A Week of Beautiful Things 03/19-25/08: Final Grades, Emptiness is The Way, Adrienne Stays, What in Life Endures

1. My time has been dominated for a week now with reading final exams and final composition essays and computing the final grades for winter quarter. This is made particularly time consuming because I email my students comments on their exams and their essays. I try to keep teaching right up to the last second, I guess, hoping that things I say on their final work will help them as they move beyond this current course to other courses and as they keep thinking and examining themselves. The beauty of this time is related to the the sorrow of this time. On the one hand, it's remarkable to see how much students can learn and produce over a ten week course of study; on the other hand, it's a brief amount of time. So much is left undone and I see so much promise for further learning. It's hard to let go of each quarter's students and our enterprise together.

2. In Survey of World Literature, I began most of our class sessions by reading chapters from the Tao te Ching. By the last day of class, I had read it all to my students. I love the Stephen Mitchell translation, (read it here), much like I love Coleman Barks' translations of Rumi's poetry. The translations are simple, poetic, and accessible. One of my students emailed me this morning, saying, "Thanks for everything you taught me in class. I have learned to not feel so bad when I feel 'empty.'" Ahhh. That's the Tao speaking through him. In the Tao, emptiness is not a state of lacking, it's a state of being receptive. It's necessary. Listen to chapter 11:

11

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

3. Adrienne continues her stay, but will be flying back to West Point, NY tomorrow. She's a graduate student, studying to be a librarian at Syracuse University, most through online courses. She's been in devoted student mode the last few days, working hard to meet paper deadlines and to keep herself on task, despite being away from home. She's remarkable with her energy, determination, intelligence, and discipline. I'll never forget the joy that rose in my heart when the Deke told me Adrienne was starting this program. She was born to be a librarian and, particularly in the digital age, she will serve her library patrons, in whatever context, very well.

4. Lastly, and then on to other writing. During the past ten to eleven weeks of teaching I've spent a great deal of time working with ancient literature and ancient ideas about life. I teach Thich Nhat Hanh's Buddhisht text, Being Peace in my composition course because I think the Buddhist ways of understanding the nature of reality help students better than anything else to generate thoughts and ideas for writing; likewise, I have my students study the ancient rhetorical trope copia as a way of thinking more fully and fruitfully. In my literature course we read Gilgamesh, much of The Odyssey, The Ramayana, Antigone, and poetry by Rumi, T'ao Ch'ien, Tu Fu, Li Po and selections from the Japanese classic anthologies, and The Manyoshu and The Kokinshu.
If you are still reading this post, you might be thinking that this all seems distant, impractical, purely academic in the worst sense of the word. Dead.
Hardly. The chief joy I experienced this quarter was that my students began to understand that in many ways there is no such thing as ancient, in the sense of gone or past. These literatures, in their exploration of ethical dilemmas, pride, mortality, the heart's longing, the right ways to live, the world of nature, love, and the many other dimensions of being human, were contemporary and unfolded wisdom to us all and these literatures became the means by which my students wrote deeply self-examining essays as they looked at their own experience as part of the unending continuum of enduring human experiences.
No wonder, now that grades are in and the quarter is over, I'm so happy.