The clarity of the classics

I’ll be patting myself on my back when I say this, but I was fortunate and very happy last month to have received a Natatanging Guro award from the University of the Philippines, one of several awards given annually by the Chancellor of UP Diliman to recognize achievers among students, research and extension workers, the administrative staff, and the faculty. Teaching has few tangible rewards, and this was one of them — a substantial cash prize, a statuette of the Oblation that served as a trophy, a medal, and, of course, the applause of one’s peers, and a special peck from the wife.

I almost didn’t win it because I was initially too lazy to bother with the voluminous documentation of one’s work that the selection committee required. I’d won it once before, a few years ago, and that for me was recognition and incentive enough. But my department chair, the indefatigable Dr. Lily Rose Tope, persuaded me to do it not just for my sake but the department’s honor as well (the winner’s department also gets a modest amount for its special projects), and together we compiled a decent dossier of this aging professor’s contributions to academia.

Every awardee (there were five of us, I think) was asked to deliver a two-minute response, and instead of the usual thank-you’s, I decided to write and read a short poem for the occasion. Since everything good about teaching had probably already been said over the many years that award had been given, I thought I’d write something about the other side of teaching—the part where, despite your best efforts, you’re just not connecting with students who can make it abundantly clear that they would rather watch paint dry than listen to you lecture. Here’s that poem:

Disaster Preparedness and Modern Living

(To My Student in My Class on Homer’s Odyssey)

Today, once more, you unequivocally announce 

By your sullen slouch and glassy eyes

That your hour in class with me is wasted time

That you and I would both be better off 

Having coffee at the mall

Or running around the oval

Than figuring why Penelope stayed true to Ulysses 

Or what that faithful dog of his was named.

Try as I might, most afternoons will be like this:

Tuesdays and Thursdays stretched out by indifference

And by our mutual wondering over 

Which one of us is Cyclops and who is Hercules.

But twenty years from now

When you’re having coffee at the mall 

Or running around the oval 

And aching in your heart and loins for her—

For her whom you had hoped you would 

Grow old and watch the Aegean sunset with—

You will understand that poetry 

Was never about the grade

Was never even about the rhyme 

That it wasn’t Greek mythology or

The wisdom of the ancients that 

I was boring you to tears with

But disaster preparedness and modern living.

To be honest, I don’t really have a class in Greek literature — the entire subject would be way beyond my competence to teach — but I do talk about Homer and his work every chance I get, whether it’s in my American Lit or Philippine Lit class, or even in Creative Writing. We took up the Iliad and the Odyssey as undergraduates decades ago — in English translation, of course — and they left a deep impression on me, which is why I keep adverting to them as a professor not long from retirement.

For all its depictions of glory gallantry in battle — this was, after all, the Trojan war — the Iliad is still literature’s loudest and most poignant denunciation of the inhumanity of war, reducing its hero Achilles to a heartless boor. The Odyssey, on the other hand, speaks to the modern Pinoy — who can be closer to Ulysses than the OFW, who has gone all over the world and sailed the seven seas, and yet nurtures an unquenchable longing for home?

Today very few students bother to read these classics, because it isn’t part of their curriculum, and there’s little obvious reason for them to pick up a musty book when they can turn the TV or the laptop on. Greek and Roman mythology have been replaced by Star Wars and Star Trek, Homer by Neil Gaiman, the epics by Marvel Comics — which isn’t a bad thing, since they all create symbolic universes which defamiliarize and by which we can better understand the here and now.

But it’s important, I think, for young people to realize that wisdom wasn’t born yesterday, and that ancient wisdom is wisdom paradoxically because it isn’t just ancient, but perfectly current. Homer didn’t have OFWs in mind when he wrote the Odyssey, but how many Penelopes live out there in Tanauan, Batangas or Pagbilao, Quezon, scanning the road for long-absent husbands and fighting the most human of vagrant urges?

Why do Shakespeare and the Bible provide such insight and solace? Not just because they saw straight through to the core of the human condition, but also because they spoke the plain truth in the elevated language of poetry, which intensifies the sense of familiarity we find with characters and their situations across time and space. Poetry (and by extension all literature) is, almost literally, another way of seeing and saying things, and it’s that difference between the real and the imagined that we find interesting and compelling, creating a space within which our own experience can resonate. We never really weep for Andromache or for King Lear, but for ourselves and for what might become of us.

This was what I wanted that student staring at the ceiling or out the window — a student every teacher has had and will have, in every class — to know: this isn’t for me, for Homer, for your diploma, or for the past; it’s for you and your future, for that wife you have yet to meet and that child you have yet to sire, and all the heart-stopping and gut-wrenching turns that your life will take. When there’s nothing else, the clarity of the classics will give you strength of spirit and peace of mind, as you join a long train of heroes who knew how to suffer (“Man learns by suffering,” said Zeus through Aeschylus) and to survive.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.