Lit Up Page 13

  In 2006, he took some of his eighth-graders for a school visit to Beacon, and he met Ruth Lacey, who quickly hired him.

  “‘You have to challenge them.’ That’s what Ruth said to me.” She also gave him, in keeping with Beacon traditions, and drawing on his own practice, it turned out, freedom in shaping the reading lists and teaching methods in his classes. Within a few years, he became a revered teacher at the school.

  * * *

  In the following days, the Alanis Projects rolled in. One group did a Twilight Zone spoof—a black-and-white mini-episode in which the women go to work, and the men stay home as house husbands: “I’m so tired of cleaning every day,” said Adam Steinberg, a studious, thoughtful boy from Park Slope, in Brooklyn; he was wearing an apron. When the women come home, they read the newspapers, while the men cook. “Things would be different,” says one of the boys, “if men were in charge.” He was doleful, angry. All of which was a neat spoof of gender roles that managed, at the same time, to suggest that the boys knew what feminist women had been talking about.

  Another group, led by Nino, produced what they called a satire on religion. Yet this project wasn’t really a satire at all. It was more of an exposure of what the group took to be self-delusions—“religion as an addiction,” as Nino called it. The group went to a mosque, and made video interviews on the street; they also interviewed some students at Beacon. An atheist boy, with a mocking smile, said, “You wanna think there’s something better, a higher power, a better life.” The clear implication was that there wasn’t any such thing. A Muslim on the street, an intense young man in a skullcap, said to the crew, “I depend on God for everything. What I save, I save for him. I am nothing; he brought me to something. He keeps my heart beating in the hospital, not the doctor.” Parody had been left behind. He was dead serious.

  As Mr. Leon remained quiet, the rest of the students talked it over. Maud—slender, expensively dressed, looking older than the other girls—replied to the Muslim young man, “I’m not dependent on God. I believe in being independent, dependent on yourself. Are you being the best person you can be if you’re dependent on God for what you can be? What comes out of religion is war—people are sacrificing themselves before God, killing others at the same time.” Marina, not in the project group but joining the conversation, complained scornfully of “people’s dependence on religion even if they don’t really believe it.”

  This was atheism with a vengeance. Mr. Leon, critiquing the project, said, “The Muslim was the most authentic. In contrast with the young atheist who was laughing.” He told them that in Louisiana most of the students believed in God. He had been raised a strict Irish Catholic himself, and had lost his faith, as he admitted several times during the year, but he disliked impiety, and he sounded angry at the glib remarks he had heard. “In my senior class, when we talk of belief, the believers find it hard to speak, the non-believers talk a lot.” He looked them over. There were certainly religious students in the class, but at that moment they were not about to say so. “How many people here will articulate belief?” he asked, and nobody answered.

  John, Susanna, and Annabelle offered a video parodying MTV’s reality shows, 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom. A teen actress (no one in the group, a friend) turned up to play a girl named Rhea. “I live to party!” she said. “I live to shop! I’m a girl. I have fun!” Rhea has two tiny baby dolls—her children—on her computer. Suddenly John and another boy, James Richards, show up as female producers, both pregnant themselves. They are interested. “I’m pregnant. I want to get on the show,” she says to them.

  “It was satire and parody combined,” said Marco, impressed. Yes, and with burlesque and cross-dressing thrown in. The students’ point was that Teen Mom was hypocritical right from the beginning. The show purportedly demonstrated how hard it was to be a teen mother: the teen moms were always talking in interviews about how they wanted to warn girls. Oh yes, warn them! But, inevitably, the show made the teen moms celebrities who suddenly had a way to make money. One teen-mom show spawned another, yet some day the celebrity teen moms would be just single moms. The students said the shows were providing incentives to get pregnant—they were a sick American media racket covered in sanctimony, and they were onto it.

  One group parodied paranormal activity movies, with ghosts in huge, ill-fitting sheets led by Latisha to a ghost-family therapy session. Another created a video in which Paris Hilton interviews people to find out who her best friend forever was—a spoof of an actual show. Marina appeared, saying: “I want to name my baby after Paris.” In the cross-dressing buffoonery and mockery of the Alanis Project—a kind of mild saturnalia—the students were liberated from grim books, from Hawthorne, Faulkner, Plath, Orwell. They were back in touch with their own lives as amused consumers of the media, but with a new critical awareness of what they were watching and listening to every day. Was it a “barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world”? Barbaric, no; but it was a bit of a yawp nonetheless.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BEACON, FEBRUARY: COELHO AND HESSE

  Wingspan

  Journeys

  The Alchemist

  The Eightfold Path

  Be There

  Siddhartha

  The River

  No Special Key

  John the big kid was standing at the front of the class. He held his arms out straight to the sides—for a fifteen-year-old, he had quite a wingspan. Mr. Leon gestured toward him. “From the end of one arm to the end of the other. That captures the entire existence of the universe—animals, nature, people, everything else. If you are going to locate us, you would have to shave off one little bit of his fingernail,” and here he touched the edge of John’s fourth finger. “That’s you. We just have a moment to live.” And he read something aloud:

  We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

  It was a passage from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, a fable about a young man’s search for his personal destiny.

  “What are your dreams?” Mr. Leon said. “What do you want to do with your lives? At your age, I wanted to be an astronaut, an archaeologist uncovering great treasures in the sand. And before that … I could go on about my own life as a Catholic boy from Northern Ireland. I was told every day, ‘Your dreams are nothing.’ I moved to this country—to Louisiana—and met an African American family that faced impossibility every day. They were shredded, every day. The Washingtons. Mr. Washington and his wife had nothing. He worked at odd jobs and refused to go on welfare. But what are your dreams? Do you have the courage to confront your own dreams? The reality is—snap!—you’re here this long. Then why not pursue your passions? Now you’re fifteen, sixteen. Soon you’ll be eighty”—he clapped—“that quick. What did you do?”

  Dear God. What did we do with our lives? What did we want to do? The only dream I can recall having at fifteen was hitting forty home runs for the Brooklyn Dodgers. My hero was Duke Snider, the Dodgers’ center fielder. There was a moment’s silence, and then a great many hands went up.

  Lena, who talked a mile a minute: “I want to be a marine biologist, and have my own reality show, so I can be a help to others. And I want to live on a desert island, but not alone—with a family.”

  Marco, the class clown now retired from clowning: “I want to be a lawyer, an architect, something to do with sneakers, maybe design them.”

  John: “A vet. I love animals.”

  Marina: “I’d like to go into the wilds, into Alaska.”

  My mind stalled for a moment at the thought of brilliant, needy Marina in Alaska, among the caribou. But I may have been unfair. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild had just been published, and if Strayed, who was willful and prickly, flourished in the wilderness, Marina probably could, too. Anyway, many more students spoke in the same
vein, offering multiple careers in some cases, some of them entirely contradictory.

  The question was this: Could you set goals for yourself and then spend your life trying to reach them? Was life a journey, with triumphs, disappointments, detours, evasions, but a journey nonetheless that had the shape of an epic poem or a novel? Or was it more like a day-to-day scramble whose shape became apparent only afterward, the pattern emerging from the semiunconscious daily muddle—going to school, passing tests, going to work, falling in and out of love, parking the car, feeding the kids, losing some battles, winning others? These were questions that fifteen-year-olds couldn’t possibly settle for themselves at that moment, but they needed to know that the questions existed. Fall had given way to winter, and English section 10G, at the Beacon School, on a dreary street behind Lincoln Center, debated these issues unrelentingly. It was the time in Mr. Leon’s reading list of The Alchemist and Siddhartha—“quest” books filled with “wisdom,” and perhaps a little literary pleasure, too.

  The young hero of The Alchemist, Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd, leaves home and wanders about. He meets gypsies, wise men, an Englishman who wants to be an alchemist. At last, he meets the greatest of all alchemists, who adopts him as a protégé. Santiago stays in towns, travels across the Sahara, attains magical powers. He falls in love with a beautiful girl, Fatima, but he never gives up his search for his “Personal Legend”—a treasure buried near the Pyramids. Coelho’s little book, which feels at times like a young adult novel crossed with a self-help volume, was composed in two weeks, in 1987. Coelho, living in Brazil, and writing in Portuguese, had trouble getting it published, but he persevered, and The Alchemist eventually became an international bestseller of enormous proportions—allegedly, 65 million copies have been sold. The book had caught the fancy of dreamers everywhere.

  Set in some vague, premodern period, The Alchemist has a slightly cloying ingenuousness and a tendency to smooth banality. An old king tells Santiago, “When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true.” Oh, yes, right. I had trouble getting through the book, short as it was, but the students liked The Alchemist, and Mr. Leon took Coelho’s ideas seriously. He led the class through a discussion of some key passages, asking them to interpret Coelho’s fables and incidents. He did a literary reading with them, but his real interest lay in pushing them hard on the idea of a goal, a journey. Earlier they had announced their far-flung dreams. But now they had trouble with the idea of just jumping off. They had trouble locating a horse that they could mount as “destiny.”

  Marina, leaning over her desk, said, “It was scary to me. I didn’t see much connection to my own life.” Mr. Leon asked, “Why is that scary?” Marina came back: “I know I lack understanding of the world, but I feel Coelho simplifies so much. And I don’t think anyone can drop their whole life and go in search of their destiny.” She was scared, I thought, because she felt more weighted and anchored by her responsibilities than she wanted to be. I remembered her situation: worked at three jobs, constantly needed money, her family life a rolling disaster, unhappy at school. She was too hampered by the circumstances of her life to think of taking off.

  Grave Leonardo agreed with her: “We’re connected,” he said, “to where we are by technology. We can’t run; and we live with our parents.” Leonardo’s dad was a Peruvian who had come to New York when he was twenty-five; he had graduated from City College and become a city project manager on construction sites. His mother was Puerto Rican; they met in Brooklyn and never married. Math came easily to Leonardo, but “reading, not really. Reading just puts me to sleep.” At the beginning of the year, Mr. Leon told me, “you looked into Leonardo’s eyes, and you saw the question ‘What is this English literature?’” But Leonardo was becoming more active in class as the year went on, and he insisted now that we were too caught in our lives to pick up and run. He liked The Alchemist, but he didn’t buy what it was saying, and neither did Ike Pressman, who said, “I have a hard time thinking I wanted to just drop everything. But maybe we could go on a journey within ourselves.”

  A journey within was, for once, not what Mr. Leon meant. He meant a tumbling out of habit, a big risk, travel somewhere, young men and women putting themselves in peril. He seemed a little abashed by their pullback. For my part, I was sorry that starting a business—one of the great American adventures throughout our history, and always perilous—was not part of his thinking. No, he meant jumping off the college-job-marriage track that most Beacon students (if they thought about it) wanted to be on. As always, he wanted to transform his students, but this time they balked. After saying earlier what they dreamed of doing, the students now acknowledged what most adults acknowledge: our life is conditioned and we are never more than partly free. We are encumbered by family, by culture, by society, by expectations, by fear, by the need to earn a living. “My journey,” Hasan told me later, repeating what he said earlier, “is to live without a father in a female-dominated household. I feel responsible for the family”: his mother and his three sisters.

  None of the students said that freedom was an illusion, but they were realists nonetheless. They may have seen society as oppressive, but, it turned out, they weren’t that eager to give up its protections. In other words, they were caught, pretty much like the rest of us, between longing and fear. The conversation produced by The Alchemist satisfied no one; it had gone stale, even become depressing.

  * * *

  As a way of supplementing the two short novels, Mr. Leon had asked the students to study the elements of Buddhism; in particular “The Noble Eightfold Path,” from later Buddhist teachings, a set of aspirations or steps that an individual might take to rid himself of what plagued him and everyone else—dissatisfaction and suffering. Some of the steps: Viewing reality as it really is, renouncing harmful actions and idle chatter, speaking truthfully, and so on, all of it reinforced by meditation. The goal was the renunciation of egotism. Suffering would end when one ceases to want things; one could then, just possibly, after much meditation and discipline, enter a state of enlightenment, in which illusion dies and truth begins. Mr. Leon was dead set on pulling the students out of themselves. This time he was trying to offer an alternative to purely Western modes of thinking. Also, without understanding a few things about Buddhism, Hesse’s Siddhartha wouldn’t make much sense.

  “To what extent can we really live our lives this way?” Mr. Leon asked, and he divided the class into three large groups and asked them to discuss the “eightfold path.” The students, it turned out, admired the call to virtue, but found the day-by-day practice of it hard to imagine. “Western society is always moving forward,” melancholy Justin said, and Mr. Leon smiled and said, “Progress is great, but what have we lost along the way? Why are we angry all the time? Is it jealousy, because you don’t have something that other people have? Why do we say one thing and mean another, bad-mouth people behind their back?” In response, the students, one after another, traced malice and bad-mouthing to technological improvement. They were embedded in capitalism and the Internet, Facebook and texting, and they knew it. They said they could not renounce envy, desire, trivial and malicious thoughts, and all the other things that Buddhists wanted to renounce. Under Mr. Leon’s tutelage, they were hard on themselves, but I wondered whether fifteen-year-olds in the nineteenth century were any more virtuous—or whether the old virtues were covered in sanctimony that made them blind. These kids were not blind—a little unhappy and self-serious maybe, but not blind.

  Mr. Leon himself must have had mixed feelings about Buddhist ideals, because the day after discussing the eightfold path, the following words, unexplained, were written on the whiteboard as we came in:

  You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

  “How many have heard of Franz Kafka?” he asked. Only
three or four hands went up. “That’s him back there, that odd-looking man,” and he pointed to the poster-sized photograph, in the back of the room, of the very young Kafka, eyes wide open, thick rug of dark hair extending down over his forehead. Kafka had been casting his liquid doleful gaze upon the class all year long. “Of all the modern writers, he most understood the human condition in the alienated industrial world,” Mr. Leon said. The extraordinary sentence on the board, like so many of Kafka’s remarks (it’s one of his aphorisms), looped back on itself before breaking into clarity. The students took a crack at it:

  Marco, in serious mode: “No pain, no gain. If you don’t suffer, you won’t grow, learn anything.”

  Vanessa: “You can’t experience happiness unless you experience pain.”

  They didn’t quite have it. Here was Kafka, in his incomparable way, telling us that the attempt to avoid suffering was damaging—it only added to your suffering by cutting you off from the heart of things. His remark was (no doubt unintentionally) a devastating rejoinder to Buddhism’s insistence that the attempt to escape suffering was central to the spiritual life. Kafka’s remark suggested you could try, but you would diminish yourself by trying. Mr. Leon didn’t explain this drastic dialectical opposition. I wondered again: Where was he going?

  “How many of you have experienced suffering?” Mr. Leon demanded. “How many of us indulge ourselves with video games and drugs to avoid it?”

  He was on their case again. Their “journey,” he was telling them, would not be trouble free. Trouble would come find them, he wanted them to be sure of that, and the attempt to avoid it was a mistake. He enjoyed a great many things, but, philosophically, you could not call him a hedonist. “I’ve led a life,” he said, “in which I’ve seen a lot of people die—six or seven family and friends who have been snatched away.”