What Will Suffice

I am told that I usually seem to have, as Margaret Laurence once put it, the “strength of conviction.”  (Other people have been known to call it stubbornness.)  But, you know, I don’t know everything.  (I know!!!)  Someone was telling me the other day that they thought there was really very little in life worth regretting.  “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” this person said, grasping for depth, authority, I guess.  No better place to go than Shakespeare.

In high school I had a crazy madman of an English teacher.  I have succeeded in shedding most things from high school except the memories of this person.  To my sixteen-year-old bookish self he was like Heathcliff, in more ways than one – there was always a hint of a storm cloud around his eyebrows.

I can’t say I was attracted to him, exactly, though perhaps my mind has whitewashed some schoolgirl crush.  But he was the first person I’d ever met who did things like paper the walls of his classrooms with e.e. cummings poems.  (Now that I think of it, in that time before the internet he had undoubtedly typed them out himself, an even greater sign of something-wrong-in-a-good-way.)  So he had a sort of magnetism to him that, in college, I would realize, attaches to most people who are invested in some higher order of thing than themselves.  At least, that quality is magnetic to me.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a paean to the teachers in our lives who Make A Difference, who Change Young Minds, and Deserve Better Salaries for their trouble.   Even were I tempted to write something so earnest, it wouldn’t do Mr. C— justice, because he openly despised everything in the world that so much as leaned towards the insipid.

The best memory I have from his classes, the one that presents itself at the most inopportune times, in fact, was him rebuking a student for observing that Biff, in Death of a Salesman, was “really sad, because he found out that his whole life kind of sucked.”  (I’m paraphrasing; you get the idea.)  Mr. C— eyed this poor soul carefully before breaking eye contact to stare out the window.  This was his standard signal that a speech was coming on, and from what I remember this was quite a long one.

I could try to reproduce words, but the funny thing is that beyond a certain roughness and deep baritone, I no longer remember his voice very well.  My memories of him depend less on who he was than on the things he said, and how he said them.

But what he said boiled down to this:  Biff’s experience seems really terrible, yes, when he finds out that his dad was, in essence, an archetypal schmuck.  It’s terrible to find out that people you admire are not what you think.  But without that realization, Biff would have walked on thinking the world followed some kind of obvious story about how you Grow Up, become a Man, have a Family, and do Good ‘til you get to the end, usually a hospital bed when you die surrounded by your family.  Living in a delusion doesn’t benefit Biff; it locked him into a kind of insincere existence.

This memory unfurled for the thousandth time when the person I started out this entry talking about said what she did.  Because I understand getting tangled up in issues of regret, because you don’t want to think you’re a bad person but you also don’t want to be afraid to admit mistakes, because you’re closer to fine the less you seek your source for some definitive, because you have to seize the day, and because, as in the case of Mr. C— vs. the student that pitied Biff, it’s not always obvious what’s a good experience and what’s a bad one.  I once tried to compliment a friend by telling her I found it admirable how unapologetic about herself she was, but I’ve also condemned public figures for being afraid to admit they were wrong as cowardly.

But I don’t know how to be consistent about all of these things that are true.  I don’t think Mr. C—did either.  I don’t know if he’s still teaching; some part of me thinks he isn’t.  He didn’t much like it; it wasn’t him.  He didn’t fit into that Make A Difference narrative, at least not in the traditional sense.

But I’m not sure he should regret it.