Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual AN OFFER I COULD REFUSE A few weeks ago a nice woman who lives in my building asked if I would be interested in teaching two morning sessions devoted to Montaigne to her book group. They...
...Unlike the old fight trainer Whitey Bimstein, who, asked what he thought of the country when working with a boxer at Grossinger's, said he thought it was a pretty nice place, I don't think it's such a nice place...
...This Shakespeare course taught me that one could grow older without growing smarter...
...My classmates were quite as clueless as I, not so much about Shakespeare as about the world...
...In his eighties, Santayana said that his physician advised him to lose fifteen pounds, evidently hoping, the philosopher noted, to have him perfectly healthy just in time for his demise...
...Adult education is a regular feature of every so-called senior-citizen home...
...Will death arrive with neither a bang nor a whimper but a short course in the politics of the Balkans...
...They would be meeting in Starved Rock, Illinois...
...Ignorance in the young is understandable...
...Adult education is built on the premise of self-improvement—improvement right up to the moment, it would seem, of death...
...I can't bring myself to do it...
...What would be the point of my flogging away at course length to retired men and women about the majestic aesthetic virtues and wisdom of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather...
...My and my wife's expenses would be paid, and I would be given a $600 fee...
...Absolutely not, I thought...
...And there is something slightly fraudulent about pretending to teach people things they are unlikely to have the time to put to use...
...But adults said things in that class even darneder...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...That last point clinched it...
...I love my wife, and I'm not going to let those mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, poison ivy, and whole multitude of irritators have so open a shot at her...
...I'm not a big fan of nature...
...Kids," the smarmy Art Linkletter used to say on his radio show, "say the darnedest things...
...I had my first taste of adult education as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where, in order to arrange my schedule so that I could stay up all night and sleep late into the morning, I took a Shakespeare course in the university's downtown night division...
...I can't take such stuff myself, and I don't want to dole it out—not even for a fee...
...retirees flock to nearby universities and community colleges, ostensibly hungry for education, though perhaps hungrier still for something to do with their time...
...ignorance in the old, though also understandable, is depressing because of its hopelessness...
...The number of people signing up for adult education courses figures to rise as people live longer...
...Most were there not to work on an unfinished degree but for the sheer love of learning...
...I know a man, himself the author of serious books in American history, who recently took a course in the writing of Jack Kerouac...
...When he told me this, my first instinct was to tell him that, in a more sensible world, Kerouac ought to be taking courses from him...
...A lecture is one thing—it's an intellectual entertainment, a divertissement— but a full course suggests a much greater promise: a promise on which, I am fairly certain, I can't deliver...
...As a quondam university teacher, I have on a few occasions been asked to give adult education courses...
...This made me sad...
...The combination of being in the country and partaking of adult education was an offer I had no difficulty refusing...
...I prefer to see it, when I have to see it at all, from out the window of a fast and comfortable car, preferably with the songs of Reynaldo Hahn on the CD player...
...Until then it had not occurred to me that the sheer love of learning could be a deeply disturbing thing...
...How can you tell someone in, say, his early eighties that Henry James advises one be a person on whom nothing is lost when the likelihood is great that that person has already missed nearly everything...
...I would, I suppose, be killing an hour or two in a long week for people who go in for adult education, but doing so would, I believe, kill more than time for me...
...Yet quite bright older people continue to sign up for one course after another: on philosophy, on contemporary fiction, on Zoroastrianism...
...Shakespeare does many things, so I shouldn't have been surprised that his plays could bring out the confident ignorance in people of all ages...
...My classmates were men and women in their forties through their seventies...
...Shall we all end our days listening to teachers drone on about subjects we don't need to know...
...Adult education seems to operate on the same assumption...
...The setting was quite beautiful, I was assured, and I could spend the afternoons walking in the woods with my wife...
...It's not easy nowadays to have an utterly unfashionable opinion, but I wonder if my strong distaste for adult education qualifies...
Vol. 8 • October 2002 • No. 4
