Read Online Teacher by Mark Edmundson - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Edmundson
Tags: Fictioin
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heroic culture in
The
Iliad,
the apogee of all male warrior culture up to the present, really, isn’t just the great doer of deeds, the man, that is, who kills so many Trojans one day that he gluts a river with blood until the river god is revolted and tries to drown him. Achilles is also a great orator. His powers of expression are nearly incomparable. But you don’t go to Achilles for an elevating discussion. He makes speeches, lays down the word, and in his orations he unfolds the heroic code. The code revolves around one issue—honor—and its preservation, enhancement, and demolition. Achilles always knows what he must do—what god he must respect; when he must sacrifice; whom he must kill and despoil. And when Achilles speaks, everyone goes silent and listens. If you don’t, you’ll be blood on the sand. The most maladroit peewee football coach urging his kids to hold the line is tied, however pathetically, to this rap-and-wreck tradition.
Socrates, who comes on later in history, is not prone to speeches. He’ll give them if he’s pushed, but he’d prefer to pose questions, endless questions. With them, he hopes to get his interlocutor to know something about himself. And, too, Socrates aspires to be improved by the exchange. Unlike Achilles, who assumes he knows everything worth knowing (including the fact that he’ll die very young), Socrates says he knows nothing. For this, the oracle at Delphi commends him, calls him the wisest man in Athens. As soon as Achilles opened his mouth, Socrates would have begun badgering him with questions.
Though they are not entirely unlike, these two, Achilles and Socrates, they are much opposed. There was only one Socrates; we’ll never see his like again. But his spirit is always abroad in the world, and when it meets up with the spirit of heroic manliness, Achilles’ spirit—and this will happen before my eyes, soon—then one has to give way. And it will not always be the homely figure with the ready laugh who steps aside.
MACE JOHNSON, the spirit of football, the spirit of manliness, call it what you like, had anointed me at the end of last football season—though such investitures can always be revoked. Here is how it happened.
I came to football with precious little aptitude. My first year on the varsity, junior year, I was six feet tall, radically uncoordinated, tallowy in body, and bat-blind without my glasses. I missed getting cut from the team by a hair. On the fateful day of the last cut, the linebacker coach, Brian Rourke, pulled me aside and informed me that I was utterly without ability and that the only reason, the only reason in the world, I wasn’t going to be cut was that I “hustled like a bastard” on the field and was an example to the “lazy shits” with which the team, that year, was rife.
Rourke came on like a Thoroughbred: He’d been the captain of the Malden Catholic team and had then gone to Harvard, where he was a star football player. The next year we heard he skipped away to Harvard Business School, and today, for all I know, he owns great expanses of cement and steel and whole choirs of computers and is worshiped by phalanxes of cell phone–yammering princelings of global commerce. At the time, what came through was that he was deplorably handsome, a movie star in the flesh, and absurdly tough. He spat tobacco juice down on us while we pushed the blocking sled along, him riding atop it like Darius of Persia. He was a triumph of prole genetics, was Rourke; I was a mutt, just managing to bark along after the team as it strode through the stadium.
Rourke was not a subtle motivator; he wasn’t, I’d wager, trying to inspire me with a brash challenge. No, he was simply calling roll, letting me know where the scales of justice were poised. He was in charge of order and degree, like Ulysses in Shakespeare’s play, and he was going to let me know where I stood in that great chain of being on which he held such an exalted place. He
The
Iliad,
the apogee of all male warrior culture up to the present, really, isn’t just the great doer of deeds, the man, that is, who kills so many Trojans one day that he gluts a river with blood until the river god is revolted and tries to drown him. Achilles is also a great orator. His powers of expression are nearly incomparable. But you don’t go to Achilles for an elevating discussion. He makes speeches, lays down the word, and in his orations he unfolds the heroic code. The code revolves around one issue—honor—and its preservation, enhancement, and demolition. Achilles always knows what he must do—what god he must respect; when he must sacrifice; whom he must kill and despoil. And when Achilles speaks, everyone goes silent and listens. If you don’t, you’ll be blood on the sand. The most maladroit peewee football coach urging his kids to hold the line is tied, however pathetically, to this rap-and-wreck tradition.
Socrates, who comes on later in history, is not prone to speeches. He’ll give them if he’s pushed, but he’d prefer to pose questions, endless questions. With them, he hopes to get his interlocutor to know something about himself. And, too, Socrates aspires to be improved by the exchange. Unlike Achilles, who assumes he knows everything worth knowing (including the fact that he’ll die very young), Socrates says he knows nothing. For this, the oracle at Delphi commends him, calls him the wisest man in Athens. As soon as Achilles opened his mouth, Socrates would have begun badgering him with questions.
Though they are not entirely unlike, these two, Achilles and Socrates, they are much opposed. There was only one Socrates; we’ll never see his like again. But his spirit is always abroad in the world, and when it meets up with the spirit of heroic manliness, Achilles’ spirit—and this will happen before my eyes, soon—then one has to give way. And it will not always be the homely figure with the ready laugh who steps aside.
MACE JOHNSON, the spirit of football, the spirit of manliness, call it what you like, had anointed me at the end of last football season—though such investitures can always be revoked. Here is how it happened.
I came to football with precious little aptitude. My first year on the varsity, junior year, I was six feet tall, radically uncoordinated, tallowy in body, and bat-blind without my glasses. I missed getting cut from the team by a hair. On the fateful day of the last cut, the linebacker coach, Brian Rourke, pulled me aside and informed me that I was utterly without ability and that the only reason, the only reason in the world, I wasn’t going to be cut was that I “hustled like a bastard” on the field and was an example to the “lazy shits” with which the team, that year, was rife.
Rourke came on like a Thoroughbred: He’d been the captain of the Malden Catholic team and had then gone to Harvard, where he was a star football player. The next year we heard he skipped away to Harvard Business School, and today, for all I know, he owns great expanses of cement and steel and whole choirs of computers and is worshiped by phalanxes of cell phone–yammering princelings of global commerce. At the time, what came through was that he was deplorably handsome, a movie star in the flesh, and absurdly tough. He spat tobacco juice down on us while we pushed the blocking sled along, him riding atop it like Darius of Persia. He was a triumph of prole genetics, was Rourke; I was a mutt, just managing to bark along after the team as it strode through the stadium.
Rourke was not a subtle motivator; he wasn’t, I’d wager, trying to inspire me with a brash challenge. No, he was simply calling roll, letting me know where the scales of justice were poised. He was in charge of order and degree, like Ulysses in Shakespeare’s play, and he was going to let me know where I stood in that great chain of being on which he held such an exalted place. He
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