25 Ear

I won a leave of absence from Friend at full pay to work towards my doctorate in English and in the fall of 1970 I returned to school, this time at Arizona State University in Tempe, where I met and studied for two wonderful years with the respected Melville scholar Marvin Fisher, my generous advisor and mentor, and with the brilliant teacher, scholar, and professor Glenn O'Malley and his student Billy Boyd.

O'Malley was the smartest man I had ever met. He deserves a book all his own. His intelligence was piercing, profound, his irony infinite, ruthless. O'Malley was the first teacher I experienced who understood the power of silence. There were forty students in his class in contemporary British and American poetry. O'Malley read aloud the assigned poem and then stared at the text, thinking, his head bowed, his hands folded as in prayer, and simply waited for response.

The silences seemed interminable.

They stretched on and on.

Longer still.

On.

Though I had been a teacher myself for three years I could not bear such silence for more than a few seconds even in my own classroom. Neither could my students. It frustrated expectation. Our collective silence filled us with anxiety. It made us doubt and wonder about education, learning, school, purpose, meaning. It forced our confrontation with meaninglessness, absurdity, the void. We had all been conditioned to expect authority, the teacher, to tell us why we were here and what we were doing—to rescue us from unknowing. This was the teacher's responsibility, his duty, his job. If no one spoke in twenty seconds I would begin to sweat. If my students wouldn't talk then I'd talk—if only to ease my own discomfort.

Not O'Malley.

He waited and waited and waited. He seemed never uncomfortable with silence. He just silently continued, it seemed, to reread the poem and to think about it and to reflect.

Some students thought him not just odd but incompetent.

Students whispered.

"Why isn't he saying anything?"

Some squirmed.

"What's going on?"

Some giggled.

"What are we supposed to be doing?"

Eventually one would find enough courage to raise a hand.

"What are we doing, Dr. O'Malley?"

"We're reading this poem," he might say, "and thinking about it."

"Oh."

Students rolled their eyes.

Whispered.

From O'Malley I learned how the discomfort of collective silence in a classroom evoked fundamental questions not just about a poem but about education itself and about life in the mystery of the universe.

"What are we doing?"

"Why?"

"What are we supposed to be doing?"

"Why?"

It was a powerful lesson and a tactic I adopted.

Silence.

Interminable silence.

Ear.