12
LIONel TRILLING
the creators of the intellectual life of the future, there comes a
kind of despair. It does not come because our students fail to
respond to ideas, rather because they respond to ideas with a
happy vagueness, a delighted glibness, a joyous sense of power
in the use of received or receivable generalizations, a grateful
wonder at how easy it is to formulate and judge, at how little
resistance language offers to their intentions. When that despair
strikes us, we are tempted to give up the usual and accredited
ways of evaluating education, and instead of prizing responsive–
ness and aptitude, we set store by some
sign
of personal char–
acter in our students, some token of individual will. We think
of this as taking the form of resistance and imperviousness, of
personal density or gravity, of some power of supposing that
ideas are real, a power which will lead a young man to say, "But
is this really true-is it true for me?" And to say this not in the
modem way, not following the progressive educational prescrip–
tion to "think for yourself," which means to think
in
the pro–
gressive pieties rather than in the conservative pieties (if any of
the latter do still exist), but to say it from his sense of himself as
a person rather than as a bundle of attitudes and responses which
are
all
alert to please the teacher and the progressive community.
We can't do anything about the quality of personal being
of our students, but we are led to think about the cultural ana–
logue of a personal character that is grave, dense, and resistant–
we are led to think about the past. Perhaps the protagonist of
Thomas Mann's story, "Disorder and Early Sorrow" comes to
mind, that sad Professor Cornelius with his intense and ambiva–
lent sense of history. For Professor Cornelius, who is a historian,
the past is dead, is death itself, but for that very reason it is the
source of order, value, piety, and even love.
If
we think about
education
in
the dark light of the despair I have described, we
wonder
if
perhaps there is not to be found in the past that quiet
place at which a young man might stand for a few years, at
least a little beyond the competing attitudes and generalizations
of the present, at least a little beyond the contemporary prob-
