My last lecture

Five minutes before my last lecture, I place a candle on the desk and light it.  The lectern stands apart from the desk.  Some students have already arrived, others come in; some are puzzled at the candle, others not.  At 11:10 a.m., May 5, 2015, I stand and deliver my last lecture in history before college students.  I begin…

Good morning.  I have lit a candle, as you can see, and hopefully none of you are allergic to the scent of rosemary.  This is my last lecture of my teaching career and I want you to share this time with me.  I light the candle because I want some physical remembrance of this class, of this time, of my career, of you.  I turned in my letter of resignation to retire yesterday.

This is my last lecture.

We have material to cover, but at the end of the lecture, I will make a few personal remarks.  But, first, let’s begin with the First Persian Gulf War under Bush the First’s administration.  Of course, we didn’t know that there would be a Second Persian Gulf War, so it was merely called, the Persian Gulf War…

[I proceed to lecture for about an hour, finishing with the presidential election of 2012, the Obama victory coming from the gradual, but not complete, recovery from the Great Recession, the ongoing withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mitt Romney’s ill-chosen remarks about the 49% of the American people being “takers.”  The economy nearly always has affect upon the party in power.  I ask for questions. I close my notes, pause, and then proceed...]

Since 1960, I have either sat in desks like you are today, or I have taught college and university courses in history, government, anthropology.  I have taught a total of fifty years, twenty-four at Amarillo College, seventeen here at Cisco, and several years at Texas A&M, Texas Christian, the University of Texas at Arlington, and Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth.

I am seventy-two years old and I want to do some other things while I am in good health such as hiking, mountaineering in northern New Mexico, travel to Europe again, write.  I may teach again, perhaps.  Texas Wesleyan students want me to teach a course in Native American history, and I would like to teach a course in the philosophy of history.  But, we’ll see about all that.

In my teaching I have striven to be unbiased, giving as many sides to interpreting an event as I can.  If I have taken one side strongly or the other, I have done it with disclosure to you, playing and arguing a position: liberal, conservative, socialist, communist, fascist.  I have not played that role or presented that method to you.  I’ve done that technique in the past, but not recently in our class. Nonetheless, the constants in my lectures have been science, naturalism, reasoning, rationality, evidence, corroboration.  Those are methods that must remain constant.  They must.

I have given you the definition, early on, that history is philosophy with examples.  I have not explicitly spelled out the philosophies of history, but you may find the philosophies if you parse my lectures and review the constants of science, naturalism, and the reasoned approach to life.  I wish I had done more to explain examples, the historical events, with contrasting philosophies, but I have not. I want to tell you some quotes or axioms that have guided me and my teaching over the years.  Some of these I have already given to you, but here they are again.

Say what you mean.  Deliver what you promise.  Fight for the right [1].

Now, fighting for the right doesn’t necessarily mean take up arms or drop bombs, but it might.  Here it means to take a stand, argue reasonably, talk to power.

History is not dead; it isn’t even past [2].

That is a Faulkner quote, and I believe it fervently.  I add my own dimension to his words:  You may not want to live in the past, but the past lives in you.  What that means is nothing spooky, but your genotype, phenotype, the narratives you carry within from your mother and father, me, your friends, the books you read, even the way you walk, are related to the past that you carry now, within you.

If you are not for yourself, then who is for you?  But, if you are for yourself alone, what are you?  If not now, when?  [3]

I am neither religious nor Jewish, but this quote from the Talmud expresses much, both taking care of yourself and entering into a civil life with others, unselfishly–now. Then, finally, you have heard this quote from me in class, but it is quite significant.  It comes from Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2,400 years ago.

Happiness depends upon freedom and freedom depends upon courage. And, courage is the knowledge of what is sweet and what is terrible, and yet notwithstanding, going out into the day to meet it [4].

There has not been a a class I have taught that I have not had anxiety until I am fifteen or so minutes into the class.  Lecturing, presenting before you is both sweet and terrible.  All of my career, it always has been both.  Thank you for being with me today.

I paused and looked over the class through the years.  I then walked over to the lighted candle on the desk and blew the flame out

—–

[1]  Codes of fealty, Middle Ages, Europe, various sources.  This was the mission statement of American Airlines after World War II.

[2]  William Faulkner, various sources, perhaps the Nobel Prize speech he gave in literature.

[3]  Tractate Avoth, Chapter 1, Mishna 14 (New York: Judaica Press, 1965).

[4]  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin Classics, 1972).  This comes from Pericles’ funeral oration.

Lands and Peoples: Formative Years

During formative years, life events shape our destiny.  In 1952, my mother gave me seven volumes of The Grolier Society, ‘Lands and Peoples.’  Volume I is pictured above along with an additional Volume I purchased later.

These volumes plus ‘Book of Knowledge’ encyclopedias my mother also acquired as a gift to me opened the world in colored photographs and text for me to see.  I became enriched through these books, so much so that I went into history, government, and anthropology during my college coursework and teaching.

Other influences, of course, had their sway on me:  university courses at UT-Austin with Ginascol, Morgan, and Bullock; my work under Covey at Howard Payne; and Coach Warren at Brownwood High School who taught me Texas history and was the first lecturer (other than pastors and priests) I ever studied under.

As a tip of craft for college students studying history, world civilization, government, I recommend looking at these volumes (if you can find them), but I also recommend that students use the Google image resource along with the text.  Peruse the images about the period you study.  Look at the photographs and paintings depicting an event or the archeaology of the Romans or Indus Valley–any topic under study.  Use the Google feature to get an image that will enliven the person or event, much like The Grolier Society, ‘Lands and Peoples’ formed my lineament of life thereafter.

Literature of my early college days

I have been rereading my English literature textbook from Howard Payne College in the early 1960s.  Mr. Robnett was my professor and he taught me Shakespeare as well.

I implored my students in my career to save their textbooks and refer to them as they went out into the world, or prophetically for myself as well as them, “You can read them in your old age.”  I thought I would read my books again and, so, here I am.

From Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” I made a note in the the 1960s to study and now in 2018, I read these lines again,

We are not now that strength which in the old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Tennyson wrote those lines in 1842, one hundred years before my birth in 1942, during World War II.

I hope my history and world civilization students kept some of their textbooks and on a rainy day read the lines of whatever interests them and kindly remember me as their teacher of history whose definition of the field was, “History is philosophy with examples.”  For I remember my students…and our books.

An Elegy for the Library – The New York Times

Annie Dillard’s Impossible Pages from NYT, or, see rose-prints on her quilt.

Three early and unpublished works by the author of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”

Source: Annie Dillard’s Impossible Pages – The New York Times

Alice Walker, “The Color Purple,” and writing to heal

BACK STORY

“Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.”

So begins “The Color Purple,” the story of Celie, a poor, black child-bride who struggles to escape her abusive stepfather in 1930s Georgia.

Photo

Alice Walker, the author of “The Color Purple,” turns 72 today. Credit Peter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

The author of the book, Alice Walker, born on this day in 1944 in Eatonton, Ga., told the tale mostly through Celie’s letters. The authenticity of her voice catapulted the novel to best-sellers lists, as well as a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Ms. Walker was born to sharecroppers, the youngest of eight children. At age 8, she was blinded in one eye when her brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun.

She later wrote that the disfiguring scar and blindness left her feeling isolated and introspective. She started a journal and began to develop her writing voice.

“I think writing really helps you heal yourself,” Ms. Walker once told The Times. “I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.”

Source: Your Tuesday Briefing: New Hampshire Primary, Obama’s Budget, the SAT – The New York Times

The 25 Greatest Westerns of the Last 25 Years

This is a list from Entertainment Weekly of western films considered outstanding.

The 25 Greatest Westerns of the Last 25 Years

Source: The 25 Greatest Westerns of the Last 25 Years

James Salter (1925-2015)

From the interview of Salter in Paris Review, Summer, 1993:

“I’m not the first person who feels that it’s the writer’s true occupation to travel. In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural. Furthermore, many men of ancient times died on the road, and the image is a strong one. Kings of Arabia, when they are buried, are not given great tombs. They are buried on the side of the road beneath ordinary stones. One thing I saw in England long ago struck me and has always stayed with me. I was going to visit someone in a little village, walking from the railway station across the fields, and I saw an old man, perhaps in his seventies, with a pack on his back. He looked to be a vagabond, dignified, somewhat threadbare, marching along with his staff. A dog trotted at his heels. It was an image I thought should be the final one of a life. Traveling on.”

I came across Salter late in my life, two years ago. His descriptive powers, in part illustrated above, are deep and wide. The first chapter to A Sport and a Pastime is like no other introductory–speeding across France on the train–and his prose grasps you so you are there with him in the compartment.

Read Salter and travel. Yes, as someone has written in the Comment section, the world is lighter in weight with Salter’s death; the heavens, I think, be heavier with his passing for he is up there, amidst the clouds.

[Copied from my contribution to the Comments section, The New York Times, June 20, 2015, James Salter obituary.]

Students: You Will Travel Abroad to a Different Culture!

Favorite Streets in Europe – NYTimes.com.

Berlin’s Rudesheimer Strasse by Gordon Welters of The New York Times.

The above link to The New York Times is about twelve favorite streets in Europe; the photograph is from Berlin on the Rudesheimer Strasse.  The streets of Europe include England, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and, of course, France.

Traveling to another country — even a different state in the U.S. — broadens a person’s outlook on life as others live it and deepens insight into one’s ability to adapt and to see the limitations and strengths of one’s mother culture.

This is what I have told my students over the forty-seven years of my teaching college and university history and anthropology students:

When you go to another country and you will, you will see different things and be changed.  I do not care if you have to borrow your mother’s credit card and max it out, but go!  Go out of the country as soon as you comfortably can!  And, do not go into another culture and expect them to know YOUR language.  Get a pocket dictionary of Spanish, French, Flemish, Hungarian, Russian, an use it to learn and communicate.  Try to talk their native tongue.  I have never had a bad experience in trying to communicate in a foreign language to order food, shop, ask directions, buy tickets for a train, and get shampoo and conditioner at Galleries Lafayette in Paris.

Travel abroad.  Go even to Mexico, Juarez or Matamoras!  If you immerse yourself in another culture, you will learn strange and wonderful things.  As I said, don’t wait, borrow your mother’s or dad’s credit card, book a flight.

A street in Lisbon from Marnoto in The New York Times.

A kind of reality check:  Of course, you will have bad experiences, but you will learn to cope with them.  Besides borrowing your family’s credit card (that is what I did when I first traveled to Europe) there are grants and study-abroad programs that finance one’s adventure and education.  You can also work and save money to go.

My admonition, however, to my students was to go as soon as you can.  Do not delay.

Finding Meaning in the Midst of Oppression

In Nov. 18, 2013, Ms. Badwan said, she was harassed by Hamas officers while helping with a youth arts program. They questioned why she was standing with men. They chastised her for wearing those jean overalls and made her sign a paper promising not to go outside without loosely fitting, traditional Islamic garb.

“I told them I’m an artist; they said, ‘What does this mean?’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘I make films and videos.’ They said, ‘We don’t know what you are talking about, and what do you wear? Why do you look so different?’ They hit me.”

The next day, Ms. Badwan retreated to her room.

Click the link below to access The New York Times article and her photography:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/world/middleeast/finding-gaza-unbearable-artist-creates-her-own-world-in-one-room.html