Silas Timberman Read Online Free PDF

the extent that they were puzzling him at this moment.
    His first feeling was that he did not know them or anything very much about them, even though this was his sixth lecture with this particular group. There were forty-two students in the class, twenty-eight boys and fourteen girls, and he knew the names of at least a dozen of them and could make a fair guess with a dozen more. But that did not increase his knowledge of them. For several years after the Second World War had ended, he had felt knowledgeable about his students and exceedingly close to them, for they were all—at least the men wholly, and to some extent the women—a part of the enveloping experience of war. But by 1950, almost all of the veterans had gone. A new generation had replaced them, a generation of strong, tall and fair youth who had never known want or fear or deprivation, who had never crouched, face in the mud, and listened to the scream of the planes overhead, who had never talked to death and listened to death, who had never counted the hours and days and weeks and years in some lonely and godforsaken outpost, and who had never walked gingerly and apprehensively into the hallowed and forbidden halls of learning, armed with a scholarship granted by the GI Bill of Rights . The war generation he had known well indeed, but these were something else. These, in this university, were the sons and daughters of the satisfied and the successful of the middle west. Here were the sons and daughters of large and small industrialists, department store owners and storekeepers, doctors and lawyers and men who had the rich franchise with Ford or Pontiac or Plymouth or Coca-Cola, great farmers who had reaped ten good years of crops, and judges and state senators and congressmen and real estate operators and contractors and engineers—from good homes in the pleasant green towns of the middle west, from Chicago and Indianapolis and St. Louis and Cincinnati and Cleveland and Gary and many other cities. They were as fair to look on as any group of boys and girls had ever been in all of the land’s history, for they had been cared for and fed as no other children were—but their health and fairness and robustness only served to foster his doubts and uncertainties.
    When he looked at their faces, he found no uncertainties there, no doubts. Suppose he were to tell them the rather inconsequential story of what had happened this morning? What would they do? What would they say? He did not know because he had never thought of them in this manner before.
    Suppose he raised it to them as a question of principle?—which made it even more puzzling; for he was by no means certain that he was acting on a basis of principle; and he was a little less than certain as to what their principles might be.
    He recalled now that he had no clue. They did not argue with him; they were not inquisitive, and they did not challenge his opinions. Neither were they obstreperous, unruly or disinterested. Satisfied was closer to it, yet not sufficient; they were not deeply interested in American literature, but he was unaware of what their deep interest might be, if they had deep interests.
    He was somewhat defensive when he said to them,
    â€œYou may have wondered why I seem to build my entire thesis of our literature around Mark Twain—”
    He realized that very few of them had wondered; he was answering Lundfest, and it made him annoyed with himself. He went on speaking precisely, evenly, logically, watching their faces while he spoke and trying to read some message from their faces. But during the next half-hour, he read no more than he had known before.
    â€œIn a manner of speaking,” he was saying, “we can call Twain the first and the last American realist, which makes his tragedy the more pointed, the more forlorn. He was the last novelist who hoped, who believed, who sang a song of praise and pride about American civilization. At the same time, he