You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [70]
“What was her name?”
“Isabelle.”
“You ever think about going back?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know, Will. Maybe there’s a chance. Maybe she’s still around. Cowards spend their lives alone. Either with people who can’t hurt them, or with no one at all. Either way, man. Same thing.”
He squeezed my shoulder. “You be tougher than that, Will. You do the hard thing.”
He smiled.
“I got to get out of here, buddy. Take care of yourself.”
“You too, Mickey.”
I could still feel the weight of his hand, the heat of it on my shoulder as I listened to his footsteps fading down the long hallway toward his classroom.
* * *
After he was gone, I gathered my things and left the office before anyone else arrived. I went to my classroom and prepared to spend the morning teaching three sections of sophomore English.
I placed copies of the second chapter of Walden on the empty desks fanned in a semi-circle before the whiteboard. Then I wrote the day’s quotation across the board:
“If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities. If we are alive, let us go about our business.”
Each of my sophomores had a separate notebook in which they’d write a ten-minute response to the day’s quotation. Those ten minutes were often my favorite part of the day, sitting on the edge of my desk, drinking coffee, watching them write, smiling at the students who looked up at me. I loved the ones who chewed on their pen caps and furrowed their brows, pretending to think hard. I loved watching the few kids who got lost in their work. The sound of the room, the pens across paper, the exaggerated sighs of exasperation.
I used to think, These are my students. I love them. I was often amazed by the closeness I felt, by my desire to protect them, to push them. I wanted to make them proud of me. I wanted never to disappoint them. As much as I loved them in those quiet minutes at the beginning of class, I also wanted them to love me in return.
After I’d written the quotation across the board, I sat at one of their desks and looked up at the board. I watched myself, book in hand, pacing, asking questions. Teaching.
There was noise in the halls—laughing, lockers slamming, familiar voices.
The ten-minute bell rang. I looked down at the packet and read:
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui . . . Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business . . . The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things . . . My head is hands and feet . . . my head is an organ for burrowing . . . I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.
From Thoreau’s Walden, Chapter 2, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.”
After the bell rang, after they’d written their ten-minute responses, we began. What did he mean? I asked again and again. What did he mean by “and here I will begin to mine?” And how is the “intellect a cleaver?” And is it really? And are we really mining? And should we be? And do we “only crave reality?” And should we? And what about morality? And is there such a thing? And what are these “thin rising vapors?” And are your heads “hands and feet?” Are your heads organs “for burrowing?” And if so, what hills are yours burrowing through? And what have you found so far?
* * *
When the bell rang that last period