76
PARTISAN REVIEW
"It would he nice to think so." He added, "Of course I am not
a professor."
This was clearly a disappointment but Tertan met it. "In
the French sense," he said with composure. "Generically, a
teacher."
Suddenly he bowed. It was such a bow, Howe fancied, as a
stage·director might teach an actor playing a medieval student
who takes leave of Abelard- stiff, solemn, with elbows close to the
body and feet together. Then, quite as suddenly, he turned and
left.
A queer fish, and as soon as Howe reached his office he sifted
through the batch of themes and drew out Tertan's. The boy had
filled many sheets with his unformed headlong scrawl. "Who am
I?" he had begun. "Here, in a mundane, not to say commer–
cialized academe, is asked the question which from time long
immemorably out of mind has accreted doubts and thoughts
in
the psyche of man to pester him as a nuisance. Whether in St.
Au
6Ustine (or Austin as sometimes called) or Miss Bashkirtsieff
or Frederic Amiel or Empedocles, or in less lights of the intellect
than these, this posed question has been ineluctable."
Howe took out his pencil. He circled "academe" and wrote
"vocab." in the margin. He underlined "time long immemorably
out of mind" and wrote "Diction!" But this seemed inadequate
for what was wrong. He put down his pencil and read ahead
to
discover the principle of error in the theme. "Today as ever,
in
spite of gloomy prophets of the dismal science (economics) the
question is uninvalidated. Out of the starry depths of heaven
hurtles this spear of query demanding to be caught on the shield of
the mind ere it pierces the skull and the limbs be unstrung."
Baffled hut quite caught, Howe read on. "Materialism, by
which is meant the philosophic concept and not the moral idea,
provides no aegis against the question which lies beyond the
tangible (metaphysics). Existence without alloy is the question
presented. Environment and heredity relegated aside, the
rag~
and old clothes of practical life discarded, the name and the
in–
strumentality of livelihood do not, as the prophets of the dismal
science insist on in this connection, give solution to the interroga–
tion which not from the professor merely but veritably from the
cosmos is given. I think, therefore I am (cogito etc.) but who
