A Boring Blog Post

Chekhov's “A Boring Story: From an Old Man’s Notes” does not have the most promising title.  On the whole it was good, but that fact also raises my problem of the Short Story (a problem about which the Reader is surely tiring); it is 53 pages long in the volume I have (Selected  Stories of Anton Chekhov, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky); when does a short story grow up to become a novella?    

The tale is about an elderly university professor.  And in the middle of this tale, he talks about lecturing at the college.  The passage was quite literally stunning—it is without a doubt the single best description of what it is like for me to give a lecture I have ever read.  It’s a bit long for a blog post, but here it is in its entirety.  If you want to know what I feel like in class, this is pretty much it.  (The translation, by the way, is not the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation—that translation isn’t easily copied off the web somewhere.  This is David Magarshack’s translation.)

I know what I am going to lecture about, but I don't know how I am going to lecture, where I am going to begin or with what I am going to end. I haven't a single sentence ready in my head. But I have only to look round the lecture-hall (it is built in the form of an amphitheatre) and utter the stereotyped phrase, "Last lecture we stopped at . . ." when sentences spring up from my soul in a long string, and I am carried away by my own eloquence. I speak with irresistible rapidity and passion, and it seems as though there were no force which could check the flow of my words. To lecture well -- that is, with profit to the listeners and without boring them -- one must have, besides talent, experience and a special knack; one must possess a clear conception of one's own powers, of the audience to which one is lecturing, and of the subject of one's lecture. Moreover, one must be a man who knows what he is doing; one must keep a sharp lookout, and not for one second lose sight of what lies before one.

A good conductor, interpreting the thought of the composer, does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, makes a motion sideways, first to the drum then to the wind-instruments, and so on. I do just the same when I lecture. Before me a hundred and fifty faces, all unlike one another; three hundred eyes all looking straight into my face. My object is to dominate this many-headed monster. If every moment as I lecture I have a clear vision of the degree of its attention and its power of comprehension, it is in my power. The other foe I have to overcome is in myself. It is the infinite variety of forms, phenomena, laws, and the multitude of ideas of my own and other people's conditioned by them. Every moment I must have the skill to snatch out of that vast mass of material what is most important and necessary, and, as rapidly as my words flow, clothe my thought in a form in which it can be grasped by the monster's intelligence, and may arouse its attention, and at the same time one must keep a sharp lookout that one's thoughts are conveyed, not just as they come, but in a certain order, essential for the correct composition of the picture I wish to sketch. Further, I endeavour to make my diction literary, my definitions brief and precise, my wording, as far as possible, simple and eloquent. Every minute I have to pull myself up and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, one has one's work cut out. At one and the same minute one has to play the part of savant and teacher and orator, and it's a bad thing if the orator gets the upper hand of the savant or of the teacher in one, or vice versa.

You lecture for a quarter of an hour, for half an hour, when you notice that the students are beginning to look at the ceiling, at Pyotr Ignatyevitch; one is feeling for his handkerchief, another shifts in his seat, another smiles at his thoughts. . . . That means that their attention is flagging. Something must be done. Taking advantage of the first opportunity, I make some pun. A broad grin comes on to a hundred and fifty faces, the eyes shine brightly, the sound of the sea is audible for a brief moment. . . . I laugh too. Their attention is refreshed, and I can go on.

No kind of sport, no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to abandon myself entirely to passion, and have understood that inspiration is not an invention of the poets, but exists in real life, and I imagine Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just such voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after every lecture.

As I said, remarkably accurate.  In so many ways.  I even have the stock opening (mine as surely every student who has ever sat in my class could tell you is, “So.  Where were we?”  I think I start every single lecture with that rhetorical question.)   Irresistible rapidity?   Check.  I simply can’t slow down even if I try.  Constant attention to the audience while wandering through a reservoir of ideas and anecdotes and turns of phrase while trying to turn out sentences with some literary flair?  Check.  The well-timed pun or joke to reacquire attention?  Check.  Even the exhaustion.  Before reading this, the best description of lecturing I had seen wasn't about lecturing at all.  In the old Bob Seger song, “Turn the Page,” there are the lines: “Out there in the spotlight/ You’re a million miles away/ Every ounce of energy/ You try to give away/ As the sweat pours out your body/ Like the music that you play.”  I think about that a lot at the end of a lecture, when I have tried as hard as I can to generate in the audience the same energy I feel when thinking about the subject at hand.  (By the way, I really like the Metallica remake of that song; it may well be my favorite Metallica song.)

In two weeks, classes start here at Mount Holyoke.  Having just spent a year in Administration, I am frequently asked if it is going to be hard to return to the classroom after being absent for a year.  I find that to be a very odd question.  Why would it be hard?  Lecturing is so natural.  I think that passage explains why; when a lecture is like that, being a conductor, it isn’t a time consuming chore to prepare to lecture—you simply show up and the lecture is there.  But, I don’t think lecturing is like that for everyone.

So, yes, I am very much looking forward to walking into the lecture hall; there is a thrill in the lecture.  Administrative work has joys which are quite different.  There is nothing in administrative work quite like the never ending quest for the Perfect Lecture.  That lecture never quite comes.  I learned long ago, though, that part of the art of lecturing requires adopting the mantra of the Cornerback: never remember the last play.  Every time I walk into the room, it starts anew—it makes no difference if the last lecture was great or a disaster.  This lecture is a new creation; this set of students on this day deserve the best lecture I can muster.  There is no tomorrow, there is only the next 75 minutes.  And it will be glorious.