I had a teacher in graduate school named Dennis. Our round of graduate students had gotten in the habit of calling him The Buddha. I think the term of endearment was meant to signify his inscrutable nature. He’s a semi scruffy, Birkenstock wearing, Wallace Stephens loving guy.

After I was long out of the program I heard that one of his classes went south with learning style tension to such a degree that the students staged a mid class fire drill to change seats without explanation. I see this as a comment on the quality of student rather than instruction. Dennis is one of the most brilliant people I have ever had the honor of knowing and it saddens me immensely to think of him as being so under appreciated.

The Buddha was fond of exploring the Greek and Latin roots of words to unpack hidden meanings. I took a seminar with him on Joyce and contemporaries in which he gave five or maybe six lectures, the rest of the class was student presentations. If I had it to do over I would have tape recorded each of those lectures when the mostly quiet man gave up the façade of letting the students make their own connections and really held forth with his own scholarship. His lecture on the evolving depictions of hell in the Western artistic tradition is still bouncing around inside my cranium.

He was fond of talking about Techne – the Greek word for art – or for thing made. “Relate that,” he would say, “to the Greek word poiein, which becomes the modern poet or maker.” He had an innate sense for the metaphorical richness of language. “Understanding is a combination of two words used to refer to bridge construction, the arches underneath that support the span above are the understanding, that which stands under. The obvious associations of crossing the chasm from confusion to knowledge, or innocence to experience come later and the earlier structural meaning falls away.”

I wanted to write a little about Techne and technology, but let’s leave that for another day – today let’s just think fondly of Dennis sitting inscrutably in his office awash with the pleasures of reading for a living.