Concerning an Inability to Understand

Looking at my syllabus for my HIS 222 American Experience Since 1865 course, I realize just how much ground we need to cover this semester.

Of course, History is a subjective art, and it falls to the professor to pick and choose the people and events and ideas significant enough to discuss in a limited amount of time.  In this course we begin with the Civil War and end with the Cold War and beyond.  In the mainstream of History, this represents a lot of water under the bridge!  I will be satisfied if we can just find enough time in this course to make it to the Civil Rights Movement and to the Cold War.

Few contributed as much to American diplomacy as did George F. Kennan, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, the author of some eighteen books on Russia and the Soviet Union, and the Cold War.  Kennan died at 101 in 2005.

As Mr. X, it was Kennan who spelled out his idea of “an appropriate United States response to potential Soviet aggression,” what came to be known as containment, in the period after World War II.  He argued later—during and after Vietnam—that he meant to suggest the use of political, economic, and moral pressure on the Soviet Union, rather than military force.  After his appointment as an ambassador to Moscow, he spoke bluntly to a journalist about life there, comparing it to a Nazi concentration camp, and was promptly kicked out by Joseph Stalin.

Kennan’s “Sketches of a Life,” a book of excerpts from his diaries covering over sixty years of his remarkable life, is one of the most sensitive and eloquent examples of a diary that anyone could ever hope to read, much less write.  My own diary entries contain profound enlightenments like:  “It looks like it might snow,” or “Maddie continues to disturb the neighbors with her incessant barking.”  Maddie is our dog.

Compare those insights with Kennan’s description of Berlin, fifteen years after the end of World War II.  His description is not just a reminder to us Cold War kids of that not so distant past, but Kennan also, I think, describes the malaise and unfathomable loneliness that many feel in the present day.  This, then, is a portion of George F. Kennan’s diary entry for June 22nd, 1960:

“It was now late twilight—the long-drawn twilight of the northern night.  Under the trees it was dark, but the sky was still partly bright.  There was a touch of gold in the air.  Before us, there was only the great square confronting the ruins of the enormous Wilhelminian Romanesque cathedral.  The entire area was unbelievably silent and empty.  Only one pair of lovers, standing under the trees . . . moved uneasily away at our approach.  All about us were the ruins of the great old buildings, semisilhouetted against the bright sky.  And what ruins!  In there original state, they had seemed slightly imitative and pretentious.  Now they suddenly had a grandeur I had never seen even in Rome.

We both became aware that this was, somehow, a moment like no other.  There was a stillness, a beauty, a sense of infinite, elegiac sadness and timelessness such as I have never experienced.  Death, obviously, was near, and in the air:  hushed, august, brooding Death—nothing else.  Here all the measureless tragedy of the Second World War—the millions of dead, the endless seas of bereavement and sorrow, the extinction of a whole great complex of life and belief and hope—had its perpetuation.  So overpowering was the impression that we spoke only in whispers, as though we were in a cathedral, instead of standing in the open, before the ruins of one.

Not a soul was now in sight.  But no—far up, at the top of the enormous flight of steps leading up to what was left of the cathedral . . . we saw half-hidden in the shadows three adolescent boys—motionless, themselves like statues, themselves silent, endlessly alone and abandoned;  and their lost, defiant figures burn themselves into my vision to the point where I see them still today—elbows on the knees, chins resting on the palms of hands—the embodiment of man’s lost and purposeless state, his loneliness, his helplessness, his wistfulness, and his inability to understand.”

Kennan wrote that achingly beautiful passage in 1960, but I am quite sure that I saw those same three boys at the top of the steps of Pogue Library just yesterday evening.

Teacher’s Journal: Concerning Gift Exchanges

From time to time, my students come to me bearing gifts, gifts that any history professor would appreciate.  One student brought to me a copy of an old family letter, a description of a great great grandfather’s experience in the trenches on the Western Front in World War I.  Another student brought to me a Civil War bayonet, an artifact that I continue to show to my students each semester.  Yet another student brought to me ration stamps from World War II.  I cherish these gifts from students, and I share them with my other students year after year.  Students, though, have showered me with gifts of another sort, gifts that characterize the real value of the teaching/learning experience.

I have been on the receiving end of many gifts throughout my life.  Alicia Knight, my next door neighbor, and God recently gave me the gift of life itself.  What a gift my family has been to me!  What joy they bring to me each day.  My home has been a gift that has brought to me a sense of place and a haven of rest.  Throughout my life, teachers—Evelyn, my son, my daughter, my parents, my brother—have taught me what it means to give and receive love.  And it is the idea of gift exchange that has caused me to strive to teach better in my university classroom.  After all, my calling as a teacher is a gift in itself.

I think of my school and college teachers:  Mrs. Bradford in a seminary kindergarten; Mrs. Eubanks in first grade; Roy Pullam, in his first year of teaching whose excitement for the profession was infectious; Mr. Harding, a victim of polio, who inspired me in the seventh grade to learn History; Hugh Ridenour, who inspired me in high school to teach History;  Bob Gillaspie, who taught me to love literature and writing, and Janice Gillaspie, who comforted me through mathematics and life.  Dr. C. Pat  Taylor and Dr. Albert Wardin and Dr. Roy Z. Chamlee in undergraduate school, all models of caring professionalism, and Dr. James Leo Garrett and Dr. Bill Pitts and Dr. Bert Nelli in graduate school who took a special interest in me and saw in me something that I did not see in myself.  These teachers showered me with gifts, gifts of learning and inspiration.  How I wish I could tell them thank you in a way that would convey to them the depth of my gratitude.

What if I could go back and be a student again, listening to a story on the oval, braided rug of my kindergarten classroom, running down the hill of the playground at Oaklawn Elementary School, walking the halls of Webster County High, soaking in the lectures at Belmont University, or talking with my professors in corner offices in graduate school at Baylor and the University of Kentucky.

How much more I could learn!  In P. F. Kluge’s Alma Mater, the author went back to teach at his old school, Kenyon College in Ohio.  There he had lunch one day with a new colleague, an English professor, who opened the conversation with the observation that “this is my twenty-second year of teaching `Tintern Abbey.’”  The English professor overcame the repetition by making each reading in each new class fresh, and by looking on teaching as a gift exchange.  “I have this romantic idea of teaching as gift exchange,” he told Kluge.  “What matters is if I reach a few students at a level that transforms them and gets them to see the world in a different way.  Gift exchange.  Sure, teaching is method and information, but it’s something else, a gift, an enrichment of your life, a transformation that you spend the rest of your life discovering.”

I still benefit from the gifts given to me by my old teachers.  But now the gift exchange continues still.  Now, I find myself unwrapping gifts from my students:  new perspectives, the excitement of learning, the awe of discovery.  Now, my students come to the classroom or to the office bearing gifts, gifts described by the Kenyon professor, as “an enrichment of your life, a transformation that you spend the rest of your life discovering.”

Taking the Perspective of Others Seriously

Perspective is something that we try to teach our history students at Murray State.  We talk about point-of-view or the “climate of opinion” in which historians write a book or article of history.  Sometimes in our everyday lives we take for granted our own perspective, our own point-of-view.

Or we make the mistake of believing that we are always right, that we always have a clear view of things.  What if we were able to look through the eyes of others, or as the old Native American adage would have it, “walk a mile in his moccasins?”

Perhaps it would make us less self-centered, less parochial, less set in our ways.

Samuel Woodworth wrote nostalgically about his childhood, and particularly about his memories of an old oaken bucket from which he would quench his thirst:

“How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood,

When fond recollections presents them to view!

The orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wildwood,

And every loved spot which my infancy knew,

The wide-spreading pond and the mill that stood by it,

he bridge and the rock where the cataract fell.

The cot of my father, the dairy house nigh it,

And e’en the rude bucket that hung in the well.

That moss-covered bucket I hailed as a treasure,

For often at noon, when returned from the field,

I found it the source of an exquisite pleasure,

The purest and sweetest that nature can yield.

How ardent I seized it, with hands that were glowing,

And quick to the white-pebbled bottom it fell.

Then soon, with the emblem of truth overflowing,

And dripping with coolness, it rose from the well.”

Well, you get the idea.  This poet is remembering back to his childhood to an article of delight, an old oaken bucket that came to represent for him the innocence and joy of the simple pleasures of youth.

There always has to be some crank with a different perspective, a different point-of-view.  And, sure enough, some “Unknown” poet rewrote the poem, “The Old Oaken Bucket,” with a different slant, an angle the poet said, “as censored by the Board of Health.”  Here, then, is a different version of the poem:

“With what anguish of mind I remember my childhood,

Recalled in the light of knowledge since gained,

The malarious farm, the wet, fungous-grown wildwood,

The chills then contracted that since have remained;

The scum-covered duck-pond, the pigsty close by it,

The ditch where the sour-smelling house drainage fell,

The damp, shaded dwelling, the foul barnyard nigh it—

But worse than all else was that terrible well,

And the old oaken bucket, the mold-crusted bucket,

The moss-covered bucket that hung in the well.”

Well now. The unknown parodist clearly has a different perspective.

And as much as we sometimes dislike challenges to our own points-of-view, points-of-view often clouded over with nostalgia, by taking seriously the perspectives of others, as hard and inconvenient as that might be, we can learn much about the truth of our lives, the reality of our world.