In pursuit of wisdom: a distinguished author/philosopher encourages college students to grasp the opportunity to take it all in

Black Issues Book Review, Sept-Oct, 2005 by Charles Johnson

I'm talking about other students, the people you're sitting beside today. I found, as I hope you will find, that the other students with whom you share classrooms and dormitories represent an incredible degree of difference and diversity. My classmates in college were not only from the Midwest. They came from the East Coast, from Africa (like Fortunata) and from China, from Chicago's inner-city and from little towns in Illinois with names like "Flat Rock" and "Granite City." They came with backgrounds and cultural experiences different from my own. As a matter of fact, a few older students I knew came from prison. Needless to say, each and every one of these students enlarged my perspective on life. I believe your fellow students, if you let them, will, do the same for you.

Asking the Right Questions

Your other source of serendipity is, of course, the faculty.

I started out as a journalism major. As such, I found I was required to take a class in--of all things--philosophy. At 18, I knew nothing about philosophy. I let my adviser talk me into taking a huge lecture course taught by a professor named John Howie, on the philosophy of the pre-Socratics. Somehow (I don't know how) and with some gift he had (I don't know what), Dr. Howie was able to sing the 2,000-year-old ethical problems Democritus and Epicuris wrestled with in such a way that I realized for the first time that many of the social issues I was publishing political cartoons about in the late 1960s were issues debated and discussed with sophistication two thousand years before the birth of the American republic. He made me see that the questions we ask determine the quality of the answers we get. Sitting in a sea of students in Dr. Howie's class, I realized I simply had to pursue philosophy if I wanted to understand my work as a journalist better. And so, thanks to Dr. Howie, who is today one of my friends and colleagues, I discovered a new passion I didn't realize I possessed until I went to college.

Dr. Howie was a quiet man, in fact, he was a minister. But directly across the street from his office in the Department of Philosophy was the Department of English, and in one of those tiny offices there was a young teacher named John Gardner, who was a novelist, medievalist and critic. He was destined to become the most influential writing teacher in our time. I came to know John Gardner after I graduated with a degree in journalism, and was by then a graduate student in philosophy while I worked part-time as a reporter for one of the local newspapers. I signed up for his class in novel-writing because I'd heard so much about him, and because after writing and publishing journalism for several years I had the urge to explore what I might accomplish as a writer in a longer form--like the novel.

To shorten a long story, John Gardner--who taught thousands of students across America--guided me, sentence by sentence, when I was 24, through the composition of my first published novel. He also provided me with a portrait of what an artist and scholar could be. Gardner knew 12 languages, ancient and modem. He was a Chaucer scholar, and if any of you take a class on the Old English epic Beowulf, it's possible that your teacher will also ask you to read Gardner's novel Grendel, which retells the story of Beowulf's battle with the monster Grendel from the monster's point of view. (It's a bit like Beowulf meets Walt Disney.)