A Fable
Scene: Guardroom of a Nazi concentration camp
An SS guard is talking to his CO.
SS man: The other guys are snubbing me but I don’t see what I did that’s so wrong.
CO: What did you do?
SS man: I raped a female prisoner, a very beautiful young woman, perfect hair, perfect breasts.
CO <raging>: Have you gone out of your mind?! Race defilement is a capital crime. The Jew is decay. She will suck the life out of a pure-blooded Aryan.
SS man: I killed her first.
<CO looks surprised and uncertain what to say next>
An Event, with its Significance
RW. I taught at San Francisco State, a university somewhere below the second rank, and was slightly acquainted with a mustachio’d man who, like me, held a degree from the ivies, and, unlike me, planned to return to them (after 2 years he became a professor at Dartmouth).
Meeting me by chance in front of the library, he asked: “I’ve heard you spend a lot of time in there. Is it good?”
The casual way he implied that he didn’t read books startled me. I reflected that Leonard Library had 3 million books, including several editions of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and said, “Yes, it’s a fine library.”
Our next chance meeting featured him bearing down on me with outrage in his moustache. “What do you mean, that’s a fine library? They don’t have anything up there.”
My bewilderment redoubled. I recognized the discourse of the junior-high schoolyard in “They don’t have anything.” Of a baseball player who disgraces himself for all time by striking out: “He’s got nothin.’” Of a teacher:” “She makes me puke.” People who only yesterday were bland children now carved out with rude strokes their right to be adults, to be negative. How strange that a Ph.D should talk like that.
I ordered Leonard’s Acquisitions Department to buy J.P. Migne’s Patrologia Latina, a collection of medieval literature in 170 volumes. That should eke out Leonard’s Nothing. Meeting with Professor Moustache again, I mentioned this.
“I’ve heard the scholarship in that is pretty poor,” he said.
I felt anger; silently my mind raged: “You’ve heard! You’ve heard! If you had read some of it, that would be something. But somebody apparently said to you, in your idiom, ‘Migne has nothing,’ and that gave you the same rights as if you had read all 170 volumes and taken notes.”
3 meetings like that did it, and the repartees ceased. Not until years later did my knowledge of academic men and women reach a level to enable me to read the subtext of each of his little talks.
- To me, this provincial place is a temporary refuge that I’ll escape from as fast as I can, so I don’t know what the library is like, or where the Student Union is, or where the men’s room is.
- When I visit a university library, I search for my own books
and essays. If all are there, it will do; if not one is, it is abominable.
- Though a student weighs the merits of a book by reading it,
a professional man seeks the opinion of someone with the right to affirm or dismiss with a spoken word—a world-famous expert on the subject. And if he passes the expert’s opinion on, he is himself of sufficient clout to do so without naming the source. To paraphrase the motto of a brokerage, “When Professor Moustache talks, people listen.”
Young people planning an academic career, beware: it rots you.
A Ruffled Gun, continued
Contributions were sought to issue rabbits with surrogate feet after pedal amputation had subjected them to a run of bad luck.
A Fable
In a trench, during combat, the soldiers were appalled to see an enemy grenade come hurtling over the parapet and fall in the mud. Before anyone could do anything, a man had thrown himself on the grenade, just in time, for it exploded instantly and sent its fragments into him, killing him but sparing the others.
“He sacrificed himself that we might live,” said the sergeant. “I’ll nominate him for the Medal of Honor.”
As the men nodded agreement, a second grenade came over the parapet and fell in the mud. Four soldiers snatched up the corpse of the dead man and threw it on this grenade, just in time, for it exploded et cetera.
“Can’t you let him rest in peace?” said the sergeant.
“Now he’s twice enabled us to live,” said a soldier: “you can nominate him for two medals. This is bad?” |