...of students

...The students are weary of my cheerless aphorisms, my Culpagrams. These pithy sayings got written down in the old days, they were guides for the good conduct of life, mottoes hung up in the head,

BLESS THIS HAPPY HOLE

but now their bored fingers fiddle with those cheap felt-tipped pens, and the eyes, which once ran hands excitedly along a tablet's laddered courses as if heading up a thigh, look on in puzzled wonder while I rant. Highlight me, dammit. Run yellow lines over my voice. To those students a paperback book is a disposable rag. It gives them a hanky to honk their heads in. The subject, students, is the aphorism, or the quarrel between form and content. When sentences are sufficiently condensed the sweetness gets squeezed out, I tell them. I ask if they know any cheerful ones. Aphorisms, I mean. Silence greets that. At least one dumbo out of this herd ought to offer me a proverb. What does Culp call them? His slobwebs. "Little by little small things don't get large." Silence greets that. The slogan is also short, I say, but in the slogan's case it is the thought that gets trimmed. And set aside. You know. Like fat. Silence greets that. Brief entreaties are common, terse petitions frequent. The subject, students, appears to be brevity. Brevity is not the soul of wit, of course, but its body. Prayerful outcries are curt because they neglect to stipulate the grounds for their request. Whines without whys. No response. They couldn't take a shit without consulting a pony. God Bless This Happy Home, for instance. JESUS SAVES is a slogan, okay? How about WORK IS SALVATION? whereas "Never underestimate your insignificance in the eyes of others" is an aphorism. The students were expecting a mini-lecture on Wolfgang Kapp's abortive Putsch and the governments failure to disband the Freikorps. Not that they are disappointed. Since it is nearly impossible to interest them, it is also nearly impossible to disappoint them. They study the initials carved in the paddle-like right arms of their chairs. Lefties may use their laps. Lefties must use their laps. The students are diligent. They darken the designs with pencil points. They lay up in little abysses like boats in a bayou. Playing with words is a sign of an infantile imagination; it is worse than playing with your tiddlywiddler, it displays a gruesome... what was it? it demonstrates a disagreeable... deplorable... no - it argues a... a loathsome mind. Sometimes I modestly attribute my own smart remarks to Benjamin Franklin or Aaron Burr. The students are still and their silence continues. They are confident. They are silent. They are still. They know nothing. It comforts them. It promotes peace. Their heads are as empty as the hole the anvil did an Alice in for forty nights some days ago only to light in a lake of fire on whose ordered surface like a gas drill the shadows of the acid-shitting birds are sharply defined, and upon whose verge the tourists stand, shading their shutters. Just as well, for if the students knew what I know (and won't teach them), they would run amok with their felt pens and bobbies, defacing bystanders and marking up other innocents. Life will get you bastards yet...

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]