to spill from the same waters.

After considering myself, well, maybe a bit off for proposing such a thought, that here at Amherst there is a tension, that tension being whether or not the teaching is done well, done with regard far far less to the material ends of things, but to, yes, the spiritual.

The Kirkus Review reviewer quipped about an essential piece of the book I wrote, call it what you will, of a student, in summertime, talking with his father, within the context of such a treason, noting that material ends, here referring to them as vocational, could derail the efforts of the highest forms of education.  The reviewer, dull of mind, saw the exchange only in his own current context, of our own current economy, of, indeed, the overwhelming need to turn a college education into, guess what, a job, money, a practical vocation that earns bucks.   Thus, an entire misreading, a complete miss as to what the book might be about in its essence, was the review's clever judgment.  And from there, the reviewer can only fill in the lines of the script, thus receiving his payment from the author for 'a professional unbiased review,' i.e., dull dialog, cliché even, uninteresting characters, no plot, etc.  As would make complete sense.

A book might, though, be judged on its merits, for old understandings that it awakens and brings back into play.  And a place like Amherst really must operate within the spiritual context, albeit under a surface, if it's to continue to hold its place and do its job and work its magic of teaching, as many thoughtful carefully thought out teacher's essays point out.  Take an Emily Dickinson poem, say, "My life had stood a loaded gun in corners," which, if read with a certain nod to the spiritual, in this case the being taken up by, the master, a kind of transcendental Oversoul, yields richer fruit than if just considered coldly, the gun just being the gun, or little more than a pun (as one film beats to death stupidly.)

Well, I know well enough what can happen when the spirit that animates the life of the mind is less the matter of attention.  A whole reality is dismissed, treated as something non existent.  But it is also true, the oldest things written, like the line about the stone that the builders rejected, or the house divided against itself.  Amidst crime novels, legal thrillers, faux histories, a little piece with the tenor of All Quiet on the Western Front taken down a good few notches is hard to observe, and maybe it has an altogether entirely different place than amongst novels, as it is politely purported to be, even as it largely is, in the American tradition.  Even the college itself, very largely secularized, would want little to do with it, as if it were smeared with something quite organic, so it would seem, as egos have to be protected.





Perhaps there has to be that crisis of confidence, of faith, of getting lost, before finding one's way.  Below that may be the traps one falls into when faith is diminished, the seeking of sensual comfort to compensate for the clarity we all want, of which there are many takes in the literature of faith.  Dante finding himself lost at midpoint in life, Jonah, Job...  Perhaps the reference to the very long time Jesus Christ spends out in the desert, 40 days without known nourishment and water, speaks to crises of confidence of twenty year periods that require a metaphorically equal time away, in the purifying desert finding bearings.  It would be good not to have to go through such long crises of confidence, but better for being stronger, for the inner knowledge of 'sin,' of being able to firmly tell temptation and devils to disappear.  Interesting that Christ himself, while having a tradition to fall back upon, is not completely wedded, such that he is not able to ad-lib were necessary to flesh out new grounds of faith, comprehending a remarkable authority.  Does being out of tradition make it easier, or more difficult?  He doesn't seem to have too many problems.

Sitting on a teak bench, overlooking the quadrangle, or the mountain range, I had my own poor behavior to examine, as such following me around campus as I remembered things.  I fell into the same sensual traps that fall, in all their variation, upon a lot of young people, students, young adults.  Drinking has so fallen into the collective ideas for gifts and relaxation, its hard for the consumer-minded person to avoid, 'the good time.'

I later would witness such dirty dancing to raunchy disrespectful-to-women albeit seemingly thoroughly enjoyed and encouraged by 'co-eds' music under the tents of the most recent reunion that I felt very old indeed.  I suppose one needed a drink after witnessing bare-chested young man and young woman simulating intercourse for half an hour.  But, that I would 'need a drink' to feel comfortable enough to linger there means that I didn't need a drink, nor to remain there dealing with it.  That night I had an excellent conversation with my friend Victor to enjoy, and the previous night I dealt with by wandering off into the playing fields musing over the spot where JFK's helicopter had landed almost fifty years ago, under a glorious sky full of stars and then a moon rising orange over the Pelham Hills.  That night I also saw a vet of the Iraqi war aggressively walking the same night playing fields and peering into the darkness, very much like a soldier on a patrol, able to act at any moment, from what I might have sensed in my bookish way.  Yes, that I would have needed a drink, back then, as now, meant there was something deeper and more soulful and perhaps more lonesome, ostensibly at least, to find and ruminate over.  And so I felt liberating emotions over where President Kennedy's helicopter might have landed, remembered doing my own thing in the music library listening with headphones to a record of his speeches.  It made me feel a good deal less haunted by the thoughts of a relationship I, being who I am, could never win, concerning the past and 'a beautiful girl.'  It took a few years to accept all that, and being again in Amherst helped.

 The intent may not have been laziness or maliciousness, but the habit resulted in spiritual wrongs and the ongoing spiritual crisis that haunt a creative type lost in his career.  I had worked into the night, reading 'til the library closed, writing papers in the late night study hall, but there was enough drunken foolishness to make me ponder how much I'd squandered, not that I didn't find myself with a temperament that led to slow careful readings and late papers, as if there was an inability to focus.  (I should have exercised more, kept the good chemistry flowing.)  That wine soothes, goes well with dinner, indeed is part of the Bible's own picture of life, has to be allowed;  it can't be all bad.  But...

So it was, and is, a comfort to be handed a little white book containing Amherst College essays by a venerable family friend, a treasure indeed, offered to parents by a grateful President Cal Plimpton, whose remarks at the memorial service held in Johnson Chapel on the evening of November 22, 1963 for President Kennedy hold some of the finest reflections upon the man read within recent memory.  So was it a comfort to read the lines of G. Armour Craig, from an essay "Teaching Confidence," that a teacher must necessarily be at odds with society.

The knowledge to move on, to teach, must come from within, after scholarly struggles and crises.    And it is comforting as well to ponder the wisdom that a teacher will always be at odds with the society that exists outside his classroom, that being the only place he is himself.  As would hold, say, over suggesting the presence of the spiritual in early Hemingway stories, the victories of the scholar, the critic, are not of this world.  They are limited, in tenor as well as reality, to the classroom.  Or maybe, certain Quixotic books.



One day from now, far in the future, the language we write in, the words we use, will be rustic,
the spellings funny, the phonetic spelled out in long quaint ways.  But behind such strange-looking words, the thoughts will be surprising, fresh and plain, such that future people will say to themselves, 'wow, they thought the same, but were very open about their lives, as if something depended on their communicating through printed words.'