The Smell of Wet Tobacco and the Life of the Mind - Issue #5
In which Fitz comes to terms with his high school education, steeped in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and surrounded by boys.
In my mind I’m in a high school classroom. The floor is made up of those 12” x 12” (are they linoleum?) tiles that are mostly a dirty white, but every so often, and in no discernible pattern, one is green. I’m sitting in the second row. The desks are in rows, of course. This is not the kind of class, or the kind of school, where the desks are arranged in circles or haphazardly scattered across the floor. We are in rows, and I’m in the second. In my mind, I’m there in A.P. History class at Malden Catholic High School. It’s 1999. But there in 1999, in my mind, I’m elsewhere. I’m everywhere. I’m in a museum. I’m in Russia. At the Hermitage Museum. I am seeing things I’ve never seen before. Art. So much beauty that I can barely contain it, but, then, I have to contain it because I’m not in the museum but in a classroom in a Catholic school in a working-class city surrounded by boys.
There’s a teacher fiddling with the VCR. Mr. Linde. He, and his entire classroom, smell like wet tobacco, but in a good way. It’s a smell I can almost conjure and it’s the smell, for me, of thinking, of discovery. No, more than discovery: magic. Of being able to sit in a desk in a row in a classroom, surrounded by boys, watching a worn tape of a documentary tour of a museum in Russia and understanding for maybe the first time that the world is bigger than the corner I’d been occupying. On another day, Mr. Linde stands at the front of the class waving around a little red book—the Little Red Book. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. I don’t know where Mr. Linde got it, though I’m sure he told us, but I remember him holding it like it was sacred, like I used to hold the school-issue blue pleather King James Version of the Bible with its powder-gilded pages when I was in elementary school. Mr. Linde opens The Little Red Book to a page somewhere near the middle and the spine bends easily. He wants us to see the thumb print, worn into the page from being held open for so long. He’s amazed by this and he’s trying to make us understand, but no one is impressed—at least not visibly, at least not then.
I am not there, really, in that social studies classroom in the late ‘90s, but I am here at my desk in my office surrounded by books and putting off preparing to teach a class; I am thinking of Mr. Linde and that red book and I’m amazed, too, and too late, by that thumb print worn into the words of Chairman Mao. Something happened in that classroom. Something between the Hermitage and the Red Book. Something that burrowed in and changed everything but remained hidden for all these years. I’m thinking now that that teacher, and that classroom, and that school, altered the course of my entire life and yet until recently I thought of it only in passing—remembering that tobacco smell and feeling again a little bit of the magic that worked wonders in an 18-year-old kid from Malden.
In the story I tell myself about my education—my academic origin story—I don’t give enough credit to Malden Catholic High School. Actually, I don’t give any credit. Whenever it comes up and someone asks me about my experience there, I default to a prebaked answer about the only aspect that I thought mattered to them or me: the fact that it was an all-boys school. It was fine, I say. But I wouldn’t send my kid there. This is a disservice. I see that now. It took just over two decades, but it’s all coming back. I pulled out my yearbook (to remember Mr. Linde’s name, if I’m honest) and I see me with a flattop haircut and a tie and I look like that photo of my dad when he was a teenager that used to hang—yellowing—in Papa’s basement. I never saw the resemblance before. And beside my name, the activities listed read like predictors of my future self: newspaper Arts Editor, Student Council Religious Chair, Lit mag. My senior quote: “I’ve never had so much fun in my life as I did these last four years,” which by way of high school yearbook quotes is pretty boring, but was it true?
I see now—I was formed there. From the very first year, I was challenged. Ms. Grondin, a religion teacher like I’d never known before. That bumper sticker on her little hatchback, “Trust in God, She will provide,” is etched in my memory, first as an affront and then as a revelation. This, I know now, is how revelation works. I became a writer in that school, scribbling rap lyrics onto pieces of paper ripped from my five-subject spiral notebook and folded into eighths and shoved into my pocket so I could keep working on them throughout the day. Creative writing class where I wrote a story about my first kiss. I left the ending ambiguous—a little bit of mystery, a little bit of modesty. A classmate wanted to know, did I kiss her. The teacher, Mr. DiDomenico, said the ambiguity worked. I felt, for the first time, like a real writer.
I didn’t know then, or for a long time after, that I was part of a tradition…an intellectual tradition…the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. It is a tradition that attempts to answer Tertullian’s question, “What does Jerusalem have to with Athens?” How do we reconcile faith and culture? This dialogue between faith and culture began as Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, and further refined as the Christian church fragmented, and it informed the founding of universities in the medieval period.
I don’t remember anybody talking about the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Malden Catholic, but I see it now everywhere. In the Hermitage and Chairman Mao’s book. In the religion class where I heard, for the first time, the phrase “social justice.” In the Catholicity of the required masses we attended, and the catholicity that allowed me, a Protestant, to sit out communion and confession. It wasn’t a perfect school, of course, but I see a commonality now between all of the teachers there—that they were attending to our intellectual and moral development.
The Catholic Intellectual Tradition looks to the writings of John Henry Newman, who recognized the Church’s call to meet the needs of the human mind, which Newman writes, “may be regarded from two principal points of view, as intellectual and as moral.” The intellectual, he says “apprehends truth;” the moral side “apprehends duty.” But these two points of view have been separated such that “where power of intellect is, there need not be virtue; and that where right, and goodness, and moral greatness are, there need not be talent.” Newman continues, “It was not so in the beginning.”
Correcting for this separation is why, as Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, former editor of Commonweal, writes, “Catholic intellectual life is central to Catholic identity.” Michael J. Buckley affirms this in his book The Catholic University as Promise and Project. Though he is writing about the Catholic university, I see traces of my high school education in his call that the Catholic university “should foster a development in social compassion and a sense of justice both in the sensitivities and skills which it imparts to its students and in the order of the curriculum by which this humane development is attained.”
I see now how I am a product of a catholic Christian education, both Protestant—specifically evangelical—and Catholic. And though the ratio skews evangelical over Catholic (12 years to 4). The impact has to be about even. Where, on the Catholic side, there is a great intellectual tradition, on the evangelical side there is an altogether different tradition when it comes to the life of the mind, as summarized in Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The scandal, Noll writes on the first page, is “that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Noll’s book was published in 1994, five years before I graduated from Catholic high school to evangelical Gordon College, and Noll indicates in his book’s closing chapters that change seemed to be on the horizon. He describes a potential “awakening of the evangelical mind.” Certainly, I had the opportunity to study with scholars who were a part of this awakening under Gordon’s banner of “freedom within a framework of faith,” which seems to me now, as close as the school ever came to something like an evangelical intellectual tradition. It’s worth noting that under the current president who, (hallelujah) just announced he’s leaving, the slogan was abandoned.
Regardless, I’ve long attributed my own intellectual development to my time at Gordon, and I don’t want to undercut that here. But here’s what I’m realizing: when I showed up on campus as a freshman in 1999, I had been primed and prepared in ways that even then weren’t clear to me. Looking back, I see this clearly in a life-altering event that occurred in my first year at Gordon. It was during a convocation, which was a weekly required meeting of the entire college community that was meant to be more academic than the other (twice a week) required event, chapel. For this particular convocation, the theme was “Who is my neighbor?,” and we were introduced to a number of community leaders from the North Shore. Among these was a minister from some mainline denomination, which I’ve long since forgotten. She was a woman, which may have already scandalized some students coming from those denominations that don’t ordain women, but beyond that, she told us, she was a lesbian.
I remember an awkward silence that hung in the air for a few seconds before it was cracked by the sound of the heavy doors of the chapel slamming shut. People were storming out in anger. My fellow students couldn’t tolerate the presence of a lesbian minister, even in the context of the question, “who is my neighbor?” The anger I felt that day, the embarrassment of being part of that community, is burned in my memory, and now I see where that righteous indignation came from.
I was, by then, a product of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. I had learned to put faith in conversation with reason. I’d studied religion with Ms. Grondin. I imagine that I could smell in the air on that day at Gordon something like wet tobacco, that scent I’d come to associate with critical thinking and discovery. And, because I’d been allowed to think of myself a writer, I responded in the way I’d been practicing for four years prior: I wrote a poem. It wasn’t a good poem, but it was impassioned. It definitely marked the start of something.
That convocation ignited a fire that had been smoldering for years. I was ready for a life of the mind, and after four years immersed in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, I was primed to pursue it.
The opinions expressed in the above essay are solely those of their author.
What We’re Listening To:
Fitz: I’m in full-on autumn listening mode. My go-to in that category is Neil Halstead’s Sleeping on Roads, but this week’s post was written while listening mostly to Daniel Martin Moore & Joan Shelley’s Farthest Field (thanks, Cal, for the recommendation!) and Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left.
Jason: Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness turned 25 today, as a friend on social media reminded me. What a weird album: a massive, self-indulgent, multi-genre double-album monstrosity in the mold of The White Album, released on the heels of grunge’s post-Cobain decline.
“Bullet w/ Butterfly Wings” was my angst jam in 9th grade. Unfortunately for literally everyone in my parents' small-town neighborhood, I had an electric guitar and a loud amplifier and the wherewithal to learn the chord changes to that particularly noisy song. Now, I feel like “Thirty-Three” and “Here is no Why” are where it's at. Whatever your pick for best song, it’s a monumental, audacious, beautifully-realized album written and performed primarily by a man whose melancholy and egomania are apparent in equal measure.
What We’re Reading:
Fitz: So, full disclosure, I’m writing a paper for a conference on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, which explains a lot of what is happening above. To that end, a book I’ve been digging into is one I mention above, The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom by Michael J. Buckley. It is really inspiring me to see what a Humanities education at a Catholic institution could do. For example, this: “Humanistic education must inculcate a perceptive care for human beings in the lot that is so often theirs, not as skilled or as idealized only, but in the lived human life when it is wretched and impoverished” (118) or this: “the humanities themselves must advance in their self-understanding to cultivate the kind of human being who can respond to this contemporary world of suffering” (121).
Jason: For work, Richard Russo’s The Whore’s Child and various bits of Flannery O’Connor. For pleasure, I’m rereading Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, which I think is second-tier Perrotta, despite featuring two of his best, most complex characters, Tim Mason and Pastor Dennis.