Years later, in the course of his novice training for the Holy Order of Vision, Father Benjamin had set before him a thin folder. "This is Temptation," Father Benjamin had said.
Brother Paul looked at him. "I don't understand. I had expected to meditate this hour." Meditation was serious business: another form of learning.
"Indeed you shall, Paul," the Father said with a certain obscure smile. "You shall meditate whether to open that folder or to let it be."
Was the Father joking? This was hardly the standard definition of meditation! Yet it seemed he was not. "How shall I know what is right? I don't know the nature of this folder."
"It is your college transcript." And Father Benjamin departed.
Meditation? This was turmoil! Brother Paul knew this transcript was, for him, classified material; he was not supposed to see it. In order to remove all competitive pressure, the college concealed the records from the individual students. Of course, Paul knew generally how he had done, for his own opinions were part of the record.
Now, however, he wondered. If he knew what was in his transcript, why should it be secret from him? What difference did it make?
He pondered, and the doubt grew. No one kept his age a secret from him, or his weight, or any other aspect of his own being or performance. Generally Brother Paul felt that any person had a right to information about himself; it was after all his life. What purpose was there in a secret, ever?
But surely the college had reason to restrict this document. The pointless frills had been eliminated there in favor of the genuine education. If some aspect had to be concealed, it was necessary. Wasn't he honor bound to obey the rule and leave the folder alone?
Then why had Father Benjamin presented him with this material? Was this a test of his basic integrity, whose result would determine his progress in the Order? Was Father Benjamin playing the Devil's Advocate, subjecting him to temptation? Would he, like Jesus Christ, prevail and remain above reproach—or would he, like Eve in the Garden of Eden, succumb to the lure of the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge?
That introduced another aspect. Brother Paul himself had never condemned Eve for tasting that fruit, though it had cost her and Adam their residence in an earthly paradise. Knowledge was the very essence of man, the thing that distinguished him from the animals. A person who eschewed learning of any type sacrificed his heritage. Eden had been no paradise; it had been a prison. Ignorance was not bliss. Surely God had intended the ancestral couple to eat of the fruit; it would have been wrong not to do it. The point of the legend was that the price of knowledge was high—but it had to be paid. The alternative would have been to remain an animal.
This was not, perhaps, an orthodox interpretation. But the Holy Order of Vision, like the college, encouraged widely ranging thought. If man's insatiable curiosity were the Original Sin, how could he expiate it, except by finally satisfying it?
Was it significant that Satan had tempted Christ with power, wealth, and pride, but not with knowledge? "If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread." Jesus had responded: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." And to the offer of worldly power if he would worship the Devil: "Get thee behind me, Satan..." Why not knowledge?
He looked at the folder again. The thing seemed to glow with evil light despite his reasoning. Could it be that knowledge was power and, therefore, had been included in the temptations Christ withstood? What had Father Benjamin done to him, putting this manifestation of the Devil within his grasp?
No, he had no Biblical reference here. The verdict on knowledge was inconclusive. Each specific case had to be judged on its merits.
By what right did the college decree that everyone except the person most concerned should know the details of his education? There was an inherent unfairness in that which should be manifest to any objective person. By what irony were the educators themselves blind to this wrong?
Yet he knew from his experience that educators were human too, with human assets and failings. They did not see right and wrong with perfect clarity. And why should they? Their purpose was to enable the students to grow; if they succeeded in this, they had met the requirement of their office. Could God himself demand more of them? Probably it had been the college administrators, not the instructors, who had classified the documents.
But again: why! So the students could not complain? Why should any student complain about the simple record of his progress that he himself had helped write? Something was missing...
He remembered his encounters with Exec and with the Vice Squad. Secrecy had been the hallmark of illicit dealings there. Secrecy was so often invoked to protect the guilty.
Was it the simple record? Or was there some sinister secret buried in this folder, known to all except him? Brother Paul recalled the frustrating joke about the man who was given a message written in a foreign language. Each person to whom he took it, who was able to read that language, refused either to tell him its meaning or to associate with him further. Thus the man remained forever in doubt. Was this college transcript like that? Surely he should find out!
He reached for it—but his hand hesitated. Did the end justify the means? The end was enlightenment, but the means was the violation of someone's trust. The college was a mere institution, true—but trust was trust. It did not matter what dark secrets lurked within this folder; the unveiling of them would be a personal sin, an affront against morality, lightness, and justice.
"Ah, but the flesh is weak," Paul murmured, opening the folder.
Soon he wished he had not. Yea, Pandora! he thought. Pandora was the girl who had opened the box (was she merely another incarnation of Eve?) and thereby loosed all things upon the world, retaining only one: hope. Paul had now let hope itself escape. For the cherished ideals of his college days, that had survived all the buffeting of campus politics, flawed faculty members, and a questionable suspension, were now revealed as delusions.
First, this transcript had grades. Straight letter grades, A, B, C, of precisely the type the college never used. Oh, there were paragraph evaluations too—but each was followed by its translation into the letter, the kind that computers could manipulate for numeric grade point averages, just as at any other school. But at other schools the grades were posted openly; each student knew exactly where he stood. Here they had been posted secretly so that not only was the student not advised of his rating, but he did not even know that he was being graded. Thus he was at a competitive disadvantage in the remainder of his life. As though he were playing poker and every other player could see his hand, but he could not. Brother Paul understood poker all too well, and the analogy tortured him. Here was his message in a foreign language, and of all the parties who could have revealed its content to him, only one had done so: the Holy Order of Vision. Thus he had broken the terrible geas more or less by luck. Yet its prior damage could not be undone. "Alma Mater, how could you!" he cried with a sensation like heartbreak.
At the beginning of the transcript was a note saying that the college preferred not to use grades, but owing to outside requirements had had to do so. Another note cautioned the reader against allowing the subject to see this record. No wonder!
Paul had traveled more or less innocently through the curriculum for four years without thought of grade or competitive standing; that had been the beauty of it. He had learned eclectically, for the sake of learning—and now via this hyprocrisy it had come to nought.
No, no—that was an unfair verdict. The gradeless environment had forced on him a peculiar discipline. It was so easy to sink into stagnation, deprived of the goad of tests and grades and the printed-letter esteem they brought. A number of students had done just that and in due course washed out of the program. But others considered it a challenge—to learn, profit, and grow without a formally structured stimulus. And a few, like Paul, who were well able to compete for grades if that were required, had discovered instead the she
er joy of knowledge. Knowledge of things was one route leading into knowledge of self. A grade in itself was nothing; it was, at the root, the attitude that counted.
The process had hardly been complete when Paul left college. He had had serious problems when he departed that protected environment, as his experience with the drug mnem had shown! But the foundation had been laid, and in time he had built upon it, and now he was learning more and growing more every year than he ever had in college. This was no denigration of that educational system; it was the fulfillment of it. Learning to learn—"that was real, though the system turned out to be false.
From good must come good, and from evil, evil, he thought, remembering Buddha. Instead, he had encountered a set of statements, one saying the other was true, the other saying the first was false. A paradox. Good, somehow, had come from evil.
"If only you had believed in it yourself, O College Administration!" he murmured, more in regret than ire. "You wrought so much better than you knew, had you but had more faith!"
Yet they had made the letter grades under protest and hidden them under this shield of secrecy. So it was a partial lack of faith on their part, rather than a complete one. The flesh of colleges, too, was weak.
Paul looked at the individual grades for the courses —and received another shock. They were not the correct ones!
He delved more deeply, reading the evaluations. Slowly it came clear: these were his grades—but not as he had understood them. For they hardly reflected his own one-third opinion or what he had known of his counselors' opinions. (He had had three faculty counselors before Will Hamlin.) They were the opinions of the course instructors—just as at other schools. Thus the courses having greatest impact on Paul's thinking and development were marked by B's and C's—and the course dearest to the heart of a particular instructor was marked A. That last had been completely worthwhile—but so had the others, receiving lesser marks. The variation had lain not so much within Paul, but within the instructors. Thus the evaluation system, too, was false.
On top of that, Paul had been given no credit for some of the courses he had taken; they were not even listed. Drama and music, where he had learned stage presence, voice projection, and artistry of sound—all supremely important to his later development—gone. By error or design—quite possibly the latter, as they were considered "minor" courses, heedless of their impact on the student—those parts of his college growth had been excised. Neatly, like a circumcision. Had he known, he would have protested. But the veil of secrecy had prevented him from knowing.
Was there ever justification for secrecy? Or was the seeming need to hide anything, whether physical or informational, an admission by the hider that the thing being hidden was shameful? Surely it was the act of hiding that was shameful! That would bear further meditation.
Yet the inadequacy of this sorry record could not take away the fact of his learning. Paul had profited, and at this institution.
Wasn't that the real point of education? The college by distorting the transcript had not really denigrated or deprived him; it had merely diminished its own estimate of its impact upon him. If he failed in life, that had not been warned by the transcript; if he succeeded, the transcript showed no prediction. As with so many conventional transcripts, distorted by conventional factors, this one was largely irrelevant. The college had cheated itself by publishing a document of mediocrity instead of the document of accuracy it should have. The good the college had done him would never be known though the transcript.
Paul completed the transcript and closed it, bemused. It was not after all a work of the Devil, merely of fallible people. Perhaps its greatest failing was its subtlest: in all the welter of statistics, test scores—yes, there were some there!—and comments, the authorities had somehow succeeded in missing the essential him. A stranger, reading this transcript, would have no idea of Paul's actual nature or capability. In this print he was nondescript, possessing no personality and not much potential.
He had known at the time that a number of instructors (including, to Paul's regret, Will Hamlin) had not seen in him, Paul, any particular promise. Perhaps even today they would not consider his present course as representative of "success." He had suspected at the time that this was because they had not made any real effort to know him—and that had they made this effort, they would have lacked the intelligence to complete the job. The Vice Squad matter had shown their level of comprehension of human values. Paul was intelligent in nonconventional ways and indifferent in conventional ways. He was not easy to measure by a set standard. This transcript confirmed this: it represented them, not him.
"Transference," he said.
"What?" Carolyn asked.
Suddenly he was back in the present, such as it was. He had thrown a complex concept at the child. "Transference. That is when a person attributes his feelings or actions to someone else. If he dislikes someone, he may say 'that person hates me.' If he feels tired, he says 'They made these steps too steep.' It is a way of dealing with certain things that he doesn't want to recognize in himself. He simply shifts the burden to someone else."
"Like Voodoo?" she asked brightly.
"Uh, no. You're thinking of sticking pins in dolls, and the person the doll stands for hurts?"
"Yes. Maybe the doll hurts too. Mine would."
Naturally she had sympathy for the doll! How hard it was to avoid falling into the same trap he had rehearsed here, that of failing to know the learner, and so misjudging his (her!) progress. "That's not really the same. Then again—" Then again—wasn't that whole transcript basically a voodoo doll? The college administration—and institutions of similar nature all over the world—thought that by calling this document "Paul" and sticking the pins of their secret opinions into it, they could define what he was. Well, perhaps it had satisfied them at the time. Next year new students had come, and he had been forgotten, buried in the office files. The irony was that his case was no doubt typical not only of the students at his college, but of the students in all colleges and universities. The great majority of them surely remained unknown. No status for any of them—or for their institutions. And people wondered why the educational system was failing! Straight Voodoo would be better than this. "It's close enough, sweetie," he told her.
Father Benjamin had never inquired into Paul's decision about the transcript. He knew the experience sufficed. It was not what Brother Paul had done, but how he felt about it that counted. He had to answer to no one, ultimately, except himself—and God.
But now he was returning to the college after twenty years with his daughter. For despite the erstwhile opinion of the administration, who had seen fit to suspend him and deceive him, he had succeeded in life. Now the college wanted him back, as a kind of authority in his field, to participate as a consultant for a weekend conference.
It was no laughing matter—but wasn't the last laugh his?
The little airplane dropped, bringing his attention to lower levels too. Now Brother Paul's ears hurt. Suddenly he appreciated precisely what his daughter had gone through.
"Blow your nose, Daddy!" she recommended solicitously. She understood!
He blew, but only the right ear cleared. The left remained blocked. It felt as though his eardrum would burst. He invisioned it bulging inward with the intolerable pressure of the atmosphere. Still the craft descended, as it were into Hell. Where could he find relief?
Finally, as the plane touched the small landing strip, he blew with such desperation it seemed his brain was squeezing out through his inner ear—and with an internal hiss of frustration, the pressure equalized. Lucky he hadn't caught a cold!
"I like Pandora," Carolyn remarked. "I would have opened that box too."
VI
Will: 14
Sex classically becomes involved for the child at a very early age, in Western civilization, with the realization that parents are hypocritical and unfair; that there is one law for the big and another for the little. That the only thing
worth being is big, and strong; and that later, when one is big and strong, one will have one's innings and one's revenge not only by doing all the forbidden things, but by forbidding them in turn to one's own children, who will be littler than oneself and therefore proper to dominate and harass. Underneath this not-so-innocent dream of 'growing up' runs along the hopeless admission that one is still pretty little, and the anxious realization that one's sexual life is a dangerous matter indeed. Like playing with food or feces, or refusing to do what one is told, or speaking in a loud and demanding way (as do adults), sex can cause one to be unfairly rejected or severely punished by those whose love one very much needs. This is the real sexual enlightenment of the child, and of just as serious a nature as that concerning the birds & bees, or even human genitalia and what they do.
—G. Legman: Rationale of the Dirty Joke, First Series, New York: Grove Press, 1968.
They walked across the strip and entered the small terminal building. It was empty. Already the airplane was putt-putting back into the clouds.
"Who was supposed to meet us?" Carolyn asked.
"A man named David White," Paul answered. Had there been a foul up?
Then a tall young man, bearded and informally dressed, hurried up. "Father Paul?" he inquired, extending his hand.
"David White?" Paul inquired in return, taking the hand, recognizing Lee in another role. He was relieved to have this confirmation that this was an Animation; any alternative explanation would have been most disquieting in its implications. "This is my daughter, Carolyn."
"Sorry I'm late. I saw the plane coming down—"
They hustled to David's small car and piled in their handbags. Carolyn clambered into the back seat with enthusiasm, clutching her little handbag and big octopus doll. The car zoomed out of the airport.