who'd wandered in from wherever people wandered in from in East Central Illinois, and I started showing off, telling him about Pynchon and entropy and Quantum Science and the way the world works if you look at it from a peculiar postmodern sort of angle. And soon he started quizzing me about all of that stuff, and I knew that I was in trouble, way over my head with the bubbles rising. Here I was, talking about the higher mathematics with a guy who actually knew something about them, and in fact knew more them than anybody I ever met. I was lucky to get out of that mailroom with my soul.
What I discovered soon was that Dave was always ready to talk about anything I wanted to chat about: books or God or Tolstoy's Russian or the exquisite uses of mathematics or the Spartans' final stand at Thermopylae. You could talk to him about anything and he'd have some fine and articulate sense of it that's been honed and formed over decades and decades of good teaching, reading, and thinking. So, while I was looking forward to interviewing him about his retirement, I was also not looking forward to interviewing him about his retirement because I knew I'd miss our conversations. But as always, Dave showed me that the talk was worth the talk.
Dave told me that when he first interviewed here in 1963, the chair was Gene Waffle and the English Department was housed in Old Main. It was Waffle who decided him on Eastern. Waffle was 70, close to retirement and comfortable in himself. They must have been talking at the very start of the interview process when Waffle stood up, put his arm around Dave's shoulder and said, "Come here, son, and I'll show you your office." This was before Dave had met with the hiring committee or the Dean or the President, and he couldn't get over the genuine concern and warmth that came from Waffle. He called Dave son and put his arm around his shoulder. It just floored Dave, and even though he had other job offers, he knew this was the place he wanted to be. They were kind people here, Dave said, kind, warm, great people.
And the place hasn't changed much, he added. The management's still pretty much the same, and so are the people. If there's been any change at all it's been in the move away from the old core studies, courses in language, math, foreign languages, history, and philosophy. The university's moved away from old Liberal Arts and Sciences courses, and that's a loss, Dave said.
I
asked Dave if there was a difference between his teaching now and his
teaching twenty-five or thirty years ago, and he said, "Sure, there is."
He's a better reader now, seeing things in the relationships between words
and ideas that he never saw before. He's listening to the words more closely
than ever. But he said that some things about his teaching haven't changed:
what he's always wanted to do is to teach students to listen to the words,
to get into the habit of examining language closely because it's only
in forming that habit that their enjoyment and understanding of literature
grows.
Dave said something too about the writers he loved, the great lyric poets like Stevens and Dickinson and Hopkins and Frost and Keats and Shakespeare and Yeats. What they give us, Dave feels, is a language thick, golden, and swarming with music and ideas. It's the best language we have.
And when I asked him what he was going to do in his retirement, I knew the answer before he even said it.
"I'm going to read, Johnny, read."
***