I’ve wanted something for a couple of years now, I’ve wanted it badly. I’ve wanted to be better than I am – in every way that matters. A woman I don’t know well, a very smart women and an accomplished literary critic told me late one night that I lacked the courage of my convictions. She was right. Another friend, sitting with me at my favorite bar, stopped a casual conversation to ask me when I had become so cynical, he said, “You never used to be this dark.” I went into the dark. My Masters thesis on Burroughs, Plato, and Kristeva on the transgressive nature of education could be subtitled “How to be smart without upsetting people.” It’s not scholarship as much as it is theological apologetics.

I used to go into classes that I taught as the champion idealist. I had a student who told me that he liked my teaching style best when I testified. He could sense the oration lessons I received from endless Sundays listening to my father hold a pause in his fire and brimstone sermons. Dad preached the gospel, and I can preach the gospel too, the gospel according to Descartes, Pascal, Cicero, Thomas Kuhn, Plato, Aristotle, Borges, Sartre, Pynchon, and hundreds of others.

How do you preach when you lose your faith? In a world of consumers with no sense of or interest in history I came to think that since my modern gospels of critical thinking didn’t seem to matter to anyone but me, that I didn’t matter. That’s the length and breadth of my long dark night of the soul. Before people in my life started dying on me, I was dying, and that doubt of validity was my cancer.

Well, I’ve gone into that closet and had a good sulk for a few years now. To borrow from my father’s parables, I put my light under a bushel and collected a pay check for a living, which isn’t living. I told myself for three years in a dead end job that the cost and benefit analysis of going another thirty thousand in the hole to make what I was already making didn’t work out in the crib sheet of life. I was wrong. Now that I’ve done it and am more than halfway through a great educational program I realize I’ve found the pearl of great price: I am better than I was.

Sometimes I give out evaluations to my students when I teach, so students can tell me how I am doing. I have a bright student who wrote on last week’s evaluation, “Mr. K has taught me that it’s ok to be smart.” That about sums it up doesn’t it.