Students

Sometimes, along the way, unexpectedly, there is a sign of some student from long ago.

At one point I wanted to get one more physical copy of my book on formal semantics, which had been out of print for some time. There were second-hand copies for sale on Amazon and I wrote for one of them. It came with a note from one of my Toronto students in the 70s, Mary. She had been teaching philosophy and co-writing a logic textbook — but now she and her husband were selling all their books, they had a sail boat and were going to sail around the world.
       Another time, walking on a street in Vancouver, I heard my name. It was another Toronto logic student, Dan, a short solid guy who told me he had not wanted to be an academic after all. Already as a student he had become involved in backgammon, a game as old as civilization itself, played for serious money in silent rooms all through the world. He made good money at it, he said. Just now he was going to sell a Volkswagen that he had accepted from one of the players who had lost more than he could pay.

But I want to talk about three students whom I came to know better: Allen and Mark who did become philosophers, and Robin Kornman who became a Buddhist monk.

Allen was an undergraduate in the late sixties. He did not fit in well, the university had made an exception to let him live off campus when the ill-fitting became too salient to be ignored. As the weather grew rainy and colder he would still come to class in sandals without socks and a sport jacket with the sleeves torn off. He was amazingly good at logic, outshining the entire class. Then, about midway, his exercises dropped from brilliant to mediocre to worse than poor. I called him in, asked him what as happening. “That question just doesn’t arise” he told me. All that happens is entirely determined by the physical history of the universe, what happens and what I do was already set in stone before we were born.
      I told him he should do well, because I wanted him in my advanced logic course in the next semester, which had this course as a prerequisite. Near the end of the semester there was only one chance for him to pass, and that was to ace the final exam. He sat with the exam paper for a while, then wanted to just hand it in. “Do it” I told him, “If you don’t do it well, I am determined to flunk you.” He sat with it another half hour, then handed it in half finished. I failed him in the course.

But then the next semester I gave him special permission to take the advanced course. Once again he outshone everyone. All the heart-wrenching problems with his girlfriend were over, and he was not a determinist anymore.

Mark looked very young, as if he might still be in high school, when he appeared in my philosophy of science class. This was in the eighties. He was a physics student, and again remarkable, like Allen, because he stood out intellectually. Where the philosophy majors had difficulty Mark would just breeze through. But that was the only way he was like Allen.

About a year later Mark came to see me. He was writing a paper on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, knew of my interest in it, and asked for philosophical literature. By giving it to him, I suppose I placed another adder in the grass. The next semester I came across him in the campus cafeteria, sitting dejectedly by himself, looking distraught. I sat down, said “What is the matter, Mark?” He had just had the worst of all spring breaks, he told me. For he had gone home and told his parents that he was going to switch from physics to philosophy. His mother had cried. Then she had called a cousin — someone I knew well, actually, a philosophy professor — to ask him to talk to her son and convince him not to do that.
Mark stayed firm and, like Allen, Mark became a remarkable, brilliant philosopher.

For Robin Kornman I have to go back again, to the summer of 1969, when I taught a short course on Existentialism, in Bloomingon, Indiana. That was a hippy summer, awash in marijuana, flute playing, reading from the Tibetan book of the Dead, all that sort of thing. The students — another of whom, Steven, would become a Buddhist teacher, and I would eventually know well — tended to approach Sartre’s Being and Nothingness as a sacred text. What struck me about Robin was that he seemed so sensual, as if he were tasting the words.
      In 1970-71 I was living in London, and one day Robin showed up. Could he crash with us for a few days? He was on his way to India, looking to buy a cheap airline ticket in London. He told us that he had had a mystical experience. In India he would find spiritual guidance. He was now discarding everything not essential to staying alive, everything material and superfluous. So he had as clothes just what he wore, plus a long shirt to have on when washing those. Someone suggested, jokingly, that really, underwear was also superfluous. “Right!” he said, “so I will discard that before boarding the plane”.

Twenty-five or so years later Robin looked me up in Princeton. He was enrolled as a graduate student in the East Asian Studies program. They had admitted him on the basis of the extensive translations of Sanskrit and Tibetan scriptures which he had already completed. For after his wanderings in India, he was a disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in Colorado, during which time he had mastered those languages. Trungpa had died, and Robin had gone off on his own, as a spiritual teacher.
      As was perhaps not unusual for an itinerant monk, even as skillfully adapted to our society as Robin, he had few possessions; some of these he stored in my attic. We had long discussions walking around Princeton, but they ended abruptly. He had begun telling me of the sexual liberation initiated by his teacher Trungpa, and fell almost immediately into astonishingly venal, vulgar descriptions of women’s bodies and sexual activity. I told him I did not want to listen to this, and we became estranged. Some time after he left Princeton a gangling youth appeared with a truck and took away what Robin had left in my attic.

But Robin, who died at age 60, is much alive on the web, presenting many spiritual teachings, and recalled in fond remembrances by other Buddhist initiates. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is easily found there too, named by a group of fifty women who accuse him and his acolytes of sexual abuse.

So it goes.