is teaching’s a wonderful thing! Its top is made out of rubber! Its bottom is made out of springs!

But really, the wonderul thing is that whenever I teach someone what someone else has taught me, I feel a certain inexplicable closeness with that person who first shared that gem of knowledge with me. I hear his/her voice whispering into my ear, speaking simultaneously with me, as if that knowledge were a grain of eternity in which a fragment of my teacher’s person immortally resides.

So after a year and a half or so of never getting past page 25 of Aharon Appelfeld’s Geschichte eines Lebens (Story of a Life, originally in Hebrew, translated to German) I finally picked up the book again this morning and started reading from the beginning and got to about page 14 by the time I got to class. Of course, it was made slightly easier by the fact that there were my notes in the margins and between the lines, and so of course it was better this time (not to mention the fact that I have one more semester of German under the belt than I did when I started reading it). I thought it was really good the first time as well, of course, and this time I can finally place what his writing style reminds me of — it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, but in German. It’s absolutely gorgeous — look at this conclusion to the preface, for instance:

“Der Leser möge keine geordnete und genaue Lebensgeschichte erwarten. Vielmehr findet er hier Aspekte des Lebens, die von Errinerung gebündelt wurden and nun leben und atmen. Vieles ist untergangen, vieles vom Vergessen gefressen. Was übrig blieb, ershien im ersten Moment, als sei es nichts, doch als ich ein Stück zum anderen legte, merkte ich, dass sich diese Stücke im Lauf der Jahre zu einem Ganzen, zu einer Bedeutung zusammenfügen.”

(My translation: “The reader should not anticipate an orderly and exact life-story. Far more finds he here aspects of the life, that are colored by memories and now live and breathe. Much has gone under, much has been devoured by Forget. What remains, appears in the first moment, as if it were nothing, and yet when I laid down one piece upon another, I recognize that these pieces in the walk of the years have united to one wholeness, one meaning.”)

And also:

“Aus jenen fernen, unsichtbaren Tagen erinnere ich mich nicht an Sätze, sondern nur an Mutters Blicke. Sie waren von einer solchen Weichheit und so ausschliesslich auf mich gerichtet, dass ich sie bis heute spüre.”

“From these distant, invisible days I remember not the words, but only Mother’s gazes. They were of such softness, and so exclusively directed upon me, that I feel her even today.”

It seems to me that Soloveitchik (and, in the grander scheme of things, writers in general, especially speechwriters and motivational speakers) have an unhealthy attachment to the number three. Everything seems to come in threes — good luck, bad luck, members of a relationship, signposts to success, and so forth — that along with the general catchiness and ease of recall come a sort of artificial mysticism that is really just disturbing.

“Being redeemed, is, unlike being dignified, an ontological awareness. It is not just an extraneous accidental attribute — among other attributes — of being, but a definite mode of being itself… Cathartic redemptiveness is experienced in the privacy of one’s in-depth personality, and it cuts below the relationship between the “I” and the “thou” (to use an existentialist term) and reaches into the hidden strata of the isolated “I” who knows himself as a singular being. When objectified in personal and emotional categories, cathartic redemptiveness expresses itself in the feeling of axiological security. The individual intuits his existence as worthwhile, legitimate, and adequate, anchored in something stable and unchangeable… Redemption is achieved when humble man makes a movement of recoil, and lets himself be confronted and defeated by a Higher and Truer Being.
…Dignity is acquired by man whenever he triumphs over nature. Man finds redemption whenever he is overpowered by the Creator of nature. Dignity is discovered at the summit of success; redemption in the depth of crisis and failure: ממעמקים קראתיך השם.”

The Lonely Man of Faith, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, 34-36

I’m not sure how much I agree with the statement that axiological security is discovered in the depth of crisis and failure. It would seem to me that a person in crisis would in fact feel that his existence is not worthwhile ipso facto, illegitimate, and possibly inadequate. But if Soloveitchik means quite literally the depth of crisis and failure, by which he means a point from which a person can hardly descend any further, and like a man standing at the south pole as no direction to go but up, and see himself rebuilt from nothing — from dust — then is redemptiveness discovered.

Above Cloud Eight and Cloud Seven, apparently. People kept trying to find ways to describe a state of being even more blissfully happy than that for which phrases existed. Of course, it has stayed at “nine” since the 80’s, with George Harrison’s single. Cloud Ten just doesn’t have the same ring (or does it?)

While we’re speaking of clouds, there seems to be one in my head and I’m going to stop Pythoning for a bit to let it all sink in. Meanwhile, here’s a cloud-related poem that I adore (by Sara Teasdale):

THE CLOUD

I AM a cloud in the heaven’s height,
The stars are lit for my delight,
Tireless and changeful, swift and free,
I cast my shadow on hill and sea–
But why do the pines on the mountain’s crest
Call to me always, “Rest, rest”?

I throw my mantle over the moon
And I blind the sun on his throne at noon,
Nothing can tame me, nothing can bind,
I am a child of the heartless wind–
But oh the pines on the mountain’s crest
Whispering always, “Rest, rest.”