Anyway, I also think that an issue like that does very little against the importance of his article’s overarching philosophical message, which is aching to be understood, because so commonly misunderstood, so unknown.

Does that sound naive or weird? Sounds like I’m a heartless product of my generation and so am tired of hearing about civil rights issues on every protest sign on every corner? Yeah, that’s true.

Indeed, at our best we who teach are trying to illuminate, remembering that we are not the source of Light, but we can be its agents and its emissaries.

Speaking as a teacher, I do remember far more of my students than they realize; I often don’t recognize them when they come up to me on the street or in a shop, largely because I have a poor memory for faces. But I don’t forget writing.

But the great majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing taught.

That seems really right on to me.

The teachers who have most strongly shaped my life remain like beacons in my consciousness; regardless of whether or not they remember me (though of course my ego hopes that they do!), they’ve helped attuned me both to poetry and to God — my two greatest sources of prayer and comfort — and I credit them with so much of who I am.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about heat versus light. You’re right, I think, that teaching is an act of kindling…but maybe because I’ve been studing some Zohar this spring, I’m struck by the sense in which teaching is an act not of creating heat (my heart burns) but of creating light (my heart and mind are illuminated.)

You may like the Yeats quote– I like the “brain sex” quote.