LIVES AND WIVES OF A GENIUS
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he was excited by the vision of a mass of eager young faces, strain–
ing to hear him, challenging him with endless questions, and in–
satiable in their yearning for new ideas. For days he talked about
teaching, explaining that it was essentially a ceremonial burial of
old theories and birth of new ones,
in
which the teacher initiated
the young virgins into the mysteries of creation.
If
he finally had
to accept the job, despite his fear of leaving
his
native habitat, it
was probably because, as someone snidely remarked, he could not
stop talking about it.
When Dorothy discovered that Stanley planned to go without
her, she objected on the ground that people who were married
should live together, but Stanley pointed out that this was an
idealization of economic convenience, and that the average philistine
assumed he was in love with
his
wife because he was living with her.
Dorothy then bought his railroad ticket, packed his things, and
gave him a send-off party at which he expounded his new ideas
about teaching.
For a few weeks, Dorothy continued to quote his latest ob–
servations, but soon after he had left she began to find more satis–
faction in the men who could come to see her every night. Though
they were not as brilliant as Stanley, Dorothy found that their
presence made their opinions more effective. When one y01ing poet,
who regarded the world as his mother, took up permanent residence
in her apartment, Dorothy decided the new content of her life
required a new form and she wrote Stanley she thought a divorce
would in no way disrupt their relation. Stanley had no objections,
since, as he wrote her, "divorce is only one way of destroying the
legal fiction of marriage."
By the end of the winter Stanley was back. He did not want
to discuss the reason for his return, but he did talk a good deal
about the "bureaucratization of thinking" in the colleges, which, he
said, made it possible to think without ideas. The only vital teach–
ing, Stanley said, was Socratic, roaming through time and space,
unrestricted by curricula, classrooms, and students---yes, students,
too, for there would be no need for students if there were no class–
rooms, any more than you could have forced labor without con–
centration camps. The fallacy of the modern university, Stanley
concluded, lay in substituting the concept of the student for that
of
the disciple.
