Youth is wasted on the young. Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said that, and I suppose he probably did. But it’s one of those supposed “quotations” that I have seen only as a quotation, and it has no firm location in a primary text that I can cite. I have a heretical addition to this thought: Education is wasted on the young. That’s sort of a joke, obviously, and hardly an idea that someone like myself, whose life career has been teaching young people, is likely actually to believe. But it points to a truth of which I have become ever more convinced over the years, and especially since I retired from teaching.
It is this: the four-year liberal arts curriculum that a large number of Americans have experienced is a beginning, not an end, a foundation, not a finished edifice. How many clichéd graduation talks each year have as their structuring cliché the fact that the word Commencement means “beginning”. The thing about clichés, though, is they are mostly true. What you learned in college demands continual renewal and replenishment, sort of like putting more money on your Metrocard. Take Hamlet, for example. I think it is important work of English literature, and everybody ought to read it. I have spent a lot of time teaching it to eighteen-year-olds, and reading their sometimes brilliant essays about it. But what is an eighteen-year-old really likely to know about the “the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune”? It is only when you yourself personally encounter some of life’s hardest knocks and most painful abrasions that you really begin to see the bigger picture. At least that has been my experience.
I have been moved to think about all this because of a pleasant experience I had about a week ago. I retired at the age of seventy mainly for my own personal reasons, but I still want to claim a little civic virtue in the decision. You may be aware that for many years now young Ph.Ds in the humanities have had difficulties finding faculty positions commensurate with their training, or perhaps any positions at all. I think it is often self-indulgent, and in many instances simply selfish, for professors to hang onto their tenured positions into their later seventies, and in some instances, their eighties. But of course I did miss teaching, and welcomed incidental opportunities as they came along. Obviously, I was already aware of various civic “Adult Schools” and other organizations in our town devoted to “Continuing Education” or “Life-Long Learning”—the monickers vary—and had taught in several on an occasional basis. But I had been unaware of the scale of these activities. The Princeton Adult School claims to offer 250 courses a year to a total enrollment of about four thousand! That was approximately the size of the Princeton undergraduate body during most of my career. I was attracted to a slightly smaller but in my view classier operation called the Evergreen Forum. In it I taught numerous courses, some of them related to the particular book I had most recently published, but others devoted to major authors like Dante and Chaucer. Just about the time I was already beginning to think that I was a bit long in the tooth for this kind of teaching as well, fickle Fortune made two malign interventions. I fell seriously and for a time alarmingly ill; and then the whole country, indeed world, became the victim of a protracted viral epidemic. Teaching days really were over.
But I had by then reflected on what was so pleasurable about my experience in teaching fellow “seniors”. Partly it was simply the confidence that they had heard about World War II and knew who the principal combatants were. That is, they tended to have knowledge based in an already comparative longevity. But it is also a matter of attitude. These people do want to be there; they are interested in the subject, or sincerely interested in getting interested. They also are nice, genuinely amiable people. The nice experience to which I earlier alluded was an invitation from the well-named Reading Group, a local club of well-educated, dedicated readers. The club seems now to be composed entirely of women, though not, I think, by statute or design. Few of the members are as old as I, but some are, and all are seriously “adult”.
Their mode of procedure is as follows. They pick a book, some agreed upon title of general interest that has created a buzz in the book reviews or otherwise become prominent. Everyone in the group reads the book. I presume there is general chit-chat about this book among members; but some if not all of the selected books become the subject of a general meeting. At it some allegedly knowledgeable person gives a short talk about the chosen title and/or broader literary and historical issues it may raise. Sometime last year a friend who is a club member asked me if I would give a talk relating to a new Princeton University Press title that was enjoying a large degree of “crossover” success in book stores: Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath. Marion Turner is a famous Oxford professor, author of an impressive biography of Chaucer. The Wife of Bath is probably even more famous—one of the most memorable characters in English literature, and certainly in the Canterbury Tales. Of course I agreed, and as the proposed date was months in the future, didn’t think a lot more about it. I had given such a talk to this group once before. Although I do not remember much about the event, it would have been the early 2010s because the book I was talking about was Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, published in 2011.
But time does move on, and by the last week in September I had to turn my mind to the task. I think it was a pretty decent talk; it was certainly generously received. But it wasn’t dumbed down. If you are going to talk about the Wife of Bath you have to face up honestly to some very complicated aspects of the medieval literature of asceticism. It is nearly miraculous that Chaucer could make a masterpiece, at once comic and profound, out of such materials. My audience was not a graduate seminar in medieval literature, but a group of mature, very well read general readers. They were not merely capable of tolerating some rather arcane “background”, they seemed eager to engage with it. Reading is a cooperative venture between author and reader. A good read is much less like eating lunch—like it, don’t like it—than like having a conversation with an interesting friend. We all want to get something out of a book we read; but the degree to which we can do so depends in part on what we ourselves are willing and able to put into it. And that in turn depends in part on the wisdom gained from life experience and the reading of many other books. I guarantee you that reading Hamlet when you are fifty-eight is a different experience from reading it at eighteen. And giving a lecture at eighty-seven is a different experience from giving one at twenty-seven. Indeed, a lecture is like a mini-book. The word lecture itself is French for “reading” and preserves the memory of the teaching methods in the medieval schools. Anyway, my thanks to the Reading Group and to all reading groups. That there are hundreds, possibly thousands of such self-animating reading clubs and study groups throughout the land is a comfort in what so often seems a coarsening national cultural landscape. Indeed "Reading Group" sounds like a fair title for civilization generally.
