It had been a long time since my father had tried to educate me himself. To make up for abandoning me to a system he had nothing but contempt for, Dad routinely dumped piles of books in my room with little Post-it notes (“Read this!” or “This man is a motherfucking god!”) pasted onto the covers: Plato, Nietzsche, Cioran, Lawrence, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Epictetus, Berkeley, Kant, Popper, Sartre, Rousseau, and so on. He seemed especially to favor any writer who was a pessimist, a nihilist, or a cynic, including Céline, Bernhard, and the ultimate pessimist-poet, James Thomson, with his darkly frightening “The City of Dreadful Night.”
“Where are the women?” I asked Dad. “Didn’t they think anything worth writing down?”
The next night I found Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Mary McCarthy, Margaret Mead, Hannah Arendt, and Susan Sontag waiting on my pillow.
In this way I was not self-educated so much as I was force-fed, and in truth I liked them all well enough. The Greeks, for example, had fine ideas about how to run a society that are still valid today, especially if you think slavery is wonderful. As for the rest of them, all unquestionable geniuses, I have to admit that their enthusiasm for and celebration of one kind of human being (themselves) and their fear and revulsion of the other kind (everyone else) grated on my nerves. It’s not just that they petitioned for the halting of universal education lest it “ruin thinking,” or that they did everything they could to make their art unintelligible to most people, but they always said unfriendly things like “Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas!” (D. H. Lawrence) and “If we desire a certain type of civilization and culture, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it” (G. B. Shaw) and “Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes” (Yeats) and “The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men” (Nietzsche). Everyone else or, in other words, everyone I knew was nothing more than a corpse rotting upright mainly because of his preference for watching football over reading Virgil. “Mass entertainment is the death of civilization,” those highbrows spat, but I say, if a man giggles at something puerile and his body glows from the joy, does it matter that it was caused not by a profound artwork but by a rerun of Bewitched? Honestly, who cares? That man just had a wonderful inner moment, and what’s more, he got it cheap. Good for him, you ponderous fuck! Basically they thought it would be lovely if the dehumanized masses, who made them literally sick, would please either pass into history or become slaves and be quick about it. They wanted to create a race of superbeings based on their own snobby, syphilitic selves, men who sit on mountaintops all day licking their inner god into a frenzy. Personally I think it wasn’t the “plebeian desire for happiness” of the masses they hated so much, but the secret, sour acknowledgment that the plebes sometimes found it.
That’s why, just as my father had abandoned me, I’d abandoned his learned friends, all those wonderful, bitter geniuses, and at school I’d settled in comfortably doing the bare minimum. Often I’d give myself the day off and walk around the throbbing city to watch it throb or to the racetrack to watch the horses eke out their unfortunate existence under the arses of small men. Occasionally the administration would send grave, unintentionally humorous letters to my father about my attendance.
“Got another letter,” Dad would say, waving it in the air like a $10 note he’d found in an old pair of pants.
“And?”
“And what do you have to say for yourself?”
“Five days a week is too much. It’s draining.”
“You don’t have to be the first in the state, you know. Just scrape by. That’s what you should be aiming for.”
“Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’m scraping.”
“Great. Just make sure you turn up enough to get the little sliver of paper with your name on it.”
“What the hell for?”
“I told you a thousand times. You need society to think you’re playing along. You do what you like later, but you need to make them think you’re one of them.”
“Maybe I am one of them.”
“Yeah, and I’m going to the office tomorrow morning at seven.”
But he wasn’t always able to leave it alone. In fact, I had achieved a certain notoriety among the faculty because of the universally dreaded and personally mortifying visits of my father, whose face would appear suddenly pressed against the frosted glass of the classroom door.
The day after I showed my father my Hamlet essay, he came into my English class and took a seat in the back, squeezing himself into a wooden chair. Mr. White had been writing the word “intertextualization” on the blackboard when Dad came in, so when he turned back to us and saw a middle-aged man among all of us fresh-faced dopes, he was confused. He glowered at my father disapprovingly, as if getting ready to chastise one of his students for spontaneously aging in the middle of a lesson.
“Bit sluggish in here, isn’t it?” Dad said.
“Pardon me?”
“I said, it’s a bit difficult to think in here, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, you are…”
“A concerned parent.”
“You are a parent of a student in this class?”
“Maybe the word ‘concerned’ is an understatement. When I think of him under your tutelage, I start bleeding from the eyes.”
“Which child is yours?”
“I’m not ashamed to admit it. My son is the creature labeled ‘Jasper.’ ”
Mr. White shot me a stern glance just as I was trying to merge with my chair. “Jasper? Is this your father?”
I nodded. What choice did I have?
“If you would like to speak with me about your son, we could make an appointment,” he said to Dad.
“I don’t need to talk to you about my son. I know my son. Do you?”
“Of course. Jasper has been in my class all year.”
“And the others? So they can read and write: well done. That’s a lifetime of shopping lists taken care of. But do you know them? Do you know yourself? Because if you don’t know yourself, you can’t help them know themselves, and you’re probably pissing away everyone’s time here simply training an army of terrified copycats like all you lackluster teachers in this state-run fleapit are prone to do, telling the students what to think instead of how, and trying to fit them into the mold of a perfect taxpayer-to-be instead of bothering to find out who they are.”
The other students laughed, out of confusion.
“Keep quiet!” Mr. White yelled, as if it were the Day of Reckoning and he had the crucial role of sorting all the souls. We shut up. It didn’t do any good. Silence that has been commanded is still very noisy.
“Why should they respect you? You don’t have any respect for them,” Dad continued, and to the students he said, “To bow down to an authority figure is to spit in your own face.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“I’m looking forward to that moment.”
“Please leave.”
“I notice you have a crucifix around your neck.”
“What of it?”
“Do I really need to spell it out for you?”
“Simon.” Mr White addressed one of the baffled students. “Would you kindly run down to the principal’s office and explain to him that we have a disturbance in the classroom and the police should be called.”
“How can you encourage your students to think for themselves with an open mind if you’ve got an outdated belief system crushing your own head like an iron mask? Don’t you see? The flexibility of your mental movement is constricted by stringent dogmatic principles, so you might think you’re standing there telling them about Hamlet, but what they really hear is a man in fear of stepping outside the tight circle that was drawn around him by long-dead men who sold his ancestors a bunch of lies so they could molest all the little boys they wanted in the privacy of their confessional booths!”