Without Lifting A Finger

 ‘I do not intend to be an examination coach for the rest of my life,’ he said. ‘It is something I am doing for the present, something I happen to be qualified to do, in order to make a living. But it is not my vocation. It is not what I was called into the world to do.’  Called into the world. More and more strange.  ‘If you would like me to explain my philosophy of teaching I can do so,’ he said. ‘It is quite brief, brief and simple.’  ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘let us hear your brief philosophy.’  ‘What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student’s heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to a...

I'm not sure about all the psycho-babble (Coetzee seems skeptical at times, at other times he plays along), but The Good Story was certainly an intelligent read. The final clips I share are from Coetzee on teaching (in this clip he's reporting on a talk given by one of my film idols: Juliette Binoche) and from Coetzee on Sebald's Austerlitz (first brought up by Kurtz). *      I recently happened to hear a talk by the actress Juliette Binoche during which she said (courageously, it seemed to me) that when she makes a film, her relationship with the director needs to be an erotic one -- if not, the work will suffer. She hastened to add that she did not mean that they have to go to bed together. But the actress has to be ready to give herself up to the director, to be at one with his vision; and vice versa. She did not elaborate further, but whether consciously or not she was clearly recalling Plato's position on the relationship between teacher and acolyte: ...

On teaching: The pupil thinks his work hard, but he is only the carriage while the teacher is the horse. Teaching is decidedly harder than standing by a screw or the crane of a machine, and equally monotonous.