Mr. Meyer, I hope you're doing well. Thought I'd send you a poem I wrote (it's about teaching). I'm just starting my 3rd quarter, and I'm taking Math, Physics, Classics of Social and Political Thought, and Art History. I'm also auditing Analytic Philosophy. I've decided to major in Mathematics. I wrote this on the airplane: Oh to see you draw a grin, And use my gift of paint and brush, Finishing you'd think a sin, Like Chocolates eaten in a rush. Though you know you'll like your drawing, Anticipated smile seems rotten, Thoughts of satisfaction marring, Beauty that once seen's forgotten. That's the grin of yours I'd cherish, Even more if paint is gone. I know that's when your joy will perish, But light burned out means it was on. That's all I want, that's all I'll get. A grin from you I won't forget. Emily When I read your poem again this morning, I was embarrassed to consider how much I read out of it - or into it -. I liked reading your poem in somewhat the same way that I like picking blackberries from the thorny vines in the briar patch not far from our house in the Virginia mountains, as opposed to groping with a shivering hand in the gaudy upright freezers that line the aisles of Shaws' in Waverly for a shrink wrapped package of berries that turns out to be frozen squash. I find your poetry compelling, because it's nascent and fresh, like the tomatoes at Wilson's Farms, but better, because these aisles are not crowded with competing consumers. But then, again, I'm mindful of the playful trickiness of literature, and of poetry in particular; in that it's very likely that what I read out of the poem is very different from what you wrote into it. Understandably so, because we live in two different worlds: I, close to the end of life, and you with its awesome opportunities and trials still ahead. "Grin" has not - until now - been one of my favorite words. It connotes to me a derisive and supercilious emotional detachment. Unlike a smile, a grin is not infectuous. Each of the grinning members of a class would seem to express her individual detachment from if not contempt of me. But if they smiled - I'd take it personally - and think they even liked my teaching. I looked into various electronic dictionaries on the Web, which nowadays make language so transparent, and found its etymology: O.E. grennian "show the teeth" (in pain or anger), common Gmc. (cf. O.N. grenja "to howl," grina "to grin;" Du. grienen "to whine;" Ger. greinen "to cry"), from PIE base *ghrei- "be open." Sense of "bare the teeth in a broad smile" is c.1480, perhaps via the notion of "forced or unnatural smile." the noun is first attested 1635. The cognate attribution to German is incomplete. The word "grinsen" is a more appropriate translation. Your poem brought to mind the opening scene of Goethe's Faust - lines which by virtue of their poetic virtuosity even the audacious translators on the Internet seem unable to render into English: Was grinsest du mir, hohler Schaedel, her? Als dass dein Hirn wie meines einst verwirret Den leichten Tag gesucht und in der Daemmrung schwer, Mit Lust nach Wahrheit, jaemmerlich geirret. Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein, Mit Rad und Kaemmen, Walz' und Buegel: Ich stand am Tor, ihr solltet Schluessel sein; Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt ihr nicht die Riegel. Geheimnisvoll am lichten Tag Laesst sich Natur des Schleiers nicht berauben, Und was sie deinem Geist nicht offenbaren mag, Das zwingst du ihr nicht ab mit Hebeln und mit Schrauben. Goethe describes the disappointed scholar despondent in his musty study, where, stored on a shelf is a skull which he addresses: Why do you grin at me, like that, - an empty skull, whose sometime brain, like mine, confused, sought the bright day, lusting for truth, pitifully astray. And apparatus mocking me, with wheels and ratchets, cylinders and clamps. I, at the gate; you were supposed to be the keys, however forked your prongs, you failed to lift the latch. Mysterious in the light of day, nature will not permit its curtain to be snatched; and what she deigns not to reveal to you, you wont extort from her with levers or with screws. A text which takes us back to the poet in the physics laboratory. Goethe was one of the 18th-19th centuries most emphatic and outspoken sceptics of the Newtonian orthodoxy. Contemporary historians of science still won't accept the fact that the poet belongs in the physics laboratory and the physics laboratory belong, at least in part, to the poet. They don't give Goethe credit for anticipating Einstein by a hundred years, but he deserves it. As for your student, who, if I understand you correctly, rewards your passionate commitment with nothing more than a grin. The grin, of which you write: That's all I want, that's all I'll get. A grin from you I won't forget. is, if I understand correctly, a big improvement over Aletheia's spiritual anorexia. I think of you often, and I wish you well.