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Thursday, September 02, 2004
A NEW ACADEMIC YEAR:
[Being a Series of Evocations of the University] III PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION "To have read a certain proportion of Moliere's works is indispensable to a valid understanding of the cultural background of the French," Dr. Whittaker said. He always talked like this. He spoke reasonably even to pets. He talked the way a windmill would talk, the way a sentence would talk - as he spoke, English seemed to have been dead for many centuries, and its bones to have set up a safe, staid, sleepy system of their own, in respectable secession from existence. He went on: "I have read Le Misanthrope, I am happy to say. It is a work of true sociological insight." His eyes flashed, and then softened as he said: "Unhappy Alceste! Those sacrifices, necessary but onerous, which the social organism has always exacted, must always exact, from its individual cells, those - if I may coin a phrase - intra-social subtractions, are indeed, in Le Misanthrope -- " but here he seemed very human and attractive, for he lost his way in his sentence. The sentence was bewildered: it had begun so promisingly, and now had to finish with a lame "depicted by the pen of a master." In the classroom, where Dr. Whittaker was almost as much at home as in his study, this would not have happened; there each sentence lived its appointed term, died mourned by its people, and was succeeded by a legitimate heir. His voice - he had raised it to the elevation of his sentence - came across the room to me quite clearly, and I remembered the pretty girl who had said to me, "It's not just classes, it's Dr. Whittaker! I can stay awake in my other classes." |