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.

One More Bracing Declaration: This Time, It's Provisional

I betrayed here my more-than-sneaking admiration for the take-no-prisoners affirmation of Mr. Valiant-is-Truth in John Bunyan's Pilgrims' Progress (here). Here's another in the same vein, or maybe not:

The Man who seeks what is right
Of choice and free will, shall not be unblest;
The seed of just men shall never perish.
Not so the froward and foolish heart that bears
A motley cargo of iniquity.
His outspread sail shall soon be hauled down;
Caught in the growing storm his stout
Mast shall be rent and shattered.

To ears that hear not he cries,
To angry seas which he cannot master;
His guardian spirit doth laugh to see him,
Who rashly boasted his ship would come into port,
So weak and faint he cannot breach the wave
And sinks unseen with all his riches,
Dashed on the reef of Justice, un-
Looked-on and unlamented.

--Aeschylus, Eumenides (translation??[1])

Well, I guess that settles that. So much for you, froward and foolish heart (Google search does not like "froward"). And remember, "the seed of just men shall never perish."

Okay then, but I do not a critical difference here, from Mr. Valiant-is-Truth. We have here not the man who knows what is right, but the man who seeks what is right--a critical distinction, I should say, and very Greek, in the respect that it reminds us of Socrates, whose principle claim to wisdom is that at least he knows what he does not know. Perhaps an even better analogy is this from Gotthold Lessing:

Not the truth of which any one is, or supposes himself to be, possessed, but the upright endeavor he has made to arrive at truth, makes the worth of the man. For not by the possession, but by the investigation, of truth are his powers expanded, wherein alone his ever-growing perfection consists. Possession makes us easy, indolent, proud.

“If God held all truth shut in his right hand, and in his left nothing but the ever-restless instinct for truth, though with the condition of for ever and ever erring, and should say to me, Choose! I should bow humbly to his left hand, and say, Father, give! pure truth is for Thee alone!

--Gotthold Lessing
(Web sources and my notes, but where, exactly?)

[1] I posed the inquiry to Michael Gillelund of Laudator Temporis Acti. In what must be a first for him, he couldn't identify it either. A gold-plated cigar (or suitable equivalent) to the first person who nails it.