Obituaries

Speaking of obituaries, I read two of them side by side this week, both and each of which gave me pause.  It’s not that I knew either of these guys, except to the extent that they shared some of their most important thoughts and deeply felt convictions with me, which I suppose means I did actually know them on some level but not in the sense that you know a good friend except that I do actually consider them friends of a sort.

Hm-m…

Let’s start that one again.

I was reading the April 8^th TIME, which had somehow lost its normal place on my sequential reading list which sometimes happens when a particular cover catches my eye out of order or when I put some but not all of the unread issues in the throw bag I use when flying or when I don’t notice one in the non-bill mail stack until the stack threatens to spill over so I go through pulling out items in give-a-darn order and it finally manages to come up on my reading radar.

But, I digress. Again.

Here’s the thing: These two obits, out of everything else in this issue, really got to me to the point that I put the issue on my writing desk, open to the obits because I knew I wouldn’t turn another page until I’d put these thoughts down on paper. Chinua Achebe and Anthony Lewis both died in late March and while their passing may not create a crack in the world, I felt a tremor in mine because these guys affected the way I think, the way I care, the way I view the world.

I’m occasionally asked – either by people who understand me well enough to ask or people who don’t understand propriety well enough to refrain from asking – what possessed me to go back to college to finish my degree at my age. There are lots of disparate reasons why this choice was made but perhaps the best one I couldn’t have suspected when I began.

I guess it’s all about serendipity. I am not likely to have chosen to have read Things Fall Apart by Achebe or Lewis’ Gideon’s Trumpet had I not been required to for two separate courses at two separate colleges by two profs from entirely different disciplines. It’s not that I would have chosen not to read them but rather that I wouldn’t even have known enough to check them out had I not taken these courses.

At Bellevue College, I took a law course from a guy named Albert Raines who was then a municipal court judge in a city near where I live. He was a great guy and taught using the Socratic method which untold novelists and screenwriters have tried to convince us amount to intellectual terrorism on the part of law school profs but which I found fascinating and enriching. I loved the case analyses, the discussion of precedents and the argumentation as to the correctness of the rulings. And as a part of that course, Albert assigned us to read Gideon’s Trumpet. It’s the story (since made into a movie with Henry Fonda which was okay I guess but really, please do read the book) of Gideon v. Wainwright, the landmark Supreme Court decision that explicated the now-foundational Constitutional principle that criminal defendants have a right to legal representation regardless of their ability to pay.

It was not the first time I’d felt an interest in legal or constitutional topics but reading this book brought home for me that I had a personal stake in understanding the legal underpinnings of the society in which I live. The really amazing thing is that Clarence Earl Gideon submitted his case to the Supreme Court of the United States, written in pencil on lined paper from his prison cell and without the assistance of legal counsel. It was a stunning example of the Constitution working and a story every citizen should understand and embrace, especially since Gideon is under attack on several fronts these days.

Gideon’s Trumpet was not one of the best written books I’ve ever read but it was certainly one of the most compelling stories and one that led to an enduring fascination with reading appellate and Supreme Court decisions.

Things Fall Apart was both one of the best written books I’ve ever read and one of the most compelling. Set in pre-colonial Nigeria, the story of Okwonko is one of a man caught between tribal traditions and the need to respond to a personal ethic, of a man trying to live his life within the dictates of a society whose expectations are in flux due to forces he neither sees nor understands. I read this book as a requirement for a course on Third World literature and while the prof turned out to be something of a hack, his choice of required reading was inspired. I went into the course half expecting to need to have a translational dictionary on the nightstand and I was so glad to find out how wrong I was.

Things Fall Apart is often referred to as an “English language novel” but it’s actually written in the language of life. Reading it opened for me a world of literature written in unexpected contexts but about characters and issues that are merely human. Achebe said in a 1994 quote in Paris Review (reprinted in TIME), “…until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Achebe spoke for those on the ‘they’ side of history and in reading his words, one comes to recognize the inherent ‘us’ in the life of an African tribesman.

Reading these books widened my gaze even as it sharpened my focus and I’ll be forever thankful for the confluence of circumstances that brought them to my reading shelf. So, when I’m next asked ‘why college at your age,’ I think I’ll now have a fuller answer.

Sure, it’s about having the degree. And of course, it’s about a promise to Mom. It’s about ego and validation and the refusal to leave this job unfinished. But to a large extent, it’s about the opportunity to learn things I didn’t suspect I needed to know.