Tells AllI’d never have known that a sprinkling of grayhairs had
infiltrated the sprawling assortment of graduates and undergraduates at
Columbia University, but for my friend Marvin. At 66, he has become a
full-time student again, furiously taking notes in class, cramming for
exams, writing papers, making friends and even hooking up with squash
opponents a third his age. Some of his fellow elder students are just
onetime guests, but a substantial number, like Marvin, belong to Lifelong
Learners, a Columbia program that entitles senior citizens to enroll in
courses for a fraction of the cost to matriculated students.
Two years ago, Marvin sold his printing business and cast around for
something to do. He was pointed to Lifelong Learners by a fellow retiree.
At first, he was going to the lectures merely for entertainment and
because–this is his official cocktail-party story–his wife
ordered him out of the house between 9 and 5, a claim that Jane, busy with
a midlife career managing music groups, strenuously denies. One day, a
couple of summers ago at our tennis club, there was Marvin poring over
Latin grammar books, studying for a summer-school exam. Latin! I was
impressed, and being something of a perpetual student myself, I resolved to
investigate further.
So I joined him and my husband, a professor of film at Columbia, at the
Symposium, a Greek restaurant where they have started meeting for lunch and
a Socratic exchange of gossip on Mondays before class, International Film
History, W3201. I questioned whether this student-teacher fraternizing gave
Marvin an unfair advantage, but I was assured that he is not being graded
in Prof. Andrew Sarris’ class.
Marvin arrived with his canvas attaché case, looking collegial
but dignified in white shirt, V-neck sweater and tweed jacket. “You
have to be careful,” he said when I complimented him. “If I wear
grunge, or a backpack, they’ll think I’m a sex pest. But if I
wear a necktie, the students ask me to O.K. their spring schedule, and the
faculty gives me that puzzled look, as if they should know me.
“It’s all-important not to be elegant. I’m very friendly
with the undergraduates. But if I arrive wearing a tie because I’m
going to lunch with someone, the student who usually sits beside me will
leave an empty seat between us. It’s as if I’ve suddenly become
suspect, or am impersonating an officer.”
He went from auditor to participant when a professor who taught a class
titled “Rome in the Age of Nero,” now retired, said, “If
you’re that interested, you should take Latin.” Another faculty
member told him he’d get more out of it if he did the work. “So I
did and I did,” Marvin said, “and the satisfaction went up by 50,
100 percent!”
After film class, a discussion of Jean Renoir’s La Règle
du Jeu , Marvin rushed off to a class on Seneca. “He was the spin
doctor to Nero, but was he a hypocrite or not? How much did he know of
Nero’s murder of his mother and brother?” Marvin asked, as if it
were the latest controversy in the Clinton saga.
The next day, before his class in medieval literature, I asked him, Why
the classics?
“I started with English but found the classics department friendly
and accessible, and liked the professors very much. The classes are small,
eight to 10 students in Latin, unless they call it ‘Sex and Gender in
Ancient Times,’ then you get 40 enrollees.”
Could it also be, I asked, that there are not only fewer students but
fewer Lifelong Learners? I’ve noticed Marvin is not overly fond of his
campus peers.
“I avoid their company,” he said. “They’re very
garrulous and discursive and sometimes ruin the class. There was one, in
‘Rome in the Age of Nero,’ who wouldn’t let the class
proceed. He thought it was a kaffeeklatsch between him and the professor.
The professors are very polite and don’t come down on them, but
another Lifelong Learner told him to be quiet. He got insulted and left the
class.
“I asked one [professor] if he minded having these old fogeys and
he said, ‘Not at all, in fact we’ve talked about it and we think
that if the students see you people so interested in these subjects,
they’ll value them more.'”
Marvin showed me a folder containing his papers and
exams–admittedly the best ones–some with rave notices by
professors. I especially liked the heroic couplets (written for English
W4301) called “Thinking About the Game,” which encapsulate in 30
lines of iambic pentameter a fierce singles match between the warrior-poet
and an opponent, both apparently wily strategists in the Odyssean mold, at
an age when “the days of aces long are past.”
He’s currently taking five courses. He prints copious notes in all
of them, which he later types up, photocopies and gives to students
who’ve missed the class. I asked him why he bothers, since his
handwriting is as meticulous and regular as any machine’s.
“Oh, a teacher once said, ‘See how nice Marvin is …’
so I kept doing it.” Let it be said that Marvin is a bit of an apple
polisher.
The next morning, I was late for Carmella Franklin’s class in
medieval Latin. I was mortified, especially as the day’s topic was on
Héloïse’s letters to Abélard, and that
carnal-Christian haute soap opera that our high-school Latin teachers had
carefully steered us clear of.
I got there in time for Héloïse’s gorgeously elaborate
salutation, “To her master, or rather her father, husband, or rather
brother; his handmaid, or rather his daughter, wife, or rather sister; to
Abélard, Héloïse.” As she recaps
Abélard’s letter with its threnody of woes, Héloïse
slyly suggests (according to Professor Franklin) that he may have been
laying it on a bit thick. As Marvin stumbled perseveringly through a
translation, I grabbed the English text and read up on their relationship,
and was stunned by Héloïse’s brilliance and strength of
mind. When their affair has been exposed, and he wants to make an honest
woman of her, she refuses, saying she’d rather be a mistress than a
wife! Why couldn’t we have had more of Héloïse and less of
Caesar and Cicero?
Marvin and I then sauntered over to Barnard, where he wanted to show me
the groined vault in the entranceway that he’d referred to to impress
a teacher in a class on architecture. While we were gazing at the Gothic
ceiling, author Mary Gordon happened along, and I introduced them. She
thought we must be discussing some work to be done on the building.
Next day in Prof. George Stade’s class in modern British
literature, there was a stimulating discussion of Ezra Pound’s ABC
of Reading . At one point, Marvin nudged me and nodded in the direction
of an elderly gent in the front row. He was clearly a Lifelong Learner, and
when he began to talk–making a rather strained analogy between Pound
and the Monet show he’d just seen–Marvin, looking exasperated but
satisfied, whispered, “I was hoping he’d talk in class so you
could see.” I began to understand Marvin’s chagrin at his fellow
geezers; it’s like Americans in Paris wincing at our compatriates,
loud American tourists.
By the end of class, Marvin had recovered his high spirits. He was on
his way to a medieval literature class at Barnard and bursting with
excitement. He had recently visited the new British Library in London in
order to glimpse the original manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight , and he couldn’t wait to report his findings to the
class.
” Salve , Marvin!” I said.
“No, it’s vale ,” he said as we went our separate
ways.
