And teaching, even now, he said, is what keeps him going.

“Your illness and your aches and pains fall away,” he said. “There’s something happening in that space between you and students that’s magical, that’s mystical, that’s profound and it just sucks you in completely.”

A professor struggling through chemotherapy talks about teaching.

UD, who has been teaching for twenty-five years, will free associate a bit here, in response to these intriguing words:

something happening in that space between you and students that’s magical, that’s mystical, that’s profound and it just sucks you in completely

I’ve had classes in which the students so charmed me – their collective magical force so charmed me, day after day – that I worried I wouldn’t be able to grade them with any rigor at all. These groups were usually sophomores and juniors, whatever that means. Maybe there’s a sweet spot in the lives of university students — not too young, not too old… past the traumas of freshman year and not yet at the what-do-I-do-next traumas of senior year…

They were funny, ironic, and not yet hip. They were smart. They were emotional about things. Not vehement; sensitively responsive. I watched them take in my absurdities as well as my passions and become genially receptive to both.

So yes, I was sucked in. But am I willing to go as far as mystical?

Maybe. An interviewer asked Norman Maclean about his religion, and he said:

I suppose that in any conventional sense I’m a religious agnostic. There are things that make me feel a lot better. I find them in the woods, and in wonderful people. I suppose they’re my religion.

I feel I have company about me when I’m alone in the woods. I feel they’re beautiful. They’re a kind of religion to me. My dearest friends are also beautiful. My wife was an infinitely beautiful thing. I certainly feel there are men and women whom I have known and still know who are really above what one could think was humanly possible. They and the mountains are what for me ‘passeth human understanding.’

When does a very deep humanism become mystical? Maybe by definition it shouldn’t; it shouldn’t go there. But there’s no denying what this professor has noticed: something occasionally happens in the space between you and students. The space is sometimes charged – electrified – with a special sort of human exchange, even ‘above what one could think was humanly possible.’

For me it has to do not merely with those charm school sessions, in which I’m moved and gratified by the energy and inquiry and, hell, love of students (I’m thinking here of a moment just after I’d finished a class recently. I was ill with bronchitis – struggling through the session to keep my voice – and as I gathered my books and notes after class one student — I don’t know which one, because I had my head down, and a lot of students were passing behind me — one student simply put his or her hand on my arm and squeezed it gently.); it also has to do with rebellion. Or call it something milder – restiveness.

Youthful restiveness; the condition, among some of my students, of a somewhat belligerent, show-me, thing. They regard me with the narrowed eyes of outrageous skepticism as I prance around with my interpretations. Oh yeah? They lift their jean-clad legs onto their chairs, hug them closely, and glare at me. Says who?

They laugh with cynical disdain!

I do not like this laugh.

Or yes, I do like this laugh. I want them to be at odds, pissed off, picking away at things. I want them to have that congested personal / philosophical nihilistic thing going, because, yes, to take another of Professor Monte Bute’s words, there’s something profound about feeling as though you’ve been admitted into the thing they’ve got going. Something you’ve said about a poem or a story has coaxed a person’s inner life into a public space of discourse, and now you’re privileged to watch as – over time – that inner life clarifies and maybe begins to transform itself, as a result of its encounter with texts and people who’ve already experienced something similar and turned it into art and philosophy.