Inexplicable
encounters with goodness awe-inspiring
Alexei Waters
Goodness is inexplicable. That’s why literature, film, drama and even ancient
religious texts remain plaintively silent about how it arises and how to preserve
it through turbulent and trying times. I claim no originality in thinking about
goodness. Please, then, bear
with me.
My South American-born mother started college at 16 upon moving to the United
States. In one of her freshman world literature classes, she studied Tolstoy’s “Anna
Karenina” and named me after one of its protagonists. So, quite early as
an adult, my mother gave me my first lesson in not fearing difference, even with
names that seem strange upon first encounter.
My mother, always brilliantly ahead of her peers, decided shortly after completing
graduate studies at Stanford at the age of 22, we would have a succession of
guests join our earnest Anglican family’s dinner. As a pre-adolescent,
I was allowed to participate in discussions with adults embodying a diversity
of nationalities and religions and professions.
My mother’s gift to me was the conscious exposure to world-class literature,
Tchaikovsky’s ballets, peasant Korean weddings, visits to the
Hermitage in what was then Leningrad and walks through Alexander Platz in East
Berlin during the Cold War on the way to some symphonies after passing through
Checkpoint Charlie.
My most memorable dinner discussions were with white South
Africans during apartheid and sympathetic anti-colonial exiles. These encounters
during my transition from adolescent to adult remained indelibly marked on my
character. These were the great moments in my life, my endless encounters with
human goodness that emanated
whenever I met others as moral equals.
My mother’s precious gift to me was needed when I began teaching Shakespeare
to poor black teens living in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. My class of 12
consisted of students attending Bushwick Outreach High School, a school for “troubled” youths
expelled from other high schools. I taught twice weekly in a teaching apprentice
program for so-called honors undergraduates.
Upon my unceremonious entrance to the class with 12 seemingly un-precocious and
ill-prepared students, I had an even harder challenge than most teachers. My
upper-middle-class background, acquired through attending an elite boarding school,
traveling the world with my parents and having the most expansive exposure to
the best of world culture — all classically based — made me the oddest
black person my students had ever met and probably ever will. Our profound social-circumstantial
differences were difficult for me to manage because earnestness and respect can
sometimes accomplish little.
So I tried, failed miserably at first, and then became a success, judging from
their endless responses to my comments and queries. I especially focused their
attention on some of the ideas conveyed in The Merchant of Venice. I thought
out of all of Shakespeare’s vast oeuvre, they could relate most to the
anti-Semitism, no trivial matter because many of the poorest blacks in Brooklyn
harbor animosity toward Jews.
But it was their undeniable intellectual giftedness that made me willingly accept
any difficulties I encountered. I knew instinctively, without any previous evidence,
their minds were waiting to be stimulated in non-condescending ways.
Forget about
the rhythms of hip-hop culture that have become mainstreamed. To be in a class
with them, all males, all with a radiant brilliance in their articulation of
ideas novel and textured; to be taken seriously by them, that is what I remember
most, not my elucidation of Shakespearean ideas. Their frenzied speaking styles,
reflected in a rapid-fire staccato succession of endless syllables, put me to
shame.
I listened, I sat star-struck, listening to endless ideas in endless mutations,
took copious notes and frequently smiled intensely as a result of their loquacious
vivacity.
I deserve no credit for trying, unconsciously, pathetically, to imitate Socrates
in Plato’s Meno, who instructed a slave boy — all the while claiming
we have an innate capacity for representing knowledge and for articulating language
irrespective of social class or social status. They were all much smarter and
stronger than me and carried my thoughts so much more resolutely about human
possibilities than any other world-weary group.
From my students at Bushwick Outreach High School, I learned another great lesson:
to be smart is relatively easy, but to maintain one’s
not so apparent goodness is beyond my comprehension, though its traces hover
around me at all times.
I frequently make an entreaty to some floating soul across
the earth, asking why my life is so much better than perhaps five billion souls
across the globe. The hardly satisfactory answer that always remains elusive
is that the goodness bestowed on my life (and yours) freely coerces inspiration
to make the world around less brutal and more habitable each moment the opportunity
arises.
That is what I am compelled to do. This is what my poor, heroically dignified
students taught me. Ah, my awe of goodness.
This article originally appeared in the Cornell Daily Sun at Cornell University.
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