Maynard Mack: A Life of Learning

今天有幸读到了一篇关于从事教学工作的至理名言。摘录几段教诲如下：

Maynard Mack (Sterling Professor of English, Yale University), in his Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 2000 at The American Council of Learned Societies, 1983; quoted from Douglas Greenberg and Stanley M. Katz eds., The Life of Learning (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7-8.

…

One thing I remember learning very early, and sure enough it was recorded on the first three-by-five that fell out on my lap. “Never forget,” it began—and instantly I realized I was simply confirming from my own experience what Leo Strauss used to tell every aspiring young teacher:

Never forget that in your classroom there will always be at least one student altogether your superior both in mind and in heart. Never forget, either, that there is, or should be, in that classroom a second teacher for more important than you are: a great text. Try not to get in the way of that traffic. Remember Milton’s admonition in Areopagitica: A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. Be careful not to say anything so egregiously silly as that a great artist—or a great historian or a great philosopher or any other creator of a great text—endured all that toil, and often all that suffering, to make a work that refers to nothing but itself, that is about itself and not about the follies, grandeurs, and miseries of the human lot. Be even more careful not to show off—either your learning, if you have any, or your latest critical panacea. Remember that the more luminous the work, the deeper the darkness an intervening opaque body casts. Try not to be that body. If you actually believe, cross your heart, that Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is really “about” metaphor and metonymy, or that Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” celebrates a phallus, try to get off by yourself somewhere and lie down.

What else had I learned? Many things, of course, too obvious to be repeated were set down in those little three-by-five messages to myself, and some rather saddening to repeat. One of the latter is the remarkable shrinkage, as it seems to me, if not sometimes the total erosion, of the awe, reverence, wonder, and, yes, love with which the best teachers of my youth approached the books they taught. Doubtless they were less sophisticated than many of their successors. Certainly they were less sophistic. They would have laughed out loud at the idea that it was some kind of status symbol to the called a “research” or—even more ineptly—a “distinguished” professor, if it meant being without students to profess to, or teaching only when and what the whim moved. They would have laughed yet louder at the self-delusion of those who imagined they were “above” teaching undergraduates. “Be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,” cries a voice in one of Eliot’s choruses from The Rock. “Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.” In the life of learning—institutionalized learning, at any rate—it is the undergraduate who fills the role of the Stranger. It is he or she who will ask you, What good is this stuff anyway? or, Why is the king wearing no clothes? and who are those people pretending they don’t notice? …

…