A Table of Green Fields by Guy Davenport (ebook reader .txt) 📕

is to be known about alef, and here we are hastening on to beth. Zakkaiah's mouth fell open.

—So? he said. You want me to forget that you were having a late breakfast rather than paying attention to the lesson?

—Oh no, Teacher.

—I'm listening to what you have to say about alef, if you're quite through eating figs.

Yeshua worked his fingers in the air until there was a fig in them.

—Have a fig for yourself, O Teacher. And another. And yet another. They are from the great tree down the street, and are the juiciest and tastiest figs in all Jerusalem.

Zakkaiah stood with the three figs in his cupped hands, staring at Yeshua, speechless. He looked at the figs and he looked at Yeshua.

—My father sent them to you, O Teacher. They are good for the bowels, he says.

A silence.

—I will thank him when I see him, Zakkaiah said in a soft voice.

—Alef, Yeshua said. I will recite about alef.

There was an uneasiness in the class. Zakkaiah was obviously thinking several things at once.

—Alef! Yeshua said in a voice pitched bright. In the alef there's a yud up here, and a yud down there, with a line between. As with all boundaries, this line both joins and separates. The yud above is the Creator of the universe, of the earth, the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars. The yud below is us, the people. The line between is the Torah, the prophets, the law. It is the eye for seeing what we can of the Creator. He is evident in his work, the world.

—You are reciting a commentary, Zakkaiah said, but whose? —I'm making it up, Yeshua said. The Creator made us creators, too. Look at the spider knitting its web and at the bird building its nest. Every work has a maker.

—Is it the blessed Hillel your father has taught you?

—Who is Hillel? The alphabet is all pictures. You can look at them and see what they are: a house, a camel. The alef is a picture of the whole world. Cool water on dusty feet, that's a grand thing, and the smell of wood shavings and a crust dunked in wine, and honey, and dancing to the tabor and flute. These good things belong down here, but they come from up there. That's why there's a line between the top yud and the bottom yud. Everything has a fence, so we can know where it is. A house has rooms, a garden has a wall.

Zakkaiah sat on his stool, hard. He stuck the fingers of his left hand into his beard. His right hand held three figs.

—But the fun of the line between the yuds, Yeshua went on, is that it's a fence only if you look at it that way. It is really a road, and like all roads it goes both ways. You have to know which way you're going. Look at the anemones that make the fields red all of a sudden after the first rain of the wet season. The grand dresses at Solomon's court were not such a sight, and they were made with looms and needles, whereas the master of the universe made the anemones overnight, with a word. You can get near the line with much labor, or you can cross it with a step.

—I told you Yeshua's meshuggeh, Daniel whispered to Yaakov. —Why don't you eat your figs, O Teacher? Yeshua asked. I have more.

2

 

On a blustery late afternoon in March 1842, Professor James Joseph Sylvester of the University of Virginia was walking along a brick path across the lawn in front of Jefferson's Rotunda. He had been brought from London to teach mathematics only the November before, and still wondered at these neoclassical buildings set in an American forest, and at the utilitarian rowhouse dormitories, at the black slaves who dressed the students and carried their books to class. He taught arithmetic and algebra from Lacroix's serviceable manual, trigonometry, geometry, the calculus differential and integral. Next term he was offering a course from Poisson's Mechanics and Laplace's Mecanique celeste.

He was a member of the Royal Society. At age twenty-seven he had distinguished himself with so brilliant a series of mathematical papers that he had been invited to come to Virginia. Jefferson's plan was to bring the best minds of Europe to dwell in his academic village, as he liked to call it. And now Jefferson was dead, leaving his faculty of European geologists, chemists, linguists, historians, and mathematicians to carry on his work of civilizing Virginia and her sister states.

Professor Sylvester's problem was one he had never before met. His students, all healthy, strapping young men from the richest of families, were illiterate. They knew nothing. He could scarcely understand a word they said. They came late to class, if at all, accompanied by their slaves. They talked with each other while Professor Sylvester lectured. The strangest thing about them was that they did not want to learn. Take Ballard. He was from Louisiana, some great plantation with hundreds of slaves. He was a handsome lad, beautifully dressed. Yet if called upon, he would say:

—I could answer that, Fesser, if I wanted to, but frankly I'm not minded to do so.

—Is this not insolence, Mr. Ballard?

—If you were a gentleman, Fesser, you'd know how to talk to one, now wouldn't you?

A roar of laughter.

He had gone to the faculty. They told him that the students had reduced Jefferson to tears, that they had shot three professors already, that he had best deal with them as patiently as he knew how. There was no support to be expected from Charlottesville, which was of the opinion that the faculty was composed of atheists, Catholics, Jews, Jesuits. A Hungarian professor had had to leave town in the dark of night.

They dueled, and fought with Bowie knives. They drank themselves into insensibility. They came to class drunk. When Sylvester tried to find out why this was allowed, he was reminded that the students were aristocrats.

—Mr. Ballard, will you rehearse Euclid's proofs for the Pythagorean theorem of the right triangle?

—Suck my dick.

He had had to ask what the words meant, and blushed. On the advice of a fellow professor he had bought a sword cane. One never knew.