Teacher by Mark Edmundson Read Free Book Online

luminously pretty, dark-complected, with inky-black hair, and always had her schoolwork done and never missed a sorority social night and had a boyfriend (whom she’d marry) and a college picked out (the University of Connecticut) and a profession (physical therapy), and at Christmastime, once, sewed jingling bells to her slip so that when she walked or skipped (yeah, she did skip) down the halls, ringling holiday sounds came with her. She was unremittingly benevolent to all (and I mean
all;
the most noxious social outcast got a smile and a spray of kind words from Suze) good-hearted, curious, uncloyingly sweet, and always up. No, Suze had done it before; she was near high school satori. Had Dubby thought to mistreat Suze Rodino—she wasn’t, as it happened, in this class—an invisible ring of social approval would have risen around her, guarding her high-note happiness, and, like a force field, sent the offending particle to the ground.
    Against this high school world, Lears was already taking his first small step, though it was a step we could not perceive. The quote from Nietzsche had a point. It was simply that in order to be a thinker, in order even to study philosophy, you had to be willing to fall out of joint with your times. “Genuine philosophers, being
of
necessity
people of tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, have always found themselves, and
had
to find themselves, in contradiction to their today; their enemy was ever the ideal of today.” To be at war with today and the ideal of today? That, of course, was exactly what we did not want. Everyone in the class, Sandra Steinman and Tommy Buller perhaps excepted, had bought all the rules that high school laid down, and we wanted to conform to them as well as we could. We wanted to look like experts, the way Suze did, to look like people who were passing through the gauntlet for the twentieth time and knew every step. This fellow Nietzsche and his diminutive friend Lears were telling us that by showing any interest in philosophy, we’d signaled a willingness to put ourselves a step or two at odds with the dance. And where would that leave us? Well, with the future in our hands: We’d live in the day after tomorrow, no? But by then the philosopher has taken another step forward, and again no one likes him terribly much.
    It is the Socratic type that Nietzsche is talking about and praising in the passage about being untimely. For Socrates does not fit in. He annoys people. The Delphic oracle, fount of all wisdom for the Athenians (though often wisdom of a cruelly enigmatic sort), informed the world that Socrates was the wisest man alive. This puzzles him no end. So off he goes to talk with all the people the Athenians take to be wise. He chats with politicians, craftsmen, and poets. And what comes out of the discussions, according to Socrates, is that these people know nothing whatever that’s worth knowing. They can’t tell you what justice is, why one should tell the truth rather than lie, what kind of government is best. So Socrates draws a simple conclusion. He decides that what makes him wise is his awareness of how ignorant he is. At least he, Socrates, knows that he knows nothing. This process makes the people he has questioned—the poets, tradesmen, and politicians—very angry. They become angry enough, in fact, to try him on trumped-up charges: They indict him for pretending to know what goes on in the heavens and beneath the earth, for teaching people to make the weaker argument appear the stronger, for corrupting the young. Then they sentence him to death.
    THE DOOBER is shifting into third gear. His ritual is to wait for the small, pale fellow up front to look away, then take aim, shoot, and duck behind the back of the guy in front of him, like a desperado dodging behind a cactus. Ping—duck. Ping—duck. He nicks John Vincents, who wears his soccer cleats to class. But Vincents is so good-natured and fond of the Doober—they’ve known each