Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

One day — we had meanwhile sounded each other out discreetly, and certain personal matters had entered both sides of our conversations — the young fellow hazarded the cardinal question: what was the deeper meaning of this confusing arrangement of our apartment? He apologized profusely for asking. He was quite embarrassed, and added, “It causes me increasing discomfort to be seated, that I must be seated, while my tutor remains standing.”

So there it was. It had to happen sooner or later. Now it was up to me to remain, or rather to become, master of the situation. Beatrice had predicted this moment — naturally, for she is also a teacher — and had pleaded with me to invent some excuse in order to avoid a surprise attack. But instead, I trusted my lucky stars and my instincts as a Führer , and made no preparations. Now, however, I would have to set sail and head out into the unknown.

By inquiring as to the “deeper meaning” of the interior architecture of our classroom, a query obviously predicated on the assumption that profundity is an a priori characteristic of all things German, Hutchinson handed me a cue that set me off on the slippery slope of mystification. This was a fortunate choice of terms. It served me as a pilot. I followed my inspiration of the moment, which now bore connotations of watery depths. It was the same train of thought that had granted me a vision of the snorkel, the self-inflating brassiere for flat-chested ladies, or the self-erasing rubber collar for men with a compulsion for cleanliness.

“My dear friend,”—this is approximately how I began my confabulation—“you may wish to ascribe it to my inborn sense of modesty that I have hitherto not revealed a certain aspect of my personality. “I am”—and here I bowed to him—“the inventor of the Single-Chair Method, a technique that does not yet bear my name for the simple reason that it has yet to be publicized. No one knows about it. I myself regard it as too premature, too poorly systematized, too loosely conceptualized, and too scantily tested using significantly large samples of unpredictable student reaction to inform the scholarly world of pedagogy of its advantages. For the moment I am limiting myself to small-scale statistical and pedagogical-psychological experiments. You are experiencing the last of these; soon I shall proceed beyond these low-level investigations. Now you, sir, as an open-minded representative of the scholarly world overseas, are particularly welcome as a participant in my experimentation, unencumbered as you are by shoddy and obsolete European models of pedagogy. It was Heaven itself, and not the bookseller on the Borne, that has sent you to me and my naked miniature lecture hall. The book dealer has served merely as the blindly obedient agent of a Providence that is intent upon encouraging the higher development of pedagogical methods inspired by Pestalozzi.”

The youth listened intently. His green eyes took on the glow that appears in the eyes of children when they approach the shooting gallery at the fair. His interest was all the greater since his synthesizing American mind was taking in my Single-Chair Method as if it were the strains of lovely music. He remained all eyes and ears.

Now what were the basic principles of this technique? “Listen. Every object, or rather every thing in the world that surrounds us is a world in itself. Speaking solely of the field of linguistics, each new language that a person learns comprises a world in, and of course also of, itself. Today we speak quite generally of a language’s ‘world view’—in your country, too, I would suppose?”

“Indeed we do, although we have another term…”

“‘Behavior,’ right? Very good. These two worlds, or to phrase it in Aristotelian fashion, these two categories…” My pupil gave his nodding assent to this lofty gobbledygook — Princeton had not outfitted him with the means to unmask me as an incompetent charlatan. “If allowed to meet, these two categories come into conflict with one another, which unfailingly occurs whenever a pupil confronts a new thing, which is to say, a new world.”

Hutchinson had a crystal-clear understanding of all of this. I continued:

“From my many years of experience as a linguist”—still today I am amazed at the cheek with which I uttered such a bare-faced lie to my pupil and to myself, but it just had to be—“I have come to realize that what can best improve the receptivity of a pupil is a progressive sublimation of his environment. In Germany, as a student of Max Scheler, I first arrived at comprehension — insofar as anything was comprehensible in seminars with this philosopher — that the object sphere must be torn forcefully from our circumconscious — not our subconscious, mind you — if we are to arrive at pure perception. In other words, my friend: the less environment there is in a classroom, the smaller will be the coefficient of distraction in the learning process, whereas at the same time we must also acknowledge that the pupils themselves constitute an environment, the so-called meta-environment, which in turn is subject to its own laws. Up to now scholars have avoided this complex state of affairs like a hot potato. And yet we must strive toward a Jaspersian absolutization of anonymity if we are to prevent the universal pedagogical possibilities slumbering within my method from being tossed out of the bath water along with the baby.”

I fed my pupil this and similar pseudoscientific balderdash with grandiloquence, at certain points stammering and at a loss for the clearest phraseology, as if groping for words to express the ultimately inexpressible. It all made sense to the young man. He was now quite excited; he took quick, deep puffs on his cigarette and nervously flicked the ashes into the cuffs of his neatly tailored trousers. The climax of his feverish enthusiasm — I estimated it at about 102°F — came when he leaped up from the single chair that had lent its name to my system. Caught up in the momentum of my own mischief, about to perceive a kernel of truth amid all my nonsensical blather, and starting to give credence on my own part to the parthenogenic origin of my ecological fantasies, I reared back to deliver the crowning declaration. I summoned the wise Peripatetics from the arcades of the Hellenic Lyceum to our miserable emigrant lodgings on Barceló Street. These mild-mannered strollers from Aristotle’s school of philosophy had excellent reasons, or so I claimed as I myself paced to and fro in front of my pupil, for holding their colloquies — in such sharp contrast to the “lectures” given at today’s universities — while ambling through the public galleries rather than sitting in enclosed spaces where one’s eyes would tend to focus — nay, would tend to remain fixed — on certain objects, causing the mind finally to cloud over and shut down if it had not already been occluded by the environment itself. All of this has implications, I added, for an entirely new approach to Classical Antiquity.

Hutchinson smoked more and more hectically, like a circus monkey that has snapped up a burning butt.

Over the decades, I explained, over the anguished decades of my struggle towards knowledge and the ultimate perfection of my inchoate ideas, through years of misunderstanding and even hostility, I had decided to remove gradually all superfluous objects from the space in which I offered instruction, with the same methodical care as a zoologist might exercise as he organizes his experimental station, thereby reducing the hazards of “environmental squeeze,” one classic victim of which, I added incidentally, was my own humble person. I had made a beginning by stripping my lodgings of pictures on the walls and bric-a-brac on the shelf behind the sofa. “Surely you now understand, Mister Hutchinson, why it is that in the monks’ cells — you recall yesterday’s discussion of the origins of the cult of the cloistered life — or in the so-called ‘lodges’ of the desert anachorites during the early phases of the monastic movement, the eyes that search for God must focus solely on naked walls? These sainted, or as good as sainted, men learned how to come into the presence of God, and only of God. The noted Saint Simeon Stylite was the one who, sitting and praying on his famous pillar, rid himself most radically of the environmental encumbrances that we are talking about.”