Remembering Parker
Editors:
The most persistent memory of my Duke experience, now thirty years
on, is of the quality of professors I had the good fortune to meet.
All practiced their calling with craft, and most were talented
artisans. Many taught with verve, but a few were truly sorcerers.
Harold Parker had magic.
His magic of teaching was quiet and understated, especially when
compared to the art as wielded by his contemporary, Wallace Fowlie
of the Romance languages department. Ranging from the commedia dell'arte
to Dante, from Voltaire to Valery, Fowlie would take ordinary objects,
spin them, invert them, and expose them as masks hiding beauty, wonderment,
and the abyss, so that visions of a sewing machine mated to an operating
table or of Duke's leading basketball guard walking a lobster on
a pink ribbon through the dining halls were hardly cause for comment
or surprise.
Professor Parker was different. You heard about his "European
Intellectual History" courses as a freshman; and you spent the
next three years plotting to be accepted. On the first day, everyone
was seated well before the hour; and the atmosphere was hushed, almost
reverent. He appeared, smiled, and then lectured brilliantly and
without notes, while expecting us to make nearly verbatim transcripts.
As a parting written assignment that first day, we were expected
by the next class to analyze the writings of Dilthey, who was described
as the "father of modern history." The pattern of lectures
and written assignments persisted throughout the semester. That we
could interrupt, question, and dispute was a realization that came
slowly over some of us. The majority of the papers submitted on Dilthey
varied from ten to fifteen pages, and one student's effort, typed
single-spaced and bound, was fifty-plus pages. In returning them
graded by the next class, Professor Parker mentioned that he had
given a few A-/B+'s, a bell curve of B's and C's, and one A+. Parker
read the A+ essay; it was no more than five to six sentences. Dismissing
the class, he added, "Dilthey was just so much soufflÈ." A
number of us were equally deflated.
We realized that the icons of European intellectual history were
his props, and the classroom was his theater. In his lectures and
digressions, he would hint, wink, and nudge you to the realization
that there was a string lying there that would unravel the convoluted
writings of one author or a card, if pulled, that would bring tumbling
down the philosophical edifice of another. He also showed that if
you would judiciously remove the warped lumber and mismatched bricks
housing other works, the thoughts, concepts, and reasonings inside
were pure diamonds.
I literally hauled my stack of legal notepads and typed assignments
around with me for the following decade as baggage in my moves from
one country to another. They were finally lost when my apartment
in Beirut was broken into during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon
in 1982. I found out later that they were used to good effect as
kindling during the power outages and fuel shortages that winter.
Parker's comment on that would have been: "Fitting."
And death is but a parenthesis....
Robert G. Atcheson '72
Cairo, Egypt
Wrongful Assessments
Editors:
"Overturning Wrongful Convictions" [July-August 2002] by Georgann
Eubanks is a typical, left-wing, one-sided attack on the death penalty in the
United States. Eubanks tells us that Henry Baker is innocent because he says
he is, that the death penalty is flawed because a group of New York City Marxist
law professors says so, and that the phony moratoriums placed on the death
penalty by two corr
The fact is that in 1998 there were 15,000 murders in the U.S., and only ninety-eight
murderers put to death. The death penalty is fair, effective, and final. It
should be used more, not less. We know who speaks for the criminals, but there
was not one mention of a single victim in her entire article. This is the outrage
that should be addressed.
Ray Gordon
The correspondent is the parent of a Duke senior.
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