La Paz

Two weeks later I finally got around to grading those summer reading projects. Two weeks later! Other teachers may have their own opinions about summer reading projects - they're inhumane! They're cruel! - but I like them. Not for myself, of course - I would have been filled with the acrid pus of bitterness had one been assigned to me when I  was a student - but that's beside the point. I was also an immature, lazy and unmotivated student, unwilling to pursue anything that did not come easily to me. If there was a challenge presented by something in school I most certainly did not rise to the occasion. I also never put my nose to the grindstone at my minimum wage high school jobs, and I scorned competition in any pursuit.

So I'm hardly the avatar of academic excellence, here. But for real students these summer reading projects are a good judge of what kind of work ethic they might have. Any number of advanced students might aspire to be in an "honors" class but can they hack it? Do they have the academic cojones to do what needs to be done? If they blanch at the summer reading project then you know that they're probably lazy, unmotivated and unwilling to work hard. In other words, they're much like me at that age and that's a terrible thing. Nowadays we're debating the need for such projects but I'm holding firm to the idea that an honors  student will prove themselves by accepting the challenge and those who don't want to accept the challenge is not an honors student.

One of the students in my stack of papers chose to read The Razor's Edge by Sommerset Maugham, one of my favorite books. In fact, the reading list is peppered with My Favorite Books as well as books that society deems to be Of Significant Literary Merit, no matter what I think about them. But The Razor's Edge! Now there's  a book. Although the material may be dated by now, back in the 1920s, before people could buy coffee mugs inscribed with quotes by the Dalai Lama, the philosophy introduced in this book was ground-breaking. Interspersed between scenes of the upper-crust falling apart, rendered with great and insightful bitchiness, is this story about a young man who was so affected by his experiences in WWI that he began questioning the most basic questions of life.

Larry sets aside ambition and money and the respect of his peers (including his fiance) to spend the next several years "Loafing", by which he really means studying, reading, pondering and living in genial poverty, although genial poverty is much nicer when it takes place in Hemingway's Paris. Still, it's a lovely idea; in my own half-assed way, I've been doing much the same thing - though obviously not with Larry's results of "enlightenment" and Final Joy.

I'm 47 now and, as such, so close to 50 that I could throw a rock at it and hit it without popping my elbow. I've spent the last 40-plus years reading to absolutely no profit in this world, but I like to think I've gained something by it. My wife may beg to differ, however, and she'd probably be right. Or as right as anyone. However, I never thought I'd end up rich, or even well-off. Even growing up in wealthy Fairfield County, Connecticut, surrounded by wealth that was begetting more wealth, and creating a context for future wealth for its scions through superior education and culture, I never thought I'd rise much above the lower middle class, and I've always been okay with that.

I've been reading Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer lately, and I fell in love with his quick description of Bolivia from the gentle poverty of its capital, La Paz, which means, in Spanish, Peace.

"Like many countries of South America, both Peru and Argentina seemed to have been left by the Spanish stuck between a vanished colonial notion of glory and a future that never arrived; in desperation, often, not full European and not really themselves, they'd tried to make up the gap with pomp. Bolivia, by comparison, gave an impression of self-containment: a poor country, yes, but one that did not look as if it ever expected to be rich."