Class Warfare Read Online Free PDF Page A

beloved finger, at the certain and only end …

THE EXAMINATION
    You are to write THREE essays, one from Parts I, II, and III. Take an hour for each essay. Plan carefully. At the end, proofread
.
    The process of watching over the examination is called “invigilation.” The process of adoration is called “unprofessional conduct.” At nine o’clock in the morning, the beautiful of this world enter the examination room, to find the examination booklets set out for them, and the Professor behind his desk, adoring. There is no other word. He has decided to leave his wife.
    Discuss.
The theme, “the theme of the poem.” He is open to discussion. He will observe, praise, the purity of these faces, concentrated, focused, on silly questions: this perfection of flesh, this effulgence. These are his students, and he is their English Professor:
theirs.
They are thinking of serious words, writing them down, filling the blue-lined pages, one-side-only, every-other-line-please. He is in love. The process of invigilation consists in doing nothing, vigilantly, for three hours of an April morning.
    Q.
What did T.S. Eliot have to say about April?
    The Professor is going to leave his wife because she said: “You love your goddamned students more than me.” It’s true, he does.
Choose ONE of the following topics. Plan carefully.
    He, too, is writing earnestly in the regulation booklet. He does it as a gesture of solidarity, “symbolic action”: it’s his job, his contract with the world, to deal in symbolism.
See,
he is saying,
we are all alike oppressed
. He will try not to look at the bent heads, the busy hands, writing, writing. “The universal truth expressed by the poet is …” (
Discuss conflicts of this sort, with specific reference to
…). He will try and try, not to look at them. The loveliest, the golden failures, will never know, they’ll never suspect. He’s had years of his profession to learn discretion. He won’t touch them, won’t caress, though they fall drunk against his shoulder in the Volkswagen, on the way home. “A reader may be, at first, puzzled by a work in which nothing much seems to be happening.”
In the event of a bomb threat, please follow the procedures outlined below. Do not panic. Do not interrupt the examination. Your co-operation will be
… Appreciated. The girl in the second row has long yellow hair, communicative eyes, and a valentine locket on a chain. Never mind that she’s a functional illiterate, that she doesn’t know an antonym from a pseudonym.
Never mind.
    Nothing seems to be happening. He reads, “Such a reader may find illumination …”
Strive vigilantly upward
. Said the Buddha, he thinks. It sounds like the sort of thing the Buddha would have said. So much is slipping away … everything …
    The Professor is writing a letter in his booklet; it looks like this: Dear Valerie, I am leaving you, goodbye, goodbye forever.
    He is writing a poem, in iambic pentameter, in his head. He is thinking of a song heard on the radio, this morning: something about the waters of oblivion.
Send her all my salary / from the waters of oblivion
. What he heard, the rhyme he understood, was
celery
. Send her all my celery, he heard. Now he thinks of the tall green celery growing there, the pale green stalks waving wetly in the murky deeps, in the waters of oblivion. He knows those waters well; he has seen the celery.
Valerie, I’m sorry, you can keep the car, the furniture, the dishwasher, the children. And the celery, if you must. There are so many bodies here in the examination room, and I am full of desire
.
    He is saying to them in his heart: “Little brothers and sisters.” They are writing about metaphor, metapsychology, metastasis, metallurgy; they are writing about the Central Experience. He could tell them a thing or two about that: the C.E. It is a new department of the