F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said the rich “are different from
you and me.” It wasn’t just their great wads of cash, as Hemingway
thought. It was rather that their wealth and influence enabled them
to brush off life’s jabs and right crosses when the rest of us
would throw in the towel.
So, too, I’ve found, are English professors different from
you and me. I have known my share of doctors of philosophy, and
I’ve read a great deal of their published material, and I am
convinced these folks feel more deeply, think more profoundly and
experience life more intimately than do we poor working
stiffs.
I came across another fine example of this the other day.
Never in my life had I considered mowing the lawn a mystical
experience until I read an essay called “The
Metaphysics of Cutting Grass.” Suddenly mundane little chores like mowing the
lawn and picking up after the dog took on a
transcendent aspect.
The author, an English professor at
Graceland University (which is sadly in Iowa and not Memphis),
discourses at length on the transformative enterprise that is
mowing the lawn. Far from a commonplace task,
mowing is an “applied art” and a deeply spiritual experience
wherein one’s “I” meets one’s “me,” where one works a perceptible
change in the “physical, out there, external reality.” I came away
from this essay a little wistful over my misspent life, having
stupidly mistaken 35 years of deep, meaningful experiences for mere
drudgery.
I suppose that is to be expected since I am not an English
professor. Only in the mind of a Ph.D. does one’s every routine
activity take on great meaning and significance, whether it’s
washing one’s shorts or clipping one’s toenails. Metaphysical
experiences must be all English professors have when they’re not
teaching our children subversive literature.
Nor is it enough to transform one’s
own existence. Being an educator, the author longs to find that he
has transformed his students’ lives: “Perhaps I
yearn too much to hear my echo in the world. Yes, occasionally, I
do hear from a former student, several years out, that something I
said or did has assumed some meaning in their lives.”
Teachers are the only wage earners
obsessed with assuming meaning in other people’s lives. My plumber
comes over and cleans out my clogged toilet, but does he sit around
wondering if his Roto-Rooting has had a profound impact on my life?
I sincerely hope not. That would be creepy. And it’s not even their
students’ success that concerns teachers, but their impact
on their students’ success. If a student achieves anything, it is
the result of his teacher’s guidance and mentoring. If a student
becomes a serial killer, it is because the teacher was unable to
reach him.
AN IMPORTANT aspect of the metaphysical experience seems
to involve what you or I would call zoning out, but what an English
Professor calls surrendering “to a mental whateverism.” This
is:
a kind of watching, one step removed, the products of
unwilled mental activity, products broken free of any establishing
context. It’s a being willing, not a willing — a willingness to be
open, not a willed effort to establish a goal against which to
measure myself.
No doubt you are thinking: that is exactly what
I’ve been doing when cutting the grass, but I have never been able
to put it into such opaque and esoteric words! Thank God we have
English professors to render our unintelligible thoughts into such
transcendental prose.
I doubt I will ever achieve that
level of enlightenment. When I took out the garbage this evening, I
tried to experience the embodied texture of my mental experience. I
stood in the alley a good five minutes, trash bag in hand, staring
grimly at the Dumpster waiting to sense some kind of invisible
growth. Only I felt nothing (except maybe a little foolish).
Perhaps I am unworthy. Perhaps I don’t have what it takes, which is
apparently a Ph.D. in literature.
True, my actions have
wrought some small change in the physical, out
there, external reality — after all the Dumpster is changed by the
mere presence of more garbage — yet I cannot help but feel
dissatisfied. While the Dumpster itself is full, my actions seem
empty of any higher meaning.
But I am working on my inner self. There is an old
Buddhist saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher will
come.” I must go prepare myself. The English teacher could be here
any minute.
