In a room not quite as refined as some of those at the faculty club but even grander in its own way, I’d had a similar experience a few years earlier. It was a large room with easily a twenty-foot ceiling, a grand piano, and old couches and sunken chairs scattered about on top of an immense Oriental rug. It was the graduate-student lounge at Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall, taking up about half of the first floor of that building. I’d go there to sit and read, to grade student essays, and to think while drinking in the atmosphere.
My undergraduate college, a large, competitive public university, had nothing like this. Its public spaces felt busier and more practical. The architecture was mid-century airport, the place not built for conversation or reflection.
Something better was happening at Columbia. But in that room in Philosophy Hall, I’d overhear conversations, look over people’s shoulders at what they were reading – and writing – and I’d feel silently put in my place. This was an educated crowd, a brilliant crowd self-selected to be the hardened core of students left still studying, still doing all their assigned reading and more, still looking forward for class to begin even after twenty years of schooling. And then someone – likely a PhD candidate in French or philosophy – would walk over to the grand piano in the room and start playing a Bach fugue. I’d be enthralled, intimidated, and feel smaller and larger at the same time.
I looked to my professors for guidance of a sort – not for direct advice but to see how exactly they lived in this environment. Many were simply swimming in their home waters. They were graduates of similar schools, had gone from college on to graduate school without much of a break, and then through some combination of luck, merit and pure single-mindedness had landed jobs that would pay them well for reading, writing, thinking and teaching, and demand modest levels of what most people would call work.
Others, though, were clearly outsiders. Some were angry; some were timid. I took for granted that all were extraordinary thinkers and mostly I was right. But some were at least a little bit like me. I thought I caught an occasional wink now and then from a professor. A literal pat on the back, a bit of praise including a hint that, yes, this is a different kind of environment, and yes, there’s a mood to the place that is in some ways absurd.
Once I was asked to give a presentation to fellow graduate students who were teaching writing to undergraduates. To the room full of about forty of my colleagues, I talked about some of the aspects of writing, like “attitude” and “angle” that were part of the curriculum we were all teaching, and I stuck out my arms to become an airplane and talk about what these terms mean for pilots – different things than they mean for writers, but not entirely different. The connections added nuance and vibrancy to how a young writer might think of attitude in what she writes, I said. And, I added, it’s a really good thing for a student to see his professor buzzing around like an airplane now and then. It punctures the stuffiness, and gets the crowd to pay a little more attention. A couple of people snickered. Some probably liked what I’d said, one or two might have even liked the way I’d said it, but I got a few high-handed questions after my part of the presentation was over, and the dazzling intellects in the room (truly, these were such brilliant people) seemed to dismiss my talk. My knees actually shook a little as I took a seat.
Later, the professor running the writing program – a Milton scholar with a world-wide reputation – stopped me in the hallway to put his hand on my shoulder and thank me, telling me I had done a good job. I don’t think he actually said “ignore the fools who didn’t like it,” but I heard that message anyway. He certainly belonged in any of those rooms, and could outperform most of those students in any task of thought or exposition. But he also had his eyes open for students who felt like outsiders, and now, with more than twenty years of distance, I imagine that most every student in my graduate program, the genius as well as the fools probably felt like outsiders themselves on occasion. This particular professor – Ted Tayler – understood that feeling, looked for it, and he found an occasion to break through it, to connect. I’m still grateful.