Carpe Diem

The call to prayer could be heard through the back window of the classroom as the title sequence—shots of a misty, bucolic New England boarding school—played on screen. Rows of students sipped fizzy water and munched quietly on potato chips. I had come to the first annual meeting of the Dead Poets Society at the American University of Beirut.

The club was one of a number of student groups gathering for their first annual meeting in February rather than September. The war between Hezbollah and Israel, which had pushed almost the entire fall semester online, loomed over the proceedings. As was the club’s tradition, the meeting featured a screening and discussion of the 1989 film. The plot is by now archetypical: a group of young, impressionable, white men come under the sway of a dynamic new teacher, John Keating (played by Robin Williams), only to have their burgeoning Romanticism crushed by the forces of conformity. Like the movie’s protagonists, AUB’s students were eager to suck the marrow out of life, notwithstanding the many obstacles in their way. Classrooms were full, posters advertised upcoming talks, and undergraduates crowded the coffee shops and man’ousheh stands on and off campus. Still new to the university, I was surprised at how normal everything seemed.

I had never seen the film before, and couldn’t help viewing it through the lens of a faculty member. Pedagogically, Keating’s class is a mixed bag. For example, he announces a major writing assignment—to compose and recite an original poem—on his way out the classroom door, presumably in order to dodge the students’ inevitable protests. When the students recite their doggerel or simply refuse altogether, Keating tells them to look at a portrait of Walt Whitman and close their eyes. Later in the film, Keating gives a brilliant but solitary performance of a Shakespeare play, acting out each part and voice in the way that only Robin Williams could. It is teaching as theatre. Though English teachers now understand that we are all, to some extent, performers, it is considered unseemly at best, and malpractice at worst, to make oneself the center of the classroom in the way that Keating does. The phrase “student-centered teaching” is a bland but useful reminder that the liberatory possibilities of education—of students really thinking, critically, for themselves—depend on a difficult balancing act: the teacher must somehow guide the students through difficult material and, without their ever noticing, get out of the way of self-discovery.

In one of the movie’s early scenes, Keating invites his students to tear out the introductory pages of the class’s assigned textbook, “Understanding Poetry.” The volume’s fictional editor, a certain J. Evans Pritchard, serves as the movie’s Prufrockian byword for pedagogical stultification, but Understanding Poetry is also the title of a popular poetry textbook written by the nonfictional scholars Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. The book established critical analysis of poetry as a worthwhile intellectual activity in high school classrooms, and the intellectual school it emblematized, New Criticism, is arguably the dominant literary approach of the past hundred years. While most students in an English classroom today probably have no idea what New Criticism is, its methods, assumptions and terminology still provide a powerful framework for discussing poetry. It is telling that we never actually see Keating’s students talking to each other about poetry, but only reading it aloud in the Society’s cave—away from the classroom. This is poetry as scripture, or talisman, but not as a source of creativity, self-reflection or even very interesting conversation.

When the film was over, I found myself perplexed by the club’s devotion to it. One student told me later that he had seen Dead Poets Society no fewer than five times. I was skeptical: What do you like about it? He pointed to the film’s mantra, carpe diem, and its virtuous insistence on pursuing one’s passions—an important message for students to hear in college, where education tends to get reduced to vocational utility. I asked him what his major was; somewhat sheepishly, he informed me, “premed.”

Still pondering the appeal of Keating, I turned to a beloved teacher of my own, St. Augustine, the “teacher of grace” (doctor gratiae). Early in the fifth century, Augustine took time out of his job as bishop of Hippo, in modern-day Algeria, to write a short treatise called Instructing Beginners in Faith. Here as in some of his other works on teaching, Augustine emphasizes the importance of love between students and teachers. Of course he is not thinking of the sordid kind that has been such a constant source of fascination for campus novels and films; rather, he has in mind something like the love of parents for their children captured by the theological notion of charity. According to Augustine, this love puts the teacher in the “right frame of mind to give the introductory instruction.” From there, “Fluent and cheerful words will then stream out from an abundance of love and be drunk in with pleasure. For it is not so much I who say these words to you as it is love itself that says them to us all.” Augustine’s vision of the love-drunk teacher flows through Keating’s teaching, which flirts with a sort of performative drunkenness—standing on desks, shouting Whitman lines.

Augustine’s insistence on the centrality of pleasure in teaching resonates, too, with the film’s motto, carpe diem, which means something more like pluck the day than seize the day. For many of my students, some of them from the south of Lebanon, seizure suggests nothing so much as the movements of armies or militias across disputed land. For others, perhaps, it echoes Western powers’ insistence that Lebanon seize the political opportunity presented by the end of the war. Plucking, tasting, savoring—these are metaphors for the intellectual life that Keating, in his best moments, embodies. What the students see in his classroom is not escapist fantasy but an act of resistance to the logic of seizure and appropriation that now runs through so-called liberal democracies from Tel Aviv to Washington, D.C. Like a beginner in faith, I realized that the undergraduates at AUB are already far ahead of me in what they understand the value of a literary education to be.