72
PARTISAN REVIEW
establish this fact, he shrugged, replied that he might do just that,
and continued with the course. Within three weeks it was clear that
only he and perhaps one other- the rustic from Pennsylvania-had
the faintest hope of passing. The others were out of the picture, un–
regenerate, either because they had never been blessed with the ability
to learn, or because something blocking and suppressing their facul–
ties of memory and reason had been done to them. These I would
hammer points into one by one, offering illustration after illustra–
tion of a single principle, until at last they would grasp it, and smiles
would blossom across the .room. But they could learn an isolate rule
or axiom of the language only by loosing their grip on
all
that had
come before. They were like those comedians in the silent movies at
whom a number of things are tossed in quick succession, and who
invariably drop the precious object they have hold of in order to
catch the one just launched. The classroom vibrated as if to the silent
shatter of glass, each previously fragile principle bursting all un–
heeded into splinters as the most immediately won crystal of uni–
versal knowledge was received, fondled and inspected, circumnavi–
gated and charted, and then grappled, finally and fatally, to their
minds.
Of the foredoomed
six,
five seemed about equally feeble–
their learning was so laborious that it would have taken about
two years of these sessions to prepare them merely to read the
examination. The other one was in a class of
his
own. He was
the man who gave Tampa as his place of origin. Although
his
records indicated that he had finished the eighth grade
it
seemed
unlikely to me that this was true-he could hardly have made it,
especially, perhaps, in the days when he went to school: at 38 he
was the oldest man
in
the class. His mind was impervious to the
knowledge which can be conveyed to us from the written page.
It
was unable to perform that labor of perception by which we import
the external and inanimate into our vital dominions. Whenever I
asked him to read one of the sentences
in
the exercise-book he would
sit torpidly, waiting apparently for the sentence to be generated spon–
taneously, like those balloons that float, effortless as a blimp, from
the mouth of a comic-strip character. Occasionally he would emit
a subdued grunt, as if the sentence were stirring somewhere inside
him.
Then he would shift on
his
ponderous haunches, cracking, un-
