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  In class, the conversation was tentative at first.

  “I was confused about what Vladimir and Estragon’s relationship was,” said Clare. “They don’t remember what they did the day before. What time period does it take place in?” Which was a perfectly good but unanswerable question, since the time period is all eternity.

  After the students’ hard-won success with Dostoevsky and the eminently graspable No Exit, it seemed almost perverse of Mr. Leon to confront them with a text so tough to get a handle on. I felt a twinge of annoyance. What was the point of stripping them of their new powers? But Mr. Leon had taught the play before, and he obviously knew it was a killer to face on the page. After the opening stumbles, he renewed the classroom theater. Everyone would have to read aloud. John Gruen, standing, was Vladimir, and Nino, sitting before him, was Estragon. Together they did the beginning of the play, and that bit of theater turned out to be something to hear. The two boys, cranky as a long-married couple, read with more animation and color than any of the students had in the monotonal days of fall. Rather than just course through the words, they honored the pauses, the silences (Beckett’s text is full of stage directions and instructions for the actors), letting the words claim the air for a moment. The thing came alive.

  Infuriating and ungraspable on the page, Godot can be magnificent on the stage with actors who get into the vaudeville rhythms, the music and silence of its despair. The best production I had ever seen was mounted in New York in 2006 by Dublin’s Gate Theatre company, and starred two actors, Barry McGovern (Vladimir) and Johnny Murphy (Estragon), who had been doing it together for eighteen years, a suitable arrangement for this play. (The filmed version of this production can be found on YouTube and in a mysteriously obscure Japanese-produced DVD.) The restricted physical space of the stage, concentrating our attention on what is known—on time passing, moment by moment, right before us—produces an extraordinary interrogation of what is unknown. Now over sixty years old, Waiting for Godot is a sharpened spear launched into God’s silence, a protest against mystery and meaninglessness, a statement of the human condition as extreme in its way as King Lear.

  Beckett himself oversaw different productions in Europe, in America, in prisons, but he refused to say what the play meant. About the obvious God question, however, I think many people might agree to the following, with or without Beckett’s approval: Godot is very far from an atheist’s tract. Salvation, damnation, the crucifixion, the end of time—all of these sacred currents run through the play, which could be described as a Christian work set after the fall of man and in the hollows of God’s silence. “Christ have mercy on us,” says Vladimir near the end. Mercy asked for but never received.

  * * *

  “We know at the beginning that Estragon slept in a ditch the night before,” Mr. Leon said at the beginning of the next class. “Is this all an allegory? What does that mean, ‘allegory’? At the beginning of the play, Estragon struggles to get his boot off. What does that represent?”

  Jane mustered a definition of allegory in which “everything is symbolic of something else.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Leon said, “but some things in the play are just there.”

  That was the miracle of Godot. The metaphysical conundrums are held in place by things that were just themselves. “Boots must be taken off every day, I’m tired of telling you that,” Vladimir says to Estragon. Taking off boots, finding a way to pee (Vladimir has prostate problems), eating a carrot, the sheer repetition of daily routine—these things, stupid and stubborn as they are, give us something to hold on to. The play is grounded in common existence. Jared Bennett, of few, well-chosen words, said, “The natural world is always there.” Yes, and physical need is always there. That’s one reason the play is so much loved. Clare ventured that the carrot Estragon chews on represented life, but the carrot is also just a carrot. The entire play is balanced between a limitless view of human loneliness and pressing everydayness; the two elements are inseparable.

  Midway through the first act, Lucky and Pozzo show up—Lucky, a slave, attached by a rope to his plump and overbearing master, Pozzo, who both brutalizes him and desperately needs him. Pozzo’s magisterial bullying of Lucky—“Up pig!”—became, for the students, a kind of paradigm of power and the attractions of power. “Pozzo the king, Lucky the court jester,” said Marco, and Hasan noted that the play was about “how human beings dominate each other.” Clare, returning to the society-as-oppressor theme that had obsessed the students all year long, noted that “we’re like Lucky, the slaves of society.”

  But Vladimir and Estragon were alarmingly free in some ways. Rousseau’s chains—one of Mr. Leon’s motifs—had fallen off. But free to do what? No action could possibly matter. “Society” was represented by Pozzo’s assumption of power, but otherwise was no more than an echo, barely heard by naked men stripped of social roles. They were alone; reaching Godot was their only ambition. I remembered, from the first week, another of Nafisi’s humanist principles: “In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of life, an essential defiance.” Yes, defiance was there, even as Vladimir and Estragon, baffled and needy, endured silence and held to carrots and boots—they affirmed existence, mere existence. But Nafisi’s principles sounded a little proper compared to the ferocity of Dostoevsky’s and Beckett’s work.

  In class, the play flowed on; the students interpreted it by reading it aloud. I thought back to Mary Whittemore’s classes on The Scarlet Letter, when indifferent and scornful students overcame their resistance to the novel by reading stretches of it publicly. Reading aloud was the essential beginning of understanding and interpretation. The students got inside of a voice—the author’s voice, or the compulsions of some character. Marina took on Vladimir, and Nino took on Estragon; Hasan did Pozzo’s role, and Latisha Lucky’s. Each pair would read, and then appoint the next pair. Pair by pair, quartet by quartet, they entered the classroom theater. “Step out of your comfort zone,” Mr. Leon said to some of the usually silent, and they did. They would act out a scene or two, then stop and interpret as much as they could, flagging larger themes, sorting out the characters. “Vladimir is more the intellectual, religious figure, Estragon the physical,” said John. Hasan noted that “the four together could be Godot,” which was a decent hunch, though many others thought that the enslaved Lucky, who remains silent until he bursts out in an enormous, tumultuous speech that passes (rather obscenely) through all of creation—Lucky might be Godot after all, Godot the silent, then Godot the master of creation. It was a good guess at the unknowable. After their initial puzzlement, the students turned interpretation into a high-stakes game. They had great freedom to speculate because Godot was notoriously open-ended, subject to innumerable readings.

  Time itself was at the dramatic and philosophic heart of the play, and Mr. Leon asked the students to “write about time. Write one sentence about time, just one sentence that captures your view of time.” They went up to the board and used black marker on the whiteboard:

  Time lasts forever, while I last for a second.

  Time doesn’t exist. It is a human concept.

  I don’t understand time because it is so removed from humanity.

  Time is impossible to freeze even when I want it to.

  I will be satisfied when time runs out.

  There will never be this exact moment in time again.

  I had to pinch myself to be sure I was in tenth grade. That these sentences existed at all was a challenge to conventional pedagogy. If Godot made extraordinary demands, it offered certain payoffs in speculative wonder, in imaginative and philosophical excitement that, say, Death of a Salesman would not have offered.

  “I had an epiphany,” Mr. Leon said, when they were done writing. “A time bank. It would be great at the end of my life if I hadn’t spent too much time doing diddly on the computer. How much time did I spend talking to people I love? I find myself che
cking my phone, looking at my watch. I can’t stop it. But time is something we draw on. We choose how to spend it.”

  In the time bank, I guessed, you could deposit and withdraw time, exactly what you can’t do in life. But in life you could still choose how to spend the time you had. All year long, in class, Sean Leon created the sense of presence, of time passing, time that cannot be reclaimed or recalled. What happens in class—and by extension in the rest of the students’ lives—is soul time, precious and unrecoverable. One way or another, he had been mourning lost time since September, but his urgency and grief had additional weight in the context of this play in which time moves both inexorably forward (day leads to night) and stands absolutely still.

  At fifteen or sixteen, the students didn’t know where their lives were going. They were waiting, too, and Beckett’s portrait of limbo teased and infuriated them. “They need a direct relationship with God,” said Nino. “They can’t just wait.” He was alarmed. “They are waiting for death, not doing anything with their lives.” Clare added, “Estragon and Vladimir feel uncomfortable because of what they could be doing while they are waiting for Godot,” and Jordan, so often Clare’s intellectual soul mate, added, “If you go through it waiting for God, you’ll accomplish nothing.” Justin, with considerable disgust, added, “They are waiting like sheep for someone to save them.”

  Mr. Leon’s vitalist demands and their own nature as teenagers, it turned out, ruled their responses to the play. College was before them, the rest of life. They wouldn’t wait for God’s appearance or revelation, they had to move forward, they were frightened of standing still. They were Americans. Even those like Justin who understood the play shrugged off its despair. The conversation was often ragged (what conversation about Godot wasn’t?), but the students felt the freedom to take chances, speculate, contradict themselves. The struggle with the play’s meaning had become, for them, the struggle to wrest meaning out of their own lives.

  * * *

  During the classes on Sartre and Beckett, the students brought in the essay part of their PBA—at least a decent first draft. Mr. Leon paired them up and asked each to edit the other’s paper and eventually hand it back to the writer.

  Marina came bursting in late. She held a handwritten draft. “I had to go to the cops yesterday to identify a girl who jumped me on the train,” she announced. “There were thirteen girls in a lineup.” She settled in, exchanged her paper with her neighbor. Her mysterious experience on the subway never came up again.

  It was Mr. Leon’s last time around for grammar and punctuation lessons. With great emphasis he instructed the student editors to circle misspelled titles; he asked them to circle the passive voice, contractions, and uses of the verb “to be”—the list of formal requirements and prohibitions he had been pushing all year, the basic rules without which neither intellectual clarity nor soul will reach any reader. “I want it down below ten,” Mr. Leon said, meaning ten circles. Even in the alarming metaphysical territory of Waiting for Godot, he was insisting on form, consistency, and order.

  He turned on some country music—a nod to student skills at multitasking, perhaps. Or simply a way of making a party out of drudgery. After fifteen minutes or so, the student editors finished their work and announced the total of circled offenses—from three, at the minimum, up to thirty-one. Then he instructed everyone to take the papers home over the weekend, turn them over, and write down what they thought the writers of the paper should be focused on, what they thought the weaknesses of the essay were. “Don’t just criticize the flaws. Make constructive suggestions. You get graded on your editing effort. If you get heavy editing, and do little in return, that’s poor form. If someone writes on your paper something you disagree with, that’s okay, bring it to me and we’ll talk it over.”

  The mutual edit job was one of his ways of binding the students together, something he had been doing as early as the opening weeks of the year: the Plath-inspired poetry readings, however anonymous, were certainly a move toward mutual warmth, even attachment. On several occasions, with his encouragement, they talked openly about themselves, particularly about their families. He wanted them to trust one another. But more than that, he wanted them to see one another—to have an acute perception of each person in the class. On the first day his emphasis on each student’s identity set the tone. Throughout the year, a lot of this noticing—Clare is this, Adam is that—came through classroom responses to Vonnegut or Dostoevsky or Beckett. In the final weeks, however, Mr. Leon must have felt that there was some unfinished business. The books had churned up personal responses, and the conversations had left some unresolved tensions, apparently a few grievances. After provoking them all year long, Mr. Leon wanted something like harmony and reassurance. A good teacher’s sense of honor—Mr. Leon’s, Miss Zelenski’s, what the students would call fairness—was likely the most palpable kind of morality that many of them had experienced in their lives.

  The classroom theater would continue. He commandeered the form of No Exit. He arranged a confrontational scene. One student sat in the middle of the opening, and the others offered their observations of that boy or girl. It turned out to be a benevolent exercise. Jordan sat, and received compliments on her character. “She is judgmental but straightforward,” Marina said. “She will say what she thinks.”

  Marina herself came next. She had beautiful eyes, but she was overweight, with frizzed hair, not as comfortable in her body as in her mind. “I had trouble with people in the school,” she said. “It became hard to come to school. I got a call from the hospital saying my sister is dead; I went to school the next day and had people shit on me. If anyone in this room has anything against me, let go of it. I’m letting go of it.”

  Several students said they appreciated her honesty and her guts and felt nothing bad about her. Maud praised her.

  “Do you feel consumed by anger and hatred?’ Mr. Leon asked.

  “At times. I try to love. I wouldn’t reset my life, because that’s what made me what I am. Redoing my relation with Dad, no, it’s not possible.”

  Mr. Leon looked at her. “Freakin’ warrior,” he said admiringly, and I remembered their face-off in the Dostoevsky class. (She told me later she had never had a teacher she liked as much as him.) But despite this reconciliation, at least with other people in the class, there was no keeping Marina in Beacon. I remembered her remarks about knowing yourself and still messing up your life. She was leaving. Her own freedom to act was more important to her than the rationality of what she was doing. She may have taken the Underground Man and existentialism too literally.

  And then came Justin, whose unhappiness had poured helplessly into the room all year, washing through his intelligent remarks about Notes from Underground and other works. As Justin sat before them, Nino said, “He’s unemotional, but emotional underneath, scared of judgment, self-conscious, not materialistic, very intelligent,” and Jared Bennett, sparing of words as always, looked straight at Justin and said, “You’re insightful but beautifully cynical,” at which point Justin wept, and he said, “What Nino said is true … It’s not a self-hatred thing…” He trailed off, and there was a general laying-on of hands (spiritually, not physically), and the class ended.

  * * *

  When they returned for their final class, they exchanged their edited essays. For ten minutes or so, the pairs confabbed. The room was buzzing with excitement. A few were expounding ideas, holding papers, pressing forward like participants in some sort of trade conference, explaining, defending, clarifying, all of it a preparation for their eventual sessions with their teacher.

  On this last day, Mr. Leon, in his red tie and gray shirt, was both buoyant and somber. Beckett in his twenties left Ireland and settled in France, where he set up as a poet, critic, and novelist. He went back to Ireland occasionally, but he lived most of his adult life in exile. In a way, Sean Leon was in exile, too. In fact, doubly in exile—first in the United States after his birth in Ireland, and then in
New York after his family boyhood in Louisiana. His troubles were clear enough: What was his true home, Beacon or Louisiana?

  “It’s hard to watch someone you love fade away,” he said of his brother. “In photographs sent to me, to hear it on the phone. To come into work … I loved every period. Take a moment and look around the room. This is an extraordinary group of individuals. Every period was a high. It made life that much more wonderful.”

  With mock solemnity, he gave them a set of instructions and homilies:

  “You are not as you imagine.”

  “The real trouble is things that have never crossed your minds.”

  “Do one thing every day that scares you.”

  “Don’t congratulate yourself too much or betray yourself. Your choices are half determined by chance.”

  “Friends come and go.”

  “Live in California, but leave before it makes you soft.”

  “Live in New York, but leave before it makes you hard.”

  He would see them again when they came in to defend their papers, but the year’s classes were over.

  They had done the following: They had thought about literature in a general way, citing Azar Nafisi’s solidly humanist definitions of what literature could do. They had mulled over Rousseau’s man-in-chains declaration, considering all year the problem of authority, the solitary individual, and society. They encountered the malicious nature of one such society in a Faulkner story, and puzzled over the sense of sin as judgment in Hawthorne; confessed anonymously to family unhappiness in short bitter poems after reading some of Sylvia Plath’s work; learned to avoid “to be” and the passive voice as their teacher pressured them to live and write actively; endured a digital fast that left many of them unstrung as well as unplugged; encountered the most dangerous aspects of modernity in Huxley and Orwell; created, in the Alanis Project, satire, spoof, and parody; considered life as a journey in Coelho’s and Hesse’s fictions (and discovered that there was no single key but, ideally, a span of one intense moment after another); saw, in Vonnegut’s subversive war-and-peace novel, that comedy and tragedy were inseparable; faced the destruction of identity in Viktor Frankl’s death-camp memoir and death itself in the passing of a teacher, Mr. Goldman; entered Dostoevsky’s emotionally enlarged universe of self-knowledge, self-contempt, and defiance (all mixed together) and stepped in and out of self-defining roles; discovered that hell was (and was not) other people and that life was both over in a flash and went on endlessly, a metaphysical conundrum in which men and women faced eternity alone but ate carrots and took off boots every day. They had gone from a powerful, straightforward gothic tale by Faulkner to two of the most difficult works in modernism’s thorny canon.