Kaleidoscope

Dr. Edmund Kroner taught Greek and Latin, dead languages. He'd grown old teaching them and for over half his long career had watched them die. Nothing seemed as irrelevant to young people today as the birth and infancy of western civilization--their civilization. What every educated person had once known--had had to know--had become less than terra incognita, shards buried beneath the surface of an overbuilt earth and whose existence (if one could call it that) they barely suspected.





He himself had fared much better. He had a full head of silver-gray hair, all his teeth, firmer skin than men twenty years his junior, and had never had a problem controlling his weight. He walked three miles every day and played racquetball twice a week. Sweets didn't tempt him. Youth did, but he'd resisted that temptation for most of his adult life. Sex with men under forty did not tempt him, though he found celibacy less appealing in comparison. He appreciated, admired, marveled at the graceful athleticism of young manhood--the broad shoulders, narrow hips and tight buttocks, the winning smiles--without mentally undressing them. He was content just looking and no longer indulged in fantasies. He'd seen the reunion photographs in the alumni magazine. The pretty boys he'd had in class when he started teaching now looked older than him.





His colleagues gasped, unbelieving, when the university had recognized his forty years of service the previous spring. Some asked him afterward if he looked forward to retirement. The thought had not occurred to him. In a sense, the changing times had already retired him. There no longer was a Department of Classics. Of the five people who taught in it when he started there, only he remained. Two younger colleagues, each hired as a replacement for two retirements, now belonged to other departments. When Greek had given up the ghost a half-dozen years earlier, Cynthia kept the beginning Latin class and filled the remainder of her workload as the university's ancient historian, and Jim transferred to philosophy, where he taught Plato, Aristotle, the medievals, and ethics. The provost created a new department in the non-discipline of Humanistic Studies with Edmund as chair. He taught one tiny second-year Latin class, had a couple of students in an independent tutorial in advanced Latin, and three "large" classes, at most one-third or one-quarter the size of an introductory course in macro-economics or American political theory. Every fall he offered a course in vocabulary building for second-year students who had discovered as freshmen that they needed it to read and write, and Classical literature in translation and mythology in alternate spring semesters. The latter attracted twice as many students as the ancient masterpieces.





The course began with a brief overview of creation myths--Sanskrit, African, Mayan, Norse, and finally Greco-Roman--then traced the legendary history of Athens, Thebes and Corinth, the Trojan War and the founding of Rome, gradually introducing selections from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Homer and Virgil as primary sources. At the end of the year they read longish extracts from Ovid's Metamorphoses.





Every few years one will have a class joker among one's students. This is often an advantage. Not a class clown, whose very presence is disruptive, but a joker, a young man, less often a woman, whose witty remarks are to the point and lighten the atmosphere so that sitting in class becomes a more pleasant experience for the other students and their professor as well. That spring his name was Roy Bramson.





Edmund didn't pick up on Bramson's game until halfway into the first unit; until then he took everything he said at face value. Bramson had perfected the technique of innocently asking a question that seemed naive on the surface, but which when followed through brought out complexities and led their discussion in surprising directions on topics Edmund had covered so often they had become second nature to him. He asked them with an expression of absolute deadpan and wide-eyed curiosity, like one of those students who have such ingrained opinions that they assume everyone thinks exactly as they do and require a long, overly simplified explanation before they can grasp an unfamiliar idea. What finally gave him away was that where he seemed to be coming from was constantly shifting.





Edmund always had his students fill out a small information sheet the first day of class. After three or four class sessions, he took note of Bramson's participation and looked through them again to see what he had written. Except for the last item, his answers were unremarkable.





Major: undecided--economics? computer science? biology?





Why you chose this course: I need it for my humanities requirement & it fits in with my schedule (nearly everyone put something like that)





1 to 3 things you know about Ancient Greece and/or Rome: they ate olives, they had orgies, they conquered the world





When he handed out the syllabus, Bramson had raised his hand and asked if the creation myths they studied would include Darwin's theory of evolution. A couple of students guffawed; others looked embarrassed. It was impossible to tell whether he was a wise guy or a creationist. Edmund answered noncommittally, explaining that the course did not deal with truth, but with stories different cultures invented to help them make sense of the world.





Thanks to Bramson's question, that first day was unlike any other. Instead of outlining the course, clarifying his expectations, giving his little "Why study mythology?" speech and letting them go early, they talked about subjects he always reserved for the last week of class--if the expression "modern myths" was accurate or figurative, how entertainment and the media perpetuate what we take for granted, to what extent globalization had homogenized the modern view of the world, what national legends persisted in different countries and how they affected international politics--vital questions that they would turn to again and again during the course of the semester.





Nearly the whole class participated in the discussion, and by the end of the hour, Edmund knew things about his students that might have come out later in their papers or an off-hand remark, or which he might never have found out at all. Cory Baker was probably some fuzzy kind of Marxist, Joanna Gimble a feminist, Paula Nicholson had made the Palestinian cause her personal crusade, Mark Adams thought that half the illegal immigrants were taking away our jobs and the other half were draining an overly generous welfare system, and Trisha Scheldt was a movie buff. Roy Bramson, he assumed, must be a fundamentalist Christian. He wasn't. In subsequent classes he constantly shifted his point of view, never giving himself away, impossible to pin down. When they studied Mesopotamia, he waxed enthusiastic over the resemblances to Genesis. Two days later, when they turned to ancient India, he sounded like a Hindu ascetic.





Bramson's shifting, indeterminate quality came out in other ways as well. Most students instinctively gravitate to a certain section of the classroom, though not the same spot in every class they take. The north-south orientation of the room may have something to do with it, or the size of the windows, or their interest in the subject, or if they have friends taking the course. The fact remains that they tend to pick a chair by the end of the first week and sit in it for the rest of the semester except if they arrive late. Bramson seldom sat in the same place more than once, and certainly never twice in a row. How he kept track of where he had sat and where he hadn't Edmund could not fathom. Perhaps he was less consistent in his inconsistency than it seemed, but with three classes a week for fifteen weeks and less than thirty students in the class, it was possible for him to carry it off. By doing so he forced the others to move around a bit. Not until two-thirds of the way through the semester did Bramson so metimes find all the new spots already taken and have to choose a seat he had already occupied.





Edmund noticed that a student sitting in an unaccustomed part of the room was less likely to participate in the discussions, but it was a small price to pay for Bramson's presence in his class. The course took on a dimension it never had before. The house of Atreus became a springboard to dive into (of all things!) family values and marital fidelity, and from there it went flying off in all directions at once.





"In The Eumenides AEschylus takes a moral morass and tries to bring order out of chaos," he began. "Do you think he succeeds?"





"I don't see it as a moral morass," Bramson said. "The problem is that people won't put things behind them and go with the flow. Helen runs off with some dude and the whole country goes to war. Æschylus makes it clear he doesn't think it was worth it."





"Wasn't that the gods' punishment for the sins of Atreus and Thyestes?"





"It's the people who turn it into a punishment. Menelaus wasn't the first guy whose wife cheated on him."





"What about Agamemnon's children?"





"The same thing all over again. Their father's gone for ten years, their mother takes a lover, and they get all bent out of shape over it. What did any of them expect her to do? They're a family of sickos, if you ask me."





Edmund had asked; he just hadn't expected that response.





Joanna Gimble accused Electra of betraying her sex. Bramson rolled his eyes.





"Oh, come off it! What kind of loyalty do we owe the other members of our sex?"





"Men stick together in all patriarchal societies. That's one of their ways of hanging on to power. Women have to stick together to protect themselves."





"What about friends and family? Aren't our first loyalties to them?"





"She wants to kill her own mother. That her father sacrificed her sister means nothing to her. It's always the women who get sacrificed in these stories."





"Not always," Edmund pointed out. "Theseus calling on Poseidon to punish Hippolytus is a kind of sacrifice, and earlier in that myth, the Athenians have to send seven maidens and seven youths as tribute to the Minotaur."





"I still can't figure out why they couldn't defend themselves," another student said. "It was fourteen against one."





The discussion went off on a brief tangent about monsters and then returned to Clytemnestra. It annoyed Joanna that in addition to murdering her husband--not that she approved of murder--the myth condemned her for not favoring her male child.





"Does she treat any of her children well?" someone asked, which brought them back to Electra.





"Why pick on her?" Bramson challenged. "She's not thinking clearly; she's consumed with hatred. If anyone's a traitor to her sex, it's Athena. She comes right out and says so."