Looking Back at School | Better Living through Beowulf

Julius Joseph Gaspard Starck, “Mischief In The Schoolyard”

Friday

As I will miss my first St. Mary’s commencement in almost four decades tomorrow (excluding sabbatical years), I send out this Yehuda Amichai poem to my former students who will be graduating, as well as to all those others around the world about to matriculate. It’s that time of year when, like the Israeli poet, people look back at their schooling to figure out what it meant.

Amichai recalls what he didn’t learn as well as what he did. It’s a lovely idea. Even conscientious students like myself were unable to do all the reading, and of course we didn’t know the context out of which the works arose or the discipline’s wider discourse. Like Amichai gazing out of his classroom window, we sensed a landscape but didn’t realize that our instruction was kindling a “great love” that would last a lifetime:

The windows of a classroom always open
to the future, but in our innocence we thought 
     it was only landscape
we were seeing from the window

When Amichai mentions “the two of us,” I assume he’s talking about the school. “Like everything else in Jerusalem,” it’s a museum containing holy mysteries, but he didn’t know this when he first climbed its rickety steps. I like the contrast between the early uncertain venturing out and the later solid knowledge.

After a lifetime of studying “the tree of knowledge,” he now understands better what his education was all about. He even sees the flaws, the “pests and parasites.” He will “go on studying till the die I die.”

At the moment, however, Amichai looks back, like D. H. Lawrence in “The Piano” or W. B. Yeats in “Among School Children.” Although no longer innocent because he has become “an expert on the botany of good and evil,” he focuses on where it all began. Year after year in the middle of May, I have seen my own students doing the same.

The School Where I Studied

I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
and didn't learn others. All my life I have loved in vain
the things I didn't learn. I am filled with knowledge,
I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge,
the shape of its leaves, the function of its root system, 
     its pests and parasites.
I'm an expert on the botany of good and evil,
I'm still studying it, I'll go on studying till the day I die.
I stood near the school building and looked in. This is the room
where we sat and learned. The windows of a classroom 
     always open
to the future, but in our innocence we thought 
     it was only landscape
we were seeing from the window.
The schoolyard was narrow, paved with large stones.
I remember the brief tumult of the two of us
near the rickety steps, the tumult
that was the beginning of a first great love.
Now it outlives us, as if in a museum,
like everything else in Jerusalem.