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By Root 2341 0

Mr. Lawrence undertook to expand my mind: to instruct me in music, logic, philosophy, and the liberal arts—to guide me on explorations of the subjects that have as their focus the search for what it means to be human. He hired tutors in various subjects: there was a woman who came to the house from time to time to give me piano lessons, for example. I regret that I was never able to grasp the making of music. My hands are awkwardly shaped, and they did not conform easily to the dexterous motions that piano playing requires. Little matter, though. Mr. Lawrence would play me classical symphonies and opera. Mr. Lawrence and Clever and I would recline on the couches and chairs in his office, letting our minds be transformed and transported as Eroica boomed from his Bang & Olufsen speakers. I fell in love with classical music—especially Beethoven. Someone once said, Gwen, that the solar system consists of “Jupiter, and debris”: similarly, I would say that classical music consists of Beethoven, and debris. What more is there to say about music, Gwen? I must agree with Nietzsche that life without music would be a mistake. It’s a mistake anyway, but it’d be a worse mistake.

Mr. Lawrence also tried to instruct me and Clever in logic and philosophy. He built a small schoolroom in the big house, with a whiteboard on the wall and two little desks. There Mr. Lawrence in the role of professor spoke to us of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu, Kant and Hegel. He spoke to us of history and politics, of mind and matter, of skepticism and faith, of natural right and the state of nature, of man and god and law.

Sometimes he would play us classical music while Clever and I sat on the floor and drew or painted or made little clay sculptures. Sometimes he would show us films of Shakespeare plays (this was my first exposure to the Bard). Mr. Lawrence insisted that we have exposure to the long golden procession of art and ideas, the great conversations throughout the history of human thought, all the sweetness and light of civilization, the sweetness and light.

I remember, for instance, Mr. Lawrence telling us about Xeno’s paradox. For some reason I remember that lesson very clearly. It was presented to me in the illustration of a frog and a pond.

“Say there is such-and-such a distance between a frog and a pond,” said Mr. Lawrence, and uncapped a black dry-erase marker, and with a few squeaky strokes on the whiteboard rendered an illustration of a tree, a tract of land represented by a flat horizontal line, and a pond. A sun with a face on it gazed down on the scene. He uncapped a blue marker and drew a squiggly line inside the pond—to indicate water—then with a green marker drew squiggly lines on the ground (grass) and in the fluffy top of the tree (leaves), and with a brown marker he drew a squiggly line inside the trunk of the tree. “The frog is sitting under the tree.” Beneath the umbrage of the tree’s canopy he drew a picture of a frog. The drawing looked like this:

“Now say the frog wants to hop to the pond,” said Mr. Lawrence, and already I was remembering the image of my father, Rotpeter, raping the throat of an even less fortunate frog than this one. I shook off the unpleasant memory and tried to pay attention.

“But!—there’s a problem: each time he takes another hop, the frog can only hop half the distance of the last hop.”

What?—I thought, my mind beginning to roil—why?—what kind of bizarre hopping disorder afflicts this particular frog?

“So right away he hops halfway to the pond,” and with a sweeping squeak of the black marker Mr. Lawrence drew a parabola that spanned from the frog, seated at the base of the tree, to a point about halfway across the plane between tree and pond, representing the arcing motion of the frog’s first hop.

“Then, on the second hop, the frog only hops half of the distance he just hopped.” Mr. Lawrence drew another arc, about half as big as the last one. “On the third hop, he can only hop half the distance of that hop, and then half of that and