This is something I wrote for my Junior English Class. The project was to write a "Creative Non-Fiction Essay" about one of our ancestors. I have no ancestors. Both of my parents were only children and all my grandparents are dead. So I interviewed someone whom I really respect: my Sophomore English Teacher. I really respect him as a person, so it was really cool to be able to sit down with him and talk about his life. I learned a lot...
I have walked to the Brunswick English
Wing many times. My English Class was
there my sophomore year, and, even now, my destination when I make the journey
across the pre-school playground has been and will always be the same: Doc’s
Room. And it is his room; others may teach there, but they are his books that
populate the shelves. That makes it his
room. Books have always been central to
our conversations, and I don’t think that’s solely because he’s an English
teacher. For Doc, Great Expectations was the first real, adult novel he read. For a fourth grade Doc, this novel was the
first that talked about a child growing up without talking like a child: “It
got into the mind of someone who was young, and troubled, and growing up, and
dealing with a lot of interesting emotional issues.” In fifth grade, when he was asked to dress up
as his “favorite character” for school, he decided to be Pip. For my part, I thought Pip was one of the
most interesting protagonists I had ever encountered. I appreciated the fact that he seemed to be a
real person, someone I wanted to get to know and would probably like. I developed a kind of “Lit Crush” on Pip
because he was so multidimensional. When
I told Doc about my “Lit Crush” as a joke, responded by loaning me his copy of Jack Maggs by Peter Carey for Spring
Break. It tells the story of Great Expectations from Magwitch’s
perspective and shows Pip in a very different light; he seems to be almost the
villain. What started as a talk about a
book I was reading for class became a discussion about how to think. I may not have rethought my “Lit Crush” for
Pip, after all, Pip seems so real because he is kind of an awful person at
times; this book, in concert with Great
Expectations, told a story that echoed my thought process. Both Doc and I
were introduced to complex narrative at an early age, and that is reflected in our
connection to this character who, while a child, also seemed to think like we
did.
Doc grew up in Essex,
Massachusetts on a lake in a neighborhood where there were virtually no other
children, and, while he spent a lot of time doing normal childhood things with
the neighbors, he spent a lot of time on his own telling stories to himself. He wandered around through the many acres of
woods nearby and created kingdoms. As a
child, he would read a book and act it out in his imagination and in new
terrain, twisting and turning the plot in a way that satisfied him. In his words: “Only children who grow up in a
world dominated by adults no doubt end up seeing the world slightly
differently.” The other kids he knew simply couldn’t dream of imagining some
things. “It’s the way Tom Sawyer thinks;
we’re going to go and we’re going to pretend
that this church picnic is a whole caravan of elephants and camels and we’re
going to go pretend that we’re going to attack them.” It is without a doubt that this changes the
way one thinks. Everything can be
something else for a child who has had to imagine his or her playmates from an
early age. It teaches you how to tell a
story. Not only that, it teaches you how
to tell a story through a story. In the interpretation, the truth of the story
is revealed. One way to interpret a
story is through the retelling. By
imagining it in a new world, Doc grew up analyzing what made a story compelling
and satisfying to read. In grad school, he
was taught to analyze books as though they were a science experiment. “Let us
write a Marxist interpretation of Goethe.” Let us examine the text from every
which way possible until we have exhausted it.
The classics, Classical Greek and Latin, taught him to look at the words
and what they mean and where they came from; English taught him to look at the
text as though it were under a microscope.
But he taught himself the subjective joy of the narrative. By exploring the stories on his own and in
his imagination, he learned to tell the story to himself and for himself.
“We absorb the love of
narrative early on, and because my mother was a story teller everything became
in her presentation, from the time I was a small baby, a story. A narrative of
her life that she conveyed to me and I think that all along the way as well the
idea of interpretation has always been built into this: what did it mean when
so-and-so said that? She was always
teaching me to think by using narrative as the tutor.”
Narrative as a way to think about truth
is very central to what I have learned from Doc. And I think that’s why we talk about books so
much. It’s a way to check in on how
we’re thinking about life. Doc thinks as
he does because of the way he was introduced to narrative and to story
telling. Narratives lived in the forests
of Essex, Massachusetts in the manner that he wanted them to live. He learned how to think from stories. And he maintains this way of reading and
questioning. Once, when we talked about faith,
he told me: “I almost think that if there is a God and if He did create The
Bible on some inspirational level, he did so to make people think.” To accept faith as dogma alone, in his mind,
isn’t quite the right way to do it. Doc
had his moment of rebellion in which he threw off the dogma by asking himself
“why?” And, in his words: “If you don’t
rebel against all the values you’ve been taught, then you never learn to
believe in them for yourself.” Doc’s narrative is essential to his way of thinking. He thinks as he does because he grew up on a
steady diet of stories, both those he created and those he was told by his
mother and Victorian literature. When I
walk to the Brunswick English Department, I will always be, in some way,
walking to Doc’s room. And it is his room. Others may teach there, but they are his
narratives, both bound and spoken, that inhabit the place. I think that makes it his room.
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