Encounters With Goodness

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Encounters With Goodness

By Archives Created Oct 16 2005 - 8:00pm

Goodness is inexplicable. That's why literature, lm, drama, even ancient religious texts, remain plaintively silent about how it arises and how to preserve it through always turbulent and trying times. I claim no originality in thinking about goodness and can only make some tentative leaps of fancy, though I aspire for more depth. Please, then, bear with me a little. My South American-born mother started college at 16 upon moving to the U.S. In one of her freshman classes, world literature, she studied Tolstoy's magisterial Anna Karenina and named me after one of its protagonists. So, quite early as an adult, my mother already had given me my rst lesson in not fearing difference, even names that seem strange upon rst encounter. My mother, always brilliantly ahead of her peers, decided shortly after completing graduate studies at Stanford at the tender age of 22, that we would have a succession of guests join our earnest Anglican family's dinner. As a pre-adolescent, I was allowed to participate in discussions with adults embodying a diversity of nationalities and religions and professions. My mother's gift to me was the conscious exposure to world-class literature, Tchaikovsky's ballets, peasant Korean weddings, visits to the Hermitage in what was then Leningrad, walks through Alexander Platz in East Berlin during the Cold War on the way to some symphonies after passing through Checkpoint Charley. My most memorable dinner discussions were with white South Africans during apartheid and sympathetic anti-colonial exiles. These encounters during my transition from adolescent to adult remained indelibly marked on my character. These were the great moments in my life, my endless encounters with human goodness that emanated whenever I met others as moral equals. My mother's precious, priceless gift to me was needed when I began teaching Shakespeare to poor black teens living in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn at the height of the demon-lled crack epidemic. My class of 12 consisted of students attending Bushwick Outreach High School (for "troubled" youths expelled from other high schools). I taught twice weekly in a teaching apprentice program for so-called honors undergraduates. Upon my unceremonious entrance to the class with 12 seemingly un-precocious and ill-prepared students, I had an even harder challenge than most teachers. My upper middle class background, acquired through attending an elite boarding school, traveling the world with my parents and having the most expansive exposure to the best of world culture - all classically based made me the oddest black person my students had ever met (and probably ever will). Our profound socialcircumstantial differences were difcult for me to manage because earnestness and respect can sometimes accomplish little. So I tried, failed miserably at rst, and then became a success, judging from their endless responses to my comments and queries. I especially focused their attention on some of the ideas conveyed in The Merchant of Venice. I thought out of all of Shakespeare's vast oeuvre, they could relate most to the anti-Semitism, no trivial matter since many of the poorest blacks in Brooklyn harbor some animosities towards Jews. But it was their undeniable intellectual giftedness that made me willingly accept any difculties I encountered. I knew instinctively, without any previous evidence, that their precocious minds were waiting to be stimulated in non-condescending ways. Forget about the rhythms of hip-hop culture that have become mainstreamed. To be in a class with them, all males, all with a radiant brilliance in their articulation of ideas, novel and textured; to be taken seriously by them, that is what I remember most, not my elucidation of Shakespearean ideas. Their frenzied speaking styles, reected in a rapid-re staccato succession of endless syllables, put me to shame. I listened, I sat star-struck, listening to endless ideas in endless mutations, took copious notes and frequently smiled intensely as a result of their loquacious vivacity. I deserve no credit for trying, unconsciously, pathetically, to imitate Socrates in Plato's Meno, who instructed a slave
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Encounters With Goodness

http://cornellsun.com/print/15612

boy - all the while claiming, as does Noam Chomsky, that we have an innate capacity for representing knowledge, for articulating language, irrespective of social class or social status. They were all much smarter, much stronger than me and carried my thoughts so much more resolutely about human possibilities than any other world-weary group. Perhaps only the survivors of the Khmer Rouge in I met in rural Cambodia in 1998 demonstrated with such moral urgency that goodness can indeed ourish whenever our inherent dignity overcomes barely tolerable cruelties. From my students at Bushwick Outreach High School, I also learned another great lesson: to be smart is relatively easy, but to maintain one's fragile dignity, one's not so apparent goodness, well - for me, that simply is beyond my comprehension, though its traces hover around me at all times. I frequently make an entreaty to some oating soul across the earth, asking why my life is so much better than perhaps ve billion souls across the globe. The only, hardly satisfactory answer that always remains elusive is this: goodness bestowed on my life (and yours) freely coerces inspiration to make the world around me less brutal, more habitable - each moment the opportunity arises. That is what I am compelled to do. This is what my pathetically poor, heroically dignied students taught me. Ah, my awe of goodness.

Alexei Waters is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology. He can be reached at aaw13@cornell.edu. First Take appears Mondays. Archived article by Alexei Waters
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