And the momentary cooling was in itself a necessary ceremony for the tempering. But what to do with this energy that wells like a spring, “the force,” wrote Dylan Thomas, “that through the green fuse drives the flower”? Where, how, to direct it? A teacher makes things possible for even the brashest student, or so they say. It may happen that a teacher provides sufficient provocation, as a grain of sand does to an oyster, to produce a pearl. This was apparently what Edward Said did for Asad Raza, who met the critic, scholar and leading voice on Orientalism and the Palestinian cause in 1993 when he, Raza, was “an extremely pretentious young person.” A decade later and mourning the death of his friend and teacher, Raza, by then a teacher himself, wrote about impertinently needling Said in matters alternately petty and cerebral, being alternately slapped down and indulged, and eventually finding Said’s lectures, occasionally punctuated by musical strains that the man performed on a baby grand like a concert pianist (which he actually was), “a supremely motivating, frightening, vitalizing experience.” “I loved,” declared Raza, “to have found a teacher who simply did not accept less than excellence.”
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Armando J. Malay was a big man, gruff, bushy of brow and always dressed in white. Sitting in his journalism class and listening to him lecture on the state of reporting of the day as opposed to how he knew it should be, you were not so much inspired as bullied. You winced at the timbre of his voice. You chafed under the weight of his gaze. You detested the current- events quizzes that he sprang as his way of checking whether these sorry specimens who had presumed to enroll in the course even knew what was going on in the world out there. You cut his classes as often as you could. The problem (if problem it
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