I know a seventeen year old who is heady with excitement of reading philosophy and writing papers at a college in an ideal setting. She believes that she can make bad things better. She believes in learning. She feels the beauty of it. She is feeling the soothing pleasure that stimulating her mind conveys to her whole being. The drug. The security of the orderly courses taught by organized teachers. The feeling that the chaos can be controlled, if only it can be studied, outlined, and summed up in a few words—analyzed—and thereby, captured. It’s a roll in the academic hay. Make hay while this sun shines.
I know a ninety-two year old who had that satisfaction seventy-five years ago, not far from the same setting. She recalls that the Smith girls were “sensible.” Now she feels she is no longer of any use. She feels “obsolete.”
The girl was once annoyed by what she calls “dead white males” whose philosophies and lessons she would be forced to learn at certain universities. She is studying those annoying men. The drug. Mrs. T. taught many young women. Men, too. She taught some to be teachers. After she stopped doing that at her university, she taught the wives of graduate students, who were stuck at home with children, some of them, and not much intellectual stimulation. She taught them at her house. Her house is filled with cobwebs now, except every fourth Monday, when a crew of four come to clean. Funny, spider’s webs are woven of silk. Such an elegant material. Natural. Luxurious, when we spin it into cloth. Of course we use the silk trailed out by worms, not the gossamer webs. They are not so attractive. Dust collects on them in houses. The dust and the webs grow mold, and the mold gives out an acid odor.
The wives are gone. The husbands have graduated. The bus service to Mrs. T.’s house has been cut back. It would be difficult for them to get there anyway. The teachers at her nearby university are teaching ecstatic students, some of them. The same lessons, most of them, that she taught, written by the same dead white males, and some still living, and even some written by females. Not much new is being taught. We haven’t learned the old stuff very well yet; it would be foolhardy to learn too much new. It’s hard to tell what will be thought worthy of keeping and following years from now. So it’s a better bet to keep on learning the old wisdoms, literature, philosophies. Histories are useful. They don’t change much, except in interpretation. But they repeat, don’t they? So all you need to learn are a few patterns, and you’ll soon see that humankind is not very imaginative; it just repeats, in different languages.
Mrs. T. is happy that the president is trying to reduce the costs of medical care and to provide insurance for all. The teenager is glad, too. Both support efforts to save the planet. Both want to see all the hungry fed and homeless house. I wonder where the young lady will be when she is ninety-two. Was our world very different in 1918 from this world? Did the learning help us avoid bad things? The teenager doesn’t care. It’s her turn, however it turns out. “I want to try,” she says. “We’ll see,” she says. Sensible.