The Glow of a Luminous Mind
January 16, 2020

     Some of the reading during my "inter-degree" years was forced, in a sense.  I had graduated from Harvard in June of 2001 with a bachelor‛s degree in the Comparative Study of Religion.  But that degree did not fit neatly (or at all) into any of the categories then recognized by the Oklahoma Department of Education as appropriate preparatory programs for prospective public school teachers.  So when I originally applied for non-traditional certification to teach, despite submitting my undergraduate transcript – which reflected significant writing-intensive coursework, much of it at the graduate level (I took about half a dozen courses at Harvard Divinity School) -- I was advised that I ‟lacked sufficient subject-matter hours‟ to teach English in Oklahoma secondary schools.   This was in the heady days before having a pulse seemed to become the chief qualification for alternative or "emergency" teaching certification for people lacking formal teaching degrees in Oklahoma.

     A little annoyed, but otherwise undeterred, I enrolled in an entire semester of English classes at a nearby four-year college, Missouri Southern State College, in Joplin, Missouri, only about half and hour from my home.  

     It turned out to be a magical interlude.  I took a class on the Short Story, an American Literature survey course, an advanced composition course, and a class devoted entirely to Shakespeare's plays.  Twelve credit hours in all – which was enough to satisfy the folks at the Oklahoma Department of Education.

     Each of the classes was a delight in its own way, but the Shakespeare course was a real gift.  I don't remember the professor's name, but I do recall that he was relatively young, newly transplanted to fly-over country from New York City.  Toward the end of the semester, he hosted a party at his house and made homemade pizzas with dough he had conjured from scratch.  That dough was amazing – light and soft, striking just the right balance between crispy and chewy.  I still aspire to making pizza dough that good.

    I similarly aspire to a mind as light, nimble, and capacious as the Bard's.  Perhaps "aspire" is not the right word, since that kind of genius is largely, I think, a free gift of the universe  – not something one can exactly work toward if one is not born with it.  That said, I do think one can almost always enlarge one's mental scope – our chronic underuse of our cognitive faculties has been well documented – and the output of great minds like Shakespeare's can light a path in that direction.

     The best part about the Shakespeare class for me – even better than the end-of-semester pizza -- was the opportunity to immerse myself in the plays, in the way one immerses oneself in a foreign language or culture.  Aside from reading some extended excerpts of Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet in high school, along with a smattering of the Sonnets, I had never read Shakespeare. Let me say that again:  I had never read Shakespeare.  So I was (am) grateful for this chance to really read about twelve or fifteen of the plays in their entirety.  And I was surprised to find that, with a little practice, I could read one in just a little over two hours.  (This makes sense, of course, since that is about how long a play-goer in Shakespeare‛s day would have spent watching it in the theater.)  It was a matter of allowing my brain to slip into Shakespeare's language, like slipping into a dream.  Once in, it just flowed.

     Several years later, when I was teaching advanced ninth-grade English at my hometown high school, I tried to teach this Jedi mind-trick to my students, having them practice "Shakespeare translation" exercises, transposing excerpts from Romeo & Juliet into modern English and seeing who could capture the most sense most clearly.  To this day, I'm not sure how many of them grasped just how bawdy Juliet‛s Nurse really is – but I think they generally got the idea.  And I hope that, like me, they felt, and perhaps still carry with them, some of the heat and glow from that luminous mind.