The New Compass: A Critical Review
Editorial
I
have been meaning to write this letter for about eight years. Like most
academic institutions,
When
I arrived as an undergraduate at
On
None
of this may sound any different from any other introductory lecture in any
other university. Yet when I walked out of the room I felt sick. My chest felt
empty and hollow. Nothing would ever make it feel whole again. Everything he
said was terrible and wonderful and perplexing in the extreme. The experience
was utterly strange. And the experience was repeated week after week through
four years.
I
took every course that Crick taught and then some. When I wasn’t in class I was
a fixture in his doorway asking questions. Sometimes I would walk with him
through the hallways.
When
I needed one more course in order to graduate at the end of my fourth year he gave
me a reading course in the living room of his home. We sat in two antique
chairs underneath stained glass windows. The sun would shine through the
windows as it set at the end of every spring day. Beams of sunlight would cast
rainbows across the walls at the far end of the room. I would like to say that
we had conversations but really he spoke and I listened. I listened with all
the care and deliberation that I could muster feeling that I had been granted a
rare opportunity.
Brian
Crick secured me a place in the graduate program at Dalhousie twice. He is the
only reason I went to graduate school. My dissertation grows out of an argument
he made once in the last lecture of a course on the English novel.
I
returned to
He
is the only professor I know whose students still attend his lectures years
after they have graduated, sometimes taking time from work to do so. Some
students come back twenty years after leaving Brock.
Before
meeting Professor Crick, I had no critical judgment. I had no understanding of
the importance of language and thought. I had never heard of literary
criticism. I had no knowledge of English literature. I had no sense of
tradition or history. I did not enjoy reading. I could not make an argument. He
taught me all of these things.
His
courses always exemplified his ideal that real criticism occurs in
conversations. His lectures were opportunities for students to overhear the
conversations he had with the authors of the books he read and judged to be
important. He enabled us to overhear conversations between authors who
sometimes lived and wrote hundreds of years apart. Every lecture might have
been expanded into several doctoral dissertations. He never gives the same
lecture twice; instead he plays on questions and problems as if he were a fine
jazz musician. His seminars always exemplified the liberty of thought and
discussion that should characterize the university. During his classes the
ideal of the university is a reality.
I
still have every note I wrote in his classes. They are records of arguments
about language and literature that are absolutely distinct. Crick’s lectures
could never be mistaken. I have never heard anyone so fearless. Unfortunately
my notes capture neither the seriousness nor the humorousness of the lectures.
Nor do they convey the dynamic nature of the man as he thought aloud for us to
listen.
I
have never seen the same level of teaching from any other professor. He was
always looking for an argument but we rarely gave him one. He was always
thinking about problems but we rarely broke from our habit of thinking there
are no problems. We rarely met his standards for critical thought. Very few do.
Whatever
the advertising campaign slogans for
DiSanto, Michael John. “Editorial.” The New
Compass: A Critical Review 2 (December 2003)
<http://www.thenewcompass.ca/dec2003/editorial.html>