As If We Never Said Goodbye

Watching Glenn Close sing this song as she impersonates the once upon a time star film actress Norma Desmond in the musical "Sunset Boulevard" always cuts too close to home.  Set aside the oft repeated notion that elderly gays instinctively identify with the legendary female has-beens of Hollywood.  It's the instinct--the need?--whatever, to perform that makes for the identification.  For most of forty five years I gave a lecture course for two hundred students, once as a favor to the college dean, taught it twice a day for two semesters.  For most of that time I had my material so thoroughly internalized both verbally and intellectually that I walked up to a podium with only the briefest notes, sometimes not even that, walked back and forth, held the audience in my passion.  It was thrilling, it was not exactly intercourse, but it was very interactive.  I was a ham, a performer, with a voice that carried to the back of the auditorium without benefit of amplification so that I could walk about on the platform looking out at the students, catching the eye of this one and that one, giving the illusion over time to each and every one of them that this was an utterly personal communication. I never failed to get applause at the end of the semester, one year a startlingly emotional standing ovation. Anyone who has ever done this kind of teaching and knows that it is successful, and I don't mean just as entertainment, but as a real form of communication and indoctrination, recognizes that despite the manifold objections to the lecture system, it works when the speaker is a performer.  The word lecture means a reading, and that was what it was once upon a time before the invention of the printing press made book reading an inexpensive way to communicate information.  The teacher read aloud, as the French call it, made a dictée, and the students took it down.  The system did not die as it should have because the academic enterprise is always slow to change, and in the age of electronics, they are still giving lectures, hundreds of years later.  But, if the lecturer is a very good speaker, a powerful interpreter and communicator of ideas and sensations, then the audience is getting everything they could possibly want.  If the speaker is lousy, well, nowadays the students come with their laptops and while the old geezer drones on, they are busy looking at their Facebook account and every other distracting feature they can get to.  Since I retired twenty years ago I have had the occasion to give the occasional lecture, even once taught a mini course, done it twice as a matter of fact and signed up for another one this winter.  The intoxication, the narcotic pull of the platform, the audience, all of it is there in that song in "Sunset Boulevard" as Norma Desmond, the aging actress, herself a star of the silent films, and thus absolutely obsolete in the new era, envisions her comeback, as she sees it, as though she had never left.  A few years ago at the annual meeting of the profession of classics which on that occasion was held in Seattle a friend on the program committee arranged that I would speak about a new book I had written at one of the sessions.  She was startled to discover that I could not fill the room, but although my ego was bruised I was not surprised.  Out of the action for fifteen years at that point, not a super star to begin with, I was certainly a has been.  I had definitely said goodbye.