Remembering Edward Schlesinger (And How I made an Old Man's Life More Desolate)

The post quoting Gotthold Lessing yesterday prompts my memory of a time when I aggravated the desolation of an old man.

We’re in maybe the Spring of 1964; having flamed out of “real college,” I was a second-chance night student at the University of Louisville, taking some kind of course in European culture, from an old guy named Edward (sic?) Schlesinger. Schlesinger had a cartoonish German accent, but he was a lovely person in so many ways: courteous, cultivated, with just a touch of Cervantian melancholy humor. I didn’t know the details, but he must have had a hard life: he had practiced law in Vienna (before World War II?) and here he was in a squalid night-school classroom, with a too-tall ceiling, dust bunnies on the light fixtures, and faint yellow patina on the walls that cried aloud “deferred maintence.”

We students were pretty unwashed ourselves, but Schlesinger treated us with unfailing patience and respect as he led us from peak to treacherous peak. One night he gave us a handout including the passage from Lessing. The handout seemed to have been produced from a mimeograph (sic!) machine that matched the unwashed walls—lots of blurry letters. Anyway, Schlesinger asked me to do the honors.

Even then I was a pretty fluent at read-aloud, but as I suggest, the text was smudgy, and I proceeded haltingly. Still I know I was stunned by the heroic dignity of the passage, as I remain stunned today. “Endeavor,” I read, “…to arrive at truth…easy, indolent, proud…if God held all truth shut…and should say to me…

Say to me what? I couldn’t make out the typescript, but I made my best guess.

There was an electrified silence. And then Schlesinger responded:

“Dot voss very gut.

“But vhy did you say cheese?

"God asks us to choose.”

I suppose I could have felt mortified at my stupidity, and perhaps I did. But my main impulse at that moment was one of compassion: here is this old guy, exiled from his home and his profession, stuck in an upstairs room in the middle of the night, with a yokel who doesn’t know—well, who doesn’t know choose from cheese. Boy, what a life.

Edward—Professor Schlesinger—Attorney Schlesinger—If you’re still out there (probably not, this was more than 40 years ago)—if you are still out there, please believe I still want to apologize, and to thank you for not reaching down my throat and ripping my heart out.

Afterthought: It just now occurs to me that I was merely anticipating one of the funniest scenes in Monty Python’s Life of Brian—the one where the guy in the back can’t hear the Sermon on the Mount. Cheesemakers (I quote from memory)? Why is he blessing cheesemakers? Oh, I think he means makers of dairy products of all sorts.