Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

He leaned forward, waiting, though they all seemed persuaded that the question was rhetorical—bent over their notebooks, pencils poised, ready to write down and underline and adorn with multiple exclamation points whatever it should turn out that, according to Professor Mickelsson, Plato was saying. The semester was only three weeks old. Most of his students were freshmen or sophomores, shining-faced innocents waiting eagerly for wisdom, or what they took for wisdom—things they could write down and make use of in life, like algebraic method or the rhyming saws one picked up, as they’d no doubt learned by now, in the Anguish Department (“ ‘Forlorn!’ The very word is like a bell …”)—each of them dressed in the uniform of the age, formerly the uniforms of streetworkers or cowboys, bleached-out jeans and workshirts their mothers had bought them (so Mickelsson imagined) at Saks, watching him with interest, hair-triggered to laugh if he should happen to make a joke, or groan if he should ask them to take out paper for a quiz, and groan again when he said “Time’s up!” Only one of the students in this class, the would-be suicide he’d met during the summer, Michael Nugent, was a junior—not that one would have guessed. He showed no sign of the typical junior’s amused, glossy confidence. He seemed, if anything, even more earnestly out after wisdom than his classmates, watching Mickelsson like a crazed hawk, now grinning, now showing fear, sometimes looking around in troubled rage, as if, for some reason, he’d come to hate it that he’d been born a carnivore yet could not help seeing his classmates as chickens and mice.

Mickelsson was seated, as usual, on the front of his desk, his pipe in his hand, his heavy right leg swinging. On the tree outside his window, a half-dozen leaves had turned bright yellow. Two young sparrows darted back and forth near the glass as if trying to get a look at the clock. Alan Blassenheim, probably the brightest of this semester’s crop—though hopelessly, frantically in love with his own wild, undisciplined opinions and mildly corrupted, Mickelsson suspected, by a business-world background (his father was “in plastics”) that would tend to make him unduly quick to compromise, too easily satisfied by the stylish and commercial—poor Blassenheim looked powerfully tempted, almost driven, to raise his hand, whether or not he was sure he knew the answer. He had the ways of an athlete: Get in there and fight, don’t think! Mickelsson averted his eyes from Blassenheim’s, lest he lead the boy into temptation.

“Put it this way. It may or may not be, as Miss Mariani points out …” He nodded polite acknowledgment toward the girl who’d raised the issue—a young woman thin of arm and leg, large of face, heavy of eyelid. She sat hungrily smoking a cigarette, awkwardly knocking the ashes off onto a makeshift ashtray of folded notebook paper. “That is,” he said, “it may or may not be that, as I. F. Stone argues, Socrates was a fascist and Plato, as his defender, must have been more or less the same. It’s a question we can hardly judge directly, of course, since none of us was there.” He smiled and they dutifully smiled with him. “All we have is Plato’s writings, so the only question we’re competent to deal with is, ‘Just how fascistic is Plato’s Republic?’ ”

He paused for an instant, making sure of their attention. Most of them were writing furiously in their notebooks. Miss Mariani made a show of looking interested, as if her question about Plato’s fascism had been, for some time now, a matter of concern to her. Not that he blamed the poor girl. It was a bitch, trying to learn what to ask, what to think, what to do to get attention. It was cruelly unfair and always had been, the whole teaching-and-learning business. He wished the whole lot of them back in Eden, where all you had to know was the difference between apples. “You’ll notice that Stone is very quick to use phrases like ‘Plato was saying.’ Should that bother us at all? Any reasonable objections?”

He waited, hoping for any hand but Blassenheim’s or Nugent’s, the terrible two. Nothing, of course, not even from them, and of course nothing from poor Miss Mariani. He sighed. “All right. Plato—‘the dramatist,’ as we called him earlier, as some of you may recall—” He smiled; they smiled. “Plato, or Socrates, or some Socrates invented by Plato and not necessarily to be confused with either Socrates or Plato—somebody, anyway—argues in The Republic that the masses can’t be trusted. Is that fascism, in itself?” They waited and, when the pause lengthened, looked up expectantly. “At least we can grant that it’s an excusable mistake,” he said. He raised his pipe to his lips and pulled. It was out. “Think of Hitler’s Third Reich.” Usually when you dropped an allusion to Hitler their interest increased, as if the subject guaranteed that now, at last, you must say things worthy of their notebooks. “A mass of citizens full of ignorant opinions, mainly, of course, ‘the Wagnerian morass,’ as Nietzsche calls it, anti-Semitism” (Nugent nodded quick, angry agreement). “… a madman willing to make use of anything for his own aggrandizement …” He found the matches, lit one, and held it above the pipebowl, hurriedly moving the flame from side to side. “To what extent can we pin such things on Plato? Certainly The Republic has no room for a Hitler; Socrates explicitly condemns that kind of thing, and he speaks persuasively on how it comes about, how the mob wants simple answers and the strong man, the bully, comes along and offers them.”

“Just like Reagan,” Nugent said, pretending to be talking to himself. Mickelsson decided to ignore it. There was much one might say of Mr. Reagan as bull to the Nietzschean “herd“—Nietzschean buffoonery vs. Hollywood buffoonery, that is, “harmonious classicism” housed in cowboy good intentions and fangless wit. But it was hardly to