Teachers

The great teachers were non-teachers, not of the profession, people familiar with everyday people including the lowlifes and the untouchables. Jesus, Buddha, writers like young Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Carver, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, people not unlike Shane MacGowan. They were people who'd pretty much passed on any chance to have a normal profession.

Literature is the study of personally attaining enlightenment toward the true nature of reality.

However, there is the tendency for crap to reign supreme in popularity. Crap is necessarily complex, the conflict of bedeviling ego voices, in the popular model in fiction of conflict and resolution.

As opposed to a less popular model that works by a steady resolution toward enlightenment that all are capable of. Melville has it that you put a man on his two feet and he will end up by water sooner or later. Shakespeare’s great poetic sensibility leaves it to the lowly fool to bring forth wisdom. And so there lies a peril in avoiding the usual foibles people are subject to, of wine and foolishness.

There are many reasons why writers never claim directly to be teachers. They would not immediately see it that way. Too busy making mistakes.

How to put all the vastness of higher dimensional thought into the space of one’s own small life? (I.M. Pei attempts this in his museums.) It would seem impossible, inappropriate, unconnected. It would look, if you tried, to be the worst goofing off, laziness, fucking around.