The Teacher who opened my Mind

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Nora was a high school princess, whose autobiography, I’d have guessed back then, would have translated into a graph peaking from prom to prom, with soft valleys of preparation in between. But what Nora did, in her teasing nasal voice, was to run through a litany of defenses against being alone. She mentioned listening to the radio and talking on the phone, then playing the songs and conversations over in her mind, and a myriad of other strategies, ending, perceptively enough, with our habit of blocking out the present by waiting for things to happen in the future. But Nora did not express herself with detachment. She said “I.” “This is how I keep from being alone.” “And why,” asked Lears, “is it hard to be alone?” “Because,” Nora answered, “I might start to think about things.”

Nora had been, up until that point, one of the Elect, predestined for all happiness; suddenly she had gone over to the terminally Lost. One of the great sources of grief for those who suffer inwardly is their belief that others exist who are perpetually and truly happy. From the ranks of the local happy few, Nora had just checked out, leaving some effective hints about those she’d left behind.

The book that mattered to me wasn’t The Stranger, which had gotten Nora going, or Freud’s book on the herd instinct (when I was writing my dissertation, a literary critical reading of Freud, my working text of Group Psychology was, somehow, the one that had belonged to Dubby O’Day, with the o’s colored in to about page 20), but Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s a hard book for me to read now, with its pumped-up, cartoon hero, Randall Patrick McMurphy. But at the time it was all in all. I read it in a lather, running through it in about 10 hours straight, then starting in again almost immediately.

But that didn’t happen right off. It was probably on the fifth day of reading the book out loud in class that a chance remark Lears made caught my attention, or what there was of it then to catch. He said that prisons, hospitals, and schools were on a continuum, controlling institutions with many of the same protocols and objectives, and that Kesey, with his bitter portrait of the mental hospital, might be seen as commenting on all these places.

This idea, elementary as it was, smacked me with the force of revelation. Here was a writer who was not on the side of the teachers, who in fact detested them and their whole virtuous apparatus. That the book was in part crude and ugly I knew even at that time: Blacks in it are twisted sadists, the women castrators or sweet whores. But it was the anti-authoritarian part that swept me in; here was someone who found words—gorgeous, graffiti-sized, and apocalyptic—for what in me had been mere inchoate impulses.

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