Powerful Beyond Measure

I’m sitting on my balcony, reading Middlemarch. It strikes me as a rare treat, two or three times a year, that enough time has elapsed since I’ve read it last for me to feel it freshly, and I pull it off my bookshelves and delve into its wisdom. I have the feeling that few people appreciate this, least of all the friend who woke me up late last night with a call for romantic advice and instead received an exegesis on what Dorothea's choices in love represent. I chuckle as I recall it. Beyond, the trees toss restlessly in the wind. Suddenly, a deep metallic alarm sounds, and draws me out of the world in which an author can admonish her reader to “inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honour to coexist with hers,” without seeming at all preachy. 

            My phone is lit up with a flash flood and storm alert. I turn off the alarm and toss it back inside, onto my carpet, and put George Eliot down with respect. I need to grade sixty essays tonight. My students have written about the drug problem in America, including psychological and physical effects, and I promised I’d return them so that we can finish drugs before we start racism tomorrow. We lead an exciting life. I begin to read through the essays.

 “I have 4 aunts and 2 uncles and they all smoke weed. Out of 6 of them only 2 graduated from high school, because they got lazy and didn’t want to finish school but get high.”

“My sister’s father was on a drug called water and he became abusive and harmed others.”

“I lost my grandpa because someone tried to fight him because of drugs, and when my grandpa won the fight, the man retaliated; shot and killed my grandfather on the steps of a crackhouse. This proves that drugs…”

            I put the papers aside for a moment. Although there is something incredibly life-affirming about reading these essays and picturing the three motivated, successful students who wrote them, students who rose out of the embers of others’ lives by their own sheer willpower, they hit me too heavily. Their matter-of-fact acceptance of ugliness in their lives brings to mind the glass of the door shattered in the gym today, by students who kicked it in because they were mad at being locked out, and my brilliant student who told me glumly in third block that she can’t go to OSU after all—Chapel Hill gave her a better scholarship, even though it doesn’t have her desired major. I cast about for something else to think of.

            A memory flits across my mind. Eight years ago, my friends and I crowded excitedly into the auditorium in a women’s college in the Shomron to hear Rav Lichtenstein speak. Rav Lichtenstein, one of the greatest minds of Modern Orthodox Judaism, who had a PhD in literature and speckled his sichot with poetry. I try to remember whether he spoke in Hebrew or English on that day. Odd, not to remember a language. I wonder whether at his funeral tomorrow someone will quote Milton, and whether they will read him in English or Hebrew. I hope so—I hope someone realizes that this great leader’s teachings flowed sweeter through his poetry.

            On the far side of my desk I have painted a poem. This afternoon, a student came for tutoring during my planning period and snapped a picture of it on his phone.

            “I’ve read it a million times,” he told me, “while I sit here and wonder what it means. I’ve been meaning to take a picture for a while.” He needs to finish writing his essay on drugs. He excelled in the debate. But his essay was a paltry unfinished paragraph, born of his reluctance to write, and I told him he owed me an essay.

            “I guess I’m afraid to write. I’m afraid that I will make a mistake and it will be written forever.” We talked about the beauty of editing, of slashing out the dross and leaving the gold. He bent his head over his desk and attacked his paper with good will. By the time the end-of-day announcements came on, he was finished, and eager to talk.

           “What does articulate mean?”

            “It means knowing what you want to say and saying it well, sharply, clearly, perfectly. Why?”

            “You wrote it on my first draft, when you said if I’m this articulate in speaking, I can write, too, I just have to figure out how to make it happen. But I wasn’t that articulate always—I used to be really—to not be confident. Now I’ve mastered speaking, maybe I should try to master writing.”

            I played it cool, rubbing my ear casually to stop the trumpets from blaring. My student will try to master writing. “Yeah. I’ll help, if you like.” We discussed some possibilities for creative starts.

            “You know, the award I got from you this year, that was the first time I got one in like, three years.”

I’m astonished. “How is that possible? Are you the same in your other classes as you are in here?”

“You mean, like participating? No, I guess not. It’s because… it’s because of conformity, I guess. Nobody really cares, so I don't either. I don’t really bother. I feel safer being myself in here.”

“Huh. That’s good. I'm glad.” I'd like to say me too, but refrain.

 “Yeah. I don’t know what I was afraid of, before. Maybe… there’s this line somebody once told me, that our worst fear isn’t about being inadequate… I can’t remember it.”

I can. As we head out into the sparkling afternoon sun shower, I tell him, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” My student hitches up his backpack jauntily and waves goodbye, secure in the joy of confronting his deepest fear.