Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [40]
For a moment I flashed back to a motivational speaker who visited my high school when I was in the twelfth grade. You know the type. A self-promoting, supercheerful, somewhat humorous professional speaker dedicated to motivating the graduating students by some variation on the theme “these are the best years of your life.” That message was always quickly followed by “you have the whole world in front of you.” Maybe I was jaded, but even as an eighteen-year-old, I thought it seemed slightly incongruous (and less than motivational) that I was being told that my whole life stretched in front of me but that the best of it had already passed. Maybe that’s why I wanted to slap some enthusiasm into my temporary students (metaphorically speaking, of course).
I should have told them about Héloïse and Abelard. Theirs is a tale of second chances.
According to Chris, Abelard was a renowned scholar in medieval France and Héloïse one of his most brilliant students. In an age when women were treated as little more than slaves to their husbands, Héloïse was learned, spoke several languages, and was recognized as an intellectual giant. It didn’t go unnoticed that she was also a hottie. Abelard fell madly in love with her, seduced her, and got her pregnant. Then, for his transgressions, he was castrated by her uncle.
Really. They castrated him.
Bet you didn’t see that coming. Not with all that talk of second chances.
Héloïse, getting in my mind the better part of the deal, went to Britain to give birth out of the limelight, and Abelard fled into the wilderness. That could have been it: one baby, one woman shamed, and one eunuch. But it wasn’t. That was actually the beginning of their romance.
Years pass . . . the two lovers were separated by geography and obscurity . . . not to mention the castration. Eventually they began a correspondence, until Abelard got himself into trouble with the Vatican, was threatened with excommunication, and fell ill. Héloïse heard of his dilemma and had her now dying lover brought to her priory, where she nursed him. After all the road blocks and obstacles, two people who had run out of second chances got a final second chance to be together. Abelard died soon after and was buried in the graveyard of the nunnery so that Héloïse could be close to him, and when she died, she was buried with him . . . two coffins, one grave.
That was what I wanted to tell the students—okay, not this specific story. I’m not sure how they would have taken a story about a teacher seducing his student and then getting castrated. What I wanted to tell them was that there are no second chances and yet there are always second chances. “Calling all slugs and sloths! Time to get off the couch of self-induced complacency.” Television instills in us a spectator mentality. We watch our lives from the stands. We live and love vicariously through the stories of others. And to those of us who are caught in this kind of life-by-proxy, Ben Franklin strengthens our resolve. “You are more than a lifeless lump. Don’t do it. Don’t put off until tomorrow what you ought to resolve for today.”
If I can do it, a self-professed failure, then they could do it, before their failures were upon them. If Abelard could do it, minus his . . . well, you know . . . anyone can do it. That’s what I ought to have told them. Unfortunately, all I did was bore them with details of the law of search and seizure. Although they did perk up at the mention of strip searches.
Maybe I’ll get a second chance next year.
My brief return to the halls of academia had put me in an introspective mood. Why is it, I asked myself, that I should want to change my behavior? Notwithstanding