The Other Read Online Free PDF Page B

something like Platonic Eros, and if there is, I would say this was present. Indeed, there had to have been some kind of yearning here, or why would John William have knocked on her door? Merely to talk about Chomsky?
    In February of ’73, Althea once told me, she assigned the eighteen students in her Identity Crisis class to write papers of fifteen to twenty pages on Erik Erikson, Malcolm X, or As You Like It. There was enough range in that triumvirate to provide substance for everybody, she supposed—psychosocial, political, or literary. There was the expectation of outside reading and of documentation complying with the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. There should be footnotes and a bibliography but no title page, because a title page was too grandiose—it was sufficient, she stressed, to put the title at the top of page 1, centered but not underlined, with one’s name and the date just above, flush left with the text margin. None of this was new to Lakeside students, who were well steeped in the fussy mechanics of the academic essay, though the minimum of fifteen pages was more than they were accustomed to. Aware that such a minimum might seem daunting, Mrs. Mastroianni used the term “term paper” to describe what she envisioned, and gave her charges a due date ten weeks hence.
    John William’s paper, “Cosmology of the Gnostics: Penetrating God’s Illusion,” consisted of forty-seven double-spaced pages. Mrs. Mastroianni was impressed by its scholarship but disturbed by John William’s obvious affinity for these early Christian heretics, with their dark take on God as a sinister deity who can only be transcended by defiance of his commandments: God as the devil, reality as a ruse, and life as a form of entrapment. In the courtyard of the El Monterey, throwing up her hands, she exclaimed, “All this gnosis, this very disturbing gnosis, this darkness and pessmism, this spiritual dread,” and I assured her I knew what she was talking about, that gnosticism was something he’d disturbed me with, too, and that I remembered him saying, many times, with urgency and self-regard, that the world’s a prison for our souls.
    Althea recalled the comment she’d written after John William’s last bibliographic entry, because it was such a handy, stock essay-criticism: “While this is well done, you haven’t followed the assignment,” followed by a grade of F. As a teacher, I’m familiar with her quandary. Here’s a worthy exhibition of skills, a demonstration of learning and active intelligence, an essay she feels inclined to celebrate, but one that at the same time gives her deep pause because it brazenly ignores her instructions. I also know that, when a teacher comes across this sort of thing in a stack of papers, much depends on her mood of the moment, which might be colored by, for example, how much the obligation to read and comment on student work stands in the way of other things she wants to do, or whether this is the seventeenth paper she’s read in one sitting or the second.
    Possibly this is the crux of the matter: that Althea Mastroianni had a life to live outside of Lakeside, and that, however committed she was to her students—to their education and to their developing psyches—she naturally put herself first at times. She put herself first when John William needed her to put herself second. Maybe Althea resented the English teacher’s burden by the time she came across John William on gnosticism in the stack of papers otherwise on Erik Erikson, Malcolm X, and As You Like It. Forty-seven pages on gnosticism—she would have flipped forward to that number, 47—and her first response, we might easily guess, was that John William had given this essay to the wrong teacher; it was meant for some other Lakeside course.
    She’d been fond of John William—Althea stressed this to me. She’d sat across from him on a number of occasions, both after school in her Lakeside office and in her