An Education Mooch

The air is crisp today.  The sound of clanging cymbals and beating drums from Northwestern band practice echoes on the fresh fall breeze blowing in my window.  Even the lake seems to have changed its tune from a mild summer calm to a zealous surf responding to the wind's proclamation that fall has arrived. I run down to Northwestern’s campus to see the view of the city, and I half expect to see a wave sweep up like some freshwater tsunami over the distant high rise buildings.  Fall is here.  The kind of fall that smells of football games, bright blue skies, and anticipation.  The fountains in Evanston are dyed purple to welcome back the slow trickle of college students filling the sidewalks and fields of this quaint North shore neighborhood.  I, too, feel the giddy excitement of a school year beginning.  This fall I decided to unashamedly become an education mooch at this beautiful ivy covered university.  I tell you this so that maybe you can join me in my journey.  

In two weeks Gary Morson, professor of Slavic Literature, will begin his very popular Introduction to Russian Literature class.  Hundreds of students will pack an auditorium to hear this favorite professor teach through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov.  I first heard Morson speak at an RUF sponsored discussion with Nicolas Wolterstorff last spring.  When I found out that his classes on the Russian classics (he does a class on War and Peace every four years that is said to be life-changing) are some of the most popular at Northwestern and that Morson opens his classes to the community, I said  “Sign me up!.”

I’m on page 278 of Anna Karenina.  Only 539 more pages to go.  But I can’t put it down.  It is sort of like a Woody Allen movie meets Wendell Berry meets Jonathan Franzen meets Charlotte Bronte.  Love, passion, intrigue, crisis of conscience, conversion, guilt,  the beauty of the simple agrarian life, the subtleties of human relationships and interactions.  Morson says, “The definition of a Russian happy ending? The hero learns the reason for his agony.”  Not unlike Woody Allen, eh?  Morson writes,  “Each person is a natural egoist who sees the world as if it were a novel in which he or she were the hero or heroine, but morality begins when a person can see the world as if he or she were a minor character in someone else’s novel.”  A minor character in someone else’s novel.  What if we really lived like that?  (Ok...I recognize the irony putting this quote on my BLOG, a medium who’s very nature puts the author as the center of the world.  But, well, we are all in process in learning we are not the center of the universe, right?).

I’d love you to join me in this journey this fall with either novel. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some links to lectures, articles, or books about which we can learn more about Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.  Happy Reading.