The Augusts of My Life

                                 The Augusts of My Life

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/9/18

            With the exception of three years, I have entered a public school or college classroom every August of my life since 1950.

            Pardon the excursion into numerology, but that’s sixty-nine Augusts minus three which equals sixty-six.  Of those sixty-six Augusts, sixteen were spent as a student; fifty were spent on the other side of the desk.

            Today in London, England I am pondering those fifty Augusts that began in 1966. This, my fiftieth August year, is being interrupted by a brief vacation.

            Yes, I ponder.  Why have I given fifty Augusts to teaching youths and young adults about language, literature, English history, and writing?  Why have I pointed students to merry England, English poets, and the grandeur of London, that beacon of western civilization?  Of what good is teaching English literature?  Who actually thinks youths can be dragged from their technology long enough to learn, much less appreciate what things were like before technology enveloped us all?  What do English studies have to do with gainful employment?

            More personally, how did I go from southern country boy to lover of England and a teacher of poetry and all things British?  Good grief!  My youth was spent hoeing, castrating calves, cleaning barns and chicken houses, picking cotton, digging potatoes, and wringing chickens’ necks in time to have chicken for supper.  Since I enjoyed every day of it, how did Shakespeare, Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and Churchill wiggle their proper selves through my mundane existence into my brain and soul?

            They had some help, and not just from my parents and teachers.  Up and down a country road, farmers and their wives lived, practiced, and exemplified the contemplative life.  They may have never heard of England’s William Wordsworth but they believed that “the world is too much with us / getting and spending we lay waste our powers / little we see in nature that is ours.”

            Those farmers also cared about what was going on in the truly “outside” world.  They had endured the Great Depression and sent sons to the second Great War.  They had plenty to contemplate.  Contemplate and speak of it all, they did.

            It was a Greek non-writer, Socrates, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but it was the many British writers who, like Tennyson, urged contemplation and challenged readers to “to seek a newer world / to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  Hobson Harvey may have been the only farmer on Old Highway 80 ever to quote Tennyson, but all of them would drop poetic lines from time to time, indicating that somewhere along the way the poets of yesteryear had reached them.

            For the questions raised in the fourth paragraph above, I found answers many Augusts ago.  I saw the answers writ large on the faces of high schoolers as far back as the late sixties.  It was obvious, and still is in this fiftieth August year, that youths need the contemplation that the study of literature provides.  I’ve learned that college students as well need and can find answers for life’s deepest questions (meaning and purpose) in literature and in the thoughtful discussion of it.  Sports, malls, and pleasures of all sorts can provide needed respite and relieve stress, but they don’t deal with life’s deepest questions.  Literature does.  In a fashion, so can history. 

            I’m glad I stayed in teaching.  Twice I almost quit.  Yes, what most drives teachers from teaching is students and what most keeps teachers in teaching is students as well.  Learning that former student Harold Melton was installed this week as Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court was an emotional delight.  Melton was a prince if I ever saw one.  Running into former students who have successfully maintained a small business is just as satisfying.  Both the Harold Meltons and the Average Joes can keep a teacher going.

            Tomorrow we go to Downing Street.  No doubt a guide or a brochure will resurrect Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill, and Thatcher, and let them say a few words.  But for all the contributions that Prime Ministers have made, the poets and the natural world they pointed us to have prodded the soul more.  As Wordsworth put it, “One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man / Of moral evil and of good / Than all the sages can.”

            Next week it’s back to the books and resumption of the fiftieth August since, as the American poet Frost reminded us, “the woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.”

Roger Hines

9/5/18