Louis in later years
It was 1972. I was standing on the street waiting to take the bus to my job at the library. The book I was reading said, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I remember desperately hoping it was true.
Some few months after I got my graduate degree from the University of Iowa, my wife and I had come down to live in her grandparents’ house in Tampa, Florida, while I tried to turn my Master’s thesis on Thoreau into a book. (Sigh. As usual. I knew I would become a famous author. Just a matter of time, like running for Congress in a few years.) So I made use of my M.A. to become a dishwasher at the local Howard Johnson’s, then snagged a part-time job at a cable TV station at night, then parlayed that experience into a job as assistant audiovisual librarian at the Tampa Public Library. A library? Me? Gee, who would have guessed? And of course in some ways, that was a good job for me, especially after I moved from film to books .
But still my external life was one thing, my internal life something else, with little connection between them. There had to be a clue somewhere, but (I thought in those days) finding it might be an impossibility. So many books, so little time! And even if the answer was in a book, and I found that book, how could I know that I had read it right?
I needed a teacher, I knew that much. But how to find one? And to believe that the teacher would appear when I was ready was such a leap of faith!
(Perhaps the fact that my prayer was answered helped show me by experience that life can be trusted, which helped mold my future attitude. Not everybody trusts life. After so many demonstrations, I came to trust it, and I trust it still.)
And, a few months later, Louis Meinhardt came into my life, a friend of a friend. Though he was only three years older, he had so much more experience of the world, so much more common sense, that for quite a while he couldn’t take me seriously. He saw only the comical, unformed, half-baked side of me, and believe me, there was plenty to see. I was all idealism and good intentions, but ungrounded. Where I longed for psychic abilities, Louis had them and took them for granted, and saw them, accurately enough, as no big deal. Where I was always ready to believe anything, in certain directions, he was much more likely to see that the emperor had no clothes. Where I tended to take people at their own estimation, he usually saw more clearly.
Much later he told me that the first time he felt a spark of something for me was the day I said to him (in some context I have long forgotten), “I know I make a fool of myself, but sometimes I learn something.” Something within him resonated to that.
I wish I could describe our relationship, it was so unusual. The mutual trust, the shared understandings, the emotional resonances amounted to a bond between brothers. Indeed, it was very like the one I shared with my brother Paul And the laughter! I’d love to have a dollar for every minute we have laughed together.
For more than 50 years, though with long gaps, we have maintained our friendship. , and whenever we resume communication it is as though there was no interruption. Since 1974, it has been almost entirely a telephonic link, but still we have been there fore each other in good times and bad. But how write about it? Tell specific anecdotes? Set out broad generalizations? Leave it at, “Trust me, I know”?
I can provide a few generalities.
- External situations have exactly nothing to do with internal worth. Louis when I met him was a school teacher. Nothing in his resume would have given a clue as to the depth of his character, nor of his instinctive knowledge, let alone the knowledge and wisdom he encompassed.
- Similarities in background sometimes help, sometimes mislead. Like me, he was an ex-Catholic school boy, but his relation to the church and to religion in general were nothing like mine. Yet, as fellow members of what I call The Club (ex-Catholics) we intuitively know things shared by neither non-Catholics nor practicing Catholics.
- Similarities in temperament have little to do with the creation of the special bond. In many ways Louis and I couldn’t be more different, but what we shared linked us in ways hard to describe.
- Similar opinions seem to mean little. For many years. Louis scoffed at Colin Wilson, thinking I rated him far too high. When I led Louis to read The Occult: A History, he said, “It’s a comic book.” Such differences in opinion did not lead to a breach between us. We seemed to realize that we would never agree on everything, and that there was no need to do so.
- The teacher-student relationship may reverse, once, twice, continuously, depending on the subject matter and the situation and whatever is going on with either of you. The relationship is not a one-way flow of information or even of wisdom.
- Perhaps most interesting is the fact that you can be someone’s teacher and not even know it on the 3D level. You can be someone’s teacher and not know what it is they are to learn from you. You can be someone’s student and not realize what you are absorbing, let alone how.
- In this kind of relationship, as in any other, the essentials are sincerity and love. I mean this not in any sappy or ethereal way, but as plain fact. No true relationship can exist where either half is not sincere. No true learning is ever passed without love, be it expressed or not, felt or not, understood or not. Love is to human relationships as gravity is to 3D existence on earth: It is, you might say, the underlying organizing principle, without which all is chaos.
It was many a year – many a decade, in fact – before I learned two related things:
- We are each the center of our world: Therefore in a real sense, the world revolves around our thoughts, our emotions, our interests.
- And everyone else is the center of his or her world, a world that revolves around their thoughts, their emotions, their interests.
Among other things, this tells me that anyone may become our teacher, as we may become a teacher for others. Teachers may or may not realize their role in someone else’s life, and this doesn’t matter, provided one does one’s best. We are mysteries to one another other, containing unsuspected depths. Therefore, you can never know what others may have to offer. More to the point, they may not realize it either. It’s probably a good idea to stay alert, and in a state of expectation. Thoreau said somewhere that in his dealings with his fellows, he dealt with traveling gods, only they didn’t know it. True enough, and he might have added, and usually neither do we.